Well, I’m pleased to say that I had a great time yesterday in Chicago for Sensei Otis’s clinic. The clinic itself revolved around fundamental body movements in Shotokan, focusing mainly on the backfist strike and combinations concerning knifehand block. I got the chance to spar with some new people and great fun was had by all.
I found Sensei Otis to be very cool to train under, he’s very laid back and positive unlike some of the other extremely high ranked black belts that I have trained with. He had no problem allowing me to take pictures, and take pictures I did. I was somewhat displeased with the images, as more of them came out with really screwy histograms and were somewhat blurry… ony a few times did this achieve any artistic goodness.
I was pissed to find out that the two group photos that we had taken were blurry, but I’ll get over it.
Click here for a zip file of scaled down web ready images. (6 MB)
Click here for a zip file of full sized huge images. (61 MB)
The content of the clinic was really good… I actually got a lot out of the backfist training. I also found out that I have grossly underestimated my own handspeed… there were a couple of people that when watching them I was like “damn, they have fast hands.” Interestingly, I got to spar with both of these people and had no problems blocking their full speed attacks, which made me pretty damned happy.
Apart from that, the dirlls that Sensei Otis had us doing were much like some of the things that we’ve done with Sensei Brewer. They just had a slightly different take on it with slightly different techniques than we use most of the time, but all in all it was solid gold stuff. I think everyone had a great time, it was really worth it to go. I won’t miss Sensei Otis if he comes down again, that’s for sure.
After the clinic, there was a Dan Evaluation that we stayed to watch. Basically, they sent their brown and black belts in front of Sensei Otis to have them looked at and evaluated. It was basically a quickie dan test without the pressure or actual pass/fail situation. We came to a tentative conclusion that they were running them through our dan syllabus to see how it went and then told them what to work on.
I did notice that Sensei Otis is all about snapping back the backfist in the rising block/step back round kick/backfist/lunge punch combination. After this seminar, I’m going to try to see how it sticks for me, I may end up snapping mine after all. Good stuff!
Here’s a brief snippet of our seminar, I’m impressed with the video/sound quality of the mpeg capture on this camera. 🙂 🙂
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