To maeotoshi and beyond...

Tonight we worked tegatana emphasizing the coordination of the pushing hand with the weighting of the front foot in the first turn. We call this idea 'same-hand-stuck-foot.' Then we moved into hanasu looking at how that same idea crops up in #1, 2, 5, 6, and 8. It occurs in the others too - we just chose these particular ones to look at. From here we went into nijusan and checked out maeotoshi and shihonage.

Our chain work consisted of chaining the nijusan version of tenkai kote hineri to ushiroate, aigamaeate, aikinage, and back into maeotoshi. It was pretty cool to work on this neighborhood of techniques and see how it came right back around to the maeotoshi we'd started with. We seemed to emphasize the idea of hiding in shikaku.

For the cool ninja technique of the night we did the two yokomenuchi kokyunage throws from gokata. These led to the suwari gyakugamaeate from sankata, which is really an instance of the same thing. You know, the three suwari from the beginning of sankata would really be worth a month or two of intense study and repetition.