New Beginners

What a great turn out we had last night. Along with the eight new guys AND girls we got seven regular club members, which made for a very successful session.

The first session of a beginners' course is always a bit tricky. People bring many preconceptions, consciously and unconsciously, about what aikido is about. Some of these are accurate and some not. Generally my goal in the early weeks is not so much to teach aikido techniques but to set the stage for future training.

With this in mind the class structure went as follows:

How the body maintains and loses balance
Leading to good aikido posture
And how this can be used to transmit power from the legs
Through pushing your partner
Basic avoidance of this push - side to side, on the diagonals and turning
How the body reacts to having the arm rotated forwards and backwards
The forward rotation leading into two "techniques"
Although these were taught as opportunities to practice a simple forward breakfall
A variation on one of the techniques to introduce turning
And finally some soft back breakfalls to warm down

The homework was to work on these back breakfalls during the week, focusing on keeping the chin tucked in, curving the back to ensure no unnecessary bumping onto the floor and using the body weight to bring yourself back up.

Feel free to comment on the session as feedback is always welcomed. Hope to see the same kind of numbers next week.

Congratulations

Well done to Simon, Ian and John in passing their grading last night.



As you can see they are not proudly wearing their yellow belts indicating their promotion to 5th kyu.

It is always difficult to keep up a reasonable level of training during the summer months. People take holidays and there is often a lack of continuity. These guys have made a consistent effort to turn up and it shows in their development.

Tony was also there last night to ratify their grading and was generally pleased with the level. This is also a relief to me as in many ways the development of these guys is a direct reflection on my teaching and Tony is putting a lot of trust in me to keep people who train on a Tuesday night in line with the club as a whole. Of course it is not too problematic because I think all these guys have attended at least some other classes with Tony.

Interestingly, Simon commented that he really enjoyed the session, that it was a good hard work out. This was despite my concern that I did not do much teaching and we did not freeplay at all. I suppose it goes to show that while demonstration and discussion is important giving people time to actually practice and work things through for themselves is crucial. I will consider this in future sessions.

Next week we begin a new beginners' course. This will mean bringing the pace down a little for a few weeks to get the new guys and girls into the groove but will hopefully provide our new yellow belts with an opportunity to appreciate the progress they have made and while working with the new beginners they may be able to bring themselves back into the "beginner's mind" way of thinking about their own technique.

Attack!

Tony wrote recently on the forums at http://www.londonaikido.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=155 on atemi or the practice of striking.

This is a huge topic and often completely overlooked in many aikido circles. So much so that some people would argue that aikido does not include striking. This is not so, although the focus on knockout blows that you might see in karate or some Chinese arts is fairly minimal.

Apart from the use of strikes in defending oneself (I think I have written on this before) there is obvious area of the initial attack. What are we defending ourselves from in aikido? Someone is trying to injure us or make us do something we don't want to do like hand over our worldly goods. In most of these cases there is some form of physical attack in the way of flying fists, and in more unusual cases flying feet, knees, elbows or even head.

How can we defend ourselves from such ballistic attacks if we cannot reproduce them in training. It is therefore necessary to study, at least in part, punches and kicks and so on in order that we can then study how to deal with them. Many of the early aikido students (O Sensei's students) were already black belts (or at least well versed) in a range of external arts such as sumo, judo, karate, jujitsu or forms of kung fu. O Sensei's focus in training therefore was in teaching these already competent fighters how to relax, blend, control and use their "ki" to be even more effective. This has been misconstrued in some peoples minds as aikido not really doing hitting.

I believe O Sensei himself, or at least one of his top students, stated that aikido is 90% atemi!

Any way back to our training. In the past I have had difficulty getting a technique to work. I haven't been able to off balance uke or they have managed to recover their balance and block my technique. It is important to train so that you can deal with such situation, as they will inevitably occur in real life. But I believe that in many cases the fault has been, at least partly, in a poor or uncommitted attack.

If you are supposed to be attacking someone and don't really try to connect, either by stopping short or second guessing the technique and redirecting your attack or just not following through, then it is almost impossible to get many of the most wonderful kokyu nage throws of aikido to work. You start struggling to get the technique on, uke gets solid and nervous because you are trying to force it and what you end up with is a non-technique, either uke looks at you and nothing happens or they are kind to you and roll off without being thrown. This is not just poor aikido it is detrimental to your training and drilling into you bad practice that is really hard to remove later on.

From day one all attacks should be fully committed, honest and true. This means picking the point of attack, aiming correctly at it and following through correctly. This then gives tori every opportunity to actually practice good aikido and uke the opportunity to experience good aikido and learn more about their ukemi.

One important point: A committed attack does not necessarily mean a full force attack.

Look at the level of the person you are working with. If they are a young, strong, 5th dan who trains daily, then you should be looking to knock their head off - if that is what you have agreed! Otherwise you should be looking to temper the power of you attack accordingly.

This means going SLOWLY! Slow attacks can still be committed and provide so much more opportunity for learning that crappy uncommitted fast attacks. When things happen quickly your brain just does not have the time to process what is going on and instinctive reactions kick in. There is no learning going on. Your body is just doing what it would normally do. Research has shown that your conscious thought and control processes are about 1 to 2 seconds behind what is going on.

If your attack takes less than a second then there is little chance you are learning anything.

Think about that next time you are training. Attack slowly but with commitment. Be a good uke and allow things to progress as though you had attack fast; if you would have been off balanced if you attacked quickly then allow yourself to be so when attacking slowly, rather than cheating and using the lack of speed to allow you recover your balance. Build up the speed as tori become more comfortable with the movement; this indicates that they are transferring the technique into their unconscious control mechanisms and out of their conscious brain.

If you need any evidence of this in action, just watch any free play in class. There are some techniques that people have internalized and they appear to do these quite well at any pace - in fact they often revert to doing it over and over again. There are other times when tori just seems to freeze up and go blank - this happens at all levels. That is the time where the technique is not learnt well enough and the conscious brain is having to try to catch up with what is happening. When you see this happening, go slower ...

... and train more!

Rupert leaves

Sadly Rupert informed me this week that he had to return to South Africa to sort out passport issues. It may be that his departure will be eclipsed by that of Yves but I feel it is important to note that Rupert has trained well over the last couple of years. He has always been a willing uke and open to learning. I am sure he will be missed. I only hope that he is able to find a club that he is comfortable with back home and if he returns to the UK he remembers to come back and train with us.

When you just don't feel like coming...

Some days you are tired, unfocused, busy and you just don't feel like going to aikido. Sometimes this hides an underlying difficulty you are having with you own aikido development. Sometimes it doesn't.

Acknowledge to yourself that you have these feelings. They are natural. Don't berate yourself.

Accept them and let them go. Then go to class any way.

More often than not you end up feeling a hell of a lot better for having made the effort and sometimes you find that these sessions are those when you have an epiphany or moment of clarity that you have been struggling with recently.

Of course if you end up not coming, don't get upset either. Put that in the past and resolve to go next time you feel this way.

Nit-picking

The tube strike appears to have had an impact on numbers this week. Tuesday night stalwart Simon turned up as usual. His continued attendance and commitment is displayed in his growing aikido ability.

We mainly focused on the second section of the randori no kata for Simon's sake but it actually was a useful session for all of us. Points that I picked on during the session included:

1) Ensure that the pins that complete the technique control the shoulder of uke. If this does not happen it is fairly easy for uke to get up even if you are applying quite a lot of pain.
2) Techniques 7 (ude gaeshi) and 9 (ude garame) are setup in this kata by uke trying to prevent the previous technique, 6 (oshi taoshi) and 8 (hiki taoshi) respectively. In order to train for these techniques correctly it is important that uke actually reacts correctly. In the case of ude gaeshi, uke must try to come back into good posture. It is no good doing this half heartedly, knowing that tori will apply ude gaeshi anyway. Tori must really try to do oshi taoshi and uke must really try to stop tori. To emphasize this we first got uke to reverse tori's oshi taoshi with an oshi taoshi of their own. This has the helpful feature of getting uke to block the initial technique in exactly the way that leads to ude gaeshi. Once this was being done effectively, tori was then able to transition into ude gaeshi. This gave much better feel for both parties and resulted in better technique all round. The same ideas are true for 8 and 9.
3) All the controls at the end of techniques, whether pins on the floor or standing locks should not require any muscle strength to maintain. Otherwise how are you going to keep someone controlled for a long period of time, may be until the police or help arrives? If you are getting pumped and tense when controlling people then you are doing it wrong. Try to find comfortable positions to stand in where the control is primarily provided by the skeleton and body weight.
4) Finally as always, it is vitally important that uke's balance is broken. A compliant uke will go down with any old dross but a resisting one will just stand there and look at you unless you break their balance. Breaking balance is so fundamental it should be considered for every technique in every class. You can only control someone larger and stronger than you if their balance is broken. This was demonstrated rather badly by all of us in our little session of aiki sumo at the end of the class.