Stretching the pieces

After about a month of random delays class resumed last friday. I had John from Johndo show up along with regular student Jesse.

We ran through tegatana a couple of times and paid attention to the same hand-same foot relationship of the movements and how they work like in hanasu. Disengaging our hip and fall-stepping to the hand-foot side works in both kata.

The rest of class was spent working on hanasu 1-8. More practice for jesse and a refresher for john turned into an interesting evening of technique dissection and discussion. I tried to make the overall goal of our practice to be get out of the way with the first step but make sure the second step (where at the moment i think the magic is concentrated the most) focuses on facing uke at unbendable arms length and then the third move ends up behind the arm as just the consequence of uke's continued motion. Sometimes it works like in the first four, sometimes uke makes a second attack like in the last four. As long as the second step is a turn to face uke you're doing alright, or at least you'll be better off.

That was the jist of class: experimenting with motion and distance and timing and footwork. We had fun and i think we all learned something. We did a bit of shomen ate tinkering as a cool down with a splash of multiple opponent aiki brush off thrown in.

No class is happening tonight but our next scheduled class time is Wedensday so i'll update as soon as i can.

As always if you have any suggestions/advice i'd love to hear it.
Thanks