Sunday, October 21, 2018

My personal journey to Go Dan exam: - 8 months

Last Thursday I went to the evening practice at Shubukan - Massari, the dojo where I usually practice when I am at home in Torino. The instructor of Thursday practice is Arialdo Bolognesi (7 Dan).

Sumi sensei seminar 2018


Usually the practice is divided in warm up, kion and jigeiko. During Thursday practice usually we have the majority of the people that is below nidan and we dedicate quite some time to basic practice.
This time I was running the warm up and the basic kion. I focused the lesson on the combination of techniques and on changes in techniques repetitions to keep the attention of everybody always high. On the last 20 minutes we had  mawarigeiko. During mawarigeiko I was focusing my attention to seme, inducing my partner to attach. On the last jigeiko I was practicing with Arialdo. It is always very challenging, because I have to find an opening and, although I know that his preferred technique is kaeshi do, there is no way to avoid to be catch by him.
However, this time instead of kaeshi do, I was blocked a couple of times by the tip of his shinai during the attachs.   At the end of jigeiko, Arialdo told me that I was not searching the center and for this reason he stopped me with shinai. He suggested me to add more shinai work to improve my seme. It is something on which I was already working, but as frequently happen, at least to me, during the practice your attention focus on other points and this time my tip was definitively out of my attention. Looking forward to test again the combination of tip center and seme next week.
Last but not least, as frequently happen in kendo, suddenly something you were unable to do for a long time it comes out. I was very surprised that simply changing a little the grip of my left hand on the shinai make me able, finally to strike some decent kote from jodan-no-kamae.
This is the nice of Kendo there is always something new to learn and something that suddenly comes out smoothly.
 

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