Mini-Post: Just In Time For The Taikai...

Well, this week has not started off on a good note. Friday, as I was doing some suburi at home, I suddenly felt all my energy leave me. When I started to get up (I was sitting in seiza), I felt super dizzy, and things went downhill from there. Turns out I had a bout with the flu, which lasted all through the weekend and through yesterday. I was not able to make it to practice last night, and I was also informed that there will be no practice on Wednesday. With the UW Taikai on Saturday, the only other time I'll be able to practice will be Friday night in Bellevue when we head over to the coast. For me, this is both good and bad. Bad because I feel like I'm going into this weekend without being properly warmed-up. Good, though, because it gives my leg and muscles a little extra time to heal up. If anyone caught my post last week, you know that I pulled the muscle in my left leg, and was not able to fumikomi properly the rest of the practice. But since then it's healed up quite a bit. When I lunge forward too far I can still feel the soreness, but for normal everyday movements and running there's no pain. So I think that as long as I don't overdo anything I should be fine this weekend.

So, in the absence of proper practice this week I'll be doing more home suburi, as well as my normal core exercising and other things I do when I'm not at the dojo. I feel ready for this weekend, but I just want that little extra push to give me that confidence in myself I'm looking for.

Comments

Sutemi

The Japanese-English Kendo dictionary, located at www.kendo-usa.org, defines sutemi as: " Sute-mi (n.) 1. Concentration and effort with all one’s might, even at the risk of death. 2. Concentration of all one’s effort into one strike, even at the risk of defeat." Ok, so risking everything at the risk of defeat or death. But how does that apply to our own training? Fighting to the death is a very foreign concept to many of us, but I believe that we can all understand fighting at the risk of defeat. This is a concept that we've started examining in more detail at our dojo lately, and one that I believe can be learned at any stage of practice that you're at. To put it simply, Sensei explained that sutemi is putting 100% effort into a strike. Holding nothing back and leaving all cares and worries behind so that you can give all of yourself over to that strike. it sounds like a complicated idea, and it is, but just like all things in kendo I believe that

Nuki Men - A Personal Look

2010 Kent Taikai This month we'll be focusing on nuki waza at our dojo, specifically nuki men and nuki kote. Here are just a few of my own (emphasis on own!) thoughts on the subject. I, personally, love nuki men. It's been one of my favorite techniques for years and years, and I used it a lot when I was a mudansha. I still use it now on occasion, for that matter, but in order to become and stay effective with it I had to learn a few things. These are things which work for me and your mileage may vary, as one of my friends like to say. First off is the movement itself. I'll start with the "classic" version with kote-nuki men. One person attacks the kote, and their opponent responds by raising the shinai up and countering with a men strike of their own. In this scenario there are a few things I like to keep in mind. The first being to get my hands out of the way! I can't just lift my shinai and expect to be ok, I have to also get my hands (and my

Harai Waza

Photo courtesy of T. Patana, Kendo Photography Another month down, another new focus for training. This month we'll be focusing on harai waza. Here are some of my personal thoughts on it, from my own training and experience. I really had trouble figuring out how to start this entry. Normally I just open the page and go to work, letting whatever ideas and thoughts I have flow out onto the screen, but this one really had me stumped for a while, mainly because everything I started to write sounded really negative and I didn't mean it to, so I think I'll just go with it and try to get to the point that I was trying to make in the first place. When I first started learning harai waza it was part of kihon kata three. If you want to be fancy, that would be the Bokuto ni yoru kendo kihon waza keiko ho, kihon san - harai waza . The idea was simple: strike the motodachi's shinai out of center and deliver a men strike, all in one smooth movement. It was one of the

Keiko: A Kenshi's Journey

Search This Blog