Visiting Shubukan Voghera Septeptember 2008

On september the 3rd I visited Shubukan Dojo in Voghera. The Instructor of the Dojo is Claudio Scacchieri 5th Dan and he is helped by Laura Imperiale 3rd Dan. The two instructors come every Monday to the training session at Shubukan, Torino, which is the Dojo where I started my Kendo practice. September is the beginning a a new year of training and I suffered very much for the impossibility to practice Kendo during August. Since Shubukan Voghera starts the activity one week earlier than my Dojo, I took this opportunity of early opening to enjoy again the Kendo practice. This was not the first time I go to the Shubukan Dojo in Voghera. Usually, in June when my sun gets to the sea in Liguria with grandparents I manage to visit Claudio's Dojo at least twice. I know all the persons practicing there and I always have a great time there. Claudio's way of training is sometime a bit rough but I always learn a lot by his comments on my way of doing Kendo.

Since this year they started also the Iaido course, the lesson begun with a brief Iaido demonstration of seitei and Muso Shinden katas. After we started the Kendo training. we had a brief worm up under the supervision of Laura, then we started the kion. Since in November I have to make my 2nd Dan exam, Claudio focus a lot on the right way of cutting. My problem is that I stamp the foot on the floor when I hit the opponent with the shinai instead of cutting with the full body. I realized that I push little with my left foot, which is something that I am trying to improve before the November exam. After kion, we applied what we have learned practicing gigeiko. An other point that it was raised from Claudio is that I have to be more quite when I am practicing giving more homogeneity to my attacks which are imprecise since I am speeding up too much the action. After gigeiko we did ippon shobu with Claudio. As usual I lost :-) but at least, I was trying to apply all the tips I learned during the lesson.
It was a nice way of starting the Kendo training season.