Monday, March 23, 2009

A Beginnner's Point of View 6

Day 6:
Today was all footwork. Good footwork is deceptively simple. There’s balancing on the front of your feet. Carrying your body weight at the right time, proper Kendo stance, proper movement, and then including swinging the shinai on-target at the same time. I liked it, especially since I need so much work on it.

Today we had a full-length mirror to take turns practicing in front of for each of the more advanced drills. The mirror had to be tilted to stay stable against the wall, so the image had the shinai higher than you did.

I’m not sure my instructor keeps good perspective when correcting me in my chudan (basic sword position where you point at your opponent’s throat) since she keeps dropping the point down a couple of inches. It looks to me like it was right before. Take into account that she’s shorter than me and maybe it was right before she corrected it. Maybe it was right afterwards, I don’t know.

We added a new footwork drill today. Forward, right, forward, left. The mirror helped with this one. It’s different than the ‘box step’ (forward, back, right, left) that we’ve done. The box step was easier, but this new one was hard. The rhythm is easy, but the 90 degree shift in weight throws one off balance.

Also, we did something called ‘rapid footwork’. Normally in Kendo, you never let your feet leave the floor. Here we did just that. We leaped forward and backward, over and over. This provides a springing step for a quick attack and a quick retreat. I had to go slowly since I didn’t feel like falling down.

Each week I keep learning new stuff. It’s all good, but there’s just not enough time in the day, unless Kendo was my job. Too bad.

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