Oh and make sure you add in some shin blocks when shadow boxing or working the bag. Your lead leg will get battered in knockdown and you want to get used to lifting it defensively as well as working your own offence.
For roundhouse kicks, if I or others haven't said it also, try to aim through your opponent. If you ever see a stickfighting match or just a super heavy handed slap, you can see the follow through. If you stop your kick at the target, it won't hit as hard as if you pictured your kick going THROUGH the target. That's what I always do, when I throw my roundhouse kicks, I point my knee past the target, to the opposite side and trying to kick through them.
With the kata video, do you think your a bit tall in your stances? Especially neko ashi dachi? Maybe that's your styles way though? I'm just asking. Also It seemed to me you were really muscling up on the blocks? My tuppence. Kudos for posting, and good luck in the tourney!!
Those are all known issues of mine. My cat stances tend to be narrow, and I often over muscle blocks and end up stiff. Il put up another video when I get the chance trying to fix some of these things.
Thanks for uploading the videos grasshopper, kudos for having enough courage to do that I think pretty much everything I could say has been said - the reverse punch is a little stifled and doesn't have much follow through, the angle of the roundhouse kicks is a little off, the supporting foot isn't pivoting enough to allow your hips to follow through with the technique correctly for kyokushin style fighting. I don't know if it will help, but when you practice your round house kicks, how are you thinking about your body alignment in correlation to the target? I tend to think as mine as a pie that's been cut in half to make a 180 degree ark. I tend to see myself as being smack bang in the middle of the straight line and my opponent at 90 degrees (so straight in front of me). At the point my opponent is at 90 degree from me, if I kick then my foot reaches maximum "oomph factor" around 75 - 85 degrees, so when it reaches 90 it doesn't have enough momentum to go through the target and is already starting to lose some impact. So now when I go to strike a target with my foot I tend to shift a little bit off to the side so my foot/shin goes into the target and then has a bit more to go before it reaches the 90 degree angle. Personally I've found my striking power has shot up massively as a result just from thinking about the attacking arc differently. Also, when you pivot your supporting foot, are you pivoting the heel forwards or twisting the foot backwards? Great work though so far, keep it up and show us some more stuff EDIT: BTW, how much does that target your hitting in vid 1 weigh?
Grass hopper, Thanks for posting videos of yourself. You got a lot of feedback on them. I will just bring up one point. On your front kicks you are coming up on your toes. This is a good way to bring your hips forward for power. I suggest, however, that you consider keeping the head a bit more back and drive the hand down when front kicking on the toes. This helps to counter balance the hips going forward. Look at this kick as an example: [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGD0qxRSmjU"]Vitor Belfort vs Anderson Silva - KO Front Kick - YouTube[/ame] The issue with coming up on your toes on a front kick when you do not have a good a counter balance with the legs and torso is that if you miss, you will fall forward and be easily counter punched/kicked. One easy way to work the mechanics is to front kick your bag seven times as fast as you can with the same leg without letting your kicking foot touch the ground. When you hit like a 50 cal machine gun, you got it down. I personally like to keep the heel just barely touching the ground on the front kick. Like if you took a piece of paper, you could slide it under my heel. To counter balance with the heel more down, like I prefer... turn the foot out more and bring the elbows in when you kick (like if you were grabbing someone to judo throw them). This allows you to snap the hips forward for power, combined with the mechanics of using the knee as both a hinge and a piston (up and down) Here is a video of how I prefer to do the front kick: [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu7EsuXEhdk"]Masao Kagawa MAE GUERI - YouTube[/ame] However, even though I realize that Masao Kagawa is known for his great kicking ability, the one point in his demonstration of the front kick that I do not like is his use of the knee in the video. I prefer more of the use of the knee like a piston (e.g. knee goes up and then comes down like a piston) during the kick. Masao Kagawa is describing, I believe the correct knee action of a piston, but because he is pulling the kick on his uke, the knee is primarily used only as a hinge. I would like to see Masao Kagawa kicking a bag or makiwara to see if more of the knee as a piston is seen. FYI: The weight forward is okay on kicks where you commit fully such as a stomp or axe kick where you want 90% of your weight stepping through the face of the opponent. You have a very good right axe kick in one of your videos.
I don't know how much it weighs. We have two of the same approximate size but it looks like different models. That is the heavier of the two. I'm unfortunately sick right now, so I wouldn't be able to properly shoot a video but come Wednesday I will probably be able to. About the pivoting, I was experimenting with pivoting my foot less than normal in order to telegraph my kicks less, and apparently went too far with it. I pivot my heel forward. I've been practicing on my bag doing what you just described with moving to the side before a kick and have found my power shoot up drastically as well.
got around to watching the vids. everything's pretty much been said already. definitely work on the angle of your roundhouses, as you're pretty much kicking upwards right now. never going to get any significant hip rotation like that. try what i said earlier about building it off a roundhouse knee. your knee is what's going to transfer all your force to the lower leg, so the knee MUST follow-through during the impact for the impact to be any good. learn to get power into the knee, and the roundhouse kick automatically builds off that. getting a more horizontal kick will also leave your front hand higher, since the scissor movement at the waist during a roundhouse kick tends to be in the same plane as the kick (so it should go more off to the side). if all else fails, go watch the videos by cold steel where they cut through loads of stuff with huge swords, and then kick picturing that you're doing those cuts with your leg instead of a sword :evil: also, don't remember if it's been said already, but i think your standing bag is too short. probably a huge contributor to you dropping your hands, since you had a pronounced forwards lean in the first video.
I just took a bunch of videos today, I'm uploading them to YouTube now. This channel is going to be just for kata video I think. At least for now, the idea is that if someone looking to take karate googles the names of one of the instructors (me) they will find something more proffessional than training videos.
[ame="http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ee8kBVj5Jkk&feature=plcp"]Pinan shodan - YouTube[/ame] New Pinan shodan video, much better I think.
[ame="http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wpbwL-XRUGI&feature=plcp"]Pinan sandan - YouTube[/ame] I don't know where the wobble in the beginning of this one came from.
I don't know, it's a fairly common kata, nobody really knows its origin although many say Chinese. Also a personal favorite of mine and thank you!
Here's another kata from the nahachi series. There are three, I have a video of the second but I forgot to bow at the end so I won't upload it to YouTube. One of these days I'll reshoot the video. [ame="http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aAl8_csaaog&feature=plcp"]Nahachi sandan - YouTube[/ame]
