Technical aspects

Nothing really funny or overwhelming noteworthy, but we had an awesome time. A total time slip. We started out with a combo exercise after doing kicks for a half hour. The roundhouse still frustrates me to no end, but that's what the practice is for. I'll definitely have to do that on my own more often. I've been working on side kicks for so long that all others got rusty.

So the combo was an upward block (jo dan) combined with a punch to the solar p that then moved to a neck grab to knee strike. Executed smoothly you get the feeling that the other person would never know what hit them. I had to learn a few things around this combo. First, go as low I can on the strike so I can use the upward block to keep uki's arm up. Then, second, keep my elbows up as I slide my hands in for the neck head grab to further my control of uki's arms in the short time I'm doing the move. I have a tendency to keep my arms down, since we've been taught that so often, it's now become hard to do anything different. And, third, when grabbing the head for a knee strike, you're actually grabbing the neck with fingernails down with slightly interlocked fingers. You don't even have to use muscle as it naturally guides the uki's head forward to the proper kneeing position.

So I learned that the harder I strain for the knee shot the shorter my stroke it. The more I relax for the strike the higher I bring my knee up. It was like a full foot difference -wow.

Cook asked Teacher about practical sword use. I was intrigued because we rarely bring out the weapons and this seemed interesting. Teacher used the common sword draw hand movement and turned it into a self defense move. Uki sticks a gun or knife in your kidney and you do the sword draw. Basically, you reach across with opposite hand, take their hand (making sure not to get stabbed or shot) and do the draw. This brings their locked wrist/hand up and over your head and then as you move down in the "strike" position Uki must roll or flip to exit a very painful wrist/elbow/shoulder lock. Fun as hell. It's like all those dumb movie stunt man moves that requires the stunt man to do all the work while tori effortlessly moves out of the way.

I only said "I'm sorry" five times this evening. I made sure that I was making contact and that I was doing it correctly. Day one of the new me.