Zolley's blog

There is a movie that is not about aikido, not even Japanese and I was very sceptical about before watching it. It is The Forbidden Kingdom. I was afraid of its being too Hollywood-like, too shallow or boring. Maybe I was just able to see the positive parts that I was prepared to see but I think the movie is great. Here's why:

I included several pictures in my post about our grading so I think it's a bit more neat if I have a separate post for the grading video clip. Please find the clip below or on YouTube.

Day 6 is special in every Veszprem summer camp. There is no weapons training, there is an extended 2 hour training in the morning and no training in the evening. Instead of the evening training, there is one session after the long training in the morning which is devoted to gradings!

Today we started with jo and cut several yokomens after warming up a bit. Today's fun exercise in the weapons training was that one of us had to roll the jo towards the other while catching another jo thrown by our partner. I practiced this with Karesz and we were very effective in this highly demanding task, especially when there was a direction change after some claps :).

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.

Tuesday was the first complete day of the camp.

We had weapons training in the morning. It was announced that every other day we would practice with bokken, otherwise with jo. The first training was with bokken. It was a shomen based training, so first we warmed up by cutting shomens very slowly and focusing on our breathing and that this cut should be straight and vertical.

Many of us from the dojo attended a one week training camp in Hungary. This camp is organised by the Aikido Foundation (Hungary) every summer and the trainings are held by Laszlo Elsner 5th dan master. With this post, I start publishing my personal notes which I either wrote in the evenings of  training days or a little bit later, using my evening notes. Here's what I wrote on day one.

From time to time, people keep reporting that either they can't see the pictures about how to fold a keikogi in my old blog or they report that the order of the pictures is messed up. Since I don't want to fix it every time Flickr makes some changes that causes an order change in my embedded slide show I decided to import the pictures and gi folding description here.

I've already written about the children's grading, now it's time to examine what can be learnt from an adult grading.

It's time to have a summer break in our club. It will be one month as usual to let people go on holidays without being stressed about missing so many trainings :) and to build up motivation to come to trainings later. One month is enough for some techniques and learned principles to settle in one's mind and then we can start again with fresh enthusiasm towards training. In our club, a year finishes at the beginning of July (so I'm a bit late with this post but was waiting for the pictures), and the end of a season is marked by a special training which ends with "Britain's got talent" or "who knows what" (as Karesz sensei says), i.e. gradings.