Basic aikido done by advanced aikidoka

Rob and NewBuddy (sorry - I'm bad with names for the first while) and Vincent showed up an hour or so early and worked on some judo. Looked like they mostly did uchikomi and newaza randori.

In aiki class we worked on the heart of aiki randori - at least the heart of the kind we saw in my previous post on randori. If you watch closely in these videos, the players that have good success do not stop to attempt to smear every single attacker. More often than not, tori evades the attack, brushes uke off, and moves on to another attacker. The aiki-brushoff - kokyunage - the breath throw.

We worked on the evasions of tegatana then worked on the aiki basic instinct (evade+hands up) with partners then we turned the aiki basic instinct into various forms of the aiki brushoff. We finished by looking at the first four releases from the point of view of actually forcing uke to let go and then brushing him off.

For the cool ninja technique we explored a version of ryotedori kotegaeshi chained into ushiroate. This demonstrated that the complex, "cool" stuff in aikido is just made up of the fundamentals - the aiki basic instinct and the aiki brushoff. So the most advanced expression of aikido (randori) is really just a re-arranged form of the most basic aikido building blocks. Reminds me of a quote:

"There are no advanced aikido techniques - only basic aikido done by advanced aikidoka."