A change to my training schedule

2012-02-28 22:36:00

From this week onward I will be training kendo twice a week: saturday morning at Renshinjuku Almere and tuesday evening at Renshinjuku Amstelveen. Tonight was my first class in Amstelveen and I'm very grateful to a bunch of people. I'm thankful to Peter-sempai for coming along as moral support. I'll readily admit that I was a bit nervous about going to a completely new group, so it helped to have a friendly face in the first hour. And of course I'm grateful towards Heeren-sensei and everyone in the group for the warm welcome. It felt like I'd been training with them for a while already :)

Most notably, I'm thankful to Marli! She's the one who pulled the trigger on this decission!

After witnessing us at the NK Teams and after hearing some of my thoughts, she basically said that "if you really want to become serious about both kendo and the discipline that comes with it, then you're going to have to train with another group". Me being a stupid-head I originally understood that to mean "leave Almere and go elsewhere", but that's not what she meant. She meant: train more and with other groups. Wow! I'm so lucky that she's actually the one pushing me to go do kendo twice a week :)

Now... Class schedule at Amstelveen is a bit different. Almere usually does kata, warming up, footwork, kihon+waza and geiko. Tonight's schedule was warm up, then an hour of kihon+waza and half an hour of geiko. Heeren-sensei indicated that this does shift around a bit, depending on the crowd that comes in. One particular aspect that I enjoyed was the personal involvement ('hoofdelijke aansprakelijkheid') during the debriefing. Heeren-sensei asked a few of the kendoka how they have been using the waza that we practiced in their geiko and if they succeeded (and if not, why not). "How often did you do harai waza? Did it work? Why not? When would you best use harai waza?" (the answer turned out to be "when your opponent has become weak in his arms")

Things that were pointed out for improvement:

• For ten-no-uchi, my left hand is too high.
• My right hand wanders over the tsukagawa. It should stay firmly at the top.
• In kihon practice, after receiving men, I should turn on the spot instead of stepping sideways and turning.
• In kirikaeshi, I receive my blows incorrectly.
• In geiko I'm too tense and rigid.

I'm very happy about the fact that I did pay more attention to my fumikomi! I was conciously trying to make improvements in that! Also, I used my bogu for the first time this evening and I'm very, very happy with it! I still need to break in the kote, but every piece of the kit feels comfortable and suits me perfectly.

A great night! And now I'm off to bed!

kilala.nl tags: kendo, sports,

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