6th Kyu Success!

Today I passed the 6th Kyu grading!

The morning was taken up fulfilling family commitments and delivering the kids to a friend for the afternoon. I arrived at the grading venue just in time to get changed and bow on with the rest of the attendees. There were 6 of us taking the grading, an examination panel of three and a number of 1st kyu and shodans who came to assist and give us support.

We started off with the usual warm up exercises followed by a session that included techniques of the 5th kyu syllabi principally, Ude Kimi Nage and Uchi Kaiten Nage. After a break, the formal grading was held. I was Tori first and managed to get through all the the techniques with only two issues that I recall. One was doing an Omote technique instead of Ura and the other where I began doing an Ura technique instead of Omote! In the latter circumstance I stopped and corrected myself, but  informed that I should have continued with the technique. Then roles were reversed and I was Uke. Things went fine until we ended up doing endless repetitions of Ai Hanmi Katate Dori Ikkyo Omote. We stopped at one point and the panel told us to carry on until we told to change. Soon we were all done, bowed off and sat to watch the 5th Kyu hopefuls. They did a good job with very smooth and fairly effortless techniques.

After the grading, we did Aki-Ken practice with bokken – Disarming using Shihonage, Happo Giri and an exercise where armed with a ken you had an attacker at front and back. We also did some attacks designed to teach tenkan (stepping back) and irimi.
We then lined up and were given our grades. The course and examination were both very enjoyable. The next grading is in 6 months – hopefully enough to master the 5th kyu techniques.

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