Rolling the ball

Saturday morning John Kirby worked with us on a concept called "rolling the ball" This is apparently an exercise of FBI origin that they use for moving through a crowd efficiently. It involves light pushes, blending, and moving with the flux in the crowd. It is a fun exercise that has some interesting aiki implications. From there we worked on techniques that emphasized the pushing nature of aikido as opposed to pulling motions. We played a little bit with the idea of doing hikiotoshi (the "pulling drop") with a pushing body structure, then we explored aikinage (iriminage) with the idea of the hand on the head being both a push and a sensor to let us know when uke is trying to change the equation on us.