[JonnLeejsp]

When most people do hayasuburi or excessive number of suburi, the kensen will never stop. At the end of the swing, the shinai is immediately jolted upwards. For even a brief moment in time, the velocity and the acceleration of the kensen should be zero at the end of the swing if the suburi exercises are not be to detrimental to form. Not many people can keep that up when doing a excessive number of suburi at an excessive rate.

Well, yeah. Which is the point that several people made - if you are doing 1000 suburi, odds are you are just raising your arms up and down. 100 correct suburi are more beneficial than 1000 bad ones. It's also the point about learning suburi in 10 minutes - if they are learning suburi in 10 minutes, they are learning bad suburi. It takes years to develop nice suburi, not minutes.

Regarding tenouchi - the same point can be made for hitting a target - many beginners just thwack into the target like swinging a club, and make no attempt to stop the kensen themselves. The target fools them into thinking they have tenouchi when in fact they don't.

Having the target there is useful for timing with fumikomi, but as far as swing mechanics are concerned it is unnecessary. In fact, when developing swing mechanics early on, the target is much more of a distraction than anything else. Just proved this to myself again this past Sunday when I introduced hitting a target in our kids' class. Most of the kids forgot everything we had taught them and just tried to wack the target. Back to suburi for them!

[BokerokyBan]

Well this is an interesting discussion. Let me add my experience.

I’ll start with my own suburi. At one point I was doing 1000 suburi almost daily to improve my strike. I did these in front of a mirror so I could do them both for speed and correctness. This means part was done for correct form and part for speed improvement. Suburi serves many purposes for improving your kendo.

Now for my students. So every practice you tell them that they should do suburi. Do they go and do it? Most do not. So since they won’t do it on their own I make them do it at practice.

In order to teach certain waza they have to have an adequate skill level. So the beginning and intermediate students could not make a good enough strike to do the waza. This of course is due to a weak strike, which lacks proper handwork.

So I added an additional 200 men strike during warmup. We did 3 sets of 100 with sets of 30 one-step fumikomi men in between. This is finished up with 50 hayasuburi. Emphasis is on correct strike. After only a few weeks I saw improvement in the students. At first they were just struggling to get through it. Now they can zip right through it. Bottom line is one way or another it has to be done.

[hs6KnlcW]

What is up with people doing insane amounts of these things? Be it regular men uchi or haya suburi. It is important to do them correctly. We do 30 or 40 men, sayu men, haya suburi during streching. Then on to warm ups, kirikashi twice, 10 men, 5 kote men, 5 kote do. Split the dojo in two lines, 3 motodachi each for each line. Four or 5 trips through the motodachi. First round men, second round kote men, third round kakarigeiko. Form is much more important than numbers.

[joeyCanada]

All suburi are rather simple movements of the arms and takes less then ten minutes under constant supervision to 'master'. Suburi is a warmup and nothing else.

I don't often say this because in kendo practice, there are often shades of gray and one sensei will have differing opinions however: Both these statements are just flat-out wrong, wrong, wrong. Correct suburi takes a long time to master. I'll let you know when I've got it right, it's only been 20 years for me.

I suggest you check out the thread pointing to the documentary on Ishida-sensei's attempts to pass the 8th dan test. His main practice was striking men on a target dummy. Men, step back, men again.

[optormtix]

my kendo class spends a lot of time warming up and streaches. i wish we could spend more time doing other things, but any way i cant blame my teacher for doing that at al. i also just started the class and i have to amit i thought it was going to be easyer thanit is right now. we are doing 50 now and we are going to get more as we progress. *sigh* i cant wait!

[MondayBlues]

Thread necromancy.