 Hello, I'm Cheyenne Abbott and welcome to Learn The Sword on TGN. This is a weekly show with a new episode every Friday, so just click below to view the whole program. The second basic concept is your stance. A stance is just a simple transfer of weight, positioning, and movement, which carries the sword into and out of the target area. First placement of your feet, and the positioning of your legs, hips, shoulders, and arms are key factors that allow you to set up for your next technique. Gait on, yaw, hip, left jaw down, yaw, hip, right jaw down, yaw, right hustle, left hustle, right waukey-nou-kamae. Left waukey-nou-kamae. Number three are the basic cuts of hapogiti. The purpose of a sword is the cut through mass, and there are many ways to cut, mind But you need to choose the correct patterns to be consistent and simple, yet effective and practical. Here are your eight basic cutting patterns. And the fourth basic concept is kata. Kata teaches everything from the basic footprint to all the subtleties of the sword. Every turn and move has a set technique or pattern. Forms are a very important factor in your learning process. Let's take what we've learned so far, put it all together, and see what interesting patterns we can practice. Let's begin in a hostile position and execute a short, medium, and long-range cut. When we execute these three cuts, we're also going to ki-ai. Just follow along and slowly your muscle memory will be set again, and there you'll start looking at the techniques and I'm starting to understand this. I see how this works now. Within this take, you'll see that I have different ki-ais. At the very beginning, when I'm not exerting that much energy, my ki-ais are low and brutal. Later, when I start becoming a little more fatigued, you'll notice that my ki-ais are also changing. I'm practicing your thousand strokes. I want you to note that you probably are going to fatigue. The muscles in your back and your neck, you're going to start to hurt, and you might feel the next day like it's a little painful. All you need to do are a few stretches to alleviate that problem. There are a couple I'd like to demonstrate. When practicing this first stretch, it'd be easier to sit down. What we're going to do is we're going to stretch the muscles between our shoulder blades and our neck. You take your hands, your arms, and you cross them, and then you grab onto one of your shoulders. After you've grabbed onto one of your shoulders, I want you to push out and pull. You're going to start feeling the stretching between your fingers as you're doing that. You're going to do a lot of tension. Another stretch is to grasp your fingers and put them behind your head, and pull behind your head so you can stretch your neck and your back. Those two stretches will help your back stay limber and allow you to go onto the next thousand strikes without moving you into a challenging hip fest. There are many angles to cut when you use the sword. Let's keep this simple and work with the basic eight. The first one is a cut vertical from 12 o'clock to 6 o'clock. The second cut is a top right to a bottom left cut from 9 o'clock to 7 o'clock. The next cut is one that is called a gyaku, or reverse, where I'm cutting from 7 o'clock to 1 o'clock and coming back up. The third cut is cutting from 11 o'clock to 5 o'clock. And that one's reversed. Coming from 5 o'clock, back up to 11 o'clock. There are also horizontal cuts that cut from 9 o'clock to 3 o'clock. There are also stabs or fluffs. When you put all of these together, there are eight basic cuts that you can work with and keeps it simple. What I'd like you to do is follow over on either side and start working with those cuts. But it is very important to know after every cut, to hold it there for an extra beat or two to get no two into the cut. A lot of times when people start swinging a sword too fast, the cuts become all blurry and you don't know where one cut ends and one cut begins. So make sure instead of trying to go for a bot, go for the quality of the cut. And make sure they're all done at 100%. When practicing your thousand cuts over on the other side, after you've put in a fair amount of the repetition, your mind will start to wander. That's all viable and great. The difficult part is your technique becomes sloppy. Sloppy technique can get to the targeting time. What I'd like you to understand is you need to use the focal points. Staying consistent with these focal points. Allow your sword to cut straighter and more true. During this lesson plan, if you don't do 100 strikes a day, don't worry about it. You might have to stop with 100, 200, go to 500, and go to a thousand after you've finished a thousand. Then we'll start working out when we start hitting 2000 or 5000. Most cuts and strikes need to take about 20 minutes or so to complete a thousand. So use that in your guideline. Akiyai is very important. Akiyai keeps you from fatiguing. If you put in the ki-ai quickly, you'll be able to go to two to three thousand cuts. Within this take, you'll see that I have different ki-ais. At the very beginning, when I'm not exerting that much energy, my ki-ais are low and cut away. Later, when I start becoming a little bit more fatigued, you'll notice that my ki-ais are also changing. Help! Congratulations! You have just finished your thousand strokes for the day. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me at LearnTheSword.com I am Sheehan Abbott, and I look forward to seeing you next Friday on TGN. Until our next lesson, be well. Thank you.