Lithuania Seminar

The seminar was held in beautiful Vilnius last weekend (Sep 28-30) and we had great training and fun.

Participants came from Germany, Austria, Czech, Russia and of course, Lithuania.

We worked on fundamentals, and stressed that the deeper we go into fundamentals the better the development in the future.

Develop one or two technique that you have confident with rather than many techniques  you are not sure about, and than expand.

A great thing about working on fundamentals is that we can have in the same class yellow belts and world champions or top instructors, and they can work on same subject at totally different levels, each person can take what he or she are ready for.

We worked on posture and show how optimal posture allow one to use the full potential and bad posture hinders it.

Stance, being functional rather than esthetics, adopting the principles of stance to one’s own body, finding own stance, do not copy.
Breath in technique and its relationship to reaction, rhythm and timing.
We clarified body dynamics and how to use body dynamics effectively according to line of energy and space.

We spend long time digging into kime and how to make shocking power.

And of course, we practice a lot of timing, focusing on Oji waza (response techniques) and footwork.

I am really happy that we spent time after classes to discuss how to keep the purity of Sensei Nishiyama’s teachings, since we can see that in the future it could easily be diluted and misunderstood, because of the many interpretations and misinterpretations.

We must take steps to keep the knowledge Sensei gave to us available to whoever is interested.