After prague

Yesterday's training was fun. We had quite sometime at the end for jigeiko. Lots of people were late in fact at the begining, and three of us thought the other weren't going to come. So we started warming up and doing suburi until the others showed up almost at the same time. Strange.

When Georg took over the training, he asked us to use two shinais to do 500+ suburis. Very, very tiring.

After a few rounds of long kirikaeshi down the hall and normal kirkikaeshi, men-uchi, and sashi-kote-men, we started jigeiko. We had chance to practise with everyone, 6 people in totoal. For ippon-shobu I drew two, won two, and lost one to Georg.

• I found that keeping the upper body straight during kirikaeshi actually helps the beathing, and therefore makes it easier.
• I repeated the same thing to Wei as I did to Misha on Tuesdays training. I kept hitting his kote until he didn't raise the shinai.
• My hiki-men is still not sharp enough, so my opponent can block it.

After the trainig I asked Georg for his advice:

• don't let the kensen drift too far away from the centre otherwise it'd take a long time or more effort to make the strike (I tend to reverse the shinai and draw a big circle to strike)
• good strong kote. He very kindly said that he hasn't been (or not for a long time ) hit by such a strong debana-kote.
• becareful of the zanshin after kote. Dont raise the shinai backwards.
• He stressed to everyone how useful and important kote-men is.

He said after I came back from the Prague seminar my level shot up, and he now has real fun do jigeiko with me, which is very flattering! He said now I have to try to practise other waza's apart from debana-kote.

• more tenouchi.