Training this month

The focus of our training this month was the Kara-Zuki exercises.  Kara-Zuki, roughly translated, means basic punching and we have three distinct exercises in our Kihon.  This article explains it in more detail.  Ironically, Kara-Zuki is great for improving balance and stance, more so than punches.  Not to say that we didn’t practice punching.

We did thousands of them!

Kara-Zuki-Ni was the primary focus of our classes as it can be used for many Kata techniques. For example, the 3rd move of Heian Shodan is a tricky one to learn. It can take some time to get the hang of, particularly as it only appears once in the Kata. So we took the move out of the Kata and drilled it in Kara-Zuki-Ni. We also did the same for the four Shute-Uke from Heian Shodan and that seemed to have a big improvement for all students.

More students join our club

Also this month we were visited by two new students.  Tony was interested in doing some cross training and thought Karate would be worth trying out. He has no martial arts experience and was a bit unsure what to expect. To start with we went through some basics and Tony did well, picking things up really quickly. He even came back the following week, so he must have enjoyed it.

The same week Tony joined us, Dusan started back at training with us. Dusan used to train with us about a decade ago and got to the dizzy heights of brown belt. Even though it has been a while since he last trained, it wasn’t long before he was back into the swing of things. It’s great to have him training with us again.

The Gasshuku

The Winter Gasshuku was held in Tocal during the first weekend in August. As always, Soshi Sensei Hudson gave us a fantastic weekend in Tocal and plenty of ‘tools’ to take home.  We were also given notice on what to work on for the November Gasshuku in Sydney.

The full blog is coming soon.