Katy Aikido Club

Something I think is worthwhile to keep in the back of the mind while training is that when someone attacks with a hard attack, your response should be "easy". It's a fairly common scenario where uke grabs your wrist with a lot of muscle and almost instinctively the tendency is to push back or at a minimum offer enough resistance so that both of you are at a stand still. This produces strength meeting strength and is commonly referred to as crashing. But crashing happens at a very specific point. It's very important to find that point because it is at that point where we have to analyze the automatic response that "feels" right and change the course of action.

So at the point where uke has your wrist and you recognize the strength being used, turn. Simply bring your wrist into your center and turn your entire body. No strength on your part will be necessary. As a result of doing this instead of using your own strength, you'll notice the person attacking you will suddenly shift a bit and lose balance. Instead of crashing, you are now blending. This is the physical aspect of Aikido. Stay tuned for how to apply this concept outside of the mat so you can start observing the mental aspects of Aikido.

On Saturday's regular class we finished with doing some basic randori with 2 person attacks. As sort of a guideline for this randori session, the attacks were limited to one person at a time. Usually, it's ideal to not have any rules for randori as the emphasis is to try and mimic a real scenario where you might be attacked at the same time by multiple people. With that said, the reason for imposing the one at a time limitation was to study the concept of not getting stuck. The purpose here is to understand the timing aspect and when you are being attacked it is important to understand that there is still someone waiting to attack you. This is supposed to place emphasis on movement and remove the emphasis on trying to do specific techniques. As such, I really believe randori is best approached as a skill to develop. Looking forward to more randori practice.

Last night a few of us were at the Quillian Center for class with Calderon Sensei.  It was a really good class that put a lot of focus on seiza and shikko.  A very interesting version of Shihonage was taught where instead of bringing your knee up immediately, you first raise your torso and hands for kokyo, then pivot and raise your knee.  At this point, you roll backwards on your other foot and then push off backwards to finish doing Ura.  Sensei said this is the correct way to do Shihonage Ura and when executed this way, it is veeery powerful.  I don't have a video for this right now but once available I'll post it.  Might be time to focus on seiza and shikko!

sitting in seiza
chaos and order cross paths
irimi nage

This is to announce that there will be a section of the website dedicated for students. The first feature will be blogs that students can post to. Registration will be required but will not be as painful as doing 500 shomen strikes (warning, that might be an exercise for a future class!). An announcement will be made once the blog section becomes available. There will be guidelines posted as well that should be used as a reference regarding etiquette for contributing to this website. Stay tuned and I'll see you on the mat!