#66: Hiki-men footwork

I've had some people who asked me about hiki-men recently after seeing my hiki-men cuts at the Founders Cup event. I went through the video from it, and chopped out the other bits, and slowed the video down some before uploading it here to youtube:



The thing about hiki-men is, there is a lot of different styles to it. For me, how I do it is that I move my left foot back a little, then push off my opponent with my arms, as I go backwards from the push I lift my arms simultaneously as I lift my right foot, and make the cut. At the point of fumikomi with the right foot, my left foot comes off the ground which allows the right foot push to push my body backwards before the left foot comes down to continue my footwork/bounce away from my opponent.

This is how I do it, it isn't neccessarily how it has to be done and even I am not sure on if this is the best way to do it.

Random #50: Video from Founders Cup 2009

Here are three videos that were kindly taken by Grace on her hand held camera with movie mode. The video quality is poor because I downsized it to 320x240 and 15fps because the original size was 106mb /min, where as my upload rate is way too slow to upload files of that size.

From the videos, what I can see is, my backswing on small cuts is way to big. I need to work on not bending my arms on the backswing but using my wrists more, so that my line of center is maintained.

My legwork is still pretty poor and bad posture. In the 2nd video against SBK, I could have scored a men ippon however as I was told afterwards, not enough zanshin. In the third match, unfortunately even in the original quality video, I couldn't tell how legit the kote that scored against me was. During the actual shiai, I didn't even feel it, but it looked good from the other side to the shimpan ~shrug~ thats the way it is.

Good points however, I maintained my distance well I thought. Yes, my hiki-men cuts seem to be okay. I also seem to be okay in terms of controlling my court position, ie, not running out of the court and being aware of the boundaries. It's all an experience.

#45: Kata

We practiced Kendo Kata, Ipponme to Sanbonme in our last training session before exams started. Our regular training venue was not available to us so we used the grass outside to learn basic Kata.

I will not attempt to draw and show Kata because I feel that Kata is something that needs to be very precise, and the exact learning of it is neccessary and therefore should be learnt in person. In exchange though, I have found a very good (while old) clip on YouTube on the complete Kendo Kata for Taichi and Kodachi (1-7, 1-3, though it is 1-10 if you do them completely as a set). The narrator for this video does a very good job with a simple explanation.

Random #22: Shiai Video

I got this video from my fellow Kendoka who had videoed our shiai a while back. The competition was to select the team for the competition held at Burwood. Although I wasn't competing at the actual competition, I could still enter the internal competition for training and practice. I did mention it previously (here). I had to shrink the movie from the original quality (45mb) to a shoddy resolution and compression to make it a much more manageable size for uploading on my poor adsl1 connection (14mb, and as it, it took ages to upload).

It's enough to see how shocking my kendo is, and I can tell that my left leg isn't explosive enough in speed or power, and when I go for small cuts, I bring my shinai back way too much, opening myself for those beautiful debana kote cuts. Lessons learned.

Enjoy the short video of me getting beaten LOL

Random #21: YouTube Video - 2008 All Japan Students Championships

I normally don't really watch YouTube videos for Kendo because I prefer to learn my own path instead of trying to mimic things I see online or something, unless it is passed along to me for good reason. The better quality stuff though I don't mind watching now and then, but I certainly do not scrabble around for all the Kendo videos there are on this site. In any case, I've embedded the first out of seven parts for the Finals.

The link to the first one is here:
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=vR6eJ5j72OQ and no, you are not going to get rickrolled, but you'll have to click on the other six parts from the first one.