Training roundup
Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these!
Had training last night, went very well! It was extremely full-on, but rewarding. Sometimes when you head out to martial arts training you have spurts of flat-out exercise, and then by the end of it, you’re not feeling knackered; then you have the opposite, where despite the few breaks between drills, your gi is soaked all the way through with sweat, your muscles are getting achy, but despite it all you have that stupid look on yourself that says “Check out my awesomeness – I just jumped around in a pair of white pajamas and probably looked a bit on the unco side, but I’m exhausted and it was uber”. Last night’s training is closer to the latter – I tried to work really hard to improve my technique, though there were some points where I wasn’t sitting right in the socket on my leg and I was paranoid the leg was going to drop off, despite the fact I always strap it to my waist before I head out for training 😛
So yeah, excellent training. The only thing we didn’t cover was kata, as we’d run out of time to focus on it properly. I’ve decided that I’m going to squeeze in some extra kata practice over the next week, as I’m keen to get the pattern solid in my head so I can move beyond simple memorisation and start to focus on the quality of my technique, and from there, executing that same quality along with appropriate speed and kime. I normally take a while to solidify the pattern of a new kata, but I’ve been trying to really suss this out in my head. It helps that I’m doing pure shotokan, as there are plenty of vids of people demonstrating kata. In fact, a couple of weeks back I wanted to have a quick refresh of my kata, I looked it up on YouTube and tracked down a demonstration of it by Kanazawa-sensei, and was blown away by the technical proficiency of such an early kata in the shotokan syllabus. It’s bizarre, you think you know a kata and do a good job of it with your peers, but when you see your instructor or legendary figures like Kanazawa perform the same sequence, it really hits home how much more you can achieve with your kata.
But talk on kata could probably be left to a future blog. Besides, its getting late and I’m planning on getting into the office earlier than usual tomorrow, so I might call it a night. I’ll try and squeeze in another blog before next week’s training, but we’ll see how I go. If nothing else, expect another round-up next week along with my usual musings!
