Finally got the time to post a report on our trip to Sabah for the Kota Kinabalu Karate Open Championship 2010….
My AirAsia flight from Senai International Airport (JHB) in Johor Bahru my late…. not much… 20 minutes I think… but late enough for me to take notice. But by some miracle… it was a also 20 minutes early getting into Kota Kinabalu International Airport (BKI) arriving just before 12 noon. Kudos to AirAsia. The flight was uneventful… just the way I like it… to much “events” on a flight gives me high blood…. On arrival to at BKI I was met by tournament supremo Loh Beng Hooi Sensei of Kobe Osaka Sabah.
At around 3pm, Fairuz Sensei of Kanazawa-ryu Sabah came to pick me up for a training session at his dojo in Sembulan on the outskirts of Kota Kinabalu about 40 of his students were there, led by Benson Sensei, were gearing up for the training. As the team (who by the way arrived 1 day earlier) were on the river safari, they were unable to attend the first training session. Fairuz Sensei had me take over the class for the day, and I decided to focus on kime waza for that session. The two main techniques focused were gyaku-tzuki and kizami-tzuki. being two of the most used waza in the karate arsenal, I believe that it is important, especially for the beginner and those preparing for black belt, to really understand the fundamentals that make up these two waza.
I started out with a slow execution of gyaku-tzuki. Attention is paid in keeping the dachi in place and on hip rotation and the hanmi. I had the students do gyaku-tzuki in 2 counts (i) the tzuki itself & (ii) the pulling back of the hand. By executing this waza slow-mo revealed a lot about the fundamentals in which these kids were training in. The majority of the kids were trained in sports styled dojos before migrating to Fairuz Sensei’s dojo, so a lot of them had to be tweaked in their kihon and had to be told to forget about jiyu kumite. The recipe I gave them was :
KIHON –> KATA –> KUMITE
not
KUMITE –> KATA –> KIHON
So I had them focus on what good karate is made of, sound fundamentals of the kihon. First I had them do 30 gyaku-tzukis slo-mo on each side. Second, I had them add a little more speed (50% I said… as if they could be measured by the human eye), 30 on each side, and last I had them do it with full power, 30 on each side, kiai on every count. Lo and behold, I had them do close to 200 gyaku-tzukis without realizing it. Along the way, there I pointed out various minute adjustments that each kid had to do. The beginners had to deal with the whole concept of gyaku-tzuki itself, punching from the of the opposite side of the front leg, while the more advanced belts had to deal with the hip rotation and also the pulling back of the hand (hanmi).
The same principles were applied when we practised kizami-tzuki, focusing on correct kihon.
This is all the time I have to write for now.
Yoroshiku,
Azlimmi
Comments