Getting in synch and flowing around obstacles

Aiki with Patrick M., Kel, and Rick

• Today we discussed getting in rhythm with uke, like Musashi was talking about in the passage I posted a few days ago...


• Tegatana with emphasis on shortening steps to keep in synch with an external pace.


• Hanasu with emphasis on shortening or stretching steps to get in synch during releases #1 and #3. From there we played with brushing off and disengaging. #2 turns into a particularly fabulous brushoff if tori stays light on the feet, times uke's near footfall and brushes himself off of uke.


• Koryu dai ichi section B with emphasis on staying light on the feet and flowing around obstacles.

Kote hineri practice tonight

Aiki with Patrick M. and Rick

• ROM & ukemi
• Tegatana emphasizing synching arms with rise-fall of body and movig the center and building a stance underneath it.
• hanasu #1-4 with emphasis on releasing as brush-off. The idea was to make #1 feel like #3 and the strong side to feel like the weak side.
• Nijusan kote hineri
• Ichikata tachiwaza #3-4 (Release 5 into tenkai kote hineri and release 3 into mawashi oshitaoshi)

Stick & rope

Aiki with Kel and Rick

• ROM and ukemi
• Tegatana with emphasis on relaxing the shoulders down and back throughout the exercise
• Hanasu with emphasis on the stick and rope model - that is, releases #1 and #3, the connection is like a stick - you can only effectively push forward along the length of the stick, lining the stick up between your center of mass and the point of contact. Releases #2 and #4 work like a rope - you can't push a rope, only pull it with both centers of mass lined up with the rope. What this does is minimizes all moments of torque around the shoulder joint.
• nijusan #1 - shomenate
• Sankata tantodori #2 and #3, Sakate yokomen gyakugamaeate and sakate hidari wakigatame - both of these with emphasis on evading and brushing off - minimizing the amount of time you are in the meatgrinder. #2 (at least the way we were playing it tonight - similar to the kokyunage pictured above) is another one of those super-cool ninja invisibility tricks.

Last night's aikido

Aikido with Knox, Quin, Rick, and Kel

• Warmed up with the kids with a contest to see who could run across the mat in the silliest way. There was a lot of arm flailing and head wagging, hopping, and wiggling of butts. In short, good warmup.
• Ukemi with me throwing/spotting the kids into the crash pad for about 20 minutes before class started. Then the kids bailed and the grownups showed up and continued with the ukemi in the crash pad, emphasizing forward roll falling from a reflexed position.
• Tegatana emphasizing rapid recovery, bringing the back side of the body with you, and doing it as near-instantaneously as possible.
• hanasu #1-4 emphasizing tori staying centered on the power hand and uke flowing with tori.
• knife evasions, aiki brush-off, and stab-twice.
• The brush-off led into the tantodori section of sankata, including the ushiroate brushoff, the udehineri, the kotegaeshi, and the stab-the-knee gedanate.

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.

A helpful handful: yoko o mawashi

A couple of days ago, John asked about potential applications for the last movement (yoko o mawashi) in our first exercise (Tegatana no kata). Following are a handful of applications or things that this last movement teaches - but not before a disclaimer. I consider this exercise to be very general-purpose. This movement, or something similar could occur in many techniques.

• As John pointed out, all the steps in this kata are very small, conservative motions, so, in contrast, this large, lunging motion teaches us what a large recovery is involved with a large step
• You may also consider this as a withdrawing evasion (like a retreating tenkanashi) getting the hands up on the centerline. You may not step that deep, but in essence yoko o mawashi is a specific type of aiki brush-off.
• You may also interpret this motion as pushing uke down: an evasion with some degree of turning motion, dropping, and pushing uke into offbalance - taking an incoming opponent and driving them into the ground.
• As for specific techniques, you may see this type of motion as a kotegaeshi. As uke punches, tori evades with a retreating tenkanashi, grasps the arm, and returns back to the starting point, throwing with a gaeshi.
• You could also call it aigamaeate or aikinage - retreating tenkanashi scooping the arm and head in an arc, then turning the other way attacking the face.

Randori with locking techniques

Aiki with Kel

• We've gone from freezing cold to temperate to too-humid-to-survive in about two weeks. Scott Z. would feel right at home.
• Ukemi with emphasis on landing properly and slowing the legs down so they don't get hammered on the mat
• Tegatana & hanasu as warmup - no particular emphasis
• Nijusan #6-10 with the ukemi and pins (see this training log)
• Chain #1 - the shortcut that contains the hineri-gaeshi loop
• Randori with both partners walking into and out of gaeshi, hineri, mawashi, and wakigatame locks.
• Rokukata maeotoshi and Rokukata sakaotoshi as the cool ninja techniques of the night

3% error – bias or random error?

A teacher once told me that the greatest professional musicians in the world still make about 3% error - despite an infinite amount of practice. That is, they mis-play about three notes out of every hundred. If you look at Tegatana no kata, it has between about 70 and 100 steps (depending on how you count it). This implies that there will always be a few missed steps each time you do it even after you have practiced it for years. Thus there will always be something to work on in this exercise.

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Something to look for is the difference between systematic error (bias) and random error. When you spot one of those mis-steps, are you making that same mistake repeatedly or was that just a fluke? Systematic error is (perhaps) more shameful for the expert but it is by far the easier type of error to fix. Errors that occur at random are hard to pinpoint, much less fix. Errors that you make repeatedly the same every time are pretty easy to modify, but to fix a random error you have to re-tool your entire thinking process and movement strategy to be more error-tolerant or error-detecting or error-correcting. Change everything that you do so that there are no consequences to the occasional random error and suddenly the error will cease to exist. This is why the greatest experts can do things that are taboo for novices – because some of these things make a difference for novices but don't matter for the expert that has worked through that particular error for years.

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.

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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.

Yonkata and other kata ideas

5AM aiki with Rob

• tegatana
• hanasu
• Yonkata #1-14 (A.K.A. Shichihon no kuzushi omote and ura)
• We talked about different ideas of what kata is - more ammo for some future posts.

Blending and ukemi

Aiki with Patrick M. and Kel.

• Warmup with particular emphasis on ukemi. We don't do a whole lot of ukemi during the winters but its about spring and it's time to get back into ukemi. It is very hard, if not impossible to develop superb aiki without throwing all the way into the ground and taking the falls yourself too. You simply have to feel both sides of the relationship all the way through the techniques.
• Tegatana emphasizing shizentai (natural upright posture) and closing the hands to protect the fingers.
• Shichihon no kuzushi with emphasis on getting rid of the discontinuities. In this exercise it is both partners' responsibility to blend intelligently throughout the thing. The ukemi on the end is a natural extension of the blend in the beginning.
• Nijusan hon kata #1-10 with more emphasis on uke blending into falls and tori throwing into the pins at the end. Gedanate was working particularly well tonight and we explored it from aiki, kime (karate), and ju perspectives. Kel was doing exceptionally well on the wakigatame that begins like shomenate.
• Release #1 into maeotoshi from Rokukata (pushing with the free hand on the body).

Aiki practice

Aiki with John J.

• It was cold in the dojo (after our snow last night!), so it was streetclothes, no-mats practice today.
• Tegatana emphasiding bringing recovery foot back under your center and same-hand-same-foot.
• Hanasu #1-4 emphasizing relaxed, unbendable arm and moving the center behind the shield of the hands no matter where uke moves that shield. We particularly worked on #1 and #2 emphasizing how each flows into the other when resisted.
• Shomenate
• Kotemawashi off of release#3 as the cool ninja technique of the day.
• A little bit of "crazy man" randori, emphasizing relaxed movement and "stay off me" hands and

Ninja invisibility in aikido

Aikido with Patrick M., Rick, and Mytchi

• Jodo with Mytchi. We worked on rolling the cane from pencil grip to honte, gyakute, and sakate grips. We also worked on #1 and #6 seiteikata as separation events against unarmed attackers.
• Tegatana emphasizing using ideokinesis to release into shizentai by visualizing forces drawing the crown of the head and the balls of the feet apart (is that enough jargon for you or what?). This was an amazing, relaxing postural fix.
• Hanasu #1-4
• Randori as a game of random releases. Everyone was doing great on this.
• Oshitaoshi (irimi omote and tenkan) emphasizing sidestepping into uke's blind spot and staying there with feelers until you can separate or execute a technique. We also got to play with good locking posture in pins.
• We talked about several really disorienting tricks that are part of tori's motion. Things that make tori seem to disappear and make it more difficult for uke to continue attacking. We nicknamed this the ninja invisibility trick. I'll probably have a good blog post on this soon.

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.

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• 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.
  

Thursday aikido

We had no 5AM class this morning - Rob had a test to study for.
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Kid's judo with Gavin, Whit, Mason, and Emma

• Warmup, ukemi, spider-crawling alternated with big falls (teguruma) with a spotter
• Osotogari uchikomi "by the numbers" sets of theee throwing on the last rep and trading partners. Whit was doing especially good on the osotogari, and hammered Gavin once. Gavin tried to whine about it but then started laughing.
• Osotogari into kesagatame
• Uphill escape from kesagatame. Mason was majorly out-doing the others on this escape with an excellent bridging action.
• Crawling man

Aiki with Rick

• tegatana emphasizing balls of the feet and short, conservative steps.
• hanasu #1-4 emphasizing the feeling of release.
• partner evasion exercises using release motions to evase and brush off lunges.
• suwari kokyuho (kneeling freeform pushing exercise)

PM Aiki

Aiki with Kel and Mytchi

• tegatana emphasizing falling during the first half of the step and pulling with the front leg in the second half.
• hanasu #1-4 emphasizing releasing feeling and "stay off me" hands
• chain #3 emphasizing synch and brush-off in kotemawashi oshitaoshi, hikitaoshi, and udehineri.
• review of shomenate and aigamaeate

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