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: Suburi Techniques. You would like to improve the basis of kendo once you start to practice, and suburi is one of the useful practices to develop it especially for beginners. Today, I'm going to introduce the suburi techniques that help you practice suburi more effectively.
I suppose that many of you practice suburi in the beginning of the practice as a warm-up every time. Although suburi is a good warm-up practice, you should pay attention to the important points during suburi practice, not just for the warm-up. Now, I'll give you 6 important suburi techniques, so please remember and work on those techniques.
1.Swing a shinai through the center
First, you should swing a shinai through the center of your body, which is called seichu-sen in Japanese. This is important because the hitting accuracy is going up if your swing is very straight. If your swing is not going through the center in suburi practice, you would miss some attacks in the imporatnt situations such as kendo matches and dan-tests.
Even if you believe that you swing very straight, you need to make sure if your swing is straight for sure, since it is difficult to do that without looking at yourself. I recommend you doing suburi in front of a mirror and checking whether your swing is correct or not.
2.Swing up using shoulders
When you swing a shinai up, you should use your shoulders, meaning don't swing it up only using arms. The important idea is swing up your shinai, not swing backward. If you only use arms for swinging up, the streangth of your left hand grip will be weak. If you don't take hold of shinai with your left hand, you could not swing straight because you hold a shinai with your right hand tightly.
The tip to swing up with shoulders is that you should avoid using your wrists too much when you swing up since that leads to a lack of your left hand grip. Instead, you can lift your left hand above your head , fully using your shoulders.
3.Swing dowm at the height of men
The next thing I want to advise you is the height of swinging down. You should swing down at the height of an opponent's men. If there were a opponent in front of you, please make sure you would hit men accurately. Some people stop swinging upper than the height of the head, but it doesn't work because you need to hit men when you have a real opponent.
This imagination is very important when you practice any kind of suburi. It's going to be difficult to swing down at the level of an opponent's men, especially when you practice choyaku-suburi because it includes very fast movement. However, you always want to pay attention to the height of the shinai.
4.Swing down as fast as possible
You should try to swing down as fast as you can. You don't need to swing up fast, but the speed of swinging down is very important because it enables you to attack strongly. In suburi practice, you don't have a real opponent, but imagine an opponent and try to swing down fast as kendo matches.
Surely, the streangth of your arms is vital for swinging fast for a long time. If your arms feel pain during many suburi practice, I recommend training your arms to keep swinging fast, that I'm working on as well.
5.Use your wrists
When you practice suburi, make sure you use wrists in the very last part of a swing. If you don't fully streatch your wrists, you possibly stop swinging above the height of men. The wrists use creates the speed of the end of shinai, that is the very important part of a swing.
Shoulders, elbows and wrists are the three joints you should work in suburi practice. When you swing the shinai down, your shoulders go ahead first, your elbows streach next, and your wrists streach at last. You need to use those three joints in order to swing fast.
6.Keep your body stable
The last thing you should pay attention to is to keep your body stable. It is difficult to keep the correct posture since your upper body is moving while you swing a shinai. Your upper body should be between your right foot and left foot, that makes it easy to keep the correct posture.
If your body goes forward and backward because of the swinging movement, it is going to be hard to keep balance. It will be difficult to keep balance in the beginning, but you should make your posture right especially for experienced players.
Thank you for reading the blog post! Suburi is one of the basic kendo practice, so you can work on 6 points that I gave you today in the usual practice and get a great kendo basis. The basis is always useful even if you keep working on, so please don't skip the basic part of kendo. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me and I'm happy to answer them!
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