Karate 9

One of the hurdles to beginning karate is that one is barefoot and one must turn quickly on the balls of your feet. On a wooden dojo floor, or any floor for that matter, this usually translates into a painful friction burn. So to practice, one has to daily rotate quickly on first one foot bearing all of your weight, then the other foot. Do this on the ball not the heel of the foot. You only have to do this two or three times at first to feel the friction burn. You will notice a lingering burning pain if you do it right and for enough repetitions. Any more than that and you risk blisters, or tearing the pad off of your foot. Soon you will have thick enough skin to be able to do this without worry.

So today we had an extensive warm-up then we did katas for most of the rest of the day. We did some limited sparring in the last 15 minutes of the 2 hour class. I learned my shuto/kicking/high/middle/low block kata but unfortunately I forgot some of the end of the kata and I also forgot the name of the kata. I have not been able to find it on line so it must be unique to our style. I was going to write it down so I could remember and be able to burn it into my memory at home, but I decided against it because I was told it was in the manual. It is not in the manual. So I am a little peeved at that because I won’t be able to do it completely until next Saturday. We have no class next Tuesday because of Halloween we were told.

So in class the Black Belts were in the back doing their own thing getting ready for some tournament in Toronto, while the white belts like me were doing the white belt katas, and the other higher ranking belts did their own.

It was a good class, I learned a lot. Once the basic kata moves are known and you can go through a particular kata with some fluidity and ease, there is still much to perfect in the actual forms and flow. Our Sensei counted out and for each count we would do the respective move then wait for the next count. Ichi! Ni! San! Shi! Go! Roku! Shichi! Hachi! Kyu! Ju! and so on. The Sensei would walk around correcting our posture before we were allowed to continue. I am happy to say she did not have to correct mine too often, just twice. Once when my shoulders were not square, and the other when I was caught punching too low.

I am looking forward to next Saturday, though I may decided to head to another dojo to train before then. Meanwhile I have daily practice to perfect my form, power, and katas. That’s the beauty of being a karate-ka. You can easily practice at home.