The musings of a weary mind. Conversations on aikido, gardening, cooking, travel and, maybe, woodworking.
Aikido players:
Adam and Laura
Ukemi:
Self-directed warm-up
The Walk:
Once.
Releases:
Adam and Laura ran through theirs tonight
Techniques:
Adam and Laura worked backwards from 5 down to 1 tonight. Adam tori'd all 5 first and then Laura did the same.
A bunch of tweaks and adjustments to both folks techniques. Just a little for Adam. For Laura, I swore I saw smoke coming out of her ears.
Commentary:
None of note.
Aikido players:
Willie and Laura
Ukemi:
Self-directed warm-up
The Walk:
Not tonight.
Releases:
Not tonight
Techniques:
I worked with Laura a little on Ude Hineri before Willie showed up.
Laura and Willie then worked from 9 down to 5: Ude Hineri, Hiki Taoshi, Ude Gaeshi, Oshi Taoshi, Ushiro Ate. It went pretty well.
Laura was interested in learning the names of the techniques in addition to the numbers by which we usually refer to them, so I'd quiz them between attempts of a technique and when we switched from one to another technique.
Commentary:
None of note.
Aikido players:
Adam and Laura
Ukemi:
Self-directed warm-up
The Walk:
Not tonight.
Releases:
Not tonight
Techniques:
I ran through the offensive jo with Adam and Laura as uke. For Laura,who wanted to protect her left side tonight, we had to play with the jo techniques to see if the would work to throw her on her right side only. They all did, and it was an interesting exercise.
I had a small epiphany related to two of the techniques. There are tow throws that send uke rolling on their left side. The first one in the kata is direct down the horizontal plane of thrust of the jo and is about 30 degrees off of the initial vector of thrust in that plane. The second one has a bit of a vertical vector to it (maybe 45 degrees or so?) and the horizontal vector is about 60 degrees off of the initial line.
There's another technique in the kata that I'd like to experiment with in that vein. Technique number 5 (what we're currently calling the single pivot). That technique, as we've played with it so far, requires that the jo be as near to horizontal as possible. I'd like to try to see if we change the angle of the jo and the direction of the throw if it will still work. My guess is that it will not.
Adam went through his defensive jo work and then Laura worked on number 8 and 9.
Commentary:
None of note.
Aikido players:
Laura and a potential new student, Thomas, who sat and watched
Ukemi:
Some warm-up slaps and rolls
The Walk:
Once.
Releases:
Laura did hers.
Techniques:
We worked on numbers 13, 12, 11, and 10
Ended the evening throwing Laura with some big falls.
Commentary:
Thomas is a soon-to-be transplant from Killeen. I told him about Full Circle Aikido in Killeen and he was dismayed that there was a dojo he could have worked out with at his current post. Since he's going to be going up there on weekends until the school year ends, he might be able to catch some classes.
Aikido players:
Willie and Laura
Ukemi:
Not tonight.
The Walk:
Not tonight.
Releases:
Not tonight.
Techniques:
I was uke or supervisor for the entire evening.
Laura did about 70 repetitions of Shihonage before Willie arrived. Willie served as uke for a bit and then he got to attempt the technique for a bit. And then we switched over to left side.
From there, we moved on to Tenkai Kotehineri. Laura and Willie both got some work on the right-sided version of the technique.
At the end, I had them play with reactions that uke could attempt depending on where tori was in relationship to uke (in front, even with, behind). If tori was in front of uke, it opened up a number of counters that uke could attempt/achieve. When tori is even with, or slightly behind, tori has a better position and can more readily counter uke's attempts.
Ended the evening throwing Laura with some big falls.
Commentary:
Our first Friday night class. We got a lot of work in on the desired techniques.
Aikido players:
John, Adam, and Laura
Ukemi:
Not tonight.
The Walk:
Not tonight.
Releases:
Not tonight.
Techniques:
I worked as tori on the entire run of Kroyu Dai San offensive jo techniques (1 thru 8).
I went through them, working with Adam, to explore my problems and solve them. One of them I kept wanting to rotate counterclockwise to start, but it has to be clockwise. I eventually figured it out.
Then I ran through them, attempting to go straight through. Still a few issues, but really just minor tweaks.
Laura then ran through the set as tori.
Adam ran through the set as tori with first Laura and then me as uke.
Commentary:
No class on the previous Tuesday due to icing in the area.
Aikido players:
John, Adam, and Willie
Ukemi:
Not tonight.
The Walk:
Not tonight.
Releases:
Not tonight.
Techniques:
I worked as tori on the entire run of Kroyu Dai San offensive jo techniques (1 thru 8).
Adam
then ran through them all with Willie as uke. We spent a lot of time working on both players to try to get them in sync. Willie's a 3rd brown and has not seen any of these techniques before. With both folks relatively new at it, we were able to explore problems and approaches to teaching these techniques that might not be necessary/visible at higher levels.
I ran through all 8 again at the end of class with Adam as uke again.
Commentary:
None of note.
Aikido players:
Adam
Ukemi:
Not tonight.
The Walk:
Not tonight.
Releases:
Not tonight.
Techniques:
Adam and I worked on the first 5 of the offensive jo portion of Koryu Dai San. It was quite enlightening how quickly the tables turned if tori attempted to use force in these techniques, especially number 5.
Commentary:
None of note.
Aikido players:
John, Adam, Laura, Willie, and Matt (new student)
Ukemi:
Simple slaps
The Walk:
Not tonight.
Releases:
Not tonight.
Techniques:
Adam and I did work on the next 4 techniques of Koryu Dai Yon and the first 4 techniques of the offensive Jo portion of Koryu Dai San. These are part of the set I need to work on for my next and final demonstration.
A nice demo. I hope to have the video up in a while
Commentary:
Thursday night is going to be our Black Belt night going forward. We plan on adding a Friday night class that I will be running. John will be scaling back a bit as he will be helping his wife get her fledgling business off of the ground.
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