Bucking Up

My recent struggle on the plateau and the stresses it breeds notwithstanding, slogging through practice is the only help for it and so finding a way to endure and become enthusiastic again becomes the only viable path. I've felt uncomfortably bored with my ability for the past few weeks, and I think it's largely due to a drop in confidence in my ability. I've been falling back on simple kihon techniques that are neither very effective against high ranked players nor very elegant, especially considering that I've been trying to focus on both guarding my right wrist and pushing off with my left leg more. The split concentration has caused a great deal of collapse in my usual ability.

In any case, it was necessary to convince my mind today that I both wanted to be at practice and was excited to be there. Sometimes, if you tell yourself something enough, you start to believe it. It worked today, thankfully and despite feeling uninspired upon arriving, by the end, I was feeling much better, though it could be largely because the other members all did their part to not make me feel like the complete disaster I've been feeling in myself recently.

I'm over extending my arms too much. I can feel it in my shoulders sometimes. It's a product, again, of trying to guard my right wrist by not bending my elbows. And for whatever reason, when I'm actually trying to close a distance with a lunge alone, I fall horribly short on it. Fortunately though, after a few warm up drills I was feeling a little more like myself.

Practice seemed to go by quite fast, actually. It didn't seem that we did many men and kote-men drills before we moved right onto mawari-geiko for three rounds of two minutes, and when that was finished, there was only 20 minutes left for ju-geiko.

I got to fight Fukao Sensei again, since he's been nice enough to give me the hard instruction I hate, but still need. Practicing with him always reminds me to keep myself straight, but he's so solid and together in normal practice that it's really difficult to get a hit on him, to the point that when he does open to give me a 'freebie' it really throws me off.

After our match was over, I spent some time watching how he fights and I observed that he really doesn't move his arms very much, His motions all come from the wrists. Of course he raises his arms to get the necessary height to hit men, but the height never seems to be higher than chest level. The way he can manipulate his shinai with very quick, pivots of his wrist has given me much to think about.

My final fight was with Koyama-san who gave me a much needed confidence booster. He let me tap him on the men a few times which was enough to get me relaxed enough to stop thinking how horrible everything has felt recently, and just do it. Somehow, he knows just what needs to be done.