Wednesday Night at the Dojo 1/3

Aikidokas: Raymond, Tim, Keith, Martin, Rob, Shiela, Kim, and Leonard.

Ukemi: Not bad. Big fall on the left side I'm doing more garuma than not. I need to fix that.

The Walk: nothing unusual.

Releases: Worked with Martin. He had some tweaks for me that I can't remember at the moment. I wasn't getting completely around on a couple of them, made an adjustment and they worked better.

Techniques: Worked with Martin and Keith. We did some seiza work. Just one technique, I don't know what it's called so I'll describe it. Uke comes up with a foot near your knee. He grabs your nearest shoulder and pulls tore up off the ground. Tore's response is to rise up, moving the hand nearest uke's leg to just above uke's knee on the inside. As tore rises up, pressure on uke's leg increases and uke falls. Very neat.

We tried it with two attackers as well. It works in that situation, too. You just dealer with the attacker who is exerting more force first, remembering to drop back to seiza to improve the technique.

I also worked on shihonage with Keith and Martin. A nice session of intensive work. Hand positioning on the first off-balance and at the wrist pin are important. My first attempt was for the "big 10" version of shihonage as I didn't realize the Ju Nana Han Kata version was a wrist pin.

The wrist pin seems to work best if tore's thumb/forefinger webbing is just a little closer to uke's fingertips as opposed to being right in the wrist joint. The last two fingers on tore's hand need to be involved as well. If I can get leverage on the hand joint of uke's middle finger a large amount of control occurs. Also, it is better the closer uke's hand is pinned to his shoulder as opposed to his neck.

Aftermath: Shiela will be testing for green belt on the 12th. She and Kim will be working together over the next few nights to get her ready.