Tuesday, April 24, 2007

April 22nd-Tokyo here we come!
















So even though my wrist is still sore, I went to the dojo Sunday. We were practicing kokyunage some more. I was in a trio with my girlfriend and this oaktree of an Englishman. He throws pretty hard, bit daunting at times. It pushed me to work on my tobiukemi in this waza.

As with so many other situations in and out of the dojo, I just have to let go and let myself to do it. So I dropped my fear and ran full steam at my partner. He performed the throw very well and I went flying head over heels. Banged my butt pretty good, but it was a better uke performance. Speaking of which, it was rather amusing watching my girlfriend get thrown and seeing her spin 360 balanced on one buttcheek.

The differences in our weights becomes an issue with these momentum-based techniques. When a smaller person is throwing a larger person, the smaller person must be grounded and confident with their techniques or they get thrown by their attacker. In kokyunage, we should redirect their momentum to throw them. We goofed a few times and the result was that we basically threw ourselves along with our uke. Baby with the bathwater, as it were.

Towards the end of the night, we started our pairwork for Tokyo. I'm working with one of the teachers again. He's a funny, kind man. Always good to work with him. We practiced some of the koshinage techniques together. Speaking of momentum, its easy to bungle these. If your positioning is incorrect, the aite feels really heavy. I threw my partner and sometimes fell on top of him as a clumsy grand finale. We haven't finalized our routine for Tokyo yet, but I'm looking forward to hammering it all out.

1 comment:

jrfiction said...

It was good to see you training so hard Steve. I'm sure everything will fall into place on the day, if you'll excuse the pun. see you at the dojo next week.