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.
  

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.

Unbendable arm

Aikido teachers often make reference to this phenomenon of the unbendable arm. The Japanese term is orenaite, which means something close to, "The arm that is not to be bent." Notice that this is not really the same thing as "the unbendable arm." It is an advisory to not bend your arm - not to be so strong that your arm can't be bent.

Unbendable arm is really a posture and a mobility thing - not a strength thing. The goal is to be light enough on your feet that it takes less pressure to move you than to bend the arm. So the arm becomes this relaxed feeler that moves your body when it starts bearing weight. The only strength that is needed here is sufficient core strength to maintain a natural, upright posture.

Thanks Henry, Greg, and Terry!

Tonight Patrick M. arrived a little early and we began early, moving straight into his rank requirements. Specifically emphasizing nijusan #6,7,11, and 12. We worked some of the wholly magical stuff Greg Henry recently showed me regarding slipping aside at the end of the line. Kel showed up and we rewound into tegatana, hanasu 1-4, and nijusan 1-3. It was a very good practice.

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The really interesting thing of the night was a followup to the momentum exercises I posted a week or so ago. Patrick M. and I ran races across the mat, stopping on designated finish lines and watching how long it takes to recover to a neutral, upright posture. Then we repeated the exercise with me holding his arm. Guess what? The simple fact that we were connected damped out our momentum at the finish line, allowing us to recover to neutral much faster.

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So, what does this mean for our aiki practice? When doing the offbalances in nijusan, you want to leave uke hanging freely out in space over the offbalance point. If you push or pull or even just connect to him then you give him stability and improve his speed of recovery. However, if you get the offbalance and leave him hanging in space then the only thing that he can exert against to regain control of his momentum is the ground and he is limited as to how hard he can push on the ground without coming off the ground. So, you get a much better offbalance and uke slows way down for you.

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Thanks to Henry Copeland, Greg Henry, and Terry Gibbs for explaining these points to me. They are making a huge difference in my aikido already and I've only just started exploring where these points fit in.

Sidestepping into oshitaoshi and udegaeshi

Yesterday I suggested a momentum exercise in which you learn to use a sidestep to kill your momentum, leaving you in shizentai ready to move in another direction. This experiment is easiest to do walking forward by yourself at a moderate speed. Here's you a modification to make it easier to run this experiment walking backward.

Tie a rope to a wall or post at shoulder-level. Hold the rope with about an arm-length amount of slack in the rope. Start standing right next to the pole and walk backward until the rope snaps taut. As the rope snaps taut, put one foot straight under your hips and use the other foot to do the sidestep trick. Repeat this experiment over and over so that you can practice sidestepping to both sides at the end of the line.

Now, where this becomes really cool is when you replace the pole and rope with an uke. The Nijusan form of oshitaoshi and udegaeshi are done with tori passing backward right beside uke and moving away until the connection at the wrist snaps taut. At that point, if you plant one foot you will sidestep behind uke and execute an oshitaoshi very similar to release #1. If you plant the other foot, you will sidestep in front of uke, turning into kotegaeshi or udegaeshi.

Changing directions

Here's you a cool momentum experiment with some important implications for aikido. Set up a line down which you can walk. Put a finish line 15 or 20 feet down the line. Walk rapidly down the line and stop suddenly with both feet on the finish line. Watch how your body reacts to recover your balance and control your momentum. Typically, you'll see things like:

• elbows out to the side and knees bent
• weight on the balls of the feet
• vertical posture lost - butt out to the back
• etc...

If you can't see some of these adjustments, walk the experiment faster until you can, then repeat it until you can see the adjustments at slower walking speeds. It takes a while for you to recover from the sudden stop. Watch to see how much time to takes you to recover a neutral posture on the finish line.

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Now, try it this way: walk rapidly down the line, place your first foot on the finish line and use the second foot to take a sliding sidestep on the finish line. When the second foot lands, recover your first foot back under your hips. You can use this sidestep to spend all your forward momentum, leaving you in shizentai on the finish line - even from a near-run speed.

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The point is, any time you are changing from forward to backward motion or vice versa, there must be a sidestep or else you are left hanging out motionless on the finish line for a relatively long time before you can return to a neutral posture and move again. Stay tuned for some application of this sidestep principle to oshitaoshi and udegaeshi.

Great posture exercise - climbing stairs

Ok, when you think about posture exercises you might think about Army recruits trying to stand straight up while a drill sergeant screams in their face, "Suck that gut in. Pull those shoulders back." Well, the aikido and judo ideal of good posture begins with relaxed, mobile, and upright. While the old drill sergeant might have gotten upright, he sure missed the relaxed part.

The folks that probably know the most of anyone in the world about functional posture are the Alexander Technique folks and the Feldenkrais Method folks. I've written before on the crossover between aikido, judo, Alexander, and Feldenkrais principles, including a recent article on a neat Alexander trick for fixing neck posture. Feldenkrais has some similar exercises which involve repeatedly sitting and standing from a chair to reprogram the neck muscles. Here's something that, so far as I know, is of my own invention... Walking up and down stairs to fix neck posture.

Try this. Get a flight of steps and walk up and down sliding your hand on the rail for balance. Repeat the flight of steps several times. First this will help your leg and cardiovascular strength if you do it regularly, and having better wind means you don't have to use shoulder and neck musckes as accessory breathers. So they can relax and control your neck posture more efficiently.

Second, keep breathing as you walk the stairs. If you are not used to walking stairs you might, without thinking, hold your breath and drag yourself up by the handrail. If one flight of stairs wears you out and leaves you breathless, look to see if you're doing this.

Third, and this is the really neat part, try the Alexander trick I previously posted while walking the stairs. Concentrate on moving however you have to in order to get your nose forward and upward. As you descend the stairs, imagine your face lifting forward and up, so that your neck gets longer and straighter and more upright as your body descends. As you climb up the steps, imagine leading with your face. Imagine someone gently holding your chin and the back of your head and giving you a little lift as you ascend. Notice that getting your nose and face up and forward releases tension in your shoulders (because you can't raise your face if your levators scapulae are in contraction) and frees your breathing (because your shoulder muscles are hooked to your rib cage).

Happo no kuzushi

There is this classic demonstration of offbalance in Judo called Happo no Kuzushi (8 forms of unbalancing). The way it works is this. You get an uke who agrees to stand still and you push and pull him into various positions of unbalance. First you pull him forward onto his toes. Then you push him back onto his heels. then tilt him left, then right, and into each corner. Most instructors pay lip service to the happo no kuzushi and the students never see it again. Really, after seeing it once or twice and doing it once or twice there's not much to it. The main problem is uke standing still. That is totally unreal and abstract form. Uke always moves.

The theory is that you can learn the offbalances on a static partner then hope to catch someone unsuspecting in randori so that they stand still long enough to do one. That almost never works and it takes forever for people to feel comfortable doing throws in randori that way.

Here are three modifications that we're playing with to turn happo into an honestly useful piece of kihon, worthy of at least a little bit of time in each class.

• First, let uke move. Take your standard grip in shizentai. Apply one of the pulls or pushes to uke, who allows tori to move them slowly to the point of no return. This is the point whhere uke has to either step or fall. At this point, uke collapses one leg (whichever feels right), shifts, and turns it back on right under his hips. This way, uke is learning to shift using tsugiashi in response to an impetus but without having to predict how tori will apply force and leading tori.
• Second, tori moves with uke. As uke responds to the push or pull, tori matches his step using tsugiashi. Tori is learning to synchronize with uke and move with uke's force. Tori should make his foot land at the same time as uke's foot.
• Third, at the instant the feet hit the ground, tori applies a very light push or pull precisely parallel to uke's feet or perpendicular to his feet. This is the kuzushi that we're really exploring in this exercise - the perpendicular and parallel offbalances that happen right as uke's foot hits the ground.

All the throws in Judo can be done with these two offbalances (perpendicular and parallel) and it is better by far to learn to apply these two offbalances with appropriate timing to a moving opponent than to learn eight offbalances on a mannequin.

Change your mind and the rest will follow

The other day I was scouring the net for info on Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais method because they are particular interests of mine. I came across an AT discussion of head/neck posture that I thought was interesting and enlightening. Try this out...

Notice what posture your head and neck is in then imagine someone yelling at you, "STRAIGHTEN UP!" What motion did you make? What muscles did you use? I can't see you through your computer screen but I bet it involved neck retraction (moving your chin straight back) and looking upward. Accentuate this posture so that you can feel the muscles required - pull your chin back and look up. I feel stress in my neck and shoulders when I do this.

Here's another option. Another way of thinking about straightening up. Instead of trying to retract your neck, think about lengthening your neck upward and forward. Move however you have to in order to get the bridge of your nose forward and upward a little bit. When I tried this a couple of times, I noticed that the heavy upper part of my head was naturally rocking back over my spine in better balance and my shoulders were relaxing and dropping. This posture follows all the shizentai rules (ears above shoulders above hips...) while requiring less from some really overworked muscles (traps, erectors, levators).

Alexander (as I understand it) specialized in fixing neck posture and using that as a starting point to fix other postural problems. Alexander used some cool mental tricks like the above in his work. The idea being that if you can change how you think about your posture and motion then your posture and motion will begin to change and fix itself. This idea is known as ideokinesis and was developed and elaborated upon by Lulu Sweigard, Mabel Todd and others.

I really like the leverage that these systems (Alexander, Feldenkrais, Ideokinesis) give us for self-improvement of our physical potential. Not only are they very effective but their principles appear to fit well with the principles of aikido and judo.

28 (thousand) days later

According to the statisticians at the Census Bureau, God is giving most of us about 28,000 days to live. It’s becoming increasingly common to see people moving about, living healthy lives even after having already lived thirty thousand days. What got me thinking about that was one of Feldenkrais’ movement principles, “There is no limit to improvement.”
How can that be? We see limitations and diminishing returns all the time. Well, consider where Feldenkrais was coming from. What if we were to spend five minutes per day diligently working to improve some particular thing in our lives. In an average lifetime, we’d accumulate more than 2300 hours of practice at that one thing. What if we spent 1.5 hours two or three times per week working on improving ourselves? That works out to 12-18 thousand practice hours.
According to Feldenkrais, the vast majority of people stop developing physical skills and abilities at around puberty. At this point we settle into our habitual (unthinking, senseless) modes of action. However, some few of us are able to continue to develop ourselves physically for years after this. These people tend to be celebrated athletes or dancers or perhaps actors.
Even if we start with a third of our life spent, we still easily have the potential equal to 8-12 thousand hours practice. Even with 2/3 of a life already spent, one would have between four and six thousand hours to get your act together! That’s a lot of potential, considering that people can achieve shichidan (7th degree black belt) in aikido or judo with just over 4000 practice hours!
Not only are we living longer, but we are dying longer. It used to be that people generally lived an active life followed by a short period of illness and then death. Now people may be inactive and invalid for years – perhaps even a quarter of their lives. Several of the problems that are endemic in our older population are related to poor posture, including back pain, thoracic kyphosis, osteoporosis and related fractures, sciatica, and restrictive lung problems. What if we spent just a few minutes per week working on our posture? This is why activities like aikido and tai chi have proven so beneficial for adult fitness. I think, in this sense, there is no limit to the potential for improvement.

What's up, doc?

Tegatana concentrating on small steps and medial balls of feet. Hanasu as a warmup into Chain #2, including kote taoshi, mae otoshi, hiki taoshi, and oshi taoshi. Nijusan concentrating on shomenate, aigamaeate, and gyakugamaeate. After class, Patrick M. and Kristof demonstrated Nijusan 1-10 for our new guy. Patrick has made some particular improvements in the atemiwaza (1-5) of Nijusan. #4 and #7 still need some work. Kristof did well with his demonstration, but still needs to clean up #10 (wakigatame) and the pins on #6, 7, and 8.
I’d like to introduce our new guy, Kel. He comes to us from an aikido class in the vicinity of Purdue University where he studied under Dr. Thomas Burdine. I like to ask new guys that have done aiki stuff before if the stuff we do looks the same or different – Kel responded, “Yes.” Dr. Burdine shares some aiki lineage with us, having trained under Tomiki as well as Tohei, and Burdine sensei must still using some of the Tomiki structure because Kel told me that he recognized pretty much all of the nijusan that Patrick and Kristof demonstrated and that he’s seen it in similar format.
As for my current posture quest, after each repetition I made a point to rock my head back and look upward a couple of times to get the feel of what a little more neck extension might feel like. Working this I made an interesting observation. Tori doesn’t have much trouble working with good neck extension but uke pretty much has to break this neck posture in order to do an event as athletic as an attack. I think this practice might have helped me some without really trying to remain rigidly upright. Head/neck posture has some interesting interactions with the concept of eye contact (metsuke) too.

Unfettered motion

So, why might it be a good idea to separate the martial from the art, at least for some of our practice? Consider one of the Feldenkrais principles I mentioned in previous posts: Concentration on the aim may cause excessive tension.

By placing these martial constraints on our motion, like ‘stay upright’ or ‘stay centered’ or ‘keep unbendable arms,’ we may be creating unnecessary tension in our motion and variance in our posture. By letting go of all the constraints and goals (i.e. of winning) and simply moving in contact with another person we may be able to learn what un-hindered motion feels like so that we have a reference point when we get back to practicing principled randori with martial goals. For another example of the type of motion I’m talking about (unconstrained by martial principles but still applicable to martial settings) check out this video of Tai chi silk reeling exercises. Silk reeling has the additional benefit that it can be done alone - unlike most aikido exercises/kata.

Stiff separators and contractile connectors

So, what is all this hoopla about posture? ‘Good’ posture is not an aesthetic judgment but a functional thing. We worry over posture in minute detail because it has been made evident to us by the masters of the art that minute variations in posture change our movement and the results of our efforts in rather large ways.

Consider this. Bones and muscles are vastly different in structure and behavior. Bones are stiff separators while muscles are contractile connectors. Therefore, they must be different in function – they are designed to be used for different things. In proper posture, bones are used as separators (i.e. to keep our center of mass off the ground) and muscles are used to move us around. In improper posture, muscles are used to keep us off the ground, and are therefore less free to move us around. Thus, broken posture renders us less mobile. I noticed this phenomenon recently when my butt rocks back out from under me during a tension moment. Because of the break in my posture, it takes longer to get back in order and change directions.

So, how to fix this? Being more rigidly upright is apparently not the answer, and trying to get the shoulders back over hips is not the answer because the shoulders are constrained by being hooked to uke, ao placement of the feet must be part of it. My two tacks that I’m going to be working on are :

• Put the weightbearing foot behind the butt in roughly a straight line from foot through center to shoulders. So, the posture will have an element of ‘straightness’ and bones will act properly as separators, even though the line will not be vertical.
• Take smaller steps so that hips rock less. This will make the line in the previous exercise more vertical.

Posture vs. morphism

Dojo rat sorta mentioned in his comment one of the next things I wanted to talk about - How do societal aesthetic values affect our perception of 'good' posture or motion? For instance, check out this picture of Usher-san that I labeled "Great posture." Usher has a mesomorphic (stratight, athletic) body type, which is generally more aesthetically accpetable than an endomorphic (softer, rounder) body type. Even if I were to take a photo in that same position, someone comparing the two pictures would likely say that Usher's posture is better than mine. Body shape plays into subjective evaluation of posture.

However, a pretty-much infinite amount of research has shown that most people's perceptions are skewed when it comes to their own bodies. I remember graduating high school weighing between 169 and 175 at my current height of 6'1". I've seen pictures taken during that era in which I look rail thin - almost gaunt. Years later, finishing graduate school, I weighed about 210. And looking back at the pictures, you can still see all the angles in my skull. I still looked skeletal - even with an extra 40 pounds. Now I'm a good bit heavier than that (though still a good bit lighter than my lifetime peak weight). Here's the kicker... I have always felt fat. Even when I knew that I was at about 3% bodyfat in highschool. Even knowing that body perception is so skewed that eating disorders prevail in the population.

So, where am I going with this? If you are going to evaluate your own posture and call it 'good' or 'bad' posture, then you need some criteria outside of how you feel about it because how you feel changes with the temperature and humidity and how your friends are treating you and every other variable in the world. I have found that brainiacs like Feldenkrais and Alexander and Hanna and Laban have given us some pretty good guidelines and criteria for evaluating motion and posture. See the list of Feldenkrais principles in the previous post.

Over the next several posts, I plan to work through these men's ideas about posture and post a series of thoughts about how they relate to my body and to aikido and judo in particular. Stay tuned, faithful reader...

Butt amok

I am really jealous of Usher-san's great posture. If he has to break his posture to do something then he doesn't do it. I saw a video of myself doing a kata the other day and, though generally upright, I found a new place to watch out for my posture breaking. When I am backing up and hit a tension point - i.e. the bad guy stops my motion. On the tape it was pretty common for my butt to rock back out from under my shoulders for a second before I could get it back under control. I will have to watch for that.

In aikido, we often work on improving our posture. To attain and maintain better posture. This is not based on some aesthetic ideal of 'straightness,' but rather, better posture is more neutral and gives the martial artist better mobility and options. The ideal is to be able to flow and do all of aikido in or very close to a natural upright posture (shizentai). In aikido you cannot really separate the posture from the technique or the motion. Upright posture in flowing motion is the goal.

Below is a re-post of several of Feldenkrais' principles from his book, Awareness Through Movement, relating to the questions, "What is good posture?" and "What is good motion?" I like to keep these ideas in the front of my mind when I am explicitly re-working my posture in aikido.

• Effective action improves the ability of the body to act.
• Reversibility is the mark of [good] movement.
• Light and easy movements are good.
• There is no limit to improvement.
• Use large muscles for heavy work.
• Forces acting at an angle to the main path cause damage.
• Superfluous efforts shorten the body.
• Concentration on the aim may cause excessive tension.
• Performance is improved by the separation of the aim from the means.
• Lack of choice makes strain habitual.

Great posture!

Tegatana footwork video

Something is seriously amok with Google - It ate my last two (long and detailed) posts! Let's try again... This is a video of the footwork from tegatana that I promsed Mytchiko and Richard so that they can work on it at home between classes.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8466079403120999991
I sure hope this crazy Blogger actually posts this... Fingers crossed...Pushing button...

Omote and ura oshitaoshi

Good class tonight. We calibrated with tegatana and with hanasu then began using hanasu as a vehicle to explore some of the principles I wanted to look at tonight - specifically, metsuke (eye contact), shizentai (upright posture), and moving from the center.
This led us to alternate between the omote and ura versions of oshitaoshi (ikkyo) with emphasis on how the insde version is more direct but promotes worse situational awareness. We worked for a good long time on oshitaoshi trying to shorten the duration of the power transfer between uke and tori. From here we moved into Nijusan 1-10, which led us to emphasize wakigatame (gokyo), hikitaoshi, and gedanate as three techniques that happen early in an ura path - right as uke rounds the corner on tori.
At the end we played with a part of chain #3 in which we transition between wakigatame and gedanate. This led to a couple of interesting variants of gedanate, which is really any well-trained balance attack against the lower body. The variants included a stepping knee strike against the common peroneal nerve in uke's leg prior to pushing uke off, and a simple but effective step-on-uke's-foot as a balance disturbance prior to pushing uke off.

Shizentai and shomenashi

Whenever someone in judo or aikido says the word shizentai it always makes me want to say gesundheit! But that's just me.
Shizentai is the natural, upright posture used in aikido and judo. The feet are under the hips with slight (but not over-done) separation side-to-side and front-back. Some instructors call this a heel-toe, shoulder-width stance but I think that makes for a little bit too big a stance for shizentai. The stance is generally vertical, with the ears above shoulders above hips above toes. weight is on the balls of the feet (particularly the medial two toes) and is approximately evenly balanced between the feet.
An important thing to work on is to be able to take one conservative step and recover without getting out of shizentai. This one basic step forms the basis of all footwork in aikido. Try this as an exercise - take one step forward (i.e. shomenashi) and stop halfway through the step just as your moving foot hits the ground. Is your front foot under your center or out in front of you? If it is not under your center then you are stepping too far out of shizentai and you are succeptible to getting immobilized in this wide stance at the bottom of your motion. Now, try the motion like this - from shizentai, shift your center in the direction you're going and then put your front foot directly under your center and freeze. This is a more mobile position (closer to shizentai) and it is not possible to get stuck at the bottom of this step. Any force that is put on you at the bottom of this step just shifts your center out of the way again. It's like your center is floating over your feet.

Another way of thinking about this same thing is think about always putting feet right under your center as you move instead of positioning your feet in some stance and then trying to get your center back over your feet. Remember - "feet under center - NOT center over feet."