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.