The Road to ISKF Canadian Nationals 2009
I’ve dediced I’m going to go to the ISKF Canadian National Shotokan Karate Championships in Calgary in October. In preparation, I’m ramping up my practice from my regular schedule to get in the best form possible. Since its 5 months away, I’m going to chronicle the journey as I go along.
My foci right now are:
- Plyometrics: my first order of business is to meet up with a physician who can tell me how much will be too much. Plyometrics is a potentially damaging road intended for middle-to-high end athletes. I’m neither, so I have to decide how I can leverage it without hurting myself.
- More Sparring: self explanatory I think. I need to expand my repetoire and increase my speed. Ideally, the plyometrics will help with that.
- Taking Up Yoga: flexibility, centerness, and understanding. Master Funakoshi wrote “Know yourself first, then you can know others“. There are still times when I don’t know what I’m capable of, or how to get my body to do something its not familiar with. I’ll need to find myself and understand my body better before I can compete at my best.
- Picking a Kata: I’ve been juggling a few kata lately, practicing some, learning others. I will need to pick 2 tokui kata to focus on for the next 5 months (in addition to the standard competition kata) if I’m going to have any chance of perfecting them. I’m going to get Sensei Dan’s input on this.
This will be my first nationals as a black belt while others will be competing for the fifth time, or more, as a black belt. I don’t have any delusions about coming home with hardware, but if I don’t try for it, I definitely won’t come home with any. My goal is that within 4 or 5 years, I can get at least a bronze. I’ve always been very goal oriented 🙂
From now on I’ll try to post updates with improvements in my karate abilities as I see them. Now I just need a benchmark…
Karate Daily 
good choice! Kayla and I have been discussing pliometrics as well as something we would like to do more of. If you need help with the Yoga I can probably throw some videos your way…
Well, I’ve finally done it! I’ve gotten to the point with my push-ups that for about 5-8 reps, I can push myself off the floor by about 3-5 inches at full arm extension. I haven’t attempted this since I started the plyometric push-ups “program”, but now it seems to have worked.
This is update #1 on my road to nationals journey 😉
u f* people dont no nothing at this tournament it was cheat and wrong judgement! this was the worst canadian nationals for karate i have ever been to. The judges are either blind or they dont know the kata and tell me why theirs judges teaching other judges wft is that !????? and master o and y just sit down and watch as judges are wrong? what is that i saw soooooooooooooooooooo many mistakes in alberta’s male team kata its not even funny and the judges give them high marks this is a scam cheat and fraud these people are messing up the real teachings of karate-do and the real katas ! and when someone that i know told the alberta mens team that they did mistakes they said and i quote ” ooo u saw that !””” what the hell is this i come from far to participate and spend alot of money… for what this iskf is falling apart and thats why JKA knew that they had to leave because of this!! and its goooooooood that kenji beat the hellll out of alberta gooooooooooooooooo quebec!!!!
I’m going to take a shot in the dark here and guess that you are from Quebec?
Bias is sometimes a problem in sports; karate may be no different. But what you have to remember is that 1 judge out of 7 (which is the number used for the finals this year) does not impact the results so greatly as to unilaterally decide the final placement.
Besides, Quebec did extremely well this year, receiving a few golds as I recall.
Oh, and its not “u f* people” as I’m not a judge and I’m not located in Alberta. Just FYI.