This week we added three new stances to our repertoir. We’d seen them before when others have been doing bassai dai, but they’ve never been explained or practiced.

Our most recent class was hard work, and it’s all thanks to Aaron. Sensei Duncan wasn’t available, so we didn’t learn anything new in this lesson; instead we concentrated on fitting in a good practice of absolutely everything we have covered before now, as Aaron took what was probably his first class in a black [...]

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

The last two classes have focused more on fitness levels and we seem to have fitted more into each class.

The first thing we noticed upon arriving at the dojo this friday was a new Sensei who we’d not met before. We guessed he’d be the Sensei because of his black and white belt, which all GKR instuctors wear.

Quite often Sensei John adds variations to kata, either to focus on a specifics, or to add complexity so that when returning to the basic kata it appears simpler, thus providing us with more time to think about what we’re doing.

To extend last week’s golden nugget that “the preparation is as important as the strike”, this week it was highlighted that the return from the strike is just as important: this was achieved with the help of some nursery school sized chairs.

Last night, though we’ve not graded yet, we had our first beyond-basics lesson.

It’s becoming a bit of a habit now; Sensei John asked Rich to take the warmup again last night.

Our Sensei’s Sensei visited our Dojo yesterday. It was fascinating to see someone so skilled and agile demonstrating the moves (even more so than Sensei John who is a little older than Sensei Simon), and it was also good to have two experienced instructors on hand to notice things.

This week we took delivery of some small Reebok hand weights.

What we began doing last week, and continued this week, was de-training the “left follows right” mentality, this is apotentially bad habit that can come automatically from practicing the base moves. i.e left, follows right, follow left, ad infinitum.

Last night we went to our second Friday night class. As newbies to the group it was cool that Sensai John chose Rich to take the warmup, this time with no warning at all. Rich did a sterling job, although did threaten to lapse into boxercise warm up at one time, and backed out of [...]

Until now we’ve been going to karate once a week, easing ourselves into it slowly. Last week we took two classes, and this week we’ll be doing the same.

This week Emma was called out front and took the warm up, and did it very well indeed, though i think we need to make everyone warm up more because the general fitness level of the class is quite low. Conversely the speed of uptake on the 1st and 2nd Kata has been very good [...]

Tuesday’s Karate was interesting. When we entered the Dojo and talked to Sensei John he mentioned that he would be picking someone “at random” to lead the warm-up session. He usually gets some of the orange belts out the front to demonstrate techniques, and has been getting Tony (who’s currently Orange belt and training to [...]

The order day a fella came round the house asking if we’d be intersted in learning about Karate. With the London Marathon behind us, and having done a fair bit of boxing, we thought it might be good to do a different style of training.