After an exceptionally long winter, the weather has decided to just skip that whole spring business and get right on to summer. It's really starting to heat up again, which means kendo is starting to get challenging once more.
We had a small group today, as usual. Koyama Sensei lead us through the warm up and did some new exercises with us to strengthen our shoulders and build muscle memory. He had us link our fingers together and stretch up, at first. Then, pulling our arms back with our shoulders, we were to push our chests out. This, he explained, is to become familiar with the back muscles used in lifting our shinai to prevent tightness n the shoulders and arms. It's a great little stretch.
We did a bit of practical suburi with it.Breaking down the steps into lift-strike we practiced using our back muscles to lift our arms. When we combined it into one motion, he asked us to step forward with our backs straight, our chests out and our knee first. It was difficult at first, as it always is, coordinating body parts while you're hyper aware of what each is doing but it's a good exercise to keep in mind.
We did our usual drills from there: men, kote, kote-men, ai-men and so on.With the back muscles already warmed up, my torso was a lot more cooperative in staying straight and perpendicular with the ground.
We did four rounds of 1.5 minute mawari-geiko after that. I'm trying to use kote a lot more recently with mixed results. Murata-san came today as well, which meant some hard hitting against a nito player. It's the ultimate game of strategy with him and he's always just a little too close for comfort, but it's so hard to judge distance without two shinai!
For a first practice in the heat, it went all right. I definitely need to remember to keep drinking water though!
