Saifa #1

-
My current focus of training is the kata saifa.  I know, I know, sequentially it is the first "real" kata in most goju schools and could be viewed as a poor cousin to its more glamorous and senior katas such as kururunfa or sepai, but I really, really like it.  (I haven't learned sepai yet either, so that rules that out)

Coming from a shotokan background (and an eclectic one at that:  the only kata were 6 taikyoku and the 5 Heian - the remaining majority were not practised at any level within the organisation), saifa was a revelation to me.  Our method of training it (learning the meaning of the technique represented in the kata), the manner of body movement and the way in which it immediately "fit" with me were all pleasantly surprising. 

For a short, relatively straightforward kata, there is a high degree of finesse and technical complexity contained within it.  It contains (apparently) relics of the old, hidden manner of passing on kata in its mis-directed head turns; the tai-sabaki concepts include direct and angled opposition, redirection and encircling methods of movement.  And at its core, it takes a direct, no nonsense approach to the age-old problem of: "oh shit!  How do I get out of this?".

As I do more work with saifa, I will blog more on how I am viewing it, and what I am doing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Seienchin Part 2

-
Image
This is now a multi-part series.  You can find Part 1 Part 3 Part 4  here So, finally, I have found some time to think some more about seienchin. As usual, my reason for doing these posts is to help myself make sense of what is happening in the kata and to explore different possibilities.  I am expecting to make mistakes and to pursue leads which go nowhere, but that's what happens when we learn. I took a video of myself doing the kata, and have attached it here.  As is usual, I have noticed quite a few things wrong with it and have fixed them up somewhat as a result (after all, isn't that the whole point of video-taping yourself?), but haven't had a chance to tape myself again.  Some things to note are that my arms are pushing too far forward in the double triangle "block" in Section A, and my hands are meant to be sweeping across high and low, not along a single mid-line in the two backward steps in shikodachi at the start of Section C. I will
Read more

DIY Training Equipment #1 - Punching Bag

-
Image
Being of a frugal and handy nature, I have made many of my training aids myself.  One of the first that I constructed was a heavy punching/kicking bag. New ones of any size cost around $150-$250.  This is money I don't have, and couldn't really justify at this point in time anyway.  So I scrounged around and found enough material to make a functional bag. I used an old brazilian hammock (without the wooden spreader), a 25kg bag of sand, a couple of rubbish bags, lots of old curtains and a couple of rolls of duct tape. To construct it, I taped up the bag of sand into the rubbish bags securely, then wrapped it in about 10cm thickness of old heavy curtains.  This gave me the core of my bag.  I folded the hammock in half, and placed a large wad of curtain in the bottom of the fold.  Then, I hung the hammock by its ends from the garage ceiling and tightly wrapped it up with duct tape, stuffing more curtains around and over the top of it.  Finally, I did a second layer o
Read more

Silat Suffian Seminar

-
I had the good fortune to attend a 2-day seminar this weekend with guru Maul Mornie of Silat Suffian Bela Diri.  It's a Bruneian martial art and mostly weapons-based. This weekend, we did knife-knife, knife-hand and machete work.  It was my first time working with machete (apart from my teen years hacking acres of blackberry) and although we didn't progress much beyond the fundamentals with it, I still found it fascinating. We started Saturday with an hour and a half of basic drills - the basic cuts with a knife (over/fore, back, thrust), and the basic defenses against those attacks.  These formed the basis of the rest of the seminar. It was interesting to me that all basics began as knife v. knife.  Everything we did for the seminar (even the empty hand v. knife) went back to this basic premise.  It was also interesting to my uneducated viewpoint (I have done bugger-all knife work before) that the knife was never used to block/check/intercept the incoming knife (no metal on
Read more