Improved Stance Competition
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- Category: Latest News Items
- Published on Saturday, 03 October 2009 14:46
- Written by Super User
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Congratulation to Eoin Rasmussen for winning the improved stance competition at LeisureWorld Bishopstown this week. As any karate-ka knows, stances are the true foundation of great karate ability. We've been focusing hard in the last number of weeks on exercises aimed at improving the three basic stances and the hard work is really beginning to pay off.
This week, we analysed the typical week of most of our Junior karate-ka in relation to time spent doing various activities. The average breakdown worked out as below:
Total Hours in a week: 168
Sleep: 56
School: 30
Homework: 6
Eating (all meals): 5
TV & computer games: 20
Travelling/commuting: 5
Chill out time 10
With all these activities and timetables taken into account, there's 36 left hours in the week! I asked the Junior karate class to tell me truthfully, how many hours (or minutes) did they spend in the previous week practicing their karate (kata or stances) - outside of karate class time. Most answered answered 0 or 1 hours. Some said 35 hours with a twinkle in their eye! Either way, the general feeling was there was a lot more that we could all do.
In particular, everyone was surprised that on average, they spent almost as much time weekly playing computer games or watching TV as they spent in school. There was definitely room to claw back an hour or two there to do something more constructive.
I then asked what the Junior karate class felt would be a reasonable amount of time to spend practicing outside of karate class considering they had 36 free hours in the week. We finally arrived at a very doable figure of 30 minutes per day. which would bring the weekly figure up to 3.5 hours per week on top of class time. 3.5 hours out of 36 is not a massive commitment and we all agreed that it was certainly achievable.
Congrats again to Eoin for achieving the improvements he has in his stances. With the extra practice outside of class time, let's see what others can challenge Eoin next week for the stance competition.