Friday's aikido class

[handslive]

Friday's class was pretty good although I'll admit I was a little concerned about it. Maybe this is just an age thing, but I have some nights when I go to class feeling, well, fragile for lack of a better term. My joints feel just a little more sensitive, my muscles just a little too tight.

Anyway, Friday was one of those days. My left wrist has given me on and off trouble for more than a year now from a minor injury while receiving sankyo. Strangely, this usually makes nikyo, kotegaeshi, and shihonage worse. By the time we'd finished warm up, though, the wrist felt fine again and it didn't even give me any trouble when we worked through shomenuchi nikyo.

I tried something during warmup, when we were doing tai no henka (some of you might call it just tenkan). There are several specific things I know our instructors like to see during this practice and one of these is that uke's elbow must be against uke's ribs before you turn. This means you have to move in a little before turning. I often get this by extending my arm forward to meet uke's grab a little early. There's a moment of tension (sometimes a long moment if I'm trying for a certain feeling of push back) and then I turn. The feeling I want is that I can feel uke's grab all the way down to my tanden. I want to feel it in my hips and waist before I turn.

I've been feeling for a while that this usually means I'm either opening up my own kamae too much or depending too much on my shoulders and upper arm to maintain the tension. This time, I tried feeling it there without the associated moment of tension in my own arm. Interesting! I think there's a real need then to feel that I'm entering on a direct line with uke before turning and my hips need to be lined up just so. The turn feels a little smoother afterwards, but I'm having trouble getting the lead then. This is probably because I'm so used to pulling my partner into the lead with that initial tension. Anyway, I like where that goes, so I'll have to play with it some more.

We also did some shomenuchi iriminage and I got to work with one of our newly minted ikkyu students. J and I have known each other for a while, although really only in class. In fact, we both graded for nikyu together, but he's taken some time off and then come back to class in just the last year.

I've still got a bad habit of assuming that I'll fall down when I'm uke. This makes me a very soft uke in many regards, but J needs more from me than just a good fall. Something to keep in mind about the newer students heading into 5th kyu, too. I tend not to provide the level of resistence I should.

I really only got one of the throws really well where I felt like I'd actually disrupted J's balance from the beginning and just kept it up the whole way. He follows really well and it's so easy to get into a rhythm where we just go around and up and down but don't actually practice.

Our basic iriminage here requires that nage do a strong block before entering in and turning. This reduces the difficulty of the timing, but I'm supposed to be working on timing. I have to enter, demonstrate that there was a good block there, but not actually stop the attack. My timing on this needs a lot of work. If I'm too early, then it's kind of esoteric and doesn't show the block properly. If I'm too late, then it's very thumpy and doesn't show good timing. In a sense, uke has to believe there's going to be a block, too, and then discover suddenly that there isn't one. I was very thumpy on Friday.

Because we did a lot of shomenuchi work, I'm seeing that I've fallen into the habit of waiting too long. This is a very old habit for me and harks back to the old karate days. :-) In karate, you often don't want to block until almost the last millisecond. In aikido, if you wait this long, you usually get squished. I've never been able to decide if this is just part of the difference in timing for aikido, if it's a sign of a strategic preference in aikido, or if it's a sign of a basic weakness in my karate (and therefore also of my aikido).

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