The Granby

Even with all my nice talk about "knowledge is not power - knowledge shared is power..." This clip is so good that it hurts me to share this. This is a video clip of some awesome wrestling, and if you back off a touch, what you see is a good offensive application for ukemi skills in judo or even aikido. Check out these guys' great ground mobility. If you want to begin playing this stuff in judo or aikido, uke had better be rolling and blending compliantly or he's going to eat a lot of energy and break corners off of his body.

Aiki training log for tonight

Aikido with Patrick M., Kel, and Rick

• ROM & Ukemi
• Hanasu #1-8 with emphasis on releasing #1 and #2 into ukemi and emphasis on #6 and #8 as pieces of shihonage
• shomenate, aigamaeate, and gyakugamaeate
• chain #1 with emphasis on taking the steps between the steps in order to stay synchronized. We also emphasized having uke constantly moving to diffuse tori's technique.
• Cool techniques of the night: Koryu dai ni first two techniques - R4→katagatame and R3→2HG→gyakugamaeate

The steps between the steps

Here is another Musashi quote for us to think about – again, from his Wind book. This one is on walking methods. In aikido we define two walking methods – ayumiashi (normal walking) and tsugiashi (a dropping/sliding motion without crossing the feet). There are benefits to both, and for the most part, we walk using ayumiashi whenever we are outside of ma-ai, instantly switching to safer, more conservative tsugiashi as we cross into ma-ai. Here’s what Mushshi had to say about walking methods…

Use of the Feet in Other Schools

There are various methods of using the feet: floating foot, jumping foot, springing foot, treading foot, crow's foot, and such nimble walking methods. From the point of view of my strategy, these are all unsatisfactory.

I dislike floating foot because the feet always tend to float during the fight. The Way must be trod firmly.

Neither do I like jumping foot, because it encourages the habit of jumping, and a jumpy spirit. However much you jump, there is no real justification for it; so jumping is bad.

Springing foot causes a springing spirit which is indecisive.

Treading foot is a "waiting" method, and I especially dislike it.

Apart from these, there are various fast walking methods, such as crow's foot, and so on. Sometimes, however, you may encounter the enemy on marshland, swampy ground, river valleys, stony ground, or narrow roads, in which situations you cannot jump or move the feet quickly.

In my strategy, the footwork does not change. I always walk as I usually do in the street. You must never lose control of your feet. According to the enemy's rhythm, move fast or slowly, adjusting you body not too much and not too little.

Carrying the feet is important also in large-scale strategy. This is because, if you attack quickly and thoughtlessly without knowing the enemy's spirit, your rhythm will become deranged and you will not be able to win. Or, if you advance too slowly, you will not be able to take advantage of the enemy's disorder, the opportunity to win will escape, and you will not be able to finish the fight quickly. You must win by seizing upon the enemy's disorder and derangement, and by not according him even a little hope of recovery. Practice this well.

I thought it was interesting that he essentially said, “Walk normally, but be careful that your walking doesn’t get you out of rhythm with the enemy.” Similar to his advice that I previously quoted.

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I have also found it interesting to note that even if we emphasize tsugiashi in kata, when we do randori, we revert back to the more natural ayumiashi and we often have the feeling that we are doing very badly because we can’t make randori work with the type of footwork found in the kata. Working chains more has corrected this for me by showing me that the kata-style tsugiashi is sort of a one-step instantaneous thing. For instance, you might walk around for a while in ayumiashi but then tsugiashi once to push uke. Then you might ayumiashi some more, then throw uke with one more tsugiashi. The ayumiashi has been taken out of the kata for the purpose of boiling each technique down to its essence, but to make it go in randori, there often have to be some “steps between the steps.”
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One more hint related to this - you can often tell if you have gotten a good offbalance on uke because it will reset him from the tsugiashi he's trying to do to the more natural ayumiashi. So, for instance, the pattern of uke's stepping during a release exercise will look like: ayumiashi up to ma-ai then attack through ma-ai with tsugiashi. Tori gets an offbalance and uke reverts back to the ayumiashi, at which point tori blends using ayumiashi (the steps between the steps) then tori switches to tsugiashi to apply a push...

Ranai – Chaos into order

So, we saw in class today that once two vibrating objects (uke & tori) are coupled together, they may either amplify each others’ motions or they may damp each others’ motions out depending on how they are synchronized and how they are coupled. Here’s the cool physical example of this principle that I mentioned in class. And here it is done with three metronomes… and with five metronomes.



So, who all out there can say they've seen this type of phenomenon happen between two people in a martial arts setting?

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.

Ukemi is a kind of intelligent blending

Cool aikido, iaido, and jodo demo, including the multiple opponents aikido randori that I was talking about with Rick last night. Notice in the randori that the tori does not engage in a fight with every single opponnent. In fact, he doesn't really engage any of them. He evades and brushes them off, moving on the the next attacker. Most of the attackers blend well with tori's redirection and brushoffs, ending up in simple forward rolls, but a time or two you can see an uke that hangs on an instant too long, applies force the wrong way at the wrong time, or is slightly out-of-synch with tori, and that uke eats a lot more energy in a bigger fall.

In situations like this you can see that skillful blending is a part of uke's role too - and I don't mean jumping for tori. I mean really attacking, then responding by blending intelligently to remain viable. Ukemi is a kind of intelligent blending. The falling is a natural extension of the act of blending with the relationship between tori and uke.

Musashi and Canadian Brass on speed

Last night, as we practiced aigamaeate, Kel and Rick commented on the difference between what I was doing and what they were doing. They were pulling uke around in a circle and it was making tori have to go faster to compensate for lack of offbalance and for the centrifugal effect. I was floating uke into offbalance, slipping aside at the proper time, doing less, moving slower, and getting greater effect.

This brings me back to Musashi’s Wind book, which I was quoting the other day:

Speed in Other Schools
Speed is not part of the true Way of strategy. Speed implies that things seem fast or slow, according to whether or not they are in rhythm. Whatever the Way, the master of strategy does not appear fast.

Some people can walk as fast as a hundred or a hundred and twenty miles in a day, but this does not mean that they run continuously from morning till night. Unpracticed runners may seem to have been running all day, but their performance is poor.

In the Way of dance, accomplished performers can sing while dancing, but when beginners try this they slow down and their spirit becomes busy. The "old pine tree" melody beaten on a leather drum is tranquil, but when beginners try this they slow down and their spirit becomes busy. Very skilful people can manage a fast rhythm, but it is bad to beat hurriedly. If you try to beat too quickly you will get out of time. Of course, slowness is bad. Really skilful people never get out of time, and are always deliberate, and never appear busy. From this example, the principle can be seen.

What is known as speed is especially bad in the Way of strategy.

The reason for this is that depending on the place, marsh or swamp and so on, it may not be possible to move the body and legs together quickly. Still less will you be able to cut quickly if you have a long sword in this situation. If you try to cut quickly, as if using a fan or short sword, you will not actually cut even a little. You must appreciate this.

In large-scale strategy also, a fast busy spirit is undesirable. The spirit must be that of holding down a pillow, then you will not be even a little late. When your opponent is hurrying recklessly, you must act contrarily and keep calm. You must not be influenced by the opponent. Train diligently to attain this spirit.

I particularly enjoyed Musashi's analogy of holding down a pillow. The image that comes to mind is smothering someone with a pillow in their sleep. In a lot of ways aikido is like that.

L.O.C.K.U.P. police combatives method

Here's a really interesting police combatives system that appears to have a lot in common with the aikido and judo that we do. Notice the things I found most ingteresting included:

• The adjectives and descriptors that Lt. Col. Grossman (the first guy on the film) used to describe the system: "more than just combatives, the spirit, the soul of the warrior. Teachable in a lecture framework to executives... powerful...funny...dynamic...style and substance..." How many instructors can claim that kind of teaching skill?
• Reality based training, or as they refer to it, environmental training. Recreating the physiological responses and environment that occur in combat. I would really like to implement this. Anyone out there in Southwest Mississippi want to practice aikido or judo at night under a sprinkler with a strobe light? Let me know and we can play that one... That might just be something to play at the next ABG!
• "We discuss everything that would be important to that officer right from legal aspects all the way down to the hands-on physical"
• Gross motor skills. Good retention under duress.

Boxing and aikido

Nathan at TDA Training has a lot of good info on boxing, including articles on boxing for self-defense, boxing combinations, and such… One of his more popular articles describes 3 C’s of boxing defense and 3 C’s of boxing offense – good rules of thumb that make things a lot better better during sparring. In this article, Nathan says that for defense, you should Circle, Cover, and Counter and that for offense, you should Close, Cover, and Clear. Read his article for details.

I’d say this is all mighty good advice but just as a thought exercise what if we change a thing or two …

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• The line between offense and defense is blurry at best most times, so, what if we combined the two groups into one?


• Cover appears twice. Maybe it is twice as important, but what if we replaced one Cover with a Clinch.

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...all of a sudden it becomes a general strategy that looks like this:

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• Cover – Keep your hands up between you and the opponent. Try to keep your hands on the plane between your centerline and his. Controlling the center of the conflict is extremely valuable.


• Circle – Get slippery. Evade, avoid, brush-off, refuse to engage, disengage.


• Close – If the opponent is putting enough energy into the thing to confound your avoidance strategy, close the gap as safely, quickly, and efficiently as possible and…


• Clinch – either in the standard head-elbow or side-bearhug or just place your hands on top of his hands or forearms to suppress his punches and keep him offbalance. (You sure wouldn't want to clinch much or for long in a situation like that pictured above!)


• Counter – bust him if/when you get a chance, and…


• Clear – get out of there!

Wow! All of a sudden Nathan’s boxing strategy is the same as our aikido self-defense strategy. Cool. Whoda thunk that boxing and aikido have that much in common?

Nariyama embu

Nice video of Nariyama Sensei demonstrating at a recent event.

The meaning of your communication is the response you get

It doesn’t do anyone any good for an instructor to assume that their students are knuckleheads who can’t follow instructions. A better way is to assume good faith on their part – that is, assume that the students are really trying to do what they think you are telling them. So, if you don’t get the response you want from your students, you can assume that you are not communicating what you think you are communicating. Change how you are saying it to them.

Be careful how you say what you say because different people have different connotations for any given word. Colin Wee gave a good example in a comment a few days ago. If you tell the student, “step over here,” then they might understand step any old way. They might step as in normal walking (ayumiashi) when what you intended was slide over here (tsugiashi) or even bring your feet together under you then slide over here (tsuriashi). A better way is to explain the difference between these 2-3 types of walking and give them their technical terms. Then you can say, tsugiashi over here, or you can let them know that when you say slide over here you mean tsugiashi.

Another example of careless instructor-speak is something that I have had to try to overcome. I used to see a student doing something wrong and say, “you want to…,” when I actually had two different meanings to this. Sometimes I would mean, “It looks like you want in your mind to do such and such, when actually you should be thinking about it this way…” Alternately, “you want to do so and so,” could mean, “Instructions follow on how to execute this move.” Sometimes I’d get so twisted up as to say something like, “you want to do (are thinking about it wrong) this, when really you want to do (should execute it this way) that.”

Beth Shibata makes the point in her article, that how we name things affects how we think about them, and therefore, how we execute them. She suggests that aikido is overly rife with the term throw, when there is no way in the world you can use a common throwing action as we normally understand the word (like throwing a ball) to propel a person-sized thing. What we are doing is not really a throwing action, but something else. She suggests the term release. So, perhaps, shihonage (“all-directions throw”) would be easier to get across if we called it shihohanasu (“releasing in any direction”). Perhaps iriminage (enter and throw) could profitably be called (“enter and release” or "enter and separate"). Maybe the rotary throw (kaitennage) is more accurately a rotary release (kaiten hanasu).

Or maybe two other alternatives would be to either use poetic language, as in Chinese martial arts or to just rename things in your native language and ditch the exotic-sounding jargon…

AM training

AM aiki with Rob

• Koryu Dai Ichi - Sections B (variations on release #1 and oshitaoshi) and C (variations on YK#1 and shihonage).
• We talked a little about the positive influence that jodo has had on my aikido - particularly in the last year or so.

PM aiki with Rick

• We spent a lot of time working on ukemi paying attention to muscle coordination - relax/contact and the appropriate times for each.
• Same lesson plan as the AM session - Ichikata sections B&C - worked great. Wonderful flow.

Koryu Dai Ichi

Aiki with Patrick M. and Kel

• ROM and ukemi (including reps of 2 buddy falls)
• Hanasu with emphasis on moving forward on #3
• Chain #2 including R2→R1→oshitaoshi
• 2 variations of Ichikata ushirowaza kotegaeshi (ducking under the arm) and R1→R2→kotegaeshi.
• Nijusan kotegaeshi and oshitaoshi (step aside at the end of the line)

More clinic clips

Here are some more short clips of some of the participants at the latest Henry clinic.

You get just as wet no matter where you jump in

One of the cool things about aikido is that there are no prerequisites. There is no ‘most advanced skill.’ You can work the skills in any order and call that a ‘system’. A beginner may jump in with the whole class profitably practicing whatever happens to be on the lesson plan for that day. Sure there are safety considerations - you don't make newbies take big falls - but they can still practice the same techniques and principles as everyone else. I've heard it said that there are no advanced techniques or concepts in aikido - just skilled students practicing the fundamentals in a very advanced way.

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Many Aikikai schools (if I understand rightly) start with ikkyo (oshitaoshi) as the first teaching, while most Tomiki schools start with shomenate as the first teaching and only get to oshitaoshi (Aikikai’s ikkyo) as the sixth teaching after several hours of practice. Either is an okay way of teaching the thing, and after a few hours of practice, it probably doesn’t matter because students of both methods end up understanding both concepts.

In some schools, there is this talk of omote (superficial techniques taught to anyone) and ura (deep, hidden teachings only taught to the initiated) but Musashi in the end of the Wind Book writes about there being no internal teachings and no gate:

There is no "interior" nor "surface" in strategy.

The artistic accomplishments usually claim inner meaning and secret tradition, and "interior" and "gate", but in combat there is no such thing as fighting on the surface, or cutting with the interior. When I teach my Way, I first teach by training in techniques which are easy for the pupil to understand, a doctrine which is easy
to understand. I gradually endeavour to explain the deep principle, points which it is hardly possible to comprehend, according to the pupil's progress. In any event, because the way to understanding is through experience, I do not speak of "interior" and "gate".

...Accordingly I dislike passing on my Way through written pledges and regulations. Perceiving the ability of my pupils, I teach the direct Way, remove the bad influence of other schools, and gradually introduce them to the true Way of the warrior. The method of teaching my strategy is with a trustworthy spirit. You must train diligently.

…In my Ichi school of the long sword there is neither gate nor interior. There is no inner meaning in sword attitudes. You must simply keep your spirit true to realize the virtue of strategy.

Martial arts – They’re not just for kids anymore

Demographers have been telling us for years about the baby boom generation. This is the group of people born between about 1946 and 1964. This is a worldwide phenomenon, but in the U.S. it represents a group of about 80 million people beginning to move into retirement age.
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Three trends that concern many older adults are health care (in 2004, boomers averaged $2700 per year in healthcare spending), finances (fixed incomes and rising cost of living), and personal safety (Things seem to move faster and violence seems harder to deal with). The perfect solution for these problems is my aikido class.
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If you are an older adult living in Southwest Mississippi and want an affordable way to get a little reasonable, moderate exercise and learn to protect yourself in an increasingly chaotic and violent world, come check out my aikido class.
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Fees are both reasonable and negotiable, and you can learn a martial art designed by older adults for older adults, taught by an adult, and proven effective in countless real-world instances for use as personal protection by older adults.
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You don’t have to be trapped by your own fear and you don’t have to spend a fortune to learn a martial art with the potential to really change your life for the better. Send me an email at mokurendojo@gmail.com and I’ll get you set up or I’ll try to help you with whatever other information you need.

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)

A lecture by Henry Kono Sensei

I just got back from seeing our great friend and teacher, Henry Copeland. I posted a video of Henry a few days back and a couple of the videos that YouTube suggested as similar was a pair of videos by Henry Kono. The first one is a very fine lesson and the second is a very lovely aiki demonstration. Much the sort of aiki I'm talking about in much of my blog. Enjoy...





I enjoyed his discussion of the eidetic teaching style of OSensei. I've talked about that elsewhere. I think (I'm guessing) that what Ueshiba and Kono were calling the "Yin and Yang" solution to the aiki problem is the same thing that we're talking about when we refer to the Kito principle - the idea that energy waxes and wanes. You can read more of my ideas on the Kito principle here and here. I also find it interesting that he mentions the idea that real aikido is driven by getting your mind straight - not through years of physical practice. Here is an interview in which he expands on this a little.

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In any case, This certainly looks like good aikido and I would love to have the chance to work out with Kono Sensei sometime.

What you put out comes back to you thrice

Aiki with Kel

• Tegatana playing with the idea of grouping 2-3 movements as one thing in your mind. The kata changes in meaningful ways when you change the groupings. We also played with the idea of otoshi-guruma and back hand as the do-er instead of the front hand.
• Hanasu #1-8
• Aiki evasion and brushoff working into release-synch-ping-brushoff and release-synch-ping-tenkan The tenkan was remarkable. We were getting some of that feel of the wind of uke's passing blowing tori out of the way. That real kokyu feeling.
• The first two standing techniques of Ichikata as the cool ninja techniques of the night. release #1 to oshitaoshi and release #1 to tenkai oshitaoshi.

All of this stuff tonight provided good practice in the idea that if tori puts out energy and uke doesn't eat it then tori has to eat it. We all know that aikido is about harmonizing with energy but it is common to think that uke is putting all the energy into the relationship and we concentrate on trying to harmonize with that. But any time tori puts energy into the relationship, if uke doesn't eat it, it comes back to tori - sorta like that karmic law - "What you put out comes back to you thrice."

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So tori's energy output had better be minimal and short-lived and tori better be light on his feet or he might get an all-you-can-eat buffet of energy (with a doggie bag) instead of a little one-bite energy snack.

Spring 2008 Henry Seminar

I'm back from the Spring 2008 Henry seminar. It was a blast as usual. Well attended - I got to see some of the Tennessee aikidoka that I don't get to see much. Everyone learned a lot. Here are some short highlight clips from the weekend.