aikido

The Star Wars movies have a lot to do with Japan and, through the Force, with aikido. This post is about Star Wars and how it is connected to aikido and Eastern culture.

I thought I embed here an old video study of mine where I compare mae ukemi with ushiro ukemi.

I took a mae ukemi recording and reversed it so it became ushiro ukemi (with one slight difference, I wonder if anyone finds it ;) ). Then I took the ushiro ukemi recording and made mae ukemi out of it.

The reasons for practicing aikido (i.e. following the Way of Aiki) can be very different for various people. I do it for one reason nad perhaps you do it for another.

I found a picture the other day which made me laugh. I haven't found many similarly funny martial art photos recently so I thought I should share this one, and I also have a 'riddle' for you.

If you can tell me what is the connection between the picture's martial art and aikido we will send you our soon-to-be-published e-book titled "Quick aid for aikido beginners" before the general publication date.

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.