Wednesday night’s class in Mapleton was a scorcher. It was easily 90+ in the dojo, the fans hardly helped to anything more than remind you that you were disgustingly sweaty. I knocked out four Sochin before class, Sensei Brewer showed up and I had let it get to 6:10 pm without realizing it.
No worries, Sensei led the first class through moving basics at a reasonable pace (because of the aforementioned heat). He had asked me before class to teach the class roundhouse kick during the last half of the first class and I was happy to oblige. I decided to try to relate this kick to something that most everyone had done, and about the only technique that shares common hip rotation with the roundhouse kick motion was inward block.
I took the class down and back through inward block, explaining that they would need to remember this feeling for later. I then took the class through three counts of the hip motion involved with roundhouse kick, pointing out some of the technical details along the way. The count was knee up, rotate it around (keeping it level), and rotating back to the start before putting the leg down. They did not do the kick during this portion, I just wanted them to get the feeling of keeping the knee up and chambered.
Then I expanded it to the more common five count breakdown, allowing them to get to work on the kick. Everyone seemed to pick this up very quickly, so I moved on to performing the kick in stance. I reiterated that now was the time to call on that hip motion from inward block to help keep your leg up and level, to swing the hips along that horizontal axis to let the knee come forward and kick before putting the leg down.
Before the end of the night everyone was doing a nice basic roundkick, even the white belts that had never done it before! Gotta feel good about that. To drive the point home about how this kick is utilized, before we did anything I had them stand in front of a partner in sparring stance and look at the big openings where this kick could go. To finish the class, I had them get across from their partners again and do the five count broken-down roundkick to see how it can fit into those openings. I think it was a fun way to finish things off.
The second class consisted of some light hip action related sparring drills. Sensei also touched on covering distance and using the sparring stance to move properly. I need to work on this, but the notion of moving forward and back in stance is getting a little easier now that my hips are in on the game too.
In all, it was a good hot night of training. My gi seems to need washed after every last workout these days, but that means good karate is coming out.
Sochin Counter
Accomplished / Goal == Percent Complete
863 / 2000 == 43.15%
Average Kata per Workout: 13.92
Estimated Workouts Remaining: 82
Workouts that gained more than 1%: 21
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