2007 Workout #84: Snow, epiphanies, and 36 ounces of Kanku Sho…

There was much concern tonight over the low class attendance, given the snowy and icy weather. On my extremely short drive to the dojo, I noticed that the roads were already slippery but not insurmountable. At the start, the class consisted of myself, Garls, (remembered you this time), Lawrence, and her Dad, and around 5-6 white and yellow belts.

After ‘s excellent warmups, we were led through a thorough low key basics workout by Garls. He did a really good job, kept the class moving while giving them a lot of information about the techniques. The white belts seemed to respond to this quite well and they seemed to enjoy themselves.

Prior to class, and I decided to do some light sparring. I was tight (AGAIN) and not really throwing anything good to write home about. In between classes, we elected to work on Kanku Sho and Empi a bit to change up the pace. Sensei Brewer had us continue doing kata in our own small groups, so we capped off the first half of the second class with more Kanku Sho and a few Sochin.

I had intended to work on Empi tonight, as I figured I should apply some sort of the center training that I received while working on Sochin to a kata more suited to my body type. After a few times through Kanku Sho and Sochin, I really wasn’t feeling much like doing Empi… it wasn’t calling to me at all. I don’t even know if the aforementioned approach is a good one… so I’m stuck between a rock and a new kata place. 🙂

Then it was time for sparring drills. We did 3-5 time attack and slow sparring, and after a bit Sensei Brewer came over to me and asked me if I realized that I tended to drift into back stance while sparring. I told him I didn’t, and that it was an involuntary bad habit. I tried fixing it for awhile and found a lot more power in my techniques and that it was a lot easier to commit to a strong attack. I ended up with a few good exchanges with before calling it quits for the night.

A somewhat slippery car ride home capped off a really excellent night of karate stuff. I wish I had so much to think about after every workout!!