Monday, December 5, 2011 - Session 46

How wild! Writing on a Monday evening! We at Yamakage Dojo have begun practicing on Tuesday nights once we realized that the YMCA has the room open in the evenings, and my work did not have enough hours to schedule me for either tonight or tomorrow night, so we had a pickup practice that lasted just under two hours. Werden Senpai led the practice and Chelsea was present as well. We also had a new person. He seemed to be into it and - as I do with all the new people - I will be rooting for him to stick with it! Mostly the practice was super informal. We opened with some suburi and that was when I knew that I was having an off night. I felt much sloppier than normal. But I got into the swing of things (my favorite pun) after awhile and mostly helped Chelsea with her tobikomi-men and her tobikomi-do technique. I wanted to impress upon her how useful it is to practice striking do because no one really seems to do it and it seems to me that many people consider do waza to be their weakest waza. We also ran through suriage-men a few times and then did some kirikaeshi. I was very impressed with the progress that Chelsea has made as far as her spirit is concerned. Actually got her to do a proper kiai to open kirikaeshi with! Much better than I had expected.

Then came the keiko! Werden Senpai and I both decided to use the informal pickup practice as an opportunity to keiko with techniques we do not otherwise get to play with. He went in with nito and I committed the keiko to (judge me not!) hidari-gedan. And I felt super slow right from the start. But I think I did a decent job on judging the waza that were worth attempting and the waza that were not. I mostly focused on going after the kote and the do with a little mune-tsuki as well. Taking a hidari kamae rather than a more standard kamae made it easier to propel forward but I believe that is only because I am more comfortable on that side. I should start working on taking what I was doing with my left foot forward and reversing it so that I can really improve on my footwork. Werden Senpai negated almost everything that I threw at him but afterward he said that I was actually throwing some pretty good strikes. Using the stance felt good. I think it really made me emphasize a more direct approach in my waza because I could not rely so much on the nuki and hiki waza I tend to focus on when I am in chudan. It was a good learning experience and one that I should be able to apply to my chudan in our normal practices. But enough writing for now, since tomorrow night is another practice!