A Beginner's Point of View 166-167

Day 166:

Today I was the highest ranking person in the class, so I led the entire class, not just in warm-ups. I did lead us in stretches and suburi. We did a ton of shomen-suburi because Sensei would go around to all of the newer students and give them a target to strike and practice on.

At the end of warm-ups, everyone in bogu would dress up and be targets for the class, except me. While the others would put on their bogu, I led the others in performing shomen strike across the floor, turn around and across the floor. We did this over and over. When the senior students put on their bogu, they allowed the newer students to strike them on the men as they advanced and once on the other side of the room, while they backed up.

We did this over and over until Sensei called for me to demonstrate a good men strike and pass through. I did this for the benefit of the others and then assigned everyone into lines for rotation. I watched the students as they went through drills, looking for anyone doing it completely wrongly. They seemed to slightly improve as I watched so I kept quiet. Once the class was over, I led the class in the bowing out ceremony.

I did not stick around for advanced class today because I worked all last weekend on midnight shifts and got very little sleep. I’m exhausted and need to rest. Maybe next time I’ll come for advanced class.

Day 167:

Today Sensei was content to work us to death. We did a near-endless routine of kiri-kaeshi. After that, we would work up to a complicated sequence again.

We would practice one-step men. Then we would practice hiki-kote. Then we strung them together into a men-hiki-kote-men drill. Sensei is a big fan of one-step drills. We kept doing one-step men and one-step kote over and over.

The new thing today was all of the tsuki practice. We drilled to try out two-handed tsuki and even one-handed tsuki. I really did not like performing tsuki, because so much can go wrong that would injure your partner. Still, I did the drill carefully. Doing one-handed tuski is like striking men from left jodan. You let go with your right hand and pull your right hand to your waist, covering doh target. This act makes the one-handed tsuki more accurate by rotating your shoulders in the counter-direction that they roll when you thrust your left arm forward. We finished class by having three rounds of keiko.