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...

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.

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.

A helpful handful: aigamaeate

Consider the similarities between aigamaeate and aikinage (known in aikikai as iriminage). They are really the same technique - or perhaps you could say that aigamaeate is a form of iriminage. Here is a handful of helpful hints - some of the things I work with my students on.

• Often in practice, aigamaeate is done as a more direct entry and abrupt atemi, whereas aikinage seems more flowing and roundabout, but either technique can be done either way. Try aigamaeate from a backing-around situation when uke interrupts your tenkan and tries to turn back in on you.
• Because aigamaeate and aikinage are about the same thing, all the helpful handful for aikinage apply to aigamaeate too.
• Where there two techniques really diverge is in the relative height of tori as compared to uke. A taller tori will often find it easier to strike over uke’s arm, while a shorter tori will strike under uke’s arm. Takng a palm to the chin from a short tori sliding upward along your body can be one of the worst experiences ever.
• Aigamaeate happens abruptly and effectively when someone is trying tori out using snappy lead jabs and testing feints. If you see 1-2 testing jabs, get ready for another one and follow it back into uke with an atemi of your own.
• Another fundamental version of aigamaeate is in response to a jo thrust – slip out of the way moving forward and outside the strike and clothesline or better yet, palm uke to the face while blocking and taking the jo with the other hand.

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

A helpful handful: aikinage

This is really the thing that aikikai guys call iriminage. Here are a handful of things that I've played with on this technique.

• This technique contains two tenkan motions and sorta describes a yin-yang shape on the floor. Either of the tenkan motions might cause uke to fall. In fact, in aiki demos you often tori throw uke facefirst into the ground and uke pops back up as tori switches directions and clobbers uke.
• Think of the hook around the head as a feeler instead of an end-effector. If you pull hard with the head-hand then you can spoil the technique and give uke stability.
• Try throwing with a tenkan motion back into the front of uke's hips instead of a clothesline.
• Try throwing with a palm to the face, like aigamaeate. This is a much better small-tori technique than the clothesline.
• This can be thrown as a hip throw.

New nikyu

Judo with Rob

• Worked on Karl’s “Creating the moment” material
• Footsweep to control
• Deashi, stepping around the corner, hizaguruma, kubinage/ogoshi, ashiguruma

Aikido with Patrick M., Kel, Jill, and Cynthia

• Warmup, ukemi, tegatana (emphasizing following-foot and shizentai), hanasu #1
• Aiki brushoff from hanasu #1 on the far footfall and on the near footfall
• Rokukata hikiotoshi as a brush-off and ushiroate as a follow-up to a spoiled hikiotoshi
• Patrick M. did his nikyu demonstration. His shomenate, aigamaeate, gedanate, and shihonage were particularly excellent. His kotegaeshi might need some work.

Judo and aiki at Mokuren last night

A slight change in the format of my training logs...

.

Judo with Rob

• Groundwork cycle – emphasis on minimizing 2-knee downs and reversing the flow of the cycle using the shoulder press turnover, the knee-lift turnover, and the cross-face near ankle breakdown.
• Newaza randori followed by drilling the skill of walking out of jujigatame by feeding the arm farther in and stepping over his body. I also got to try a step-over guard pass that I saw in a book. Worked great.
• Standing throws into a crashpad. A few repetitions of ogoshi (I hate that throw!) then working into the otoshi-guruma concept with taiotoshi, ukiotoshi, sumiotoshi, and hizaguruma.

Aiki with Patrick M., Kel, Jill, and J.P.

• Tegatana emphasizing pulling with the front foot to snap the recovery foot back under your hips to minimize time spent in an indeterminate state.
• Hanasu emphasizing the transition from #1 into #5 and #2 into #6
• KiHara Chain #2 working maeotoshi, shihonage, tenkai kotegaeshi, and aikinage/aigamaeate. Emphasis on using the wrist-hand in aikinage as a feeler instead of an end effector.

Juntai releases and aikinage

Tonight we worked tegatana once then moved into hanasu, working it once fairly close to kata mode then shifting to juntai timing similar to what Whit and I are doing in this video. This is a neat exercise because it introduces the beginnings of chaining and uke learns that in order to give a good attack he has to keep trying to center on tori. Tori learns to recognize the line that he has to move off of each time. Tori also learns to treat uke centering on him as an attack. We worked through 1-4 using this type of timing.

.

Then we moved into aigamaeate and aikinage, two of my favorite throws! Everybody got the hang of these things almost right off the bat and we used them to illustrate several principles. One of the things that aikinage illustrates well is the scalable nature of aikido. Aikido done properly causes tori to act like a mirror, reflecting uke's violence back onto him. So, aikido automatically scales itself appropriately to the level of violence tori encounters.

.

The following is an example of Nariyama whipping the living sh__ out of his poor ukes using aikinage (the 2nd and 4th techniques in the following video). While I don't approve of abusing ukes, it does illustrate the point that aikinage can be easily upgraded from the gentle-but-effective, uke-friendly version we do the neck-wrenching, bone-smashing version seen here...

And my comments are not meant, by the way, as derogatory toward Nariyama. I think the following video amply demonstrates his skill with some very nice aikido without whipping his uke too badly (though the 2 ushiroate on the second uke are pretty harsh).

Weddings and knives and grandmasters

What a wholly remarkable weekend! First, we got Rob properly and officially married off to Nikki. Congratulations to the new Belote family! All the wedding details were perfect. Just as they should be, thanks to great attention to detail by the mothers and the wedding planner and the proprietor of the tour home where the event was held. The weather was perfect and Natchez was beautiful.

.

But an added bonus was that the groomsmen got to meet and work out for a couple of hours on top of Roth Hill in natchez overlooking the Mississippi River with Bram Frank, grandmaster of Modern Arnis and owner of the Common Sense Self Defense (CSSD) knife methods. Truly a masterful teacher. It was wonderful. I am so excited about the stuff I saw because of the explicit overlap between it and the aikido that we do. Bram was talking directly about many of the principles that I preach so much, including:

• get off the line
• natural motion
• centered, strong arm positions (i.e. unbendable arm)
• same-hand-stuck-foot (he didn't talk about it but he was doing it)
• working from the worst predicaments first
• covering the opponent's face with your hand to block his vision and get startle reactions

The first of his modular knife things (similar to our chains) that we did was almost directly analogous to our kata versions of shomenate/aigamaeate.

.

This stuff that I saw really was aiki-knife at it's finest. One thing that I have to admit - and this was probably the finest lesson I got that day - although I could see that the motion was common to aikido, and although I know that theoretically the addition of the knife shouldn't make much difference - it did! While I didn't absolutely suck, I was much worse than I should have been. It was similar to when I show my students something slightly new and all their previous stuff falls to pieces and has to be rebuilt into a cohesive system with the new thing. That's really why I thought the lesson was so fine - it highlighted a weakness in my aikido. I'm really excited about working this stuff a lot more. Fortunately, we have a great CSSD instructor right here at Mokuren dojo - Rob Belote.

.

Pictures of the weekend coming soon...

Katame no kata

Recently we’ve had a new aiki partner at classes. Jill comes to us from a judo background but is getting into aikido. She lives and works locally, so it seems like she could end up being a good, stable workout partner at Mokuren. She’s also dating the judo instructor at Lafayette, so she represents some more connectivity with the rest of the local judo scene. Welcome, Jill.
.
Last nite at judo Rob and I warmed up as usual with ground cycle #1 and then I introduced Rob to katame no kata. This is an interesting exercise. Required for demonstration at nidan, sandan, and yondan levels, it is comprised of 15 grappling techniques, almost all of which the shodan has already seen – just not in this form. The really neat thing about katame no kata is that it is a hybrid between kata and randori.
.
When you are doing randori and you get into a bad position you don’t want to avoid that position in the future. You want to recreate that position over and over and over until you learn from being at that particular disadvantage. Well, in normal randori, often it is hard to recreate a particular situation because your observant mind is not working as well as your habitual/reflexive brain. So sometimes it is hard to figure out how to recreate the position you just got into. Well, katame no kata gives us an exercise for exploring fifteen pretty common ground situations.
.
Katame is done switching back and forth between kata and randori mode. Tori approaches uke, applies a precise form of a hold or choke or jointlock, and as tori cinches the position, uke takes that as a signal to switch to randori mode and attempt to break the hold or neutralize tori’s advantage. In practice it is often done with uke struggling full-on against tori’s position of advantage. For kata demonstration it is done with uke attempting three explicit escapes/neutralizations for each position then tapping. Below is a pretty good demonstration of katame no kata You have to forgive the silly posturing and crawling around on the knees – that’s part of the specified formality of the thing. Pay attention to uke attempting to reverse each position tori places him in. This video also gets the award for cool, funky background music!
.
At aiki for the past couple of times, Weve been introducing Jill to how we do aiki. We worked on warm-ups, ukemi, about half of tegatana no kata (the walking exercise), about half of hanasu no kata (the wrist releases), and aigamaeate and oshitaoshi. She’s doing great and seems to be having fun. I can tell from the giddy grin when she smears a guy twice her size facedown on the mat in an armbar. We’re looking forward to having her at class and progressing – like Kano's motto...

You and me going forward together.

Old-Bear regains his honour

Another good class. Tonight in judo we worked the Meatgrinder entry into groundwork and focussed on entering into jujigatame from the rear mounted position. Cool and easy. Standing we worked on some nice, easy ukigoshi followed by some uchimata. Good work. Rob needs to work on getting the standing leg placed properly under himself as a fulcrum. That involves:

• toe-out and hipswitch
• standing foot slightly farther back underneath our collective center of mass.
• standing foot, knee, both hips, and all abdominal muscles pointing in the same direction
• butt cheek underneath uke, almost through uke's groin

On the ground the old bear recovered his honor. I got Rob in 4-5 good submissions, including a kesagatame (i think), a couple of tateshiho, and a jujigatame. Rob crushed me at least once with something or other - maybe a kesagatame? Good stuff. Neither of us got clean throws tonight in randori. I got a partially successful kouchigari and he attempted several single leg picks, which mostly got him sprawled-on and grounded. I think I may have gotten an arm-snapdown and I know I got a great cross-face turnover.

At aikido tonight, Kel and Patrick M. and I worked on hanasu into ukemi, a little light randori, some kata shomenate and several variants of aigamaeate, including some from goshinjitsu and kimenokata. Cool stuff.

Day of the bear

I got schooled tonight by a measley judo shodan! Rob tapped me 5-6 times to my 1-2. Mostly positional deals, but I do recall him getting one fine jujigatame and one good choke of some sort. I think I tapped him with a sodegurumajime (sleeve wheel choke) and with a head-crushing tateshiho (north-south hold). But I know for sure that my mat mobility was off tonight and Rob did very well. Standing I got a sode tsurikomigoshi (sleve lifting hip throw) and a morotegari (double leg pick). Rob, as I recall, mostly got these clinches and dragged me into the ground, from which position he crushed me. He must have had a good judo instructor at some point in his past.

.

And that was all before aikido class started! By the time Kel got there I had the shaky jelly triceps fasciculations. We worked releases into ukemi, tegatana, and the atemiwaza (striking throws) from Nijusan. Kel is getting very good at shomenate and his aigamaeate and gyakugamaeate were better than mine tonight. We'll keep working on his rank requirements and solidify his skill and knowledge and have a rank test in a few weeks. At the end we played with the offbalance for kubiguruma and the kata otoshi brushoff from Owaza Jupon. Fun, but not very sklled performances on my part by that late point in the night.

.

If I did not already have a great name for the dojo, I think I'd come up with a name involving a bear - as in my defacto motto, "Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you."

Gyakugamae, wakigatame, and kotegaeshi

Another great class with Kel. The new schedule really seems to be jiving with his schedule and he is able to make more classes. Tonight we warmed up on ukemi from releases and tegatana focussing on different chest wall positions for different types of pushes. From there we moved into gyakugamae ate from nujusan. After repping that a while, we talked for a few seconds about how the assumptions you start with govern the techniques that pop up in your syllabus.

.

Well, we begin with three atemi to the face (shomenate #1, aigamaeate #2, and gyakugamaeate #3), which suggests that uke might respond by blocking the strike (technique #4) or running into you (#5) or running away from you (#6). Tonight's option was to grab or parry the hand in the face into waki gatame. Funny thing about waki gatame, it can serve as a follow-up or a counter to shomenate. We worked on both of these situations. Then we worked on wakigatame as an unorthodox release from a reverse forearm grab. Then we moved into Chain #3 and worked on wakigatame and kotegaeshi from both sides.

Another aiki basics class

Another good aiki class (is there any such thing as a bad one?) with just Kel and myself. We spent a goodly long time warming up stiff low backs and hips and worked on some ukemi, including releasing into rolls and backfalls. From there we worked tegatana a couple of times emphasizing walking on the balls of the two longest levers in the foot instead of the outside toes.

Last time we worked on #1 and #6 (shomenate and oshitaoshi) so this time we worked on #2 (aigamaeate) and #8 (hikitaoshi). Kel took to doing hikitaoshi as if he'd been born to it.

Precision in practice

Great aiki class this AM with Patrick M. We warmed up with ROM and Ukemi, spun through tegatana once, repping the hipswitch and the forward turns for a while, then got into hanasu. For a long time now, I've been working on robust, gross-motion aikido, and that is a good thing, but I want to bring some of Usher-san's precision back into our practice. In hanasu we worked particularly on #2 and #4 emphasizing pushing yourself around uke as well as stepping precisely onthe line of uke's feet and bumping him on the perpendicular offbalance.

You can get the feel of these elements by imagining release #2 as katatetori iriminage (wrist grab aigamaeate) - as uke steps in to grab, you push his attacking arm across in front of him then go for the face. Alternately, you can think of release #2 as trying to slip uke's grasp completely and going for the face as in aigamaeate. Sometimes in this situation, uke will grab to prevent the iriminage (aigamaeate) so you turn behind into release #2.

We brought this same precision into nijusan, working on shomenate and aigamaeate. We emphasized timing and angle of the kuzushi as well as not pushing uke through the offbalance or pushing him down to give him support. The feel of these two techniques today was phenominal!

.

Efficient, threatening attacks. Natural, reflexive evasions. Sharp, precise kuzushi. Flowing, well-timed, but powerful pushing throws. Good ukemi. Felt like budo to me!

.

After we worked these two techniques to death, we surveyed Nijusan #6, 7, 10, 11, kotetaoshi, and maeotoshi with regard to the stuff we saw at the recent ABG.

Fish belly white

This morning, since I'm on vacation from work, I spent a couple of hours working on my base tan. HA! I put the white in whiteboy! I'm sunburnt already, after my first swim of the summer. Seems like I'd have learnt my lesson sometime in the last 38 years.

Anyway, it sure made wearing my judogi (or, oven mitt, as Andy calls it) unpleasant. Today Cody came to aikido and we worked on fundamentals. Ukemi, tegatana (footwork), evasions, wrist releases, and finished up with shomenate and aigamaeate. Good sweaty class. Crikey, my skin burns!

Randori day at the ABG

Today, was really a randori day. We started out with a nice, long hand randori session with various partners. It was much better than yesterday. Smooth, flowing, controlled randori. Then we worked on two things that help with randori - rolling the ball as a way out of strength situations, and kokyunage, the aiki brushoff. We worked on several forms of kokyunage, including shomenate, chudan aigamae, sankata ushiroate, gokata kokyunage, and owaza kataotoshi. We also played with hanasu #1-4 in a brushoff mode where tori releases, breaks uke's grip, and brushes off.

From here, we moved into multiple person randori to test our aiki brushoff and rolling the ball. The partners were given instructions to attack one at a time but in rapid succession and tori's goal was to evade and disengage repeatedly, completely refusing to engage with any uke. Additionally, ukes were told that they could attack simultaneously if they caught tori engaging with any one uke or trying for a technique. It was great, lots of fun, and educational. Everybody knows that you don't go to the ground with multiple opponents, but in this form of randori you can really see that it's the act of tori engaging uke (even if it stays standing) that is super-dangerous for tori. Hopefully we'll have some video of this randori that we can upload soon.

As another form of randori, we played knife randori with uke told to cut twice no matter what tori does. The first attack had to be a ballistic attack from outside ma-ai but the second attack could be stab, slash, high, low, anything. Turns out that the first attack is easy to evade, but if you engage with uke instead of brushing off then the second attack almost always cuts. Shomenate and aigamaeate are still the most viable techniques I found (other than the brush-off). If you can get tori moving backward away from you (e.g. shomenate) then his second knife attack has less potential.

This was a great, high-energy, sweaty aiki practice. Take away points:

• Aikido is about avoiding force, disengaging safely, refusing to engage - the aiki brushoff
• Rolling the ball is a great way to disengage from a strength-vs-strength grappling situation. Roll uke about 1/4 turn then brushoff.
• Aiki brushoff is the crucial skill in multiple opponents randori, followed by short, low-commitment atemi, like shomenate and aigamaeate.
• Two-stab knife randori is a great form of knife evasion that really emphasizes the importance of aiki brushoff and atemiwaza.

Two good sessions

Yesterday, Chops & I had a good randori session working upward in intensity from happo no kuzushi through light standing randori into more vigorous groundwork. Chops has obviously been taught by Rich the Octopus because he gave me a good run for my money. After we pretty much wore each other out, we repped ushiro udegarame (A.K.A. Kimura) from the guard.

Today Kel & I worked on ukemi, particularly rolling into a standing position in the knee-saving manner that we teach as opposed to the knee-wrecking method some folks teach. Then we did tegatana a couple of times, hanasu #1-4 for a while, and shomenate and aigamaeate for the rest of the time.

Robust and precise

I've proudly borrowed this photo of aigamaeate from the British Aikido Association as an example of what I'm talking about in this post.

.

Today's class included Chops and myself and we worked through most of the syllabus looking at some of the things that seem to differentiate my class from Usher-san's.

Usher is a kata man from a Shotokan background and is very good at the kata. I have often wished that my students and I had the precision that Usher has in his kata. But then, I see kata as a different kind of thing than Usher-san does.

I feel that the precision in kata should be secondary to robustness. If your idea of the ideal of kata is something like, "step 45 degrees inside, push just so, turn 30 degrees, etc..." then your kata has the potential for precision but lacks the potential for being robust. That robust response is something that must be developed in randori. On the other hand, if you define kata as something like, "step out of the way, get your hands up, turn to face him, get behind his arm, follow him..." then your kata has potential to be robust in that it will work for a wider range of attacks, but sometimes it seems that this sort of kata lacks the potential for precision.

So, what role does precision play in a kata concept like mine? In what sense can you strive for precision and still maintain robust response? One of the reasons that you want to do kata the same way every time is because, even if that way turns out to be wrong, it is easier to fix a consistent mistake than a random error. If you do something different every time then you have a hard time isolating the variable to work on correcting.

As an example, let's take #2 - aigamaeate. I was tori and Chops was uke but because we're from different schools we went into the attack expecting uke to do different things. Chops, being an accomodating uke, was giving me a reaction that would have made a beautiful aigamaeate if I were doing the precise kata version Chops was accustomed to. I missed that reaction completely and didn't get the aigamae he was expecting, but because I was doing a robust form of aigamae, I cycled around him a step and then launched him away from me. Chops says it was the longest fall he's ever taken (though I didn't really see a satisfactory amount of air under him :-). That was sorta a round-about way of saying that my kata has precision too. I'm doing the same, robust form of aigamae every time, but the form of the thing takes into account more potential variability from uke.

You have to find a way to make your kata both robust and precise.

At the end of class, Chops asked for a "Cool Ninja Technique of the Day" from Owaza, so we ran through the last five techniques as a preview for him. Neat exercise, Owaza is.