Northern Wind

Still trying to catch up after spending time helping the Mrs, and may not get to post until next week. I don't know why, but this version of uki otoshi intrigues me...

It's been a while since I've posted, sorry. Not for lack of interest, mind you. I was out of town for about a week there, and now my wife is about to have hernia surgery, so I'll be busy keeping tabs on the kids for another week. I have a couple of videos that I shot not long ago (some aikido ura waza stuff we've been playing around with) that I need to edit and post, so I may have that coming shortly. In the meantime, I've leave you with this little thought on angles.

When I first began learning hip throw ideas, we were always taught doing them as uke is traveling forward. But once you get fairly proficient with that idea, you can start looking at throwing them from a number of different conditions. Basically, you can throw a person as they're coming forward, as they're going backward, and even going side to side and circling. This particular solo drill helped me practice the fundamental set-up for any advancing hip throw ideas, or reaps like harai goshi (a personal favorite) or uchi mata, or even tai otoshi (another favorite) and ashi guruma.

Last month, the overall "theme" if you will for all aikido classes was "randori", and I chose to explore the ura waza techniques covered in both the usual forms but also the experimental stuff covered in last year's shochugeiko. This month, the dojo has moved on to koryu dai ni kata, and we're following suit in the morning classes, which means that I didn't get a chance to play with some of the last techniques in junana hon kata. At least, not in regular class. I've a few occasions no to play around with some things outside of that, and I thought I'd jot them down here to finish out this series of posts and if anything make a record of what we found. Where did we leave off? Oh, yeah, kote gaeshi . Wee covered ideas regarding tenkai kote gaeshi in early classes and posts, so we'll skip that and move on to shiho nage . There is, of course, the classical counter of doing shiho nage right back to uke, which works pretty darn well, thank you very...

It's almost a cliché, really. Whenever you ask someone why they want to study a particular martial art, they typically give you the same handful of reasons: self-defense, to get in better shape and self-discipline. I think we can all understand where the "self defense" part comes in to play. For various reasons, many of us at some point feel a basic, fundamental need to protect ourselves. Maybe we live in a dangerous part of town or work in a potentially violent profession (such as law enforcement, emergency services, or even playing music at a raucous hole in the wall) and the threat of violence is ever-present; or, maybe we've always been picked on by bullies, be it physical or psychological abuse, and we want the confidence to stand up to them. It's a fairly strong motivating factor, one that's probably worth spending a few posts on in and of itself. But it's not what's on my mind. As for getting in better shape, there are probably much better ways ...

We covered counters to waki gatame (#10) in some of the earlier techniques, and countering kote hineri seemed pretty much the same as oshi taoshi (although, if I've missed something, by all means, let me know!), so we moved on to kote gaeshi . There are probably as many ways to counter kote gaeshi as there are ukes, but here are just a few that we've discovered. Before we get into any of them, however, it's important to understand one fundamental element that relates to pretty much all of these (except maybe one). Actually, the first thing to remember is that, with any of these counters, if tori does everything right, you're pretty much toast, end of story. Remember that we're working under the presumption that tori goofed and maybe sped up or tried to force something to happen. With that little caveat out of the way, let's talk about the base for all of these counters. Changing the kote gaeshi angle I like to illustrate this right up front with a little dr...

We've been having more fore fun with aikido ura waza . We went over what's covered in the KUBK forums from last years shochugeiko in regard to gyakugamae ate and ushiro ate ; gedan ate, we sort of covered when we encountered it with shomen ate , and we looked at oshi taoshi conditions with aigamae ate . Which brought us to ude gaeshi, #7. Now, in the traditional Tomiki ryu randori no kata no ura waza some of the techniques from the 17 (randori no kata) are omitted, namely, 7, 9, 10, 11, 15, 16 and 17. Frankly, I have no idea why (in fact, for various reasons, our dojo has only been looking at this kata for a very short period of time). But, that doesn't stop us from experimenting! So on we went with ude gaeshi . With this one, we utilized the same turning of the outside foot as we did in our particular version of the counter to oshi taoshi, but with two variations: 1) A large, extending turning motion. As uke begins to try and coil your arm, you basically do a #1 release...