The title says it all… we had a very hard workout that started out with combinations.  We did a three punch combination moving forward and backward, so a six punch combination.  We repeated this combination about 50 times, and then moved on to a few different variations that added a front kick and a round […]

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This week was a good set of workouts here in Pekin. It started out as a very successful kyu rank exam and was followed by a great workout on basics, sparring and kata. It was especially fun because Sensei Hartman had each black belt teach 10 minutes on a Heian kata of their choice. I […]

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Tonight I head back to the Pekin dojo to work out. I am told there is even a belt test going on! After the workout we are heading out to Steak and Shake and then I am off to hang out at my cousin’s house, hence the pre-blogging! Things are going fine here, it is […]

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Sensei Tarrant was down in Denver training the kata team, so the Arvada dojo was left to our own devices.  Class was run tonight by Kevin, and we did some interesting drills.  There were five of us, so we started with a simple combination and went down the line each adding 2-3 techniques.  Each person […]

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Tonight we continued our previous lesson on Unsu, focusing this time on the remaining half of the kata.  Before we did all of that, we worked on some sparring combinations.  The main combination we focused on was rear leg front kick, stepping back into sparring stance.  That was followed up with a rear leg roundhouse […]

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Another great workout tonight!  It started out with basic combinations, and right before we began Sensei Tarrant said “we had a request for Unsu, so that’s what we’ll train toward tonight.”  That was my request!  Woot! The basic drills were designed to get the body moving in a back and forth fashion similar to the […]

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Last night’s workout was great, one of my favorite so far.  Everything started up pre-class, when Paul B and I opted to do some impromptu free sparring.  It went pretty well, I tagged him a few times and he tagged me a few times (once in the right ribcage that really stung!) and much fun […]

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It seems like it was me against the world today.  I had the esteemed pleasure of being the only guy raising up what I feel are rather serious concerns about an application feature that we are building, so that equated to a day full of respectful yet semi-heated arguments.  This is one of the few […]

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I opted for no nap before karate tonight and the workout went pretty well.  We did two primary combinations: jab, reverse punch, jab, then step in lunge punch.  We then did the same combination with front leg front kick in place of the jab, and rear leg front kicks in place of the other two […]

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As I mentioned during my last karate post, they are renovating the dance studio that we use for our dojo.  They recently refinished one of the wood floors near the room we train in, so the place was filled with the hanging vapors of wood sealer and varnish.  Add to that the lack of air […]

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