Have you taken a good look at your Karate lately? Do you evaluate where you are at, where you are going and adjust your training based on your goals? Are you training for the sake of training even though it might not be helping reach your goals?
This is one area that I haven’t given as much attention as I should have over the last few years. After my last rank examination, I spent a lot of time evaluating my training and what I need in order to improve my weaknesses.
I have been taking advanced classes for at least two years now if not longer but I feel that somewhere along the line, I missed or never got a solid grasp of kihon fundamentals. How could I have gone through five plus years of hard Karate training without doing such simple things as tightening my core when I punch or block and not focusing on pushing from my back heel when punching. I found out, just recently, that I was doing a front snap kick like a front thrust kick for well over a year even though one of my Sensei’s corrected me almost weekly. I was kicking from the floor instead of bringing my knee up and extending my leg. The worse part is that I have mentioned that a front snap kick is just an extended knee strike in my training blog but it never sunk in until just the other day.
It’s the simple, beginner movements that are starting to haunt because I think I have gotten too complacent. The battle is fixing those simple mistakes by unlearning the many thousands of wrong movements that I have been doing. One thing that makes me feel that I am not alone is something that one of my Sensei’s said today. He said that even though he has been doing Karate for many years now, he spent over two hours working on moving forward in a front stance because one of our senior Sensei’s corrected him the week before. Moving forward in front stance is something that many Karate students learned in our first Karate class yet it goes to show that there is always something that we can fix or improve no matter how long or hard we train.