Junro Yondan, Spin Fun.

Current mindset

Progressing

Today I was motivated to work towards finishing a group of katas. Heian and Tekki are all good, so let's complete the set of Junro Katas. Junto Shodan,Nidan and Sandan are in the bank, and I knew Junro Yondan many moons ago so today I'll focus solely on Junro Yondan which will leave Junro Godan to complete the set, another day.

Junro Yondan has a cool repeated set of moves in kiba dachi. but some challenging rotation movements that should be delivered at speed, so it's a nice but challenging kata in sections.

Also, at this point my list of Shotokan Kata's is missing account for Junro Yondan, so let's see if we can solve that puzzle.

This kata always confused me at one particular sticking point. After a repeated kiba dachi section on inside block/punch/swivel, there's a section of 3 inside blocks and punches delivered at 45 degrees. So today I finally got my head round this sequence, once I understood the the transition from one sequence to the next involved turning a full 180 degrees into a front stance facing the opposite direction. Once I had that in my head, adding on the inside block, then repeating a further two times was easy.

There's a handful a kata moves or transitions that have fried by brain a bit over the years and this is one of them, however no more.

The other thing I wanted to resolve was the count. The majority of Junro Yondan is clear cut moves easily counted, but then in the final phase we come across a 360 degrees turning move from inside block in kiba dachi spinning forward into another inside block, but in front stance. Half way through this spin, an empi elbow strike is delivered, easy to miss if watching a kata delivered at speed.

Here's an image of this sequence, which is repeated again in the opposite direction.

Although the strike is delivered mid flow, it is a strike - so for the purposes of this challenge, I'm counting it both times. This give Junro Yondan a total count of 48.

The cool cartoon graphic used above is part of a full series of Shotokan Kata by Belgian illustrator Dirk Corens. There are several pages of these full kata walkthrough diagrams, check them out, they are very cool.