Importance of the wrist

One of the things that I have concentrated on since last year training in Tokyo is to increase my wrist strength. And fortunately, I have been making steady improvement. 

It is told by almost any teacher that the wrist strength is important for making the strikes sharp, and hence validating a point. However, its significance is much further beyond the mere sound effect. The following is a list of the other benefits:

• It keeps the upper body up-straight. A lot of young kenshis (for example high school students) and beginners whose sole interest is winning tend to let the upper body lean forwards when striking men, in order to add an extra speed and strength to the strike. If this can be achieved by the wrist movement along, the leaning of the body can be avoid. This of course looks better, and is also essential if one were to make continuous strikes.

• Better ki-ken-tai-ichi and more explosiveness. These are direct consequence of the previous point. Because if one keeps the body up-straight during seme or at the initial stage of the strike, it is very difficult for the opponent to detect when the strike will come. 

• Shikake-wazas rely heavily on wrist strength, as elucidated by Ozawa Sensei when I was in Tokyo. They include harai, maki, osae, and of course kote-men, etc.

How to increase wrist strength? 

Many ways. In fact, I have seen many people telling each other special exercises on how to increase wrist power, but I think the most effective exercises are the OLD SCHOOL STUFFS: kirikaeshi, renzoku-waza and continuous men-strikes raising the shinai to the "medium" position (see here for explanation). While doing them, make sure the arms and the wrists are fully extended. Especially the right index finger, if straightened, should point downwards as much as possible, instead of pointing horizontally (with the right arm being horizontal). 

Tight situation

I haven't been to the Wednesday's training for a long time. But since I didn't go to the monday's training this week due to the pain on my left hand, and Tuesdays' training was canceled due to public holiday, I thought I would go today. There were three people without the bogus and three with, so the tempo was somewhat slow. However, Georg made us do 600+ men-suburi with two shinais. Which was perhaps the most tiring part of the training.

Again kihon-geiko with the usuals, I requested do-kirikaeshi which we don't do very often. However, after watching a few clips of trainings at other dojoes, which have do-kirikaeshi in every training, and seeing everyone being able to do it so well, I thought I have to get good at it too. Well, ha, I still sucked at it.

For bogu wearers we practised briefly harai-waza. My sweeping movement needs to be sharper. This still comes down to having a good tenouchi.

The jigeiko afterwards was fun, although short and therefore not very exhausting. Won both ippon-shobu against Thomas and Georg, the latter of whom was the first time I think. However, on incident during the jigeiko with Georg left me thinking for a bit. He put pressure (seme) on me and I moved backwards until I almost touched the bench behind leaning against the wall. Then I paused and was worried about hitting the bench and falling over. At this moment my men was hit. So what kept me thinking? At that moment I thought, "ok, wait, I'm hitting the bench. Let's move away to some other place." But in fact I let myself trapped in this tight situation. The only right thing to do is not to loose my composure and fight back. It wasn't good enough to blame it on the bench behind.

Besides the training, yesterday I called Ozawa-Sensei to greet him and thank him for letting me stay at his dojo when I go there next year, after Yasuko informed him that I was to come. At the beginning of the conversation there was a bit of confusion because I spoke in Japanese "moshi moshi? Ozawa-sensei desuga? Wadashiwa Liu desu!" then I changed to English because I couldn't say anything more in Japanese, so for moment he didn't know I was speaking English. Haha maybe my Japanese was just too convincing. Now the only uncertainty for me is to finish my thesis before the end of March, and I need to buy the tickets latest in Dec I think.