Practical Karate Association

It's a wrap! The last school class of the 2025-26 academic year done!

Good stuff with pads and police riot training batons. A little space invaders at the end!

Cracking little class!

We began with a tricky 3 stage acclimatisation and option building exercise revolving around aggressive shoves by Thai pad holders.

1. Take multiple shoves and retain composure. Sometimes a shove is just a way of letting of steam. You don't need to escalate by striking though you do need to be prepared to defend against a strike. You can let aggression fizzle out sometimes. "Do not think that you have to win, rather think that you do not have to lose."
2. Receive the shove and then counter to the pad. This was more for the pad holder, practicing moving forward aggressively into attack then shifting weight backwards while retaining composure as the pad was hit, thus training using back stance to avoid a combo.
3. Intercept the momentum of the push and step to the outside and counter the pad.

A cadena flow drill to illustrate the importance of keeping hands up, plus showing the issues with flow drills.

Some kata practice.

Hit for hit slow-mo sparring to highlight positional awareness.

Wacky races to improve speed and agility including tag and pacman sprints.

A hot night, maximum effort. Really proud of this team. 😎

Some cracking work in a very hot week!

Great effort from the three brown belt candidates yesterday! Congratulations to Kian and Saahithyan for passing their 3kyu and 1 Kyu grades respectively.

Thanks to Barney, Marc and Guillaume for supporting as Uke and making it an excellent afternoon.