Sensei has the blackbelts meeting in a nearby park twice a week. We all wear masks and stay six feet apart. The heat has become unfortunate, but the shaded areas are reasonable. I feel like there is a certain amount of irony about all the folks complaining that they can't breath with a simple surgical mask. I think they should be doing an action packed kata with one on.
I'm often breathing so hard that I'm pulling the mask into my mouth a good bit. Apparently I'm back out of shape. Doing kata for an hour has become grueling. I'm not sure the heat or generally my household internment is the greater cause, but I can assume both have weight in the problem.
During the covid lock down I've returned to weightlifting, but I've been accumulating injuries consistently. Hamstring, two shoulders and a forearm have been the stuff I've been overcoming. So the return to karate has been really nice. I see it as a reasonable exercise, but as we gear up at the park I struggle to keep up with my various injuries peeking through.
Since we can get near each other the only thing we are doing is working on kata. I'm not slated to learn much more than what I know (towards my third dan) so I'm helping out Kyle work on his Nidan. It's a treat to help, but as per usual, I'm not confident with my teaching skills. What to focus on? What to correct? And so on.
Sensei took yesterday to get us all to learn Bassai Dai. I was very pleased because this was a kata I did for my Blackbelt in Tang So Do. However the versions are different, and I doubt I could remember it anyway. Once we got rolling I was able to recall the moves in some spots. Below I've got an example of the karate and the TSD so you can see the differences.
Karate with commentary!
And
TSD with some notes. Master Kil
As you can see the patterns are fairly compatible, but TSD really doesn't look at the stances too much and adds a lot of spring to the whole thing. Sigh, the good old days. The stances in the Japanese version are challenging to me.
