Bunkai

Iain Abernathy’s is a Bunkai guru from the UK and hold seminars around the world on the application of Karate moves.  He posted a blog last month asking everyone to vote on a sequence of moves that they wanted to explore.

The winner votes went to the Kata called Saifa and its first three moves. You can follow the whole blog here.

Riz and I wanted to put our spin on this and post a video.
Saifa is not a Kate from our syllabus so we went back to base principals and worked back from the end goal.

In the end simplicity prevailed and this is what we agreed on:

We’ve posted our contribution on Iain’s blog as well as twitter, vine and YouTube

Let us know what you think of ours and all the others on Iain’s site.

45^th Gasshuku

The 45^th Anniversary Gasshuku was held in Sydney over the first weekend of November and a great weekend was had by all.  The training sessions were plentiful and hugely challenging and the social side of things was great fun.

45th Anniversary Gasshuku – Group Photo

Soshi Sensei Hudson took us through some fantastic sessions and the Bunkai work was incredible. Starting in the afternoon on Friday, the weekend was all about Karate. When we weren’t training, we were discussing the Bunkai, syllabus or the ‘good old days’ of the pre-litigious era.

Friday evening and Sunday were sessions for all students where we worked on the basics, (or not so as they turned out to be) as well as a lot of Bunkai.

The Sunday Bunkai Session

Saturday was a Dan grade session with a focus on Kihon and Heian Kata Bunkai. 

Every session was fantastic and you can read up on more details in the Gasshuku blog. It was great to train and catch up with Soshi Sensei Hudson, Renshi Sensei McCormick and Sensei Alexander.

Friday night involved the obligatory trip to the Oaks for a beer. Soshi noted that there were far less Bikies and a few more girls than in the 60’s.

On Saturday we had a banquet dinner at Yok Thai in Neutral Bay and we closed the weekend off with a BBQ in the park.

Here’s to the next 45 years!