I tested last night for 4th kyu — which will still be a purple belt, but … well, a high level purple belt . (Some schools either multiply the colors or add stripes, etc., to the belts; we don’t.) I felt it went pretty well — my kata felt decent, my sparring was good, my basics were okay (sloppy roundhouse kicks, and I got thrown off on one combination such that I never fully recovered).
I’ll find out Tuesday how I did. That will have me caught up again with Katherine (who tests for — gasp — brown belt in March) — which means it’s time to learn a new kata.
59 view(s)
When you learn a new kata, do you ever go back to practice the old ones?
Oh, yeah.
In our school, attaining a black belt requires demonstrating prowess with all eight or nine katas previously learned. Though only two are tested, one will be an upper level one, and one a lower level one — and the expectation is that they will be superbly executed.
On Tuesday nights we usually spend about a third of the class practicing katas, usually all the ones being learned by the different color belts present. It’s very easy to forget something you learned a while back, and I make it a point — when I have time to practice before class — to run through all the katas I’ve learned to date.