video

Sometimes an ukemi is not performed the best way... Ukemi without using the arms is not the easiest one, that's why it's usually not recommended to beginners. If you want to try it, fold your hands, go down to shikko dachi and start rolling forward. You will see that it's harder to roll this way, but rolling without the use of the hands can come handy sometimes (think icy roads and some big china vase in your hands).

Does aikido work in the street? What would it be like to send an aikido master out to deal with the bad guys? I'm not sure whether we will get any answers to these questions but I definitely want to watch a couple of episodes of how Steven Seagal behaves as a police officer.

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.

There is a film by director Akira Kurosawa that is very interesting to watch: Rashomon (1950).  There were two main things I noticed when watching it:

Many people criticise aikido for being too soft (and many love it just because of that). Others watch Steven Seagal films and say that aikido is brutal (and many would love to start aikido because of that). Now, is it soft or hard?

Last week I was browsing my friends' profiles and groups on Facebook when I noticed that a 6th dan Japanese master would be visiting England and he would take a training which would be attended by one of my friends as well. Unfortunately, we also had a training that day so I thought it was better to go to my own training and perhaps watch videos of the training by the Japanese Sensei later. Fortunately though, I was still able to attend one of his classes...

There was a training plan. There were two parts of the training([A],[B]) . Could I finish with what I had planned? Keep reading to find out :).

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.

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.

I know that how to put on the hakama is usually not the concern of beginners. However, there are aikido organisations where all the beginners, or beginner women only, can wear hakama so the following video might be of interest to them.

In the following video I show the way I put on my hakama. The video demonstrates one possible way to put on your hakama. There exist several other methods as well. The following is a way that works for me and that I've been using since I can wear hakama. It has never fallen off me with tying it up like this.