For the last few months, the club has been running a conditioning class every Saturday morning at Stranton Primary School. Since Amy and I have been back, we've turned this into a two hour Karate class.
The attendance hasn't been particularly inspiring, but every student that turns up has worked really hard and had a great time doing it - what more can you want?
We started out with some basics...
Also at today's class, we continued on with the a theme running through our Summer School - Tanto Dori, or knife defence. This stuff is usually not taught until a student reaches black belt, in fact in Aiwakai (our association) it's not needed until a student tries for 3rd Dan, so it's very advanced stuff.Despite the advanced nature, and the fact that we had a mix of grades from yellow (8th Kyu) through to purple belt (4th Kyu), the kids did great.
We worked through the first 3 knife defences which in Japanese are called
No1: うでがらみどり (pronounciation = u-de-ga-ra-mi-do-ri) Udegarami-dori
No 2: こてなげどり (pronounciation = ko-te-na-ge-do-ri) Kotenage-dori
No 3: うんがどり (pronounciation = u-n-ga-do-ri) Unga-dori
We also made sure they all knew how to breakfall correctly, with amusing results...
