Throwing line vs Throwing rows
Over the years, I've seen a number of various methods for breaking up the monotony of training. Many work just fine, although probably only as a once in a while practice just to shake things up. Some, well, I've always thought could use some fine tuning.
I had a professor in college who always pressed us to make the best use of our time rather than just waiting around and then complaining when we ended up feeling rushed in the end. That attitude has carried over into many aspects of my life, and budo classes are no exception.
I'm not very fond of doing a lot of standing around and chatting (except when I'm tired, then I'll kill time with the best of them!) We only have an hour to an hour and a half, I feel we ought to make the most of it, right?
One method I've always had reservations about is the throwing line. Essentially, you have one person at a time doing a technique over and over to a line of uke's, one after the other. When you've thrown them all, you go to the back of the line.
It's not terrible, mind you, I just never did care for the standing around part of being in the uke line. Not only that, it got kind of boring when a person wasn't performing the technique, which was most of the time; if you have six people, you're only getting to do the technique 1/6th of the time. Granted, getting thrown is a big part of learning the technique, but the average student I find gets easily listless and distracted, and the joking around begins.
What I'd like to try is something like this:
You would basically divide the dojo in half, all the tori's on one side, the uke's on the other, so that everyone is in a pair. Each tori then throws their uke.
After tori throws, he moves to the "uke" side of the dojo, turns around and becomes the uke for the next person. After his uke takes the fall, he moves across to the "tori" side, to the next position and becomes tori. The last person to fall then moves all the way back to the first position to throw (and make him or her jog or run, so they get a little extra conditioning ;-).
This way, you're either throwing or falling, which means no time to stand around and goof off. It also means you're getting the chance to actually do the technique every other turn.
It's a thought, anyway. We'll see how well it works in practice.
I had a professor in college who always pressed us to make the best use of our time rather than just waiting around and then complaining when we ended up feeling rushed in the end. That attitude has carried over into many aspects of my life, and budo classes are no exception.
I'm not very fond of doing a lot of standing around and chatting (except when I'm tired, then I'll kill time with the best of them!) We only have an hour to an hour and a half, I feel we ought to make the most of it, right?
One method I've always had reservations about is the throwing line. Essentially, you have one person at a time doing a technique over and over to a line of uke's, one after the other. When you've thrown them all, you go to the back of the line.
It's not terrible, mind you, I just never did care for the standing around part of being in the uke line. Not only that, it got kind of boring when a person wasn't performing the technique, which was most of the time; if you have six people, you're only getting to do the technique 1/6th of the time. Granted, getting thrown is a big part of learning the technique, but the average student I find gets easily listless and distracted, and the joking around begins.
What I'd like to try is something like this:
You would basically divide the dojo in half, all the tori's on one side, the uke's on the other, so that everyone is in a pair. Each tori then throws their uke.
After tori throws, he moves to the "uke" side of the dojo, turns around and becomes the uke for the next person. After his uke takes the fall, he moves across to the "tori" side, to the next position and becomes tori. The last person to fall then moves all the way back to the first position to throw (and make him or her jog or run, so they get a little extra conditioning ;-).
This way, you're either throwing or falling, which means no time to stand around and goof off. It also means you're getting the chance to actually do the technique every other turn.
It's a thought, anyway. We'll see how well it works in practice.
Isn't that almost the same as the "Hajime" style of practice you see in yoshinkan?
ReplyDeleteExcept that the rotation goes a bit different.
Works quite well, but is very strenuous.
I really like this. It is very similar to how we run a jo class.
ReplyDelete