For the second time, our Naginata Dojo at the University of Mainz had the honor to be taught by Mark Berghaan at this year’s seminar. We are very grateful that he could visit us again. We want to extend our gratitude to Faye Noorman who joined as an instructor, both providing us with irreplaceable insight. In these two days we trained a lot of kihon, later on we continued with Shikake-Oji and ended the seminar with bogu practise.
The focus of this year’s seminar was observation and correction of common mistakes happening in kihon. Every participant, from beginner to yudansha, was asked to recognize all kinds of possible mistakes, each one on his own level of knowledge and experience. Then we were to correct ourselves in the following kihon practise. This interactive part afforded a lot of concentration from everyone, but gave us a profound understanding of the techniques in general terms and made our own technique improve visibly in the following exercises. Whilst most participants continued exercising kihon, participants who act as group instructors in their own dojo were taught how to improve their group instructing skills.
Our dojo motto “Endurance is the first step towards learning” was put to test for everybody during the seminar as the temperature exceeded 30°C. We enjoyed the many aspects and topics we learned and are eager to apply them in our daily training. We warmly thank Mark and Faye for taking their time teaching us.
We are looking forward seeing everyone at the INF seminar; ganbate.
Marie-Luise Göbel, Thomas Gerstmann