Stepping aside into udegaeshi

Aiki with Kel

• ROM, ukemi
• tegetana with emphasis on how shifting how you think about the rhythm of the exercise changes what you get from the exercise.
• hanasu with emphasis on the flow: R1↔R2↔R6. R1 (or R3) is sort of a prelude to all of the releases, with R6 (or R8) being a little curlycue on the end that is sometimes required to make the release work (almost an afterthought). So R1↔R2↔R6 and R3↔R4↔R8 make great flow exercises that seem to work on a lot of of the types of motions that occur in aikido. We also got to play with ushiroate and aikinage in the context of R1↔R2↔R6.
• shomenate and aigamaeate with emphasis on moving offline using the cowcatcher.
• oshitaoshi and udegaeshi with emphasis on stepping aside when you meet resistance. There is a lot going on in udegaeshi...

Aiki practice tonight

Aiki with Kel

• ROM, ukemi
• tegatana emphasizing walking on the balls of the first two rays of the feet. Also looking for the combinations of moves that can be trailed together into one long French Curve.
• hanasu with emphasis on following uke's curve on #6 and #8 instead of picking some arbitrary place to turn and forcing ukke into your curve.
• shomenate with emphasis on getting the initial offbalance right on the initial footfall.
• aigamaeate with emphasis on checking the elbow to keep the knife hand off you as you push him down. We were getting a little bit more vigorous falling practice with aigamae today than usual - it was good!
• Chains: R1→oshitaoshi; R1→R5→tenkai kotehineri; R1→R5→kotehineri; R1→R5→kote mawashi oshitaoshi→hikitaoshi→ushiroate. On these we were emphasizing letting the motion of the bodies tear uke's grip apart and tori just closing his hand on whatever he happened to have. This way there is no fine motor skill or specialized gripping required.

Working with Andy on flow vs. blur

Aiki with Andy

• Folk's expectations going into a practice have a lot to do with the outcome. Today I think Andy came to class expecting to suck and be frustrated, and for me to grumble at him about it. Sure enough, he was stiff and rough. But we did randori naming the release motions being played to give his conscious mind something to do besides whipping his subconscious mind and within about 10 minutes he was doing great aikido. Good, light, smooth, flowing, etc... Maybe the best aikido I've ever seen Andy do.
• ROM, tegatana, releases, chain #1
• Andy uked for me doing all of nijusan and I uked for him doing 1-10 before we ran out of time and steam. The thing to remember on nijusan is to get all the pieces in there before going on to the next thing. It is easy to get too focussed on flow, and end up with a clumsy blur. Flow will come if you put all the pieces in there.

New guy in aiki class

Aikido with Kel & Allen

• ROM
• tegatana with emphasis on tsugiashi
• hanasu #1, #3, and #2
• shomenate
• chain#2 - YK1→maeotoshi and YK1→wakigatame

Randori within constraints

AM aiki with Rob

• releases as warmup
• chain #1 - the first part with emphasis on left-right synch and hineri-gaeshi synch
• chain #2 - the sharp turn with emphasis on up-down synch and the 'who's the boss?' idea. This led into the idea of chains as randori within constraints. It is randori with enough structure to make it repeatable so you get to do randori around a set of 4-5 techniques or positions with good flow.
• Getting Rob ready for nidan in aikido. End of October would be a good time to do that as part of the aiki buddies gathering.

Variations on shihonage

Aiki with Patrick M., Kel, and Ross

• ukemi, including airfalls and flying sidefalls with a spotter
• tegatana with emphasis on hip switch
• hanasu
• aigamaeate with emphasis on not pushing past the offbalance, but leaving uke hanging in offbalance while tori slips behind.
• gedanate - variants with the idea of attacking anything low when you can't attack high
• udegaeshi/kaitennage
• chain #2 including the gaeshi-hineri loop. We'll get to the migi-hidari loop next class.
• cool ninja technique of the night: koryu dai ichi section C - variants on shihonage, hijikime and sukuinage

Rudolf Laban on the KiHara chains

Reposted from an old article here on Mokuren Dojo:

Laban’s principles of human motion:

• side-to-side motion implies (or facilitates or is accompanied by) forward-backward motion, creating motion in a horizontal plane.


• forward-backward motion implies up-and-down motion, creating motion in a saggital plane.


• up-and-down motion implies side-to-side motion, creating motion in a frontal plane

So, pure planar motion does not exist in the context of the human body. Any time someone is moving or exerting force along any plane there are also interesting interactions going on in the other 2 orthogonal planes. Essentially all human motion is a form of spiral.

.

Where this has popped up lately in the chains. The chains are about synchonizing tori's wave-like motions with those of uke. Chain #1 is, on the surface, mostly about synchronizing with uke’s left-right motion whereas Chain #2 is mostly about synchronizing with uke’s up-down motion.

But Laban’s principles suggest that, for instance, in chain#1, in order for uke to have a left-right motion in his body he has to also have a forward-backward motion, which in turn, implies an up-down motion. So in any of the chains we’re learning this 3-dimensional, wave-like, spiral synchronization even though one waveform might be more prominent or obvious.

As an exercise it might be interesting to extend Laban’s principles to other dimensions of waveform motion in the human body – to dimensions like otoshi-guruma or hineri-gaeshi or toward-away. I’ll have to think on that one for a bit…

PM judo and aikido

Kid's judo with Gavin, Whit, Knox, Emma, and Quin

• Ukemi - and lots of it with me throwing/spotting Whit, Knox, and Quin for about 30 minutes before class started. Then the others arrived and we went through the ukemi routine for the parents' demo in about a month.
• osotogari into kesagatame
• quiet sitting counting sounds that we can hear.

Aikido with Kel

• tegatana with emphasis on taking small enough steps that the heels do not strike or lift off the mat.
• hanasu with emphasis on 'stay-off-me' hands.
• chain #1, including shihonage, iriminage, and ushiroate
• some various interesting techniques from Sankata as the cool ninja techniques of the night.

I am exhausted from the three workouts today. Elise, my darling wife, has gone to purchase me a bottle of whiskey to drink while I lie in a scalding hot bathtub.

Good vibrations

Aiki with Kel and Rick

• ROM and ukemi
• tegatana with emphasis on finishing each step, making sure that you don't drag the recovery out, and bending the knees to take up the up-down slack and keep your COM level. It turns out that there are cool COM changes happening in one step - as you separate your legs to take a step, your center rises with respect to your head, but it drops with respect to the ground, so it almost balances out. With just a little flex in the knees the COM stays very close to level and you cease to telegraph so badly and you conserve your own energy much better.
• hanasu with emphasis on taking the first step as a leap of faith, without knowing what technique will fall out. From there, we worked on transitioning between #1, #2, #5, and #6 as appropriate to follow the arc of uke's force and to attain that release feeling.
• chain #1 - release #1 resisted into release #2 into reverse kotegaeshi, ushiroate, and iriminage. This is an especially cool exercise because it makes it easier to feel the vibration in uke's body when he tries to resist and you move with him instead of fighting and damping him out. We especially played attention to the ukemi because without uke taking ukemi, tori cannot ever learn the last part of the technique.
• Kel managed to get two zen-ish sayings out of me in one night. That is a feat, because I don't consider myself a very zen-ish dude normally, so I told him to cherish it. The two zen-ish sayings...

Be like water running downhill.

Seek safety in the mouth of the Dragon.

Backup plans in aikido

Aikido with John J. and Vincent

• ROM, ukemi
• tegatana with emphasis on heel-toe, shoulder-width stance, walking on the balls of the feet, complete recovery steps, and relaxed unbendable arm.
• hanasu #1 and #2
• chain #1, including release #1 resisted into release #2, which can lead to a reverse kotegaeshi. This gave us the opportunity to talk about covering uke's hands to damp or supress his potential.
• Short lecture on the four main backup plans in aikido: 1) get behind uke, 2) disengage and move away, 3) move with uke, and 4) hit uke in the face.
• We worked on shomenate as an example of backup plan #4 when we (for whatever reason) stepped inside and parried with the lead hand (a terrible, awkward mistake).

Great falling practice

Aiki with Kel

• Ukemi emphasizing how the proper landing position is a natural consequence of managing the body properly throughout the entire fall.
• Tegatana emphasizing the panther walk and bringing the recovery step in fully
• Hanasu emphasizing full recovery steps
• chain #1 including the transition from release #1 to release #5 and the stuff that comes off of release #1 - mainly tenkai kote hineri, kotemawashi oshi taoshi, and kote hineri.
• Rokukata maeotoshi and Rokukata sakaotoshi with a crashpad emphasizing feeling to see if one step is enough or if you should take one more step and catch the next footfall. We were getting spectacular throws and falls.

Aiki practice and a cool knife video

Aikido with Rob and Kel

• tegatana with emphasis on the goofy-foot pivots and turns in the second half of the exercise
• hanasu with emphasis on synchronization
• chain #1

We talked about aikido having about four major failsafes - strategies that you fall back on when something is not working. They include:

• disengage and move away
• move behind uke
• hit uke in the face
• synchronize with uke to limit his potential

Rob is having some cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile his knife-based knowledge (which is quite good and quite aiki - but just a different training methodology) with our aikido. He called it comparing apples to oranges. I called it getting stuck on the warmups to the point you never make progress. I don't know if we resolved it but I think it might be better. I don't think he isn't buyng into the aikido, but that he is having trouble reconciling how the two sysems seem to build up to the same thing through different paths.

.

We also talked about an interesting knife method that seems pretty viable and pretty aiki-like to me. (Watch out for some foul language on the film.) Rob had some commentary and potential problems with it. I think what I see there is pretty interesting because this guy talks all the same principles that we do in aikido - i.e. don't fight with the guy, disengage and run, control his balance and you control his potential, etc... I don't know if this is the 'best' knife system - but it sure is interesting.

5am training

Judo/aiki with Rob

• footsweep to control deashi & kosoto from outside cross grip, normal grip, and 2-sleeves grip
• releasing (R1 &R2) into cross grip into osoto or deashi or kosoto or wakigatame
• Sankata tachiwaza empasizing that each technique can be treated just like a chain of checkpoints rather than a kata of specific steps. This makes the technique smoother, gentler, more flowing, and more robust.

A helpful handful – Tegatana no Kata

I have previously published a list of 100 terrific things to try when practicing our first footwork exercise, Tegatana no Kata. I have also published some video (I know it’s not very good video) of the exercise here and here. Following is some elaboration on a handful of helpful hints that we have been working on most recently.

.

• You want to be weight-bearing on the balls of the feet. Specifically the balls of the two most medial toes of each foot (the big toe and the second toe). The heel and the outside of the foot is slightly brushing the ground and helping you to balance on the two long, strong levers on the medial side of the foot. If you try weightbearing on the outside of the foot you will lose power and you will notice a tendency to roll the ankle outward, which is practically the only way that it is possible to sprain the ankle.
• You are trying for a dynamic posture that is balanced around a central norm of shizentai, that is, a normal, upright posture. Your feet should be slightly closer than shoulder-width and heel-toe alignment, head over shoulders over hips over balls of feet. Notice that you cannot easily attain this natural upright posture if you stand on your heels – everything on up the chain gets out of whack. If you imagine some force drawing the crown of your head up, stretching your body out between your head and the balls of your feet then you will rock forward onto the balls of the feet and the rest of the body will tend to release into shizentai.
• Take small, conservative steps – no greater than the width of your stance (width of your hips). This minimizes rocking and bobbling and reduces the amount of recovery needed after each step, making your motion faster and more efficient.
• Your steps should be gravity-powered; falling instead of stepping. Concentrate on a feeling of your center dropping toward the center of the Earth during the first half of the step, then concentrate on pulling with the new weight-bearing leg and tightening the thighs together to recover from the step.
• And one more hint, hopefully helpful, that I don’t think made my first list. Check out the following video and watch carefully the alignment of the hips, knee, and foot during the turns. I’ve been preaching this more explicitly for the past several classes and these ideas make a difference in strength and stability during the turns.
  

5 AM Aikido

Aiki with Rob

• tegatana, hanasu (#1,3,5,7 are much improved. Work on centering on #2 and #6.)
• chain #2
• Sankata #1-16

Hanasu vs. shichihon

Lately, we’ve been working on Hanasu– the wrist releases – in greater detail, trying to really get that ‘releasing’ feeling. We’ve all been doing great, and I’ve been tweaking little details, “This time do it this way… Good, but think about this… What if we try it like this…” and then I realized that I was bringing elements into Hanasu that we usually practice in the other fundamental release kata, Shichihon no kuzushi (the 7 fundamentals of offbalance). So, what is the difference between Hanasu and Shichihon?

.

Superficially, Hanasu includes eight techniques and Shichihon contains seven. Looking a little deeper, Hanasu includes four releases and four backup ideas in case those first four go in an unexpected direction. Shichihon repeats those first four releases from Hanasu, with a different emphasis, and adds three new releases.

.

What is the different emphasis? Hanasu is mostly about evasion, blending, and synchronization, while Shichihon is more about timing and direction and extension of specific offbalances. It is possible to do either kata emphasizing any of the ideals from either exercise, but in normal practice, each has its own set of things that it teaches. Each of these two exercises contains a different piece of the puzzle. The pieces of the puzzle begin being put together in the chains, where we evade, blend, synch, and watch for proper times and directions to extend uke into weakness.

.

So why the different emphasis in Shichihon? Because of the first two new releases being inside you don’t have the safety margin like you do on the outside releases so you have to do something (kuzushi) to slow uke down and sap some of his potential while you are releasing. The rest of the kata is a timing progression. That is, the first 2 techniques are timed off of the first footfall, the next two are timed off of the second footfall, the next two are timed off of the third footfall, and the 7th technique is just plain too late.

.

We used to spend the first 1-2 years of our practice working almost exclusively with the releases in Hanasu, then we would practice the releases in Shichihon but in less detail. Since about Y2K, practicing the chains has brought some of these higher-level ideas back into the kyu ranks, but I want to start doing a little more work on the Shichihon ideas.

.

We are going to be alternating the release kata that we use for warmup – one class we’ll warmup with Hanasu (emphasizing evasion and blending and synch) and the next class Shichihon (emphasizing timing and direction and extension). We should be able to see pretty soon if this will help us to move toward that vague, elusive ideal ‘release’ feeling in more of our motions and techniques.

Early morning aikido

Aiki with Rob

Today was the beginning of our 5am aiki/judo mixed class. This morning was pretty cold and the mats were stacked so we did sweats and shoes aikido without the mats.

• tegatana emphasizing pulling with the front foot and making the turns more stable and stronger.
• hanasu working a lot on synchronization, stretching the step, direction of offbalance, and doing true releases so that uke can't reverse you.
• Chains 1 and 3 as a demonstration of how these release ideas come together into techniques.
• shomenate (junana and nijusan versions as two ends of a spectrum)
• Plus I got some jodo solo work done. Saw a neat thing on #7 and #8. Hard to put into words right now, but might improve #8 some.

Cool rokukata tentainage

Aiki with Patrick M. and Kel

• tegatana emphasizing turning the hips/body with the leg to develop a powerful position and keep the knee safe.
• hanasu segue into chain #2 but starting chain #2 from the wrong side (i.e. like shomenate or yonkata #1). This also got us off onto a tangent of how to use uke's motion and mass to get tori out of a corner or off of a wall and reverse positions.
• nijusan #1-5 (Kel's rank requirement)
• rokukata tentainage (this thing worked like a charm! Even wrong-sided! Even against really strong opponents! Even against really light opponents! Man this thing was cool!)

Aikido this afternoon

Aiki with Kel

• ROM, warmup
• tegatana
• hanasu emphasizing synching with uke's up-down rhythm all the way through the technique. We also worked on recognizing when uke shifts from casual walking to "getting ready to fight" walking and seeing if we could switch him back with an offbalance.
• rokukata maeotoshi off of release #4 emphasizing executing hte technique by stretching a footstep right at the instant of uke's footfall. Kel was getting it on the wrong footfall about half the time but it was still working great! Coolness.
• We started working on chain #3 and got as far as the elbow-to-elbow wakigatame when Kel was called away.

Randori night at aikido

Aiki with Kel

• Tegatana - no particular emphasis. Just repetition.
• Hanasu - emphasis on getting both tori and uke that smoothe, flowing release feeling. Uke doesn't want to stop becuse then he eats all the momentum and mechanical advantage tori has built up. Instead, the smart uke attempts to flow to diffuse the problems tori presents. This way both uke and tori are active learners.
• Chain #2 working on the sharp turn, shomenate, and wakigatame
• Randori - and a goodly amount of it at that.
• Aiki-handshake as the cool technique of the night.
• We also had a lovely discussion of PNF in aikido, hyperactive reflexes, and these wonders at the ends of our legs that are our feet!