Wednesday, February 13, 2013

How could I forget? 2013 tradition completed

In January, at the very first class of my dojo, my students and I completed my New Year's tradition:

We did:

213 middle punches
213 front kicks
13 Kihon Sono Ichi

This was a wonderful moment for me.  I don't know how they felt about it,  but I was happy to share this experience with them.  The whole class was dedicated towards this effort, and there was something unifying by having each student count out a set of 10.

Maybe something positive happens in the human psyche when a group works on a repetitive task as a unit, such as rowing a boat, or hauling a log, or moving together in synchronicity.  I know that I appreciate good team kata performances where each member precisely hits the same mark/technique as the other.  To realize and understand the complexity involved to achieve this feat brings even more admiration.

I love watching this following video of Russian Women performing Seienchin to music.  Although, I found that having to keep to the beat of the music tending to change the "feel" of the technique presented so that it had more of a dance look to it, I did see that they were also capable of showing the fullness of the movements.

http://youtu.be/6CBFOfh3gk8


2 comments:

Unknown said...

We used to follow a bit "different" tradition in our dojo. We do number of the year kicks and punches on last training of the year :)

OSU!

Mir said...

Thanks for your comment.

Yes, and usually the amount of strikes is far higher than just 213.. but I chose to modify to fit the available time slot.