I believe honestly, without a shadow of doubt, tonight was one of the hardest workouts I’ve ever endured. That includes the annual gasshukus and 4-hour long seminars with high ranking black belts from around the world.
I know you all are vibrating in anticipation for the description of this abomination, but before I get to that, know this: my Dad is enabling me to get better at my kata. He isn’t forcing some voodoo hex on me or holding me down and throwing weight on my back. Its all great, extremely helpful input and if it read like I was blaming him yesterday’s post it was just because the workout was hard and I really felt it.
Anyway, that one on Wednesday was a cakewalk compared to tonight. We got there around 5:55 pm, and Dad and I decided to alternate kata in order to give my ailing legs a little more of a break between kata. Dad got his 15 kata in, and I got to 14. “That’s fine,” I thought, “it’ll give me a nice capper to the workout to do one more during the break.”
Silly me. Our exalted leader
Station 1: Stance Resistance Training – Oh great. Just what I wanted after 15 Sochin kata… to have my Dad tethered to my butt by one of his old belts and have to pull him across the room for 20 repetitions. Hooray. 🙂
Station 2: Weight Resistance Training for Blocks – This one was pretty fun. We grabbed 5 pound dumbells and did 50 each of rising, inward, downward, and outward block while standing in kebadachi. By this point my legs were starting to numb up so the stance wasn’t that bad.
Station 3: Target Practice with kicking – This was also fun. One partner holds a foam pad at belt level, the other partner does 20 on each leg of front kick and round kick if we had time. We only got about 4 kicks into Dad’s round kicks before it was time to move on.
Station 4: Rubber Band Resistance for Punching – One partner is an anchor, the other partner stretches one of those rubber band dealies with the handles in such a way to work on the draw back hand of punching techniques. 20 on each hand, and then we switched to work on the punching out hand. We got through my set of the latter before it was time to move to the final station.
Station 5 (aka The Fifth Circle of Hell): Squat Kicks – Go down into a knee bend, pop back up and do a front kick. Repeat 20 times on each leg in succession. Then do the same thing with side thrust kick, only 10 per leg. We didn’t quite get to the optional round kick, but that was fine because my legs were AWOL by that point.
Oh! But it wasn’t over! We ended up by doing 20 jab/reverse punch combinations (each hand), 20 rear leg front kicks (each leg), 20 reverse punch/jab combinations (each hand), and 20 front leg front kicks (each leg).
After that, I thought I had nothing left. In having nothing left, I recalled that I still had 1 more Sochin kata to do before my goal. I decided to go ahead and do it right after I got a drink of water.
And then the bomb dropped.
Sensei Hartman comes in and decides to focus on kata work. Since we all had our own kata that we were working on, we needed to do 15 of our own kata. We really only had about 35 minutes to do it in also, since the previously described bonanza went a little long.
So
I did so and made a few mistakes, but its starting to feel stronger now. My center feels firmer, and after going through what we did tonight I know that not only am I going to do this kata, I’m going to do it well. Or die trying. The grand total for tonight was 30 kata. And circuit training. Gotta be proud to have lived through that!
Sochin Counter
Accomplished / Goal == Percent Complete
90 / 2000 == 4.5%
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