Effective Minimum Keiko

Hello everyone, 

Thank you for reading the following blog post!
I'm Kota Suzuki from Japan. I've been practicing kendo since I was seven years old in Japan－I am currently 3rd Dan. Right now, I am studying abroad in the United States and regularly practice at the university kendo club here.

Today's topic: Effective Minimum Keiko. You may regularly practice kendo in dojo or kendo club, but it is difficult to spend much time of practicing. Therefore, you need to use the prctice time effectively in order to improve kendo. Today, I'm going to show you three tips for making your keiko more effective.

1. Calm down before practice

First, you should calm down before the practice begins, and concentrate on it. If you lack a concentration on the practice, you will not be able to have a good practice. I suppose that you have a class or work before you practice kendo. If so, you should be careful about that point because you tend to be tired before the practice.

What I recommend you doing before the practice is you remember what you should pay attention in the pracice. You should have some challenging points that you are working on, so you will remember the point in your mind. By keep doing this routines, the practice will be more effective that improve kendo faster.

2. Practice basics in high quality

Next, you should practice basics such as men, kote, dou, kote-men etc. in high quality. Through keep high level basics, the quality of the practice is going to be improved. You need to focus on the quality of every basics, especially if you practice in a very short time.

For the improvement of the basic practice, the most important thing is hitting correctly to make all attacks a perfect point. If you miss some attacks, that will be a problem because you have a few opportunities for getting a point in actual matches. The high quality of each attacks will be your streangth, so you should improve the quality of basic practice in usual keiko.

3. Practice jigeiko as actual matches

Finally, you should practice jigeiko as actual matches. Jigeiko is a practice that both people fight each other like a actual matches. This is important because jigeiko is the closed practice to matches, so jigeiko is very useful for improving fighting techniques. However, you will not improve if you practice as a practice that is less effective that as a match.

Some people say that you can get hit in jigeiko because it is a practice. This is partially true, but I don't agree with this idea. Especially for people who cannot practice for a long time, jigeiko is the very important part of practice for actual matches. Therefore, I recommend you trying not to get hit during jigeiko, and try your best to get a point. If you give up getting a point in jigeiko practice, you will not be able to get a point in actual matches as well.

Thank you for reading a blog post! It is hard to practice for a long time, so you can focus on make the practice more effective. Remember these three points that I showed you and practice kendo effectively.

If you have any questions, please ask me! I'm happy to answer them. Also, if you have any requests of the blog posts, please feel free to let me know.

#kendo #剣道 #頑張れ剣道