Jujinage

As Fujita Masatake shihan is the international technical leader of our organisation I naturally started looking for his videos on the Web a couple of years ago, when I was new to aikido and when I'd just attended his seminar in Budapest. By now there have been several Fujita sensei videos on Youtube but there were only a couple of very short ones when I started looking for his recorded moves.

One of the videos I found is 4 seconds long and shows a jujinage (throw using the attacker's elbow). I had watched this video a lot of times and I tried to understand it, however, it was very short, not too high quality recording and without explanation, it was very hard to get it for an almost completely beginner. This is a point where, with Connor, we are hoping to make a difference with OnlineAikido.com, but let's keep to the original point about the jujinage video. I think I managed to understand something despite sometimes having to stop watching the video as my eyes and brain wer getting tired of watching the same 4 second sequence over and over again.

We haven't ever practiced this jujinage technique in trainings until a week ago. Udekimenage is similar (and some senior people will say all the techniques are the same in aikido, you just don't see it yet), as it uses the elbow, but I think this juji technique is a bit different. So when we started practicing it I felt I was better at it than if I had never seen the video before. So the video definitely made me better and even if, in reality, I wasn't much better technically, the 'I have seen this already' feeling made me more confident and relaxed and I really enjoyed throwing others without having to struggle or try too hard as well as it was a really good technique to practice the aikido slogan "Fly with us" (as I like flying around a lot).

Obviously, I need to practice it a lot more to do it effortlessly but I was really happy to be able to practice this technique and various versions of it as well as a couple of related techniques and explanations of particular positions of hand, elbow, arm, hips, legs and feet (basically each part of the body). I uploaded the video to Youtube so I can embed it here. Originally it's from AikidoFaq but I couldn't embed that version and they also took it from someone else so I hope I haven't breached any copyright. Here's the video: