We are working on kotogaeshi here. His landings are nice and smooth.
Here we are doing shihonage. Sensei said I should keep my hands higher, not lower them so much. This makes it easier for the partner to jump over his own arm as I twist it.
This pic shows tenichinage. The tori has to extend one hand up towards the heaven and the other down towards the ground. The result is the uke being unbalanced and brought into my space. His body should look like a bow being pulled. Then I step forward and he falls backwards.
Here's me being thrown kotogaeshi. I have to train myself to slap my hand on the mat before my body hits. This absorbs much of the shock of being thrown. Mistakes are painful, so you'd think I'd have learned it by now.
These next few photos are me with the sensei as uke. It was only second time to throw him. Quite an honor as well as a great model.
Kotogaeshi
Can't remember the name of this technique, but it look cool and is a lot of fun.
Kotogaeshi again.
When we practice with each other, we can always feel the weight of each other as we twist and throw. When I throw the sensei, I feel nothing. Like I'm holding jump rope handles and swinging a light rope around my head. Sensei often seems like boulder when I try to push him, but here he seems like a butterfly whirring around my head. Can't really understand what is going on there.
2 comments:
Hi Steve,
If Sensei does mayukemi I always feel that he could drink a cup of tea while doing it. I never saw anybody else doing it like that. I think it has to do with fully relying on the middle part of the body, so the upper part (from chest up?) is completely relaxed. And I think he is not spending any active thoughts (cortex part of the brain)on the ukemi, so he doesn't have the kind of tense face most people have when they do it.
Because faster, with tobeukemi it is more difficult to see the details of the moving. Last time that I practiced Sensei scolded me for not getting my feet straight up and my head straight down. I had to touch his hand and then he would let go, so that I depended fully on my own jump (as to be weightless to the tori as you said). I was not good enough, for a large part because recently I never practice it. So now, in preparation in Tokyo, I am battering myself dayly with at least 20 tobeukemi's in a row in the empty dojo here. Actually it is kind of refreshing.
Hans
Hi Steve,
Kept thinking about your remark that you didn't use your arm properly during ukemi. But the way you describe it sounds like a judo-ukemi. The idea of ukemi is to touch the ground with safe parts of the body, while trying to make a large impact area and increasing the time of impact (so as to decrease the impact on the single spots). The judo-fall, for some reason, is very much dedicated to increasing the impact area with strecthed arms and legs. The aikido ukemi, on the other hand, rather tries to stretch the time of impact by gradual folding over you legs when you touch the ground. It helps very much if you use one arm to bend over your upward knee after landing. In my feeling, the other arm, which hits the ground, is much more for stearing than for really reducing the impact. Both the beginning and the end of tobeukemi rely mostly on the waist muscles: first increasing the speed as to rotate 'weightless' around the tori's pivoting point, and then decreasing the folding-up speed during landing. Only when the tori succeeds in stretching your body out during the throw (basically when you are too slow), you need one of the arms to decrease the impact on your ribs.
Hans
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