Back to the syllabus

The aim of the class last night was to bring everyone up to speed with what will be expected of them for the grading in four weeks time. I wanted to work through the first five of the randori no kata and then look at the unsoku and tandoku undo. As is often the case we ended up spending a lot of time (well spent I might add) on the first two: shomen ate and aigame ate. These are very difficult techniques to do effectively and it is very easy to pay lip service to them at this stage but I felt that this would just mean that the guys would spend the next few months drilling bad technique into their muscle memory only to have to spend ages reworking it later.

I tried to focus on a few basic principles of the techniques that I felt were key to doing the technique well rather than worrying about all the bells and whistles of the kata proper. In particular, for shomen ate we concentrated on avoiding the attack and pushing through from the hips. A general exercise of pushing your partner across the mat by placing your outstretched arm on their chest and driving from the hips was meant to exemplify this. For aigame ate we looked at the position you had to get in as you actually made the throw: very closely connected to you partner at the hips with your arm out in front of your centre. I hope that this proved helpful. There were certainly a number of guys that had got what I would say a good shape for the techniques by the end of the class.

Inevitably we only managed to get through techniques 1 to 4 but as I said earlier I believe it was time well spent. Tony will take the class next week so he can fix any problems that I have introduced then!

Stuff on my mind

After reading a great book - Waking Dragons - recently I have been thinking about the motivation behind training in martial arts. What is it about MA that keeps people coming back, often to be subjected to fairly unpleasant experiences particularly in the physical arts.

The author of the book almost revels in the pain of training and pushing himself to his personal limits. In a small way I emphasize with this myself but at the same time I am also aware that aikido for me is a greater activity than seeing what I can achieve with my body. There is a personal relationship aspect to aikido in which, if you choose to, you can try to understand what makes people tick, what scares them, what excites them, how to make them happy or sad. This is an intriguing area that I feel I am only just tapping into and one in which I am trying to concentrate on.

I imagine most people come to aikido classes with the idea that they will become indestructible to assailants and would be attackers or muggers. I extremem cases some people might think that a few months or perhaps a year or two of turning up once or twice a week is going to turn them into some kind of comic book super hero, perhaps a kind of viligante going around righting the wrongs of the world.

In reality, although martial artists do have a lot of reasons to feel more confident walking the streets at night it is rare that without a lot of innate talent and even more hard work the superhero is going to appear.

Aikido is about learning about yourself as much as about learning self defence. You find out what your body can do, what situations make you feel out of control and also to what extent to you can try to manage these situations. I believe that a lot could be learnt from purely practicing ukemi (breakfalling) exclusively without even getting into the throwing. Ukemi is often a good measure of an aikido practitioner's ability. If they can't deal with the ukemi then they probably can't control their own body and mind well enough to perform techniques accurately. People who master ukemi early almost always progress faster through the belts; they are able to train harder and are less tense as they know how to protect themselves. By being thrown effectively you are able to understand the mechanics of the throw better. You can learn a lot of aikido by being an uke.

Another interesting aspect of the book is when the author describes his sensei as telling a load of beginners that he is not interested in them until they show themselves to be willing to learn. They have to prove their commitment to learning to his assistants first. Oh, to have a strength of club and conviction not to pander to people who turn up expecting to be spoon fed their martial art. I believe that anyone can benefit from taking a class in aikido, whatever their previous experience, personal and physical issues. That being said, if the learner doesn't want to learn then both the teacher and the pupil are wasting their time. May be one day our club will be so strong that it can turn away students who aren't prepared to sit on the doormat for 48 hours before they can start training. I think that was what they did in Fight Club, yes?

Return of the Prodigal...

After a number of weeks of low higher grade turn out we had a bumper session this week with almost 50/50 ratio of high grades to beginners. In addition there was the welcome return of Joga who has been out due to a dodgy back.

Isn't it interesting how most of our higher grades have one injury or another. Is this true of all clubs and martial arts? Perhaps as you get higher up the grades you also tend to get older and also your body starts to fall apart. Or maybe you just whinge more!!

Joga was actually on good form and despite continued efforts on my part not to over do it he was rolling around the room like a twenty year old. He claimed that he thought coming along to one of my beginners' classes would be a gentle reintroduction to the rigours of aikido training and I would like to think that he was right. That being said I am sure that Tony would have also eased him gently back into the routine.

There was no camera this week, which is a shame as it would have been nice to get some snaps of some of the higher grades doing their stuff.

We started to look at the first couple of techniques in the randori no kata - shomen ate and aigame ate. I hate to teach these to beginners as they require a level of understanding and ability in certain aikido principles before they can be executed effectively. Shomen ate, for me, is all about timing and entering. These two aspects of aikido being among the more difficult to acquire. Aigame ate (or irimi nage) really needs good positioning and connection to execute effectively and again, when done from a striking attack, requires good timing. I sidestepped some of these issues by introducing both techniques as exercises in good avoidance, posture and entering.

Despite abstracting the movement as much as I dared many of the graded people still automatically slipped back into what they do normally and were doing the standard grading style techniques. This was quite enlightening for me but not at all unexpected and I was pleased with the few guys who showed that they were actually watching and seeing what I was doing.

Apparently Femi turned up last week and ran what sounds like a very iwama style class. I thought I would match it at the end of the session with some classic strong grasp aikido that I have seen up in North London. It was a bit over the heads of the beginners but I wanted to give something to the graded guys who turned up.

I felt much more happy with this class than I had for a few weeks. I hope it wasn't purely down to the graded guys coming along and giving me a safety net to work above.

Gareth and Ude Gaeshi

We were blessed with the reappearance of Gareth this week. This intermittent character is often unable to train for long periods due to work commitments so it is always a pleasure when he pops in.



Gareth is a gracious and honest fella who always trains with good spirit despite somewhat dodgy knees.

As promised there was a (slight) departure from the normal run of the mill class although my "quick" recap of the four techniques seemed to take up half the session. Here are a few snaps of the guys doing some of the techniques.






To be honest most of the shots were of ude gaeshi (elbow fold technique) since that is when I had the camera out.

The difficulty most beginners have is a fear of falling. They get all stiff when a technique is being done on them and this means that the thrower is not able to learn how to break balance easily and can in drastic situations lead to injury where the uke tries not to fall and ends up hurting themselves.

Despite some of these fears the guys continue to appear to be enjoying themselves.



After the review of the past two weeks we played with a form of kote mawashi (nikyo) and kote gaeshi (wrist fold) which demonstrated that whatever side you avoid a strike there is always a technique available.

Thanks to Rupert, Gareth and Peter for supporting the class.