Instead, after the warm-up, we mostly did katas. We did a little bit of punching for a warm-up, then we took out the cushy pads. We took turns holding the bags so our partner could practice a front snap kick, front thrust kick, roundhouse kick, and back kick. It was a good exercise and we had lots of fun pushing our partners back with the force of our kicks.
Then we did all four katas plus “Ko Tai Ran” which has a number of shuto blocks in it. (Note: I do not know the proper words here so “Ko Tai Ran” is the closest phonetic spelling I can come up with for this kata. I can find no such kata online and I’ve tried many different variations of the spelling. The regular Shito-Ryu or Itosu Kai katas do not list anything like it, neither in name nor in form. I can only speculate that it is a kata unique to our Alberta dojos. I will find out more about this later). Our Sensei said he had never seen a bunch of white belts with only a dozen lessons behind them do so well with the footwork. He was very pleased. I guess the extra practice we do at home is paying off. There will be a grading come December when we hope to get our yellow belts.
Finally, we did kihon kumite with our partners. This is where there is a set attack/defense pattern. We did 5 different patterns.
The other thing we have to do before we can successfully grade is to know the Japanese words for all these items.
It is soooo much fun!