How To Do Choyaku Suburi Well?

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: choyaku suburi. This is one of the swing practices (suburi). Many kendoka do choyaku suburi in the begging of the practice as a warm up, but this practice is sometimes difficult to do especially for beginners.

Today, I'm going to explain what the choyaku suburi is and how you can do choyaku suburi well. I hope this article helps you understand choyaku suburi better and improves your kendo as well.

What is Choyaku Suburi?

As I mentioned in the introduction, choyaku suburi is one of the suburi practices. You need to swing your shinai very fast and move your foot quickly at the same time. Choyaku suburi is a quite fast movement, so it is hard to do well at first.

Now, I'm going to explain how to do choyaku suburi. Basically, you swing up the shinai when you jump backward, and then you swing down when you jump forward. Choyaku suburi is made up of these two pasts.

For the first part, you swing up the shinai and step backward at the same time. However, the most important point is that you should not put your both foots on the floor in the same moment. When you jump back, you need to put your left foot on the floor as first, and you can put your right foot on the floor after that. 

This slightly different timing of putting your foots on the floor is the most difficult part to do choyaku suburi and many people have difficulty in doing this footstep well.

This movement is completely same as the second part; swing down and jump forward. You need to put your right foot on the floor first, and put your left foot on the floor after that. 

Your one swing is made up of these two parts. Generally, you have to do choyaku suburi around 30 times in the practice in a fast speed. That's why some people are not able to follow the spped.

What The Important Points?

Next, I would like to share the important points for doing choyaku suburi well. Choyaku suburi is a very fast movement and it is difficult to do. However, you should not do it in easy and wrong way because it is not working. There are two important points to make choyaku suburi more effective and help you improve kendo.

The first point it that you swing the shinai using your shoulder movement. That means you should swing the shinai largely like drawing a semicircle with the end of your shinai. The swing tend to be very small since the speed of choyaku suburi is really fast, but this doesn't working if the swing is small. I recommend swinging largely in order to attack strongly.

The second point is that your step should be large, and you would better to jump as far as possible. This is also difficult to do because you need to move very fast. But you can train your foot muscle when you jump far as possible, and you would get a  better jumping power which is useful in kendo matches and sparling.

These two points are very important points for making choyaku suburi more effective for improving your kendo. It is always hard to follow the fast speed in the beginning, but I recommend doing these steps gradually especially for experienced players who already follow the spped.

Thanks for reading this article! Choyaku suburi is a really good practice, so let's try it again and again, and your kendo is going to be better gradually. If you have any kind of questions, I'm very happy to answer them. And you have requests to the future blog posts, I'm also glad to have them and try to write about it! 

Bye!

#kendo #剣道 #頑張れ剣道