Northern Wind

One of the most profound additions to my aikido practice, in my humble opinion, has been the development in our system of what we commonly refer to as "chained series" or renraku waza . The concept isn't new, of course, but I don't know that many people practice it in aikido (help me out if I'm mistaken, I'd love to take a look at what others are doing). Basically, you would start off with uke either attacking or grabbing a wrist. Tori performs technique A, uke falls down (or submits). Then you do it again, but this time uke attempts to escape or counter technique A, so tori moves on to B, so on and so forth. Many of these chained series can get rather long, upwards of 9 or 10 even. When it comes right down to it, there are probably an infinite number of ways you can combine them, but the main idea is to practice flowing from one thing to another, to follow uke, to keep from getting attached to making a single technique work, by golly, blah, blah, blah...

I finally got a few moments to record the kosoto gari follow-up to a failed hiza guruma that I mentioned previously . From the same "foot inward" set-up, you can also catch a nice harai goshi.

Hiza guruma to hiza guruma/sasae tsurikomi ashi One of the slickest follow-ups to a hiza guruma that didn't quite work is a second hiza to the other side. The trick here is to take the foot that you initially put up for propping uke's knee on the first try (let's say your right foot), and put it down pre-turned, inward. If you don't, the angle of the second hiza will be all wrong and plus, you'll miss out on the power that a coiled hip springing into action gives you. We also found that for smaller players, stepping close to uke at a right angle on the second throw and catching a sasae tsurikomi ashi worked well. Incidentally, this same action of pre-turning the foot also sets up the nice kosoto gari I mentioned in the last renraku waza post.

This morning, we worked on another handy little combination technique. or " renraku waza" (to see any other renraku waza I blather about, just click on "judo renraku waza" on the lower right of the page under "labels"). Hiza guruma to okuri ashi harai/harai tsurikomi ashi We started with the individual components, first working on okuri ashi harai , which we typically do from a "step around", turning entry. Next, we practiced hiza guruma for a bit. Then, we looked at the condition where hiza doesn't quite work out. When uke steps through it, you catch his trailing leg with a foot sweep. Now, when this happens, depending on certain factors, you may catch both of uke's feet for okuri ashi harai, or push his trailing leg behind his support leg for more of a harai tsurikomi ashi (I'll explain in a sec). Frankly, you don't really care, so long as you sweep the guy's foot. TIPS TO REMEMBER: When we do the step around version of t...

For the next little while (who knows, a month or so?) we're going to start incorporating a few renraku waza (combination techniques) into the morning class. I thought I'd keep a little record of some of my favorites and also include anything cool other folks come up with. And of course, if anyone has any ideas that they like and want to share, toss 'em out there! Osoto gari to kosoto gari We're going to start all of these combination practices by working on the first throw by itself. In this case, we took good ol' osoto gari , and did a number of uchi komi (basically, to practice the set-up of a throw without throwing) for several minutes. We want people to get plenty of practice getting the throw as close to correct as possible. Then, we work off the premise that uke, whose weight in mostly loaded into his right foot, takes a step back with his left. This may because he's trying to step out of it, or simply trying to keep his balance and not fall. Regardless,...