Visit to JKS Loughborough

A Small but perfectly formed class at JKS Loughborough

This Saturday morning Hans Rana Sensei invited Mike Sensei along to his dojo in Loughborough to have the chance to take his students for a bit of early morning karate. Mike Sensei opened the invitation within HSKC, and Jim Sensei, Brenda Sensei, Jonathan and myself (Ben) tagged along.

Our early morning began at around 5 AM when Jim set out to collect Mike, Brenda and myself from various parts of Haxby and Strensall before setting off under directions from the satnav. On the way we aimed to pick Jonathan up from his home but the satnav however had different ideas and decided to bypass him and head straight for Hans Sensei's home, after Jim had a rather frank discussion with his satnav we eventually collected the final member of our crew for the days training, we then headed for our first stop with at Hans Sensei’s house.

The journey down to Loughborough was very smooth and easy going on the roads at that time in the morning, where some of us even managed to catch a few more winks of sleep in the car, we decided to take a quick stop off at the local McDonalds for quick drink as we arrived rather early. After our quick stop we then headed on to Hans Sensei's house, where we received an extremely warm welcome as he invited us to join him in having a warming cup of tea, soon after we were joined by none other than Mehrdad Sensei. After a short chat and a nice cuppa our journey continued to our final destination at JSK Loughborough’s dojo.

Shortly after arriving at the dojo Hans Sensei’s karate-ka started to arrive for the early morning session and another friendly face Duncan Blades Sensei from JKS Sho Gai Karate joined the mix, and after brief introductions with everybody we set about the mornings training. This started with Jim Sensei remarking that he should be about here-ish somewhere in the line, while for me it was easy being among the lowest grades at the session I found my place at the far end for the warm ups. The whole session was lead by Mike Sensei so he began with some easier individual warm ups and then moved on to some pair work to push our warm-ups a little harder and further. Swiftly after we moved on to some basic drills to get a feel for the training and work out where the session was heading so Mike sensei had the whole class moving forward in zenkutsu dachi punching gyaku tsuki then backwards blocking age uki/gyaku tsuki. After a few goes through of the basics we moved on to some freestyle movements, in a lead up to doing gohon kumite but with a more free style spin on the defending side in such were pulling out further on the defence then moving back in to counter after each attack.

After watching the exercise Mike Sensei quickly moved on to some control and confidence boosting exercise where he picked a young karate-ka from Loughborough to demonstrate his control and what he was looking for when we are both punching jodan oi tsuki and kicking chudan mae geri, this nicely lead on to his next area where he focused deeply on generation power from our hips while attacking, for this in pairs we had one side knelt down holding their firsts out at stomach height and the other moving in full speed and power punching jodan oi tsuki and stopping themselves from being knocked off balance by using our hips and body correctly, and if you got it right you even moved your opponent back.

Then next part of the session held some more interesting jiyu ippon combinations; firstly we had an attack coming jodan to which we blocked stepping back upwards juji uke (X block) stepping forward bringing our opponent down then striking empi followed by taking the front leg with a high sweep and finished off with a ground takedown, after a few practices on either side of the line up we ramped it up with 5 full strength attacks each to test it out properly, then Mike Sensei built on what has seemed to be his theme for this week had us again in counter to a jodan attack taking a low step to the side kicking mawashi geri followed up with ushiro mawashi, our final combo was one Mike Sensei chosen from Asai Sensei arsenal, a simple but effective evade and strike when faced with a mae geri, we moved over to the left in to kiba dachi pushing our hands into a downward juji uke then before the kick landed we were simply striking with our right hand gedan.

After what seemed like only 10 minutes of training but actually it was 1 ¼ hours we had a quick minute water break then back on for Mike Sensei’s last part of the session where we had a quick but insightful run through of kata Unsu. Finally after the 1 ½ hours training we had a quick cool down, before departing the dojo Hans Sensei asked for a few photos to be taken to mark the event and to share with his karate-ka.

Thank you to JKS Loughborough for their very warm welcome. OSU!

Departing from the dojo we made our way to the local hostelry for a spot of breakfast where Hans Sensei thanked us for coming along to his club to train and for Mike Sensei's instruction. Upon finishing our well needed breakfast we said our goodbyes and farewells to Hans Sensai, Mehrdad Sensei and Duncan Sensei, finally embarking on our long journey home.

I would like to thank Hans Sensei for his hospitality, and the members of JKS Loughborough for their warm welcome. Mike Sensei has invited both Hans and Duncan Sensei to visit us in the near future so keep an eye out for the invitations to their visits – they are both extremely talented karate-ka and have a lot to teach us.

OSU

Ben

 

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