Karate Grading on Saturday ..... Part 2 : the conclusion

Just need to preface this post with a with a quick numbers upgrade - just passed the 10,000 hits point on the blog - thanks for your continuing support !!!

So if you're following me on twitter or Facebook you'll know that I passed and received a score of 60/100 for my grading, for this level of grading I'd consider that a pretty good score.

I promised I'd run over some issues around this karate grading this week that I mentioned in my usual non business weekend post. Today I'm going to do this in my first business post of the week. It is  business post because I think it highlights something important about planning and preparedness.

I had blogged before the grading that I'd felt unprepared and only at about 80% 'match fitness' prior to the grading and I had some problems with my kata (for the uninitiated these are a series of set techniques performed one after another in a kind of 'form') of which I had to do three for the grading - one previous kata and both of the new ones, learnt for this grade level. This may just have been nerves on my part because I had put in place a bit of prep in advance as below.

Interestingly, in the month prior to the grading I had stepped up my training in two main areas. Firstly fitness. I usually try and get two or three runs in a week in addition to my karate training but I'd stepped up the running from around ten miles a week to twenty. Then with respect to kata I normally run through six a day - three of my shukokai kata and three of my old Tai Sabaki Do kata (this is the name of my old club/style that is no longer running). In preparation for the grading I temporarily stopped the TSD kata and instead ran through all eleven of the shukokai kata I needed for the grading every day for a month (double that in the last week). So I'd also effectively doubled the work on kata too.

The result - I'm not saying the grading was easy, far from it but I certainly had no issues with fitness and managed to get a passing score in all three kata sections with some ease. In essence a little forethought and bit of extra effort in advance of my grading really paid off. I also didn't pick up any injuries on the day (which is quite unusual for me) and I would put that down to having just a little extra fitness/sharpness.

So in the immortal words of one of my first ever sales trainings : to fail to prepare is to prepare to fail.