Notes of a training camp - Days 3 and 4

To write this post about days three and four I need to use my evening notes because I was too tired to write proper diary entries before going to sleep. I wonder what would have happened if we had gone to the Street Music Festival (have a look on Youtube) every evening just like most of the others. The thing is that as my mother-in-law lives very close to Veszprem where the camp was held I did not feel that I needed to stay at the hostel where there others were and where they lock their doors because other funny aikidoka would paint their toes with colours of the rainbow during the night. Nevertheless, the others say the Festival was good fun and the music was good so we might visit it some time (which eventually happened after our grading). Until that I will just keep trying to sleep enough and keep going to the dojo early to do some extra practicing and, as it turns out, mat arranging. I don't mind it tough, it helps to get more familiar with the mat every time.

As not everyone is involved in the weapons trainings the warm up training is after weapons. (Elsner sensei himself does not prefer weapons so it's not required that everyone does weapons in the morning.) We did a lot of exercises to warm up all muscles and to stretch where necessary. We did a complete round of traditional Japanese warm up complete with the rowing exercise (funekogi undo), handshaking in front of us, etc. We used to do these exercises when I was training under Connor and recently I saw a Koichi Tohei video (not THIS one but what I'm referring to is before this part in the full video) where he demonstrates how to warm up, which I really liked. So this style of warm up helped me to recall good old memories and it was a good way to show respect to Japanese traditions. I say this because Japanese style warm up often involves stretching without any prior warming up of the muscles, and recent research has showed that stretching without warming up first sometimes does more harm than good. Also, it was new to me to hear during several of the morning warm up sessions that somewhere after the age of 20, osteoporosis occurs in the neck (bone structure) and it's not recommended to tilt the head back when warming up.

The morning training by Elsner sensei was about the techniques practiced the evening before, just the speed was twice as high. On Wednesday, after this morning session we had an extra 30 minutes 'voluntary' training that was to clarify basic steps and to give a bit of structure of things. Obviously, I was there too (and anyway, I think it's highly 'recommended' to be there every time if you want to grade at the end of the week :)). Uchi irimi, uchi tenkan, soto irimi, soto tenkan, the explanation of mawari ashi (which covers the same as what we used to call tenkan, but can also mean 'to turn', as far as I understood), etc.

As the training material was so much that by the end of the day my cup started to become full I'm just listing the techniques we practiced and a couple of notes to them: shihonage, kotegaeshi, importance of footwork, movement of hips, even fingers. We did suwari waza (seated techniques) on Thursday, and this made it the most demanding training so far in the week. We did katemi waza techniques (ikkyo, nikkyo, sankyo, yonkyo, gokyo) in suwari waza and kokyunage (breath throw) in hanmi handachi waza (one sits, other stands) for which we needed to form several groups and each group had to be lead by someone in hakama (black trousers).

I also remember being called out a couple of times, I received ukemi for shihonage. When being uke for sensei, he noticed that I turned away from him before standing up and facing him again. He corrected this and said you should never do this unless you want an 'unforced kick' to your back side. I memorised this but as I also remembered that we were taught not to stand up towards the defender after receiving ukemi I asked sensei about this after one of the trainings. He kindly explained that 1. you can stand up away from tori if you roll away but not if you simply want to stand up away from him; 2. if you simply stand up away you are showing your back and you should never do that; 3. once down, wait until the defender actually steps back and so allows you to stand up as you gain some free space, so even if tori is not pinning you down he is there and as long as he is there and you are down you are controlled by him. This clarified the issue so from now on I will remember what to do as uke.

At the end of one training, people who were going to grade needed to stand up so that we could see who else is going for the same kyu level and thus who were the people we should practice more in case we needed to demonstrate 'harmony' together (i.e. to grade together). Fortunately, only Chris and me stood up for ikkyu (1st kyu) so it would be hard not to be examined together on Saturday.

Connor and Zolley discussing tasks

Between trainings (and before trainings in the morning) we started to record videos with Connor for OnlineAikido.com (and one morning he showed up with our first original OnlineAikido.com T-shirt :)). With the help of my brother we had two cameras in action and I'm still wondering how much work it will be to organise and create the actual instructional videos, but at least we will have material about the basic attacks recorded outdoors, and for some techniques we will even have top-view videos thanks to the long tripod I managed to borrow from the local TV of my home village (local TV for 1800 people! :)). I broke my personal record of wearing gi (uniform) in a day as I think there were approximately 2 hours during one of these days (from waking up to taking the evening shower at home) when I did not wear gi.