Class Record: Tonso Gata + Muto Dori, Kyoketsu + Randori

Class: Monday Feb 4th

I showed the first kata of the Santo Tonso gata of Togakure Ryu: Migi kata ude tonso gata. Alex expanded on it showing how the body and angling achieves the gyaku waza. We also saw some oddily angled kicks that relied on good timing and positioning.

The muto dori was also taken from Togakure ryu taijutsu so we used shuko and other hidden weapons too. We found in training that the reactions to a rubber vs blunt metal weapon were different enough to make it really worth getting dull metal training blades at least for Dan grades.

Alex showed some looping and striking drills with the kyoketsu and demonstrated how it’s distancing ability can keep a swordsman at bay while the blade can be used much like a jutte for ensaring and trapping. It can be seen that it’s a taijutsu weapon first and formost but a lot of our other weapons – hanbo, bo, shriken, jutte etc – have features that the kyoketsu has so it would be worth applying your knowledge of these to it.

In the end we did some relaxed randori training which got us to move our feet and not get cought up with uke’s resitance.

Thought provoker: How does a bo kata help with the kyoketsu shoge?

 – Ali martinez

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