Friday 19^th April 2013

Nuffield Health Fitness and Wellbeing Centre

Sensei Cyril Cummin’s continued his kobudo (weapons training) sessions with a course featuring the Bo, Sai and Nunchaku. What follows is a brief summary of that course.

The course started with the bo, as this has featured in a number of courses I felt that I was now coming to grips with the use of the bo and when we revisited the bo kata shushi no kon I now felt reasonably comfortable doing it. This was reflected with the rest of the class who had all participated in some of the previous sessions and it felt more like revision and polishing the techniques rather than trying to remember what came next for the most part.

After the Bo we moved onto the Sai, Sensei Cummins explained the history of the weapon before demonstrating its use. We all then attempted to perform basic techniques with the sai. Personally I found the sai extremely difficult to handle especially when swivelling them and as a result found even performing kihon kata with the sai a challenge.  This seemed to be reflected with most of the class and Sensei Cummins with he help of Sensei Susan Hession slowed down and helped everyone understand how to swivel and manipulate the sai.

After the sai came the nunchaku, again Sensei Cummins explained the history of the weapon and demonstrated a number of ways in which they could be used. Then we all had a go. I found the nunchaku easier to handle than the sai and fear of hitting myself in the face with the wooden nunchaku I was using soon evaporated. Whilst I wont claim to have replicated that famous scene from Enter the Dragon, I was able to swing the nunchaku around myself and swap hands and arms with relative ease.

Finally we partnered up and participated in some basic sparring defending attacks from a bo with the sai and counter attacking. This was interesting and felt far more difficult than using the tonfa in a similar situation to me.

Alas time was up and another very informative kobudo session concluded. I look forward to the next one as everyone else who attended also indicated and hope to practice more with the weapons covered so far.

A selection of photos from the course can be found on our Flickr album here.

Richard Amuzu, 3rd Dan BHSKC.