Tough Night at Tora

Paid a visit to Tora kendo club this week... phew, it was a tough one.

A combination of reduced practice (holidays), warmest day of the year and the athletic kihon blew me out.

Its times when I visit Tora and UCL when I realise I need to improve my kendo fitness, they are able to handle extended kirikaeshi drills and kihon with enough energy for 15 mins of jigeiko at the end.

By this time I was a gonner with arms/ legs like lead.

I did gain something positive out of it though. For some reason my kirikaeshi has gone to ratshit over the last 6 months, my left hand is all over the place while my right remains centralised.

One of the seniors at Tora suggested my sayumen angle is too flat (coming in sideways) and so I should angle it up. This immediately improved my cuts. Now I know what to sort out I can work on cutting properly again.

I've also ordered a new men from Miyako Kendogu in Japan as my existing one is getting a bit manky. I have to wait a few months for it to be fabricated and sent over.

Less Power, More Speed

Thursday night practice focused on relaxing our arms and using our wrists to 'snap' the cut.

We started with what O'Sullivan sensei calls the 'tap tap' exercise. Here we practiced repeated small and big wrist based cuts on a partner's horizontal shinai with as little arm power as possible. The aim was to create a satisfying 'pop' while keeping the sword alive.

After the initial exercise we practiced cutting in armour, finishing with kote suriage men and men suriage men. Here we we started to appreciate the benefit of having relaxed arms as suriage waza can be conducted much faster when there's little power in the arms/shoulders.

An additional mental note to take into Fridays practice is to remember not to bob up and down so much as I cut during kirikaeshi. Blake Sensei pulled me up on my poor footwork on Tuesday and said I need to cut with stable posture. This means sinking my hips into the strike as opposed to bouncing up on the balls of my feet.

Young battered me again. He managed to knock the shinai from my hands 3 times, this was because I was pushing him away in Tsubazeriai using my arms (shinai horizontal across his do). Whenever i did this he whipped his hands down and slammed my shinai to the floor. Lesson taught and hopefully learned.

On the knuckle front... its still pretty swollen and bruised after it was hit again. I am booked in to see the doc Friday morning, but I already know what he'll say... "stop doing kendo for a month or so" :(

//edit: Doc says it doesn't look like a bad injury. However, I am bruised the area around an artery and nerve which is causing 'retrograde pain' (shooting pain up my arm). Im guessing i've irritated the Median nerve. He suggested I try and protect it more and keep icing it to reduce the swelling.