One of the things that I have wanted to work on for a while is aikiage - this weird trick for amplifying or projecting uke upward into a rise so that you can subsequently drop them. Aikiage makes an occasional appearance in the Tomiki curriculum, although we have never called it by this name until we started playing around with some Daito-Ryu folks. In the Tomiki curriculum it is seen in several of the Koryu no kata as a suwariwaza ryotedori attack often followed by a sukuinage or kokyunage or shihonage.
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Several years ago, one of my instructors came up to me when I was sitting in a chair and said, "Let me show you this cool thing." and he proceeded to do aikiage to me with me seated in the chair and him standing over me. It was a very minimal motion (nearly invisible) and I literally exploded upward out of the chair to end up standing on my tiptoes in front of him. This trick amazed and confounded me for several years (no, he wouldn't tell me how he did it - just said it was "ki").
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But this past weekend I got to play with a couple of folks with some insight into aiki-age and between the three of us we sorta got to where we could emulate that upward projection. It was nowhere near as sophisticated as I'd seen from our instructor several years ago, but the motion was happening and I can see how it could be worked on to make it better.
Photo courtesy of Joshua Smith
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Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com
