Tonight started with myself feeling quite under the weather. I almost didn’t dress down and was just going to let the wife practice, but went ahead and got dressed anyways. At first it looked like it may be quite a small class compared to normal with just a few people; Matt, Becky, myself, Kelly (my wife), and Steve. Unfortunately we had no sensei as I’m sure Stroud sensei was still recovering from his trip to the Mexican Nationals. Things were soon put in order with the arrival of our san-dan, Kang, or as most of us call him, Mr. Kim. He quickly got us moving into warm-ups and about that time Dr. Roosevelt, another ni-dan and soon san-dan hopeful, showed up to round out the regulars.
After the normal warm-ups we quickly moved in to ashi-sabaki practice across the gym floor. We concentrated mainly on okuri-ashi moving at various speeds. The gym is the ideal place to practice this because the distance across is so great you really get a workout. After normal footwork we added swinging practice to the drills; kote, men, saya-men(right), saya-men(left), men, do. We did 3 or 4 rounds (over and back) of this increasing speed until we went as fast as we could. Mr. Kim mentioned that some of us started to cheat a little bit and we weren’t raising our hands completely over our head instead we were just bring the tsuba to our forehead. For basics our swings needed to be big and above our head.
Next he had us do a tenouchi drill where we open our right hand up so that it is forming more of a large ‘C’ shape and the tsuka rests in the fingers. You then pull the shinai back and catch it with your thumb and snap the wrist forward throwing it back into your fingers simulating tenouchi. While doing this you make a small (as in tiny) fumikomi with your foot as you snap the shinai forward. If you think it sounds confusing to explain it is twice as hard to do. Mr. Kim explained that hayasuburi is the normal way that is great practice for tenouchi, but since it is very exahausting it is hard to do a large number of them. This was a little bit of a shortcut to be able to practice over and over without wearing yourself out. Out of all of us Matt seamed to grasp the idea the best and I failed pretty miserably at it 
.
Around this time we had one of our beginners show up as well. I believe his name is Josh. He has only been to about three practices and this was his fourth so he is really new. He snuck in between our normal beginner classes, but anytime we can get a beginner we’ll take them and work them into the normal class. While we worked on our normal drills we had him concentrate on big mens and following through. I think for only his fourth class that he is doing quite well. His hits aren’t too hard and he is starting to following through more smoothly. I hope that he sticks around.
Once we took a very short (3 minutes) break we put our bogu on and starting hitting practice. I was still feeling pretty crappy at this point and was going to just sit out the last half of practice, but my body had other plans as it just went and grabbed my bogu anyways and started putting it on.
The first couple of rounds were normal basic men and kote strikes just to get warmed up and then moved to sashi-men. Mr. Kim explained that if someone has a strong kamae then you may have to make your opening since one is not there for you. He said that it doesn’t take much of an opening and that you only need 1 or two inches and then you will have enough to strike. To make this opening you can simply slide your shinai down theirs, applying a small amount of tenouchi as your are moving forward. This will create the small opening for you to move in and apply the small, quick men strike. Now my issue with this is that I’m just not as fast as I probably should be. I’m still in two step mode; move in creating the opening, then strike the men. I need to make it all one step so that as I’m moving in to make the opening I’m already moving to strike the men as well.
Next on the list was sashi-kote. Matt gave me a good insight on this and said that since I’m a bigger guy with a longer reach that I should attempt sashi-kote from further back. Instead of moving to uchi-ma I should strike from issoku itto no maai when the tips of the shinai are just touching. Since the kote is closer I don’t need to be as close as I do to strike men and also this helps the fact that I don’t have to move my shinai as much, if at all, to get over my opponents tip and strike his kote. Out of all the things we practice tonight I think this was the one I had the most immediate results with.
We finally ended practice with jigeiko and rotated between each person. My stamina started to fade pretty quickly once we hit this stage. Between being under the weather and just a hard practice I was hitting the wall by my second or third match. My last match was with Mr. Kim and I always have a hard time with him since he is so fast and skillful. Towards the end I just try to hold center and pick off a quick kote as he moves in to strike, but I’m usually too slow for that as well.
After practice Mr. Kim came by to tell me that I have a bad habit of pulling my shinai back to strike and thus opening up my kote. I’ve known about this problem for a long time and I think it gets really bad when I’m exhausted. I need to do as Stroud sensei said before and just work on keeping my tip on my opponent and lifting the shinai with my left hand rather than pulling with my right.
All in all it was a very hard but good practice. I was feeling much better at the end, very tired, but better.