New semseter

On Monday Tino lead the training. We did some Kihon and Hiki-waza before finishing with Jigeiko. I still lost to Patrick for the Ippon-Shobu. My fighting spirit wasn't strong enough to put pressure and create openings. With the others I either win or draw.

General thing to improve:

• Seme, or more explicitly, the building-up to a strike is as important as, if not more than, the strike itself. With a seasoned kendoka a simple strike very likely leads to a crossed sword and eventually can be countered by an oji-waza.

Yesterday I arrived a little earlier for the university's training, at the end of the beginner's session. Since it was the first session of the semester, there was a flood of 50+ curious students - the largest number of people in the history of Dresden kendo! We'll see how many will stay at the end of the semester.

We did lots of Kihon (great!) and Hiki-waza. My breathing has improved for Kirikaeshi. For the Hiki-waza, we did 2 rounds of 3 x Hiki-men/kote/do. I always did the first two slowly to make sure my footwork and body coordinate well together. This for me was a good way to learn.


Then we did kakari-geiko, and ai-kakarigeiko, which I like the most. Because they're very good for building-up the stamina and the fighting spirit. The ai-kakarigeiko helps especially to attack with a strong centre, since most of the time both people would strike men, and if the centre is not strong enough one gets hit, otherwise the swords cross each other.

No time for jigeiko. But was still a good training. It also seems like with the training on the coming Friday, this week I will have trained three times, which makes me a happy kenshi!