Shūdokan 20 - Fight Night 2

Based on the fact that I completed my 20th class, I'm going to leave off the Shūdokan in the title in the future. I think I can safely say that I enjoy the class enough that I'm going to stick around for as long as I'm engaged.  So much for my martial artists tour of various styles.  I simply can't beat the cost, location and teacher.

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It a burst of ingenuity the Teacher decided to go fast and hard into movement.  Last night he took out flat rubber disks and placed them into patterns on the floor.  We would do follow the leader with various foot work.  Essentially enforcing the fact that movement translates into better distance control and trying to stop crossing feet if possible.  With all kinds of variations we worked our way up to cartwheels.  Which, being 48, set my confidence level to low, but it turned out that I could do them fine on one side, but the other turned into a round off.  Either way it was great exercise, but I'm guessing little practical martial art value.

In the past (by that I mean at my old school) Fight night wasn't regular unless I lead the class.  In retrospect I can see that I should have more rigid rules in place, but the way it was presented to me was to be close to realism versus point fighting.  It kind of blended for us over the years.  This version of Karate I'm in now stresses no fighting (or lack of conflict?) at all, minimal contact and point sparring.  I haven't seen much in the way of advanced technique either, but the work on basics is intense and multi-faceted.

In this school there are clear rules in karate point-sparring, but probably the only one last night that had a good working knowledge was the Teacher.  The line judges were struggling a bit with out of bounds and areas of contact that would give a point.  After a couple of false starts we got down to good business and had a fine time.

I have lots of experience from my other class, but this rigid environment is a bit tough for me.  I want to do take downs, which are fine, but have to be carefully managed so you don't bust joints. Definitely no throws.  Sigh.  So it was block, punch, kick and I was blocking too early.  So I had a majority of punches landing on my lead arm.  My hand feels like a complete bruise but with no visible signs.

So pretty sore and stiff today.  In the best way possible.