Posted on: June 5th 2015 | Category:
On Friday 22nd May we had a private lesson with an International Karate Champion called Sensei Dejan Nedev from Macedonia. He came to visit our Karate Academy in Muswell Hill, London, with his father and his brother who are also Karate Masters.
Sensei Dejan Nedev is a black belt 6 DAN, which is just one DAN level lower than our usual Sensei. (Sensei means Master or Tutor in Japanese).
Before our lesson we felt excited and nervous.
We started by doing some warm ups and stretching and then we started practising our blocks, punches and our breathing. He told us to breathe from the bottom of our stomach and all the way through our punch and also to keep our punches close to our bodies to contain our energy and achieve maximum power.
He also told us to make a noise with our kimino as our punch moves across a body as this makes an impressive sound for your opponent.
He told us a story of when he and his brother competed in the World Finals and they were fighting so evenly that they had to go to extra time as both of them kept defeating the other and then the judges had to decide who was the winner based on skill and technique, as neither won outright. It made Karate history. It interested us as we are brothers and he and his are 13 months apart and we are 11 months apart and we could imagine being in the same situation.
It was different from our normal lesson with our normal teacher because although he is very good and teaches us really well, it made a change to learn from someone different who was so famous and had lots of recent experience in competing in world championships.
He was very strong and quite strict but showed us a picture of his little three year old girl.
It was a great experience and we found it inspiring and exciting and we learnt new side punches.
We are very lucky that our Sensei organised this for us and that we were allowed out of school to do it.
Luke and Christian
