Keiko: A Kenshi's Journey

If you've been training for any amount of time, you probably have a laundry list of items that you are working on.  Our dojo has an established process for addressing how to tackle these items to try and keep them manageable for each person.  This works great for short-term goals and improvement, and can help build good habits for later on.  I, of course, have a list of things I'm working on, but I also have a set of long-term goals that I'm working on developing.  These are goals that I feel are a bit more complicated than basic corrections.  A lot of these goals are multi-part, and I'm working on breaking them down into edible pieces that I can use to build on each other, similar to the system that we already use for improvement.  Here are just some of the thoughts I have an how I'm thinking about approaching them.  Maybe by outlining them here I can solidify my plans.  Perhaps I just might find a new and more efficient way of approaching them, ...

Courtesy of T. Patana  Hiki waza have never been my specialty, but every once in a while I have a moment of clarity and an alarmingly high success rate.  The moments are few and far between, but they are there.  I've always believed in having strong hiki waza, even though my personal preference is to attack forward using shikake or oji waza.  I like having the ability and confidence to use techniques that work in any given situation I'm in, and since there's a lot of time spent in tsubazeriai having a strong hiki waza repertoire just makes sense.  This month our dojo is going to be focusing on hiki waza, and on some main points to make them work.  As always, this is just my personal experience and opinion on things, so take it as you will. When discussing this subject with my sensei, there were a few main points that we came up with that help to create successful hiki waza.  The first we touched on was proper tsubazeriai.  I'm sure we've al...