Working up to a cool scoop

Aiki with Patrick M., Kel, and JP:

• Ukemi emphasizing matching the line across the back with the line of the fall and practicing slowly enough that you can catch errors.
• Walking emphasizing the third pushing motion, the first turning motion, and the last turning motion. Especially the idea of matching the rise and fall of the center with the rise and fall of the arm and using the arm to clear a path for the center to sweep into.
  Hanasu #1-4 emphasizing watching for uke switching from ayumiashi to tsugiashi just before the attack and using the first offbalance to force uke to shift back to ayumiashi.
• Chain #7 working our way through kaitennage, hikitaoshi, oshitaoshi, and tenkai kotehineri with special emphasis on the idea of switching from push to pull and from front to rear of uke and synchronizing hands with feet.
• Cool ninja technique of the night was a variant of kohonage similar to the fifth standing technique in the following film. This was definately cool - but it blew everyone's minds so we went back to the zero-distance tenkai kotehineri from sankata. It conveyed the same idea and made more sense to everyone.
  
  

Ukigoshi and gearing ratio

Considering ukigoshi, if you look at uke and tori from above you can imagine them as gears turning together. One typically has to turn faster and farther than the other, thus creating different forms of throws. For example, sometimes tori turns a lot while uke doesn’t turn much, creating the big hip throws like ogoshi and koshiguruma. In other instances, tori turns a little as uke spins around him, creating different hip throws, like ukigoshi and haraigoshi. Most often it is some middle condition, with tori and uke each making some part of the turn. This variation in the turning speed of the two ‘gears’ is called gearing ratio, and you can get more info on that at wikipedia.

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With that in mind, you can define about two basic forms of any koshinage:

• Catch uke stepping forward. Step to the side just as his front foot plants, pulling him into offbalance. Turn your hips backward into uke with a backstep, loading him and throwing.
• Catch uke stepping forward. Step to the side just as his front foot plants, pulling him into offbalance. Pull uke’s lapel side 90 degrees to get him to step with the other leg. Load him onto your hips and throw as he turns the corner.

In the first form, tori makes all the turn as uke hovers in offbalance. This is the form classically taught in uchikomi, with tori pulling with the left arm and turning in to catch with the right arm. This is also the form taught in amateur wrestling – called something like ‘the back-step’. In the second form above, uke makes part the turn as tori makes the other part of the turn. As tori is turning to the left, uke is stepping with his left foot, taking up the slack.

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Both forms are decent beginning ways to learn the thing. I alternate between them in my teaching. I often teach the back-step technique as kubinage instead of ukigoshi or ogoshi – but that’s just a preference thing. There are many variations, but they mostly tend to fall in a spectrum between these two basic forms. In randori situations you have to find the right middle-ground between these two basic forms on the fly. That is just part of the art of the thing.

Right hand of the Devil

Now this is fun! But there is a lesson in this for us. Here is a great example of why you don't let someone within ma-ai distance if you can help it. In this range their hands can move faster than you can react. I figured Dojo Rat and Nathan would enjoy this clip...

Taking over the world!

YEAH, Baybee! I'm in the big leagues now! In addition to having a few of my articles picked up by Aikido Journal over the last couple of months, I've just now had an article picked up by Reuters through Blogburst. Black Belt Mama told us a week or two ago that she'd entered syndication the same way and I was jealous of her well-earned, fabulous success. Now I'm in the BBM syndicated super martial arts blogger club. Just the latest step in our top-secret plot for world domination!

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If you want to see my articles that have been picked up and re-published so far, they are:

• I am thankful for my first martial arts lesson
• At the risk of being called a heretic...
• Attack of the living dead
• The best self-defense there is

SMART Goals

In a previous article I wrote about re-thinking your goals whenever you find techniques are not working for you. When this happens, you are likely thinking wrongly about how to approach the techniques. Specifically, you may be trying to accomplish the wrong goals. Instead of trying harder physically, re-think your goals.

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The overall goal in aikido is about self-defense. This does not mean beating someone else up, rather surviving violence intact. As Mike Denton puts it…

Aikido is not about 'winning' or finishing your opponent off, but rather about being able to disengage from a chaotic and violent situation as quickly and safely as possible.

With that overall objective in mind, it is possible to define better performance goals. An acronym that is used in business and personal coaching is SMART.

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A SMART goal is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound.

• Specific – what exactly would be an acceptable outcome to you? What do you not really care about? Your flexibility or slack in the way you do the techniques exists among the things that you don’t really care about. You can’t sacrifice tactically if that means you don’t accomplish the essential outcomes but you can sacrifice tactically in the areas in which you don’t really care about the outcome.
• Measurable – how can you tell if you have achieved your goal? Is your measure objective or subjective?
• Attainable – Your essential goals must be things that are within your power to control. Something that is possible to practice safely.
• Realistic – Your essential goals must be things that are within the realm of normal physics and biomechanics. It is smarter to base your essential goals on the natural rather than super-natural (regardless of what you believe about the super-natural). Your goal should promote tactics that reliably generalize to most of the population of potential attackers. Your goal should be based on probabilities instead of possibilities.
• Time-Bound – You have to be able to execute tactics to move you toward your goals within real time. This means that your goals should promote tactics that make use of natural motion and gross motor skills within the opponent’s OODA loop.

Example: Kotegaeshi as a big fall. If tori gets the idea that in order to succeed at kotegaeshi, uke has to take a big fall that looks just like the instructor’s model, this is not SMART. It is not specific because you don’t know how big a fall uke has to take for tori to be a success. It is not measurable because you never know if the fall you just saw uke take was big enough. It is not attainable because it is not within tori’s power to control how uke reacts to the throw. It is not realistic because it is totally outside our experience to think that you can throw something as heavy as a person with that type of motion, and it is not time-bound because it often requires relatively precise leverage on the wrist and you are forced to plant your feet to exert into the throw – stopping your motion and taking you out of uke’s OODA loop.

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So, kotegaeshi as a big throw is a recipe for frustration. Without a compliant, skilled uke tori will never make that throw match his ideal of it.

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So, how do you make a SMART goal for kotegaeshi…

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Specific: tori should remain safe throughout the whole motion and uke should end up in a condition of unbalance with his arm turning outward in a gaeshi motion. Uke might fall down because of this but tori doesn’t really care if or how. Measurable: did tori get hit? is uke’s balance broken (this is a tough one to measure objectively)? Is uke’s arm turning outward? Attainable: staying safe, getting kuzushi, and holding uke’s wrist twisted are within tori’s ability to a great extent. These actions are largely related to things tori does as opposed to how uke acts or reacts. Realistic: it doesn’t take supernatural thinking to expect uke to stay safe, get an offbalance, and hold uke’s arm. Timebound: now, instead of exerting hard to throw uke thru the air, tori can relax and keep moving, acting to stay within uke’s ooda loop. These goals can be accomplished with natural, gross motor tactics.

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So, defining kotegaeshi as “tori safe, uke offbalance, holding uke’s wrist turned out” is SMARTer than defining it as some subjectively large fall out of a wrist-twist.

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The moral of the story is the same as in the previous post, “The mind drives the body. The body obeys the mind. Change your mind and you will change your performance.”

I am thankful for my first martial arts lesson

Recently I read an autobiography of Harry Truman. Perhaps not #1 on your list of Must Reads, but this was really interesting. I got it on a library discard shelf for 10 cents. You can probably find it under its original name, Mister Citizen, but it was also republished as Harry Truman Speaks his Mind. Reading his reminiscences of his childhood put me in the mood to write a childhood reminiscence. I'm sure y'all are not interested in 99.9% of my childhood, but this brought to mind my first martial arts lesson...

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I was about 16 years old and, as I've said before, had no clue about what martial arts was about. I'd never watched any martial arts movie or even heard of Bruce Lee. A buddy got me into TKD by telling me it was, "like boxing but you kick people." Well, I still remember one of my first couple of lessons. Instructor, Pat Little, had us standing after a workout one day and he told us to hold our arms out to the sides, make fists, and imagine that we were holding buckets in each hand. Heavy buckets. Five gallon buckets filled with water. We were told to imagine the weight as unbearable. He walked around us talking to each of us as we held our arms out. Pretty soon we were all convinced that there was no way we could hold up our arms. One by one we began to surrender and collapse.

After a couple of minutes rest and shaking it off, we repeated the exercise, but this time the verbal cues were different. We were to imagine strings tied to our arms holding them up. Imagine that our arms were hollow and weightless, filled with helium. Cool breezes blowing upward helping us hold. Soft pillows propped under our arms so that it was no effort to hold them up at all. You guessed it. We all sustained the posture much, much, much longer the second time.

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So, what was it about this simple, almost trite, demonstration that was so memorable, even so many years later? This was perhaps the first time I'd heard the moral of this exercise and had it so clearly linked to a practical, physical thing: "The mind drives the body. The body serves the mind. Change your mind and you change what you are physically able to do."

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And that is one of the most amazing things about the martial arts. Learning to change how you think about your circumstances in order to change the circumstances in your favor.

If it isn't easy, re-think it

Rory at Chiron just published a great article about the attitudinal difference between amateur martial artists and professional use-of-force folks (Rambling About Amateurs; Tuesday, November 20, 2007).
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He makes the point that the professional and the amateur in any field think differently about their domain of practice. This reminds me of something the late, great, Mac McNease told me, “If there is something in judo that isn’t easy for you to do then you’re not thinking about it correctly.” I thought that was profound and I still think it was perhaps the most profound lesson I ever received about Judo. It might even apply more in aikido than in judo.

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In aikido, if you disregard ukemi for the sake of argument, then there is nothing athletic about the system. If you are able to walk at a normal pace and push and pull with your hands hard enough to shut a heavy door then you are sufficiently athletic to do 100% of aikido. Virtually every adult on earth can do good aikido effectively, and if you can’t then you’re not thinking about it correctly.

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I’ve found over the years since that lesson from Mac and after I realized that there is nothing athletic about aikido, that it almost purely a mind game. Mental and attitudinal factors, as Rory puts it, are of primary importance - maybe even sole importance. All the magical aikido is simply a physical reflection of getting your attitude straight and getting your mind working right.

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So, if you are working on something and can’t do it, start re-thinking your goals and strategies. A lot of times you are working toward a faulty goal – something that is out of your control anyway. How are you applying the fundamental principles to your strategies to move toward your objectives? Is there one piece of the thing that is not working right? If so, work slower, break it into smaller and smaller pieces until you find something you can reproduce then start re-building it toward the whole thing. Is there a point in the process where the pieces don’t fit back together? If so, take it apart again and re-think it.

If it is not easy, you’re thinking about it wrong!

Re-think it.

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Stay tuned for a follow-up article about how to get your goals straightened out in aikido.

Jumpy jelly leg syndrome

In aikido we are always talking about relaxing and falling into our movements, but I think this can be taken too far at times and can lead to some stability problems that I'll call the jumpy jelly leg syndrome. This can lead to problems in your judo too. Let me give you some background.

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In order to take a step, you stand in an upright posture with knees slightly bent and feet under you. Disengage one leg - just turn it off - and your center of mass starts falling in that direction. Then you turn the leg back on under your hips and recover the leg that you left behind so that it is under your hips too. You have taken one sliding (tsugiashi) step.

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The problem comes right as the leading foot hits the ground. If you are only thinking to turn it on to keep your center vertically off the ground then your side-to-side and front-to-back muscles in your leg and hips and abs and back are left in an indeterminate state with your brain not really telling them to do anything at all. If you happen to be bumped right when the leading foot hits the ground then you can get this hyperactive reflex in these muscles that causes you to rock and bounce a few times before you can get your balance back. I'm sure you've encountered this if youve done randori with someone really good. They touch you and you either stand there bouncing spastically or you jump your own butt right out of the ground.

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How to fix the jumpy jelly leg syndrome? Give these otherwise-indeterminate muscles something to do. Doesn't especially matter what - just giving them a little tonus shuts down a lot of that bounce. For instance, you can:

• Think about pulling yourself forward with the front leg just as it hits the ground. This turns on all the muscles in the back of the leg.
• Think about tightening your thighs together to snap your recovery leg back under you. This turns on the thigh adductor (groin) muscles in the front leg.

Whatever scheme you use in your mind to get your legs to do this trick, your goal is to recover your rear leg back under you as quickly as possible and make your front leg active in the process. I often tell myself during walking kata to snap the recovery leg back under my hips.

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So how can you practice this? I say practice it in several different ways under different conditions. For instance...

• Concentrate on this phenomenon especially during the first three or so moves in the walking kata. When you get good at that, spread it out into the pushing moves in the walking kata and from there, apply it to the turns.
• Concentrate on this phenomenon when doing the nagenokata version of okuriashibarai. The side-to-side motion with a partner should be a great place to play with this. Have your partner bump you as the lead foot hits and see how different stepping strategies help or hurt.
• Do the foot-sweep-to-control drill with a partner walking together up and down the mat bumping and sweeping deashibarai every third step. Here uke gets to play with stepping strategies just like in the side-to-side motion, but tori also gets to concentrate on putting a little drag on the front foot right as it hits on the third step. This should make the ball of the foot drag back toward tori ever so slightly right as the foot hits.

Try it and let me know your mileage. Down with the jumpy jelly legs!

Mokuren Dojo Martial Artist Hall of Fame

About a week ago I asked my readers as well as members of Budoseek, E-Budo, and the Convocation Forum for their opinions on the greatest martial artist they'd ever personally met. I intended it as an informal deal, so there was not much effort to specify rules or conditions or eliminate the inevitable bias. As could be expected, a couple of my students said that I was the greatest martial artist ever (At least I've got them trained to get that right). But seriously - I don't really think that I'm all that - certainly not on par with any of the geniuses or amazing athletes I've met, but to avoid getting into an endless process of censoring folks' opinions, I left my name in there.

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And when you look at this list I think you'll see that this is part of the charm of it. It is not rife with the same dozen names you hear constantly in conjunction with the martial arts. There are some relatively unknown names here right alongside the names of living legends. I think there's probably a lesson in that. Done this way, there are sure to be names on the list that any given reader has never heard of and who it would be good to do a little research on. I've done simple Google and Wikipedia searches on most of the names that I didn't know and have gotten a few good lessons out of it.

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So, without further ado, I present to you The Mokuren Dojo Martial Artist Hall of Fame.

• Aleksander Karelin
• Bill Pogue
• Billy Hong
• Bryce Lumpkin
• Chip Wright
• Chuck Norris
• Dan Anderson
• Dave Camarillo
• Desmond Jackson
• Don Angier
• John Usher
• Ed Johnson
• Ed Saenz
• Henry Copeland
• Jhoon Rhee
• Jim Thompson
• John Waldrop
• Bruce Gunderson
• Todd Keane
• Kuda Shinshi
• Larry Lunn
• Leon Jay
• Masayuki Shimabukuro
• Mike Belote
• Mike DePasquale, Jr.
• Mike Martello
• Mike Miles
• Patrick Parker
• Raffy Pambuan
• Randy Couture
• Takahiko Ishikawa
• Tri Thong Dang
• Vincent Fernando
• William Hayes
• Zenpo Shimabukuro

The heroes of judo

Sign up for a judo class at Mokuren Dojo and you too can learn to be this tough and suave.



Thought y'all would enjoy that - particularly following Dojo Rat's week of Old School posts.

Mike Huckabee and Chuck Norris

Anyone who has read much of this blog will recognize that it is pretty close to apolitical. That is deliberate. But this I couldn't resist. I don't know anything about Mike Huckabee but kudos to him for coming up with something this funny and creative!

Jackson among the most dangerous of cities

Morgan Quitno (CQ Press) has just released its newest index of the most and least dangerous cities in the country. Thank God no local cities were absolute bottom of the barrel, but acording to this list compiled from FBI statistics, there are several cities around here in which friends of mine need to watch out for themselves. Out of 378 cities, all of the following were in the top quartile of most dangerous cities in the nation.

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  Jackson MS - ranked 356 (and that's much worse than last year)
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  Baton Rouge, LA - ranked 351 (only marginally safer than Jackson)
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  Houston, TX - ranked 335
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  Dallas, TX - ranked 345
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  Orlando FL - ranked 368
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  Oklahoma City - ranked 304
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  Lafayette, LA - ranked 289
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  New Orleans - ranked 314 (much safer than Jackson)

and the 6th most dangerous city in the nation...

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  Birmingham, AL - ranked 373 (but we already knew that)

Considering that we already knew that Jackson is a perilous place, if you live anywhere around Mokuren Dojo (Southwest Mississippi and adjoining Louisiana), it might behoove you to get some training in a proven, reliable self-protection system like our aikido. Remember, when it comes to self-defense - a little bit of something is better than a whole lot of nothing!

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If you are interested in self-defense in Southwest Mississippi or thereabouts, please don't hesitate to drop me a note at my email You can find the address in my profile at the bottom of this page.

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UPDATE: Oops! In my rush to get this important info out to y'all I got some of my numbers wrong. I've got them fixed now, and the newly corrected numbers didn't change any of my conclusions. If you want to see my source, check out this listing.

Amazing flow and continuity in Chain #3

Aiki with Kel

• Tegatana several times with emphasis on getting little details right.
• Hanasu 2-3 times as preview/warmup for chains.
• Chain #3 including wakigatame and kotegaeshi. This is what we spent the bulk of our time on and it is the thing we were wowed over. Release #3 has this amazing, light, continuous remarkable lack of feeling when done right - particularly when done inchain form instaed of hanasu kata form. This release #3 really seems to be the prototype for the correct releasing feeling.
• Part of chains #5 and #7 into various forms of kotemawashi, kaitennage, udegatame, or wakigatame.

November kohaku shiai

Today we had ur five-event shiai for the month. We had some of the same games as last time and a couple of new events. The five events included crab war, two-belt tugs, crawling man, Amazon wrestling, and newaza randori for 3-second pins. This month's club champions were:

• 1st place - Mason Alford (10 wins)
• 2nd place - Knox Parker (6 wins)
• 3rd place - Gavin Jarrell (3 wins)

I was especially pleased that 2-3 of the kids got the hang of tapping out of trouble. For the past couple of months we've had occasional bickering, whinking, and hurt feelings because someone would smear their partner and the partner was frustrated because he couldn't figure out how to get out. Today they were trying and fighting hard but they were also intelligently using tapping-out to avoid that frustrated feeling. Progress. They are also learning good ukemi, as evidenced by Mason launching Whit into a great back fall with a single leg pick - and not getting Whit's brains spread all over the mat. Progress.

The kids have the most fun and get the most competition time doing crawling man and Amazon wrestling, So I figure to work on skills related to these two games for the next month. At each class I want to especially work on the following with everyone, but especially Whit and Emma:

• Japanese pass into side or rear bearhug
• osotogari into kesagatame
• crossface turnover into munegatame