Northern Wind

Here's the last little video I have at the moment. This one talks a bit about kote gaeshi and some of the countering ideas we've come up with, including a nice one at the end from buddy Christian Lamson. He ended up doing this on a hapless, visiting aikido practitioner who wouldn't quit cranking on his wrist, despite the fact that Christian repeatedly tried to explain why it was a bad idea. Pretty sweet =) One thing I've noticed, though, about these videos is that I only sort of gloss over each technique as I talk about them, and I wish I had demonstrated them (without yapping) several times to give the viewer a better perspective. Guess I'm still a little self-conscious about putting myself out there into cyberspace. On one hand, I suppose I've been doing this long enough to have something unique to say, but I also can't help but remember how small my body of knowledge is compared to one of those 25+ years guys. Just bare that in mind when watching this st...

Skipping around a bit, these are a few ideas we fiddled around with regarding shiho nage and sumi otoshi.

Lo, and behold, I've finally put together some of the videos I've thrown together regarding aikido ura waza, or countering techniques. Bare in mind, that if tori honestly has the technique, then he's got it. But if he rushes it, tries to make it happen, then these ideas may have a chance. This particular video covers ude gaeshi and ude hineri.

Last month, the overall "theme" if you will for all aikido classes was "randori", and I chose to explore the ura waza techniques covered in both the usual forms but also the experimental stuff covered in last year's shochugeiko. This month, the dojo has moved on to koryu dai ni kata, and we're following suit in the morning classes, which means that I didn't get a chance to play with some of the last techniques in junana hon kata. At least, not in regular class. I've a few occasions no to play around with some things outside of that, and I thought I'd jot them down here to finish out this series of posts and if anything make a record of what we found. Where did we leave off? Oh, yeah, kote gaeshi . Wee covered ideas regarding tenkai kote gaeshi in early classes and posts, so we'll skip that and move on to shiho nage . There is, of course, the classical counter of doing shiho nage right back to uke, which works pretty darn well, thank you very...

We covered counters to waki gatame (#10) in some of the earlier techniques, and countering kote hineri seemed pretty much the same as oshi taoshi (although, if I've missed something, by all means, let me know!), so we moved on to kote gaeshi . There are probably as many ways to counter kote gaeshi as there are ukes, but here are just a few that we've discovered. Before we get into any of them, however, it's important to understand one fundamental element that relates to pretty much all of these (except maybe one). Actually, the first thing to remember is that, with any of these counters, if tori does everything right, you're pretty much toast, end of story. Remember that we're working under the presumption that tori goofed and maybe sped up or tried to force something to happen. With that little caveat out of the way, let's talk about the base for all of these counters. Changing the kote gaeshi angle I like to illustrate this right up front with a little dr...

We've been having more fore fun with aikido ura waza . We went over what's covered in the KUBK forums from last years shochugeiko in regard to gyakugamae ate and ushiro ate ; gedan ate, we sort of covered when we encountered it with shomen ate , and we looked at oshi taoshi conditions with aigamae ate . Which brought us to ude gaeshi, #7. Now, in the traditional Tomiki ryu randori no kata no ura waza some of the techniques from the 17 (randori no kata) are omitted, namely, 7, 9, 10, 11, 15, 16 and 17. Frankly, I have no idea why (in fact, for various reasons, our dojo has only been looking at this kata for a very short period of time). But, that doesn't stop us from experimenting! So on we went with ude gaeshi . With this one, we utilized the same turning of the outside foot as we did in our particular version of the counter to oshi taoshi, but with two variations: 1) A large, extending turning motion. As uke begins to try and coil your arm, you basically do a #1 release...

We've been playing with ura waza (counter techniques) in aikido recently. There are, in Tomiki-ryu aikido, at least, ten techniques with one counter each (you can see an explanation of each here on the Kaze Uta Budo Kai forum ). Last summer, during the shochugeiko, however, we all spent much of the time experimenting with additional counters, or rather, counter-to-the-counter-to-the-counter, and so on, which was a really enlightening experience. Fortunately, much of what was developed was recorded and is also available on the forum . Today, we worked on aigamae ate and mostly what's presented here: Basically, there's 1) aigamae ate , countered by 2) picking off the hand to oshi taoshi , which is then countered by a sharp turn into 3) tenkan oshi taoshi . After that, we found a few interesting possibilities you might play with. First off, we had one pair pick the hand off the wrong way. Well, not the "wrong" way, exactly, but maybe a less efficient way. Instead of ...