Saturday streaming

The second Saturday of online training, and sort of beginning to get the hang of things.  All the devices charged this time, links checked and iPad resurrected (I had flattened it so badly it took 3 days on and off to register), so no tech surprises ☺☺☺☺

The nice thing about Saturday training is that I get to go outside with my Son.  On the weekday sessions indoors, there isn't room for us to train together, we have to work in different parts of the house on different devices.  As ever we started with warm ups, Mokuso and formal greetings, which was followed by Kata.

We went through all three of the Naihanchis, with performance on the ones we know.  I did one run through of Naihanchi Nidan, but as instructed most of my work at the moment is trying to improve my Naihanchi Shodan, so there were three or four runs through of that as performance.  When I record copies of the kata I still see mistakes, but the one below recorded after the online session is one of the better ones, probably because I did it slowly.

Atfer that, we briefly improvised combinations, before being given some novel sequences to work on.  Various elements of our Kihon kata, the quadrant drill, plus some other fundamentals were put together in different combinations to build up improvised drills.  There were three sequences we worked on, 1 long and two shorter ones .  The longer one was build up in three stages:

• Jab, cross, hook, right stance
  Jab, cross, hook, left stance

• Jab, cross, hook, knee, right stance
  Jab, cross, hook, knee, left stance
• Jab, cross, hook, knee, mai geri, right stance
  Jab, cross, hook, knee, mai geri, left stance

The second, shorter drill was:

Jab, cross, step up yoku geri, right stance
Jab, cross, step up yoku geri, left stance

The third, short drill was:

Jab, cross, ushiro geri, right stance
Jab, cross,  ushiro geri, left stance

The drills were followed by a few minutes of shadow sparring, followed by a formal close.  I keep thinking it must be difficult to keep coming up with variations, but then I look online and see what is out there.   There a lot of good karateka sharing their ideas as never before, and I think the hardest thing is actually to keep the variations focussed on the specific themes we need to be learning.  Am sure we will be getting plenty of variation nontheless over the next few months  ☺☺☺☺