AUCKLAND P2P SEMINAR 2025
Last weekend I was very fortunate to attend my first Path to Podium event with the NZ Wolf Pack. It was a great day filled with shiai, tailored feedback, and new and interesting ideas for training exercises focussed on improving performance. In today’s blog post, I’d like to share what I learned for those who weren’t able to attend, with a particular focus on training exercises I think our team would find useful if incorporated into our shiai focussed keiko.
What are P2P Seminars?
Firstly, a bit of context in case you’re encountering P2P for the first time! At the beginning of 2025 the NZKF launched a three year strategy to disrupt the status quo of international shiai, and to prepare the NZ Kendo team to compete at the 2027 World Kendo Championship in Tokyo. This new initiative was christened the NZ Wolves, with all those interested in improving their performance in shiai invited to join the pack. The NZ team for WKC Tokyo 2027 will eventually be selected from this pack.
“We’re not here to coast. We’re here to prepare.”
Path to Podium seminars are a key component of the NZ Wolves’ focus for this year, raising the standard of shiai around the country and building powerful habits and self belief in participating kenshi. The seminars are hosted by the coaches of the NZ team, and focus on intense shiai-geiko designed to push the limits of the participants while delivering specific feedback, and teaching coaching and training strategies. The seminar I attended was led by the Head Coach Blake Bennett Sensei, with Women’s Coach Rina Kobayashi also attending.
The Wolfpack Warmup
1 - Kirikaeshi
1 x slow, without blocking
1 x fast, with blocking
2 - Bokuto Keiko Ho
#1 and #2
3 - Oji Waza
1 x Men oji waza
1 x Kote oji waza
4 - Kakarigeiko - 1 breath
5 - Ai-kakarigeiko - 1 breath
6 - Ai-men, with the objective of winning the cut
7 - Swap roles, repeat 1 - 6
8 - Rotate, and repeat
The Warmup
The seminar kicked off with a team building exercise designed to break the ice among the participants and get us collaborating, where our objective was to work in small groups to collect various items. From there, we then got stuck in with the NZ Wolves Warmup routine.
Blake Sensei discussed that in order to succeed in shiai, Kenshi must be able to be resilient under pressure and strike correct ippon when out of breath. Kakarigeiko and Ai-kakarigeiko were singled out as valuable tools to build this skill. Regular kakarigeiko during training is essential, with Sensei emphasising the need to strike ippon with each cut rather than wildly swinging the shinai.
“The Wolfpack Up”, as Sensei called it, is a routine he taught us to build resiliency and ability to continue striking ippon under pressure. It can be used during regular keiko, or as a warm up routine during a tournament. When used in training the aim is explicitly for kakarite to have to continue fighting while short of breath. Motodachi must apply pressure when attacking for oji waza, and during kakarigeiko, so that kakarite doesn’t have room to recover. Finally, both kenshi should make their best effort to score ippon during the ai-men.
This was an intense and new routine for me, and honestly I was gassed within a few rounds. I clearly have a lot of training to do! However, I resonated with Blake Sensei’s emphasis that the routine is intentionally hard and should continue to be hard regardless of the level of fitness and technique you reach. Rather than shying away from challenging routines like this, he encouraged us to feel grateful for the opportunity. Through routines like this we can develop our bodies and waza, but just as importantly, build a bedrock of confidence in preparation for tournaments or gradings that we’ve put in the work and overcome difficult challenges to get to the shiai-jo.
Custom Shiai Rules
Here are the customised Shiai rules that were introduced during the P2P to encourage or discourgage certain behaviours
1 - No tsubazeriai allowed
2 - Double ippon for nidan-waza
3 - Ippon shobu only (during team matches)
4 - Allow kenshi to call a 30s timeout during team matches to confer on strategy
5 - Kakarigeiko incorporated into the middle of the shiai
Customised Shiai-geiko
During the course of the day I took part in an individuals and team shiai with the other attendees. To match up the competitors we used an interesting approach I’d not seen before - everyone’s shinai were heaped in a pile in the middle of the room, shuffled, and shinai were then drawn from the pile at random to populate the draw. A simple and elegant solution to ensure a truly random draw!
Blake Sensei was observing the shiai to give individual feedback, and also shared several reflections on the techniques which are likely to lead to success in the shiai-jo. He placed special emphasis on nidan waza as being far more likely to score than single cuts, and encouraged us all to build our ability to continuously attack. Further, he shared an observation that the provisional rules for tsubazeriai are likely to encourage the adoption of quick hiki-waza in future tournaments, as kenshi seek to avoid the risk of hansoku. He encouraged us to do far more of this in our regular training than we typically do. In fact, a general theme of the seminar was that we often fallback on what we’re comfortable doing during regular keiko, and so he introduced some ways to customise jigeiko and shiai-geiko to nudge us out of our comfort zones.
Blake Sensei introduced us to layering our own rules onto a match to encourage or discourage certain techniques. For example, to encourage hiki-waza during our shiai-geiko, he introduced a no-tsubazeriai rule. Kenshi who didn’t immediately perform hiki-waza after closing in would receive a hansoku. Later, a rule was introduced that successful nidan waza would score two ippon rather than one. In this way, Sensei was able to re-shape the way the group was fighting, and the effect was immediately obvious. The no-tsubazeriai rule in particular had a significant effect not only on the folks I was observing, but on my own shiai, encouraging me to keep moving and remain aggressive throughout the match. I really enjoyed this idea of customising jigeiko or shiai-geiko during a practice to nudge kenshi out of their usual patterns and to build new skills, and am looking forward to trying it with my team back at Yōshinkan. Beyond the rules we tried during the P2P, I could imagine many variations of these we could try out to encourage certain techniques or address areas for improvement among our team.
We also spent some time discussing strategies for team shiai, and adapting the strategy as the match went on to respond to the current situation. To practice this, during each match anyone on a team could call a 30s timeout to confer and give advice to the fighters. By doing this the whole group benefited from useful insights, such as the possibility that a strategy might need to change not only from one fight to the next, but even during a fight as each ippon is scored, depending on what has already happened earlier in the team match.
Gengeiko
Intense fighting practice, facilitated by a time keeper
1 - Jigeiko - 2 mins
2 - Player 1
Kote men - 10 secs
Kakarigeiko - 10 secs
3 - Jigeiko - 2mins
4 - Player 2
Kote men - 10 secs
Kakarigeiko - 10 secs
5 - Bow out, rotate, and repeat immediately
Repeat 1 - 5 for the pre-agreed number of matches. Encourage the team to shout encouragement to each other and count up or down as they make their way through the rotation.
Gengeiko - Pushing to the Absolute Limit
At the end of the Seminar I was introduced to Gengeiko, a form of intense jigeiko. It’s intended to be some of the hardest training you can do, both to toughen you up and to build confidence that you can endure and continue fighting beyond exhaustion. Sensei set us the challenge of 8 matches, the longest Gengeiko which has taken place at a P2P so far this year. This seemed a lofty challenge.
The drum sounded, we bowed in, and plunged into some of the hardest fighting I’ve done in my kendo journey so far. It was exhilarating! Any snatched moment to catch my breath was seized on by my opponent and the only way to stop it was to deflect and strike back. As we rotated and dived in from match to match with no pause, the room was echoing with the yelling of the team cheering each other on. Some counted up, others counted down. As I roared “FOUR TO GO!”, I finally had the privilege to face and learn from Blake Sensei in a memorable fight that taught me a lot about how much further I could go than I thought.
As the last fight came to an end, I was overjoyed to have proven to myself that I could do it, and any doubts I’d had at the start of the seminar that I didn’t belong among the rest of the group were laid to rest.
At 36 and still early in my Kendo journey, I know that I will never realistically compete at the WKC. However, participating in events such as this one in the company of these amazing kenshi, I can certainly do the work to improve my own Kendo and achieve my potential. I’m very grateful to them all, and the organisers, for the opportunity. I look forward to seeing them all again at the next one in a few weeks in Hamilton!
