This week’s first session was again primarily focused on fitness, and again that part of the session wasn’t particularly difficult for us.

After the group warmup, 30 seconds of running, and a couple (literally only a couple) of pressups, we went into the now familiar 180 and 90 degree turns (to left and to right). One of the group was having real trouble grasping the whole thing, moving far too much, and moving the wrong foot; the rule is, the back foot always moves first, and the back foot always becomes the front foot in the next stance. He got it quickly once that was desccribed.

The early stance work forshadowed the main focus of the day: stances during kata.

Fast Kata

It has been said several times, that “the fella who invented the Taigyoku Shodan has done it in n seconds”; where n has varied between 6 and 9 depending on who’s re-telling the stiry. Sensei John has also described how the senior class can execute it together (and properly) in 18 seconds.

So this week, we added a new Kata Variation – Fast Kata. On the first run (no pun intended) we took 26 seconds.

Lesson of the week: there’s no point doing the kata fast if you just bobble around like Corporal Jones of Dad’s Army.

Here we had small movie-plot twist: stances that should be strong and low were (in some students and after several moves) becoming narrower and thus, weaker. There was also irregularity in the deviation because some people were successfully managing to stay low with right handed stances, but becoming unstable when in left handed ones (and vice-versa).

Concentrating more on the stances we still managed to improve on the second and third runs, reducing the time to 22 and then 19 seconds.

Of particular note was that the group governed it’s pace well, keeping together through the whole kata on each occasion, even with the added pressure of the clock.