Martial Arts: Iaido and Tai Chi
Iaido. We’ve had our first class this Saturday, and we liked it. I think the instructor who was teaching us beginners was thinking that we might get bored of the class because it mostly consisted of repeating the same exercise (two variations of it) for the whole class. But it wasn’t boring, and we were already expecting to have to repeat the same things over and over, since it’s usually what happens in martial arts training.
In fact, Tai Chi was the one which was a bit of a surprise for us, since the teaching method, despite including some repetition, does not work the same way as other martial arts. While in Iaido we will be repeating the exact same thing until we do it right, and it’s natural to us, in Tai Chi, we repeat a small sequence of moves a few times, and then add it to another sequence we learned earlier and repeat that a few times also, and work on the ‘right form’ of doing it later.
We already got our bokkens, and kneepads. Hakamas an Gis will be harder to get, and I’ll have to investigate where we can buy them, since hakamas are always sold out at Decathlon.
Have a nice weekend.
Tai Chi: Path to Serenity
We had our first Tai Chi class yesterday, and I really enjoyed it. Amazingly I’m not as sore as I thought I would be today, and don’t have to do the walk-like-a-penguin thing.
The first class was free, and it’s purpose was, among other things, to see if we were interested in pursuing more classes. Since we liked the experience, next week, we will become members of the association which is responsible for teaching those classes so we can go on attending them. We’d be able to attend any of the ongoing beginner classes, but this one is the only one which has a good schedule for us. There’s another one Saturday morning, but this weekend we will go check out a Iaido class which is also scheduled for Saturday mornings. And – in theory, if we like Iaido – we’ll have that part of our schedule filled in.
For three months we will attend the beginners classes, learning the 108 moves which constitute Tai Chi. After that we’ll be able to go to the more advanced classes, which focus on perfecting the form of those movements.
The attendees there yesterday, included both experienced ones and several newbies like us. A lot of the attendees were around our age, and others were senior citizens, so we had a wide range of ages and body types there. There was a guy there, experienced one, which my sweetie believes may have experience in other martial arts due to the way he did his moves. And speaking of that, João used to practice Karate Shotokan and he noticed that some of the Tai Chi moves we learned were very simillar to some of the early Karate katas. Interesting stuff. 
Anyway, I have started my path toward improving not only my body’s health but also my spirit, which is what Tai Chi intends. The folks at the association all seemed very nice, and I forsee it will be a pleasure being part of that.
