Shotokan Symposium - Part 2

The symposium was one incredible weekend; I'm pretty sure that everybody was able to take something away from it, and learned new ideas.  Of all the instructors that were teaching at the camp, I was only exposed to Otis Sensei (it was both good and bad, but mostly good.)  Azoulay Sensei, my usual instructor, and DeAngelis Sensei, another sensei that I have trained under were in charge of heading other groups throughout the camp, and as luck would have it Otis Sensei always chose to work with the competitors and dan rank classes.

As with the usual Camp Shotokan curriculum  the Shotokan Symposium had an overlying theme to the classes.  The running joke, though, is that the theme for camp is always the same thing, body dynamics, but Otis Sensei and Safar Sensei just call it different things.  This year's theme was body compression and expansion (body dynamics by any other name, but one can make the argument that Shotokan itself is just body dynamics by any other name).  The main idea being that the body compresses in transition during techniques to lead to the expansion into the strike/kick/block/punch.  Simple idea, but rather difficult to truly accomplish correctly.

For competitors, the question was of footwork, and using a very simple pattern of compress back, shift forward to attack, side step out, compress and then expand to attack again.  The process was repeated in attack and defense, and using several different techniques, but relying primarily on gyaku-tsuki and kizami-tsuki.  The classes were attended by some of my fellow AJKA-I US Team members, as well as one member of the WKF US Team, and his brother who is a gold medalist from the Maccabiah Team as part of the US delegation.  Aside from them there were a number of solid competitors with pinpoint accuracy and significant power.  It was a rough couple of days of competition training.

The regular dan rank classes were similarly basic, but incredibly complex in their own ways.  Primarily focusing on relaxing into stances and using the inherent compression to create tremendous power in attacks.  There was also a big focus on kata peformance and oyo drills used primarily for utilizing intelligent body dynamics for self-defense as opposed to technique based bunkai drills.

It was one incredible weekend, and hopefully as more details come back to me I will be posting more about it.