A Wonderful Class...

...which I have greatly missed these past couple of weeks. It seems like it's been a month.

I will say this here and now: My Sensei is a kind and generous man. I will not discuss details, but I also will never forget.

Class has a bit of a new structure now. We come in at 7:30pm and joing the second half of the beginner's class, and help them work on various techniques at Sensei's discretion.

After the beginner class bows out at 8:00, we bow in for our class.

Tonight, we started with kata, and Sensei broke a few of us back in with Takeoko Kai Ichei before going into Takeoko Kai Shii and Go. (Takeoko Kai 1,4,5 resprectively.)

At that point I had to stay with Takeoko Kai Shii, because I hadn't started learning Takeoko Kai Go yet. After a couple of rounds, he had one of the other yellow belts a bit futher along than I show me the first half of Go tonight.

After kata, Sensei had us doing eight-point soft blocks and 14-point hard blocks, but with a twist, literally. During the soft blocks, we had to turn in place after each block, one turn for each move. Following that, we had to SPEED DRILL the same thing - blocking and turning as quickly as we could.

Next, he had us go through the 14-point hard blocks with our eyes closed, then speed drill with our eyes closed, then speed drill and turn-per-move with our eyes closed.

That was the first half hour.

The second half hour was all sparring, free style two-minute rounds.

I almost forgot - Sensei & two advanced students used bat-pads (literally like square-padded baseball bats) at the end of the beginner sesssion, and had us all use our hard and soft blocks to block pokes and swings with the bats.

Quite an interesting class.

Sayonara,

Dan