My Dad reported a Mr. Hat sighting… apparently he drove by in the passenger side of some car and gave Dad a “glaring look.” Dad waved at him. The End.
Class was good tonight. We got an Oedewaldt warmup, replete with a bajillion Japanese situps and a few pushups… I can handle the pushups, but every time I have to live through more than 20 Japanese situps my back starts complaining.
After that, we split up into groups to work with the other belt ranks. I elected to work with my favored charges lately, the green belts. I talked a little more than I wanted to, but we made some progress through basics. We spent quite a bit of time on the dynamics of moving forward and backward in back stance.
We worked on knifehand block spearhand thrust for awhile as well before moving into kata. My biggest concern for the green belts is they seem to phone in the parts of Heian Yondan that need to have some power behind them despite plenty of explanation as to why it needs to be strong in certain parts. They have time to fix it. We’ll see if they do.
The second class was some “lightened up” sparring combinations that lead into an extended walkthrough of Chinte, one of the katas that Sensei Schmidt taught the last time he was here from South Africa. Its a fun kata full of strange techniques that may only appear in this specific Shotokan kata.
One of my favorite techniques in that kata is the Defending Versus Evil Curly move, where you do the two fingered eye poke that the Stooges made famous. I believe Sensei Schmidt may have made reference to this during the last seminar he held around here, which makes it all the more interesting. Also, I find the body dynamics of the middle section of the kata where the circular blocks are done very different and cool.
I like the trend that the class has been taking toward doing some of the oft neglected katas. There’s a wellspring of interesting karate there that we just haven’t explored very much and I think its a worthwhile venture.
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