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Nicole's Kendo diary on 2 March 2016

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Waikato University starts this week, 
welcome many of you coming back to NZ to continue your study and Kendo journey.


Let's have another great year together!

* * *


I think I'm gonna call this Kendo diary now... (by Nicole)
Wednesday 2/03/2016:

Firstly, we need to welcome our returning students back to training. 
Looking forward to train with you boys and girls throughout this year. This also means we will be having new blood coming into our club as the new beginner's class is going to start this weekend. You'll be Senpai from now on, fighto!

There's a change of training menu for our regulars for this year. While we are still doing the Kihon, Waza and Shiai training, we are also shifting our focus on stretching exercise to strengthen our muscle and footwork exercise to improve our agility so that we can perform better when we are doing Kendo. For example we were doing zigzag tsuri-ashi through uneven spaces to train us for being able to move rapidly and change direction quickly with our waist. The hardest part was to keep your upper body straight and steady as you are moving in a zigzag manner. We were training with different types exercise every week with the same principles. Thanks to our Captain Kai Yoshitani, we were having so much fun doing them.

Since we have returning students, us beginners were focusing on the Kihon training on one side of the dojo to refresh our memory and strengthening our foundation so we can look "handsome and beautiful" when the new beginner's class start.

On the other side of the dojo, Senpais were practicing waza and how to execute them in practice shiai. Thanks to our guest - Erina San, our senpais were able to training with someone really skillful and gained some good shiai experience. Beginners were able to witness some amazing shiai and see how cool we can be in the future if we keep training!



P.S. After training, another one of our guest - Moena San mentioned she was impressed by our Kendo club, mainly by the friendly atmosphere of our club. She also felt the Kendo we were doing was beautiful Kendo. To received compliment from someone who have done Kendo since primary school, I felt very honoured!
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