aikido

A couple of days ago, when I was writing the address of my dojo's website onto the pavement with chalk (with the aim of drawing attention to martial arts, especially to aikido), a little kid was coming by with his mother. As he saw what I was doing he asked his mother what I was writing there. After having received the answer from her, he immediately asked her mother "What is aikido?" I was curious about what people not doing martial arts might know about aikido so I waited patiently until the woman said something.

As there was no training in the afternoon on Saturday, the last technical training of the camp was in the morning of the 6th day. This training was slightly longer than the previous technical traininings. Elsner sensei left quite a number of things for this training, but as he had explained the basics throughout the week, and we had understood the teachings, everyone could follow what they heard and saw on Saturday, and the tempo was also quite good. The real, long-lasting training will happen during the regular trainings anyway.

So what we had in the last training:

As I wrote in the previous post, the 5th technical training planned to be about ushiro waza. So according to the plans, Sensei explained how to grab and hold the defender, what positions are appropriate. The attacker's arm should form tegatana, i.e. it should not be bent too much at the elbow because then the defendar can easily attack the attacker's head. So we practiced the appropriate positions and how to grab both wrists of the defender from a static position from the back.

The aikidoka start to look a bit worn due to the intense heat and the tiring nights in the second dojo (pub). We keep going though with not much less enthusiasm.

This training was my favourite so far. Although we always practiced these things in Fujita Shihan's seminars, I wasn't at a level then that would have allowed me to understand his teachings. As Elsner sensei explained, though, some of the information arrived at my head as some kind of enlightment. He showed and explained the same principles so clearly. But let's see what the techniques were:

The evening training on day 3 of the camp went as usual: it was built upon what we had learned in previous trainings in the camp. The training was mainly about katame waza: ikkyo, nikyo and sankyo.

We did a couple of different techniques to warm up: kokyuho, gyaku kotegaeshi, kokyunage. We paid particular attention to the soto irimi and uchi irimi steps.

The second day of the training camp included trainings both in the morning and in the afternoon. The session in the morning started with a weapons trainining, it was followed by a thorough warm-up, and then there was a higher-speed training. Unfortunately, I had to work so I could not attend this session on Tuesday. The other reason for allowing myself to skip this training was that the morning trainings are usually stamina and fitness-building trainings, so I will probably stick with reporting what happens during the afternoon trainings which tend to be more technical and analytical.

In this post I am going to discuss the relationship between aikido techniques and the concept of self defence, and – finally – I will also touch upon the effectiveness of techniques.

The next aspect of self defence that still does not need to end with executing a technique, but that is a very important basic principle of aikido, and no technique can be done without it, is getting out of the line. What does that mean?

During the first years of my aikido studies I kept looking for aikido videos in the online world. I couldn't find many but there were a couple of them that made me think and wonder. One of these was a jujinage (I hope it's the correct name) I talked about before, and another one is to be discussed in this post.

After a long break I'm writing again to add to this blog my thoughts inspired by the discussion at one of our videos in Youtube. The main point of the discussion is: which martial art is better, which one is more effective in real life situations.