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

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.

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

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.

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)

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)

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.

Woodreaux got scrubbed today

Jodo with MytchiKo

• Practiced grips and measuring: pencil→gyakute, pencil→sakate, pencil→gyakute→honte
• Practiced upward and downward scrubbing strikes using Woodreaux to simulate an aggressor to the rear. The idea was to step away into gyakute, scrub the jo up either leg, separate, then scrub the jo downward onto any advanced target. Worked like a charm.
• Praticed an upward scrubbing buttstroke from pencil through sakate into the centerline of an aggressor (Woodreaux) close in front.

Graduation day

Today was the graduation day and judo demo and family night for the end of our first season of Kid's judo here at Mokuren. If you're coming into this story late, we decided to run kids' judo on a seasonal sports model, like teeball or soccer, since so many of the parents around here understand that sports model better than the usual 2-3 classes/week all the time model. We ran the season from last September till today and will take off during the busy baseball season and the intolerable heat of summer, to begin again this coming September. We practiced once per week and had club judo tournaments each month. It was a lot of fun and the kids learned a lot and we all had a lot of fun.

Following is the text of the program for tonight's judo demo for those interested:

Judo Embu (Demonstration)

Introduction

In Feudal Japan, samurai warriors learned jujitsu, a form of empty-hand combat, as a backup plan in case they were disarmed on the battlefield. But after the Restoration of the Meiji Emperor to the throne in 1868, Japan began to pull itself out of feudalism through a long process of westernization and modernization. During this modernization, the old feudalistic samurai arts, including jujitsu were considered no longer necessary, and perhaps even backward. Hundreds of years of refinements of the jujitsu arts were in danger of dying out within the space of a generation.

In the 1880’s, Jigoro Kano, a master of several of the ancient jujitsu arts, came up with the idea to preserve the aspects of jujitsu that were still beneficial to individuals and to society - qualities like strength and courage and discipline. Kano took some of the techniques from the ancient jujitsu arts and used them to create a wrestling sport, which he called Judo. Judo rapidly grew in popularity in Japan, Europe, and throughout the world as both a sport and a form of self-defense.

Tonight you will see a demonstration of some of the skills that your children have learned over the course of the last few months; demonstrations of their maturing strength, technique, persistence, and courage. Thank you for joining us in this celebration of their achievement.

Demonstration

• Line-up, salutes, and warm-up
• Safe falling skills (forward roll, forward fall, left fall right fall, back fall)
• More falling skills with a spotter (deashibarai, teguruma, hizaguruma, seoinage)
• Throwing skill: osotogari (the big outside reap), that we call the “1-2 throw”
• Holding skill: osotogari→kesagatame (the scarf hold)
• Escape skill: osotogari→kesagatame→uphill escape
• Ground grappling skills: crawling man contest
• Standing wrestling skills: standing randori

Presentation of certificates and new belts

• All students will be presented with certificates, and the older students will be presented with new belts. The younger students’ new belts are on back-order and will be presented during a post-season play-day during the Summer.
• Gavin - Yellow Belt - Gavin is the oldest, and because of the age and mass advantage, had the coordination and strength to do well. Gavin especially improved in his mental control of his frustration when someone (like Whit) would grind him or play rough.
• Whit - Yellow Belt - Whit is naturally athletic and coordinated. Particularly agile on his feet, he was able to dominate much of the standing work. Whit developed a good osotogari and a fair deashibarai this season and he is making progress in learning to control that alpha-male ego thing that he has going.
• Mason - Yellow Belt - Mason is nearly indomitable on the ground because of his fierce persistence. He absolutely refuses to lose if there is anything he can do about it. He has also shown a great deal of control over natural frustration when he is dominated to the point of exhaustion on the ground by a larger opponent (like Gavin). Mason also has a naturally good leg pick.
• Knox - White&Yellow Belt - Knox is the kind one. He has enjoyed being able to develop and express a more vigorous aggression in randori this season, but tonight in standing randori he absolutely refused to throw Emma because he thought he might hurt her.
• Emma - White&Yellow Belt - It's hard (impossible?) to keep the attention of kids this young, but Emma has done very well and has improved her attention span greatly. She has had a lot of fun especially in the randori and groundwork games with Knox and Quin.
• Quin - White&Yellow Belt - Got a late start this season, and was handicapped by his small size (a 000 gi swallows him), but he has a natural aggression and a will to power that will serve him well in judo as he picks up a little more mass and coordination.

Congratulations to all of our newly advanced students!

Wonderful jodo and aikido sessions

Jodo with MytchiKo

• Reviewed moving from pencil grip, which is her normal mode of holding the cane, into honte, gyakute, and sakate postures and measuring the distance to the opponent. She is improving on the measuring stick idea.
• Worked some strikes - pencil→sakate→ushirotsuke, pencil→gyakute→gyakuteuchi (to shin or knee or extended wrist)
• Worked on moving from pencil to sakate and using the structure of the forearms and stick like a cowcatcher to brush off and roll the ball.
• Showed her a cool addition to the stab-the-foot move that she has been working on - if you miss, use the stick as a reference and step forward onto their foot, then use their reaction to roll the ball and brush them off.
• I took out a quarterstave and worked some of the same concepts against Woodreaux.

Aiki with Rick

• ROM and ukemi with emphasis on landing position and rolling back to standing smoothly
• Hanasu #1-4. Rick has excellent motion.
• Rick asked about randori so we played releases #1-4 in a limited randori, then started broadening the scope of the randori as we talked about the randori concept. The rest of the night was randori.

More on aiki strategy

Aikido with Amanda, Robbie B, and Kel

• ROM, ukemi


• tegatana emphasizing balls of feet, tsugiashi, recovery steps


• hanasu #1-2 emphasizing getting out of the way, turning to face the attacker, putting your hands up, and getting behind him


• Chain #2, including kotetaoshi, maeotoshi, and gyakugamaeate or gedanate.

Today I really tried to emphasize the stuff I've been trying to explain here on the blog for a couple of weeks here and here and here and again, here - the difference between the aikido and jujitsu and karate strategies.

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While a practitioner of any of these arts may certainly choose to use any of these strategies, the three arts characteristically make use of common techniques in different ways. They don't necessarily have to - but they usually do things this way. Karate sets up a strong position from which to preempt or counterattack. Jujitsu flows until a position of superior leverage is attained, then sets up a strong position and attempts to apply superior leverage to defeat the opponent. Aikido is a kind of jujitsu applied with a different mindset. The aiki guy evades, flows, setting up a relationship of superior position and leverage, but then tends to hold that power in reserve in an attempt to keep evading and blending.

Busy, busy day

5:00 am aiki with Rob.

• we worked on the Sankata knife stuff. I enjoy getting his CSSD Modern Arnis ideas at work on the aiki knife stuff.

5:30 PM Kid's judo with Gavin, Mason, and Emma

• Laps of the mat with silly walks for warmups.
• ukemi, including the demonstration forms and the crash pad forms
• osotogari
• osotogari→kesagatame
• osotogari→kesagatame→uphill escape
• taiotoshi

6:30 aiki with Kel and Rick

• ROM & ukemi
• tegatana with emphasis on using some ideokinesis ideas to improve posture and relaxation of the shoulders.
• hanasu with emphasis on loose, relaxed shoulders
• hand randori
• aigamaeate
• 2-3 of the Rokukata knife-taking and knife-retention techniques

Stick & rope

Aiki with Kel and Rick

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

Great beginners' class

Aiki with Vincent and Amanda

• ROM and ukemi
• tegatana - the first half of the exercise with emphasis on evasion
• partner evasion exercise
• wrist release #1 from the perspective of tori attempting to evade and brush off and uke being fast and accurate enough to grab and stop the evasion, causing relese #1.
• oshitaoshi (the arm push-down, A.K.A. ikkyo omote)
• stab-twice randori with emphasis on evasion and brush-off back to ma-ai

Chad from Akari Judo

Judo with Chad, Whit, Knox, and Quin

• Ukemi for about 30 minutes before class with me throwing/spotting Whit, Knox, and Quin. then the kids bailed out and Chad showed up.
• We had Sensei Chad Morrison down from Akari Judo of Richmond VA, now teaching at McCoy MMA. Chad and I traded ancient oriental secrets, me showing him some of the kumikata material we've been working on lately, and him showing me several good groundwork tricks, including a cool sankaku entry from ukigatame. We spun off into several bouts of randori, spinning back into lessons every so often. Chad's positional control and ground mobility have improved a lot from rolling with the MMA dudes.
• The things that Chad seemed to enjoy and he'll want to remember include: 1) the sweep-prop combination that makes uke feel so stupid, 2) the bump-and-sweep deashi/kosoto from the outside cross grip, 3) the footsweep-to-control drill that we start each class with, 4) treat uphill escape as a bridging technique with the emphasis on smashing uke's nose into the ground - you'll get more mileage from uphill escape and bridge&roll (downhill escape) will be easier when it occurs, and 5) Chad, you need to start a judo blog. Do it today.

Early AM judo increasingly strenuous

5 AM Judo with Rob

• Warmup with ground mobility cycle and holding cycle
• Drill: uki→kesa→mune→ushirokata (10 reps each)
• Drill: uki→kesa→mune→udegarame→wakigatame (10 reps each)
• Drill: uki→mune→kesa→wakigatame→udegarame (10 reps each)
• nagekomi: R1/R3→outside cross grip→deashi/kosoto
• nagekomi: R1/R3→outside cross grip→osotogari (with a crashpad)
• nagekomi: R1/R3→outside cross grip→uranage (with a crashpad)

It was good to be back to a more vigorous judo practice after bruising/breaking (or otherwise busting) a rib a couple of months ago. I can tell I've lost (temporarily) some of my tolerance to having my chest crushed in groundwork. Well, now that I can play more vigorously again I'll get it back pretty quick.

Good vibrations

Aiki with Kel and Rick

• ROM and ukemi
• tegatana with emphasis on finishing each step, making sure that you don't drag the recovery out, and bending the knees to take up the up-down slack and keep your COM level. It turns out that there are cool COM changes happening in one step - as you separate your legs to take a step, your center rises with respect to your head, but it drops with respect to the ground, so it almost balances out. With just a little flex in the knees the COM stays very close to level and you cease to telegraph so badly and you conserve your own energy much better.
• hanasu with emphasis on taking the first step as a leap of faith, without knowing what technique will fall out. From there, we worked on transitioning between #1, #2, #5, and #6 as appropriate to follow the arc of uke's force and to attain that release feeling.
• chain #1 - release #1 resisted into release #2 into reverse kotegaeshi, ushiroate, and iriminage. This is an especially cool exercise because it makes it easier to feel the vibration in uke's body when he tries to resist and you move with him instead of fighting and damping him out. We especially played attention to the ukemi because without uke taking ukemi, tori cannot ever learn the last part of the technique.
• Kel managed to get two zen-ish sayings out of me in one night. That is a feat, because I don't consider myself a very zen-ish dude normally, so I told him to cherish it. The two zen-ish sayings...

Be like water running downhill.

Seek safety in the mouth of the Dragon.

Backup plans in aikido

Aikido with John J. and Vincent

• ROM, ukemi
• tegatana with emphasis on heel-toe, shoulder-width stance, walking on the balls of the feet, complete recovery steps, and relaxed unbendable arm.
• hanasu #1 and #2
• chain #1, including release #1 resisted into release #2, which can lead to a reverse kotegaeshi. This gave us the opportunity to talk about covering uke's hands to damp or supress his potential.
• Short lecture on the four main backup plans in aikido: 1) get behind uke, 2) disengage and move away, 3) move with uke, and 4) hit uke in the face.
• We worked on shomenate as an example of backup plan #4 when we (for whatever reason) stepped inside and parried with the lead hand (a terrible, awkward mistake).

Great falling practice

Aiki with Kel

• Ukemi emphasizing how the proper landing position is a natural consequence of managing the body properly throughout the entire fall.
• Tegatana emphasizing the panther walk and bringing the recovery step in fully
• Hanasu emphasizing full recovery steps
• chain #1 including the transition from release #1 to release #5 and the stuff that comes off of release #1 - mainly tenkai kote hineri, kotemawashi oshi taoshi, and kote hineri.
• Rokukata maeotoshi and Rokukata sakaotoshi with a crashpad emphasizing feeling to see if one step is enough or if you should take one more step and catch the next footfall. We were getting spectacular throws and falls.