Working the envelope

AM judo with Rob

• warmup with the ground mobility cycle
• kosotogari→(kesa↔mune)→(wakigatame↔udegarame)
• near leg (bent) armbar, far leg (straight) armbar, and elbow crank from kesagatame
• top shoulder choke and step-over choke from kesagatame
• straitjacket holds from kamishiho, tateshiho, and munegatame

Armbars for kids

The following is an awesome video of some kids doing judo. I don't especially like having kids this age working chokes and armbars, but that might just be my particular prejudice. The jiujitsu guys train kids to do this stuff and they swear it doesn't tear up kids. I personally only teach throwing and positional wrestling to any student of any age below about green belt because I feel the positional skills are prerequisite to good choking and joint manipulation skills. But in any case, these particular kids are doing a fabulous job practicing and demonstrating these skills. I learned a thing or two myself that I intend to put on Rob next week (so Rob, don't watch this video or you might spoil my fun ;-)

New folks at aiki

Aikido with Kel, John, and David

• warmup, ROM, ukemi
• tegatana emphasizing moving with the nearest foot first and always bringing the back foot back under your hips ready for another step
• partner evasion drills using the steps from tegatana and pushing back off uke
• building release #1 off of the idea of uke grabbing tori's wrist during a brush-off. This led into chain #1 moving along watching for foot timing and either pushing into a face-down armbar (oshitaoshi) or pushing them off back outside the safe distance.
• Rokukata maeotoshi talking about the same ideas

Improvement on osotogari and kesagatame

Judo with Gavin, Whit, Mason, Knox, Emma, and Quin

• warmups, running, ukemi
• kneeling kubinage into kesagatame - most were doing much better on getting into kesagatame
• uphill escape from kesagatame - this is the first time they'd seen it and most of them did pretty good. This will give them incentive to get better at kesagatame, which wil in turn, give them incintive to get better at uphill escape and to learn more escaping actions. A cool feedback loop.
• osotogari - all were improved and we worked on uke's falling action - making sure the butt hits first and slapping instead of putting arms down. We also wlrked on supporting uke by pulling up with both hands on one arm and moving in beside the chest as uke falls. The 6+ year olds were grtting this action pretty good.

Aiki with Kel

• warmups, tegatana (worked on some hand motions), hanasu (kinda off tonight)
• Chain #2, including maeotoshi, over-the-shoulder straight armbar, shihonage, aikinage, sumiotoshi, and tenkai kotehineri
• This transitioned into randori. Kel was doing well tonight.

Another difference between aiki and judo

While we're on the topic, has anyone noticed that aikido and judo throws tend to end in different kinds of falls from uke. A lot of aiki falls end up smearing uke facedown into the mat in an armbar or else throwing uke away and letting go of him. Judo throws tend to throw uke straight downward into the mat with tori still holding on.

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Folks whose minds jive with aikido tend to fear judo and judo-types tend to hate aiki-like falls.

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Of course these are generalizations - but has anyone else noticed this?

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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.

That will never work!

I remember at times being hung up on which moves in various martial arts “just wouldn’t work.” This is actually a pretty common discussion from all corners of the martial arts world, and it is pretty much always a variation of the, “my style is better than yours,” discussion.

I recall practicing a technique in college in which badguy does a rear bearhug, defender bends over, reaches between his legs and grabs the attacker’s ankle, then sits back onto the attacker’s knee. “That’s stupid. That would never work,” was our analysis. As fate would have it, one of the 115-pound girls from our class was grabbed from behind on the beach during spring break and she sat back and busted the guy’s ass just as she had been taught. He got up and grabbed her again later and she, without analyzing the probabilities or consequences, sat back on his knee and busted his ass with the same technique a second time. His buddies laughed him off the beach.

A lot of folks like to discount all of aikido or even parts of Shotokan this way. At times, my buddies and I have subjected taekwando’s jump-spinning and flying kicks to this sort of analysis, but my personal favorite was a throw into an armbar in hapkido. We called this the “jump-spinning crotchlock” and we were sure this was the stupidest move ever conceived. Well, I still have some (probably untestable) ideas about the weaknesses of the jump-spinning crotchlock, but check this video out. It's not exactly the same as the hapkido jump spinning crotchlock but it definitely belongs to the same class of things. Whoda thunkit.

Ground cycle #1 pointers

Great return to judo practice tonight after being out for a week or so. Rob and Iwarmed up with some ROM and moved into groundwork cycle #1 with some minor adjustments to what Rob was doing:

• Even though it's a pretty elementary drill and top man is not looking for armbars, bottom man has to actively work to protect his arms from being entangled and locked. Bottom man continually moves his arms as top man shifts so that they stay free and viable and so that they act as feelers.
• Also, when pushing back to base from your belly, you don't want to do a push-up type action. Rather, pull one knee up as far as you can and use you arms to slide your butt over that shin as if you were pushing your butt over a roller (your shin is the roller). I can push back to base this proper way with a 350 pound guy on my back, whereas it's hard to do a push-up with anyone on your back.
• Third thing was the crawfish action at the end of the groundwork cycle. Bottom man has to immobilize one of top man's arms against the ground or else he will float with you. Top man has to watch out for putting an arm around bottom man's waistline/beltline because the turnover is almost trivial for the bottom man in this situation.

We did a lot of randori, both newaza and tachi into newaza. Rob did well there and got me in some positional asphyxia deals a couple of times. I got him with a good jujigatame (cross armbar) once and a good jujijime (cross choke) another time. We finished up with some repetition of kouchigari (one of the divine nine). We both agreed that if we worked with this intensity daily we'd each weigh about 20 pounds less.

We ate the bear!

Every day of your life you have to fight a bear. Some days you eat the bear and some days the bear eats you. Well, today, we ate bear!

We had a cool judo class of just myself and Rob. We warmed up with some ROM and then threw nagekomi for a while. That was okay except for falling for the hipthrows - that was unpleasant on my post-clinic muscles. But we survived it. Then we went to the ground and I did pretty good for an old fat guy. I got a triangle armbar and a straight armbar from kesagatame and a pretty good ushiro katagatame - at least those are the things I remember. Best of all, I was able to conserve my energy so I lasted for a goodly session with a 200+ pound, pretty in-shape dude 14 years younger than me. Rob did get a good positional hold at one point and wedged me into a corner of the mat but good.

Not only that, but after class I went to watch my son, Whit play baseball. Whit hit a double that drove in the tying and go-ahead runs. So Whit ate his share of bear too!

Deashi, keylock, and Moose choke

Tonight Gary and I worked on deashibarai again. We played several reps of the fundamental version then played with deashi as an early-late concept, worked on bumping the stuck deashi, and got into a deashi-kosotogari combination. That took up roughly 1/3 of the class, after which we did standing randori for about a third of the class then worked on groundwork for the last third of class. On the ground we got into a keylock turnover from a rear entry on an opponent that is turtling. The keylock led to kamishihogatame, munegatame, or jujigatame and we got to work on four methods to loosen up uke's resistane so that juji will work (lay on the head, arm entangle, a biceps crushing armbar, and striping the biceps). The choke of the night was a "Moose choke," a very cool variant of gyakujujijime.

Catching uke on the rebound

I have heard high-ranked rank examiners laughing that they can tell who has skill and who doesn’t by watching oshitaoshi (ikkyo to aikikai guys) alone. People that are very good at oshitaoshi hit the technique and uke drops straight down right then and there. Less skilled toris often have to run through uke and will take 15 or 20 feet to finally run their uke into the ground. And don’t think that either Tomiki or Aikikai guys are immune to this mistake – I’ve seen students of both ryuha do this. I’ve even heard aiki-detractors saying that aikido is not a good martial art in confined spaces because tori has to have these vast spaces in which to move. Nuts.

An interesting thing happens with oshitaoshi. When tori gets into position and bumps uke he puts some energy into uke and uke begins vibrating. Literally vibrating – like bumping a stick that is planted in the ground. Try this experiment – bump uke with oshitaoshi then let go and see doesn’t that arm flail about in space.

What tori does with this vibration is important. If tori has in his mind that oshitaoshi is supposed to look like pushing uke’s elbow through his head and into the ground then tori will actually damp uke’s vibe out, leaving him relatively motionless. Then tori’s only choices are to run uke down, crank him down, or drag him down. On the other hand, if tori follows the vibration of the arm – just moves wherever uke puts the arm in response to the bump – more often than not, uke drops like he was shot – right into position for the armbar.

So, oshitaoshi is more of a bump-and-follow thing than a shock-absorbing run-uke-down thing.

Wakigatame

Wakigatame is the Tomiki name for a variant of the traditional aikido technique known as gokyo. We practice three major variants, including the under-the-arm (judo) version, an elbow-to-elbow variation, and the traditional gokyo. The Judo version places tori at a tremendous leverage advantage but it tends to also place tori too close to uke. The elbow-to-elbow and traditional gokyo versions are often superior for self defense purposes in cases when tori wants to stay neutral and avoid force and stay off the ground with uke.

In aikido in general, and particularly in wakigatame, tori does not supply the power to break uke’s arm. Tori simply places an immovable bar against uke’s elbow and walks forward in the direction the arm is pointing. As long as uke moves with tori then the arm can’t be injured but if uke breaks the relationship then he endangers his own arm. If uke stops suddenly then tori’s motion will stretch uke’s arm longitudinally and if uke tries to stand this can break the stretched elbow.

Tori must apply this armbar on the move and continue to move and keep uke extended. Failure to do so will almost certainly result in uke scooping tori with gedanate or sukuinage. I’ve also seen one of my sensei (Usher-san) repeatedly counter this technique with oshitaoshi in randori. Gedanate makes a great backup plan for tori, as does kotegaeshi.

Hikitaoshi

In oshitaoshi, tori controls uke’s wrist and elbow from a shikaku position and pushes uke into the ground. Hikitaoshi is pretty much the direct opposite, in which tori controls uke’s wrist and elbow from an omote (front) position and pulls uke into the ground. Hikitaoshi is one of the first techniques used in the kihara chains to illustrate the kito principle in a front-back manner – the idea that if pushing isn’t working then uke may be susceptible to a pulling attack. So, in the chains, hikitaoshi is often used as a backup for pushing techniques like oshitaoshi and udegaeshi. In this context it is important to be able to smoothly and safely transition from an ura/pushing position to an omote/pulling position by moving down the line of uke’s arm and applying shomenate during the transition.

Hikitaoshi was the favorite technique of my first student and he taught it to his three year old daughter. Whenever things did not go her way she would convincingly threaten the offending person with “I’ll number-eight you!” She frequently number-eighted the cat.

Overzealous hikitaoshi was often the specific reason that the big bad judo guys in our club didn’t like to do aikido – because being off-balanced, whipped face first into the ground, and dragged across the tatami into an armbar was too un-nerving for folks who were used to being planted in the mat on their side or back. Of course, the aiki guys often hated being planted in the ground by judo folks too.