Beginning and ending kihon

There is this practice seen mostly in pre-war aikido guys, like Tomiki and Shioda, and their students - the practice of measuring ma-ai by crossing handblades prior to practicing a technique.  This practice is not seen as much (at least in this form) in post-war aikido folks, and I have not seen video of Osensei doing this, but Doshu Moriteru Ueshiba talks some in his videos about the idea of precisely setting up each practice condition.

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I suspect that the practice of measuring ma-ai is currently in disfavor because of some misuses or misunderstandings related to it, like the zombie attack.  But it is a valuable training tool, when used properly.  This sort of practice is valuable for improving kamae, ma-ai, metsuke, and zanshin

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How we were taught to begin techniques - prior to practicing a kihon (basic form) technique,

• Uke and tori stand in front of each other in a proper stance (kamae) - whatever that is according to their teacher Tomiki-students and Shioda-students prefer different basic kamae. 
• Uke and tori extend their lead arms, nearly straight, with fingers touching or hands slightly crossed. This defines the basic operational distance for kihon (ma-ai).
• Then both partners lower their arms and look at each other for a moment.  This allows both partners to get used to judging ma-ai distance visually instead of by measuring.
• When tori is ready for the attack, he establishes the visual connection (metsuke).  Different folks will tell you to do this eye-control differently, but we were told for tori to watch uke's center while measuring and when ready for the attack, make eye contact and maintain it.
• Then uke attacks.

How we were taught to end kihon - 

• Uke falls.
• Tori follows uke into a lock or pin (unless the throw is a projection)
• Whenever possible, tori lands uke either face-down or side-lying facing away from tori
• Tori places a knee and two hands on uke, chocking him and keeping him under control.
• Tori maintains as straight a posture as possible and looks around for more attackers.
• Uke submits
• Tori backs out of ma-ai moving toward uke's head instead of his feet.
• Uke turns to face tori, gets his feet between him and tori, and gets up moving away from tori.

Again, this applies primarily to kihon (basic forms) of techniques.  You will want to get some variation on these beginnings and endings, and perhaps even drop it from most of your practice once you've done it for a while.  But I think if you implement these scripts for beginning and ending kihon, you will get  some additional practice at kamae, ma-ai, metsuke, and zanshin.


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____________________
Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com

Get some jo in your aikido

I read it somewhere - not sure where - that the old jodo guys said that it was relatively unimportant to correct students on the things that go on in the middle of the kata.  He was saying that the really important thing to get right was the beginning and end of the kata.

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This jives to a large degree with what little teaching I've had from SMR jojutsu guys - they were very peculiar about the beginnings and the ends, and they seemed perhaps slightly less interested in the in-between actions than I was.

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They were emphasizing principle over tactics - the intangibles - ma-ai, kamae, metsuke, zanshin.  By paying close attention to the beginning and to the end of the encounter you get reinforcement in these intangibles.

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You see this same sort of attention to beginnings and ends in some of the pre-war aikido folks (like Tomiki and Shioda), and perhaps a little less in some of the post-war guys, though I have heard Doshu Moriteru Ueshiba speak on his videos about the importance of precision in setting up the conditions before each technique.

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In experienced jo guys there is a psychological (or dare I say, "psychic") pressure between them, as if there were terabytes of interaction being beamed back and forth between their eyes.  Because of the extreme consequences (jo or sword embedded in skull), neither partner dares break that line-of-sight communication until they see how it all works out.  I have found as an observer, it is easy to get drawn into and lost in that psychic communication between two good partners.  Often I have to make a concerted effort to watch their feet instead of their faces, or I won't know what happened after they are through with a kata.  

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There is value in carrying this type of practice with you when doing aikido taijutsu - (improvement of ma-ai, kamae, metsuke, and zanshin) but there is also potentially stupid tangents (e.g. the zombie attack, the no-touch ki masters), so beware the stupidity, but be aware of the potential value to your practice.

Want to discuss this blog post?
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____________________
Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com

Gazing at far-distant mountains

People occasionally look upward - at a stop light or at a road sign, or occasionally at a startling cloud or sunset, but for the most part we keep our worlds within about 4-5 feet of the ground.  Especially if you work at a desk or at a computer.  We look downward a lot and this becomes habitual.

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There is a great practice in jo and sword work to help counter this - when working solo kihon or suburi, you want to find a reference point in the distance - upward from the horizon.  Trees and the corners of buildings often work nicely for vertical strikes like menuchi and honteuchi.  Focus your eyes on these reference points in the distance and pretend that your jo/sword is a giant paintbrush and paint a stripe down the tree or down the distant corner over and over.

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The old dead guys referred to this as enzan no metsuke - gazing at the far-distant mountains, and it is an important practice in creating a good mindset as well as proper posture.

Photo courtesy of Brice Canonne

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____________________
Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com

Cowcatcher and vision

You ever notice when driving a car, that if you turn your head sharply to one side, your car begins to drift that direction?  That is how famous author, Stephen King, got run over and nearly killed - a driver was distracted by his dog in the back of his van, turned around to deal with the dog, and drifted off the road into King.  The moral of the story - your body (and your car) goes where your head (or your vision) goes.

In a conflict, it is often best to face the apparent danger and get your hands into the center of the conflict.  From this position, your hands tend to get in the way of incoming attacks.  Plus, the distance from the center of the conflict to where you have to put your hands to make a technique is usually very minimal.

But how do you figure out what is the center of the conflict?  The only way is to point your vision directly at (or through) your opponent's centerline.  Then your line of vision defines the center of the conflict.  Then just put your hands on that centerline.

Try this in randori for a while...  Put your vision and your hands in the center of the relationship.  Then try looking away and/or moving your hands away from the center and judge how difficult the opponent is to deal with.  I think you'll find that keeping your vision and your hands in the center of the relationship pretty much universally improves your performance.

In my class, we tend to call this the "cowcatcher" principle.  Check out this interesting video of another interpretation of the same idea - just implemented a little differently.

____________________

Patrick Parker

www.mokurendojo.com

Properties of the principles of aikido

It's pretty common to hear instructors talk about the principles of aikido being more important than the techniques. The techniques are just instantiations of principle. The principles are what you actually do and the technique is what happens. But here are a couple of properties of the principles that some of you may or may not have thought about.

• The principles are mutually-reinforcing. Becoming a little better at any one of them makes all of the other principles work better. When you find something wrong with your techniques, you can almost randomly pick a principle to focus on and the technique will start working better.
• The principles are an ordered set. While the greatest masters of aikido might do all the principles all the time, the rest of us peons generally benefit from getting the principles in a certain order.

There might be some disagreement about the exact order, but in general, you want to get the major principles of aikido working in the following order. If you find a problem with a technique, then start with relaxation, then posture, and so on trying to repair the technique...

• relaxation
• shizentai (posture)
• metsuke (eye control)
• ashi sabaki (footwork)
• ki-musubi (synchronization with the opponent)
• ma-ai (personal space and timing)
• move offline (the aiki-brushoff)
• orenaite (unbendable arm) and kite (ki-hands)
• kuzushi (off-balancing the opponent)
• atemi (striking the opponent down)
• osaekomi (suppressing the opponent)
• zanshin (remaining aware)

Notice that kuzushi, atemi, and osaekomi (the majority of what you think of as aikido) are at the end of the list. There is a whole pile of things you need to set in order before you worry too much about offbalancing the other guy or hitting him or holding him down.

Ma-ai, metsuke, and randori

Aikido with Patrick M.

• ROM
• Tegatana with emphasis on the extra rise at the end of the turns
• hanasu and shomenate with emphasis on ma-ai and metsuke
• hand randori
  

Saccadic suppression in aikido

A while back I had a very popular set of articles on eye contact in martial arts. You can find them here and here. Several of my readers gave points of view that differed somewhat. I think what is happening here is we are talking about part of the same phenomenon from different points of view (pun intended).

My contention is that you want to point your field of vision at the centerline of the opponent and keep it there, unshifting. My commentators bring up the point that peripheral vision works better and that we process better unconsciously when we are de-focussed instead of locked on a focal point.

We're talking about the same elephant here. You want to do both. you want to direct your field of vision on their centerline (perhaps nasion or suprasternal notch) and you also want to defocus into the "1000 yard stare" or " far mountain gaze" or "dead eyes" (whatever you want to call it).

Keeping your focal point fixed has a lot of advantages - see here and here, for instance, and here for the money article on the topic (it turns out that whenever you change your focal point you lose visual processing...)

De-focussing into "far mountain gaze" has additional benefits - see here and here.

Cool information, for those who want to take advantage of it - you just have to figure out how to work this into your training routine. It will make a huge difference, I promise.

You can find a set of great articles on eye control in martial arts here.

Gaze angle in multiple attacker randori

A few weekends ago I taught a seminar at Starkville and we talked about and worked on the importance of metsuke (proper gaze control). We demonstrated and gave some exercises to work on how to slow down the speed of the conflict by keeping the gaze angle constant on a fixed place on uke. In order to be able to do this when uke is facing away from us and in order to be ale to get that “far mountain gaze,” I told tori to always look through the center of mass of uke’s head, as if burning a hole with laser-vision. (Bet you didn't know that turkeys were masters of metsuke, but anyway...)

Chops made the observation that this change in perceptual speed is likely part of why multiple opponent randori is so fatiguing. We’re forced to switch gaze angle from one attacker to the next to keep track of them. Good catch, Chops. Sure enough, we do tend to screw ourselves up and wear ourselves out by switching back and forth from one uke to the next. I’ve been thinking about how to minimize or at least reduce these gaze shifts.
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Consider this article from a while back about tenkan ura forms (turning backward movement like in most of nijusan) giving us a wider view of what is going on around us before we commit to smearing uke. What if we can make use of this to reduce shifts in perspective. Let’s try this…

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Everybody in class gets an uke and finds a place on the mat. Uke stands still while tori fixes his gaze on uke and then walks around uke outside ma-ai keeping eyes burning right through the center of uke’s head. Pay attention to what you can see in your peripheral vision without ever changing gaze angle. Now do some techniques from nijusan keeping your eyes focused on the center of his head but attending to what you can see in your peripheral vision. Now add a second uke at walking speed and see if you are able to keep track of the uke you are not dealing with by making these tenkan ura motions.

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I think you will find that your peripheral vision is actually enhanced by this strategy. You see, peripheral vision only picks up motion – not shape. So a relatively motionless uke in your peripheral vision would be invisible to you. But by turning in a circle with eyes fixed on a point, we’re moving our field of vision without ever changing gaze angle, thus making everything in our peripheral vision move with respect to us. So we can see the second uke even better when we are turning backward.

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Try that out, Chops (and everyone else), and let me know how your mileage varies.

OODA and aikido

For a while, particularly since the seminar I taught in Starkville last Saturday, I've been talking and writing about metsuke (proper use of eye contact) during a conflict. It turns out that there is a model and a terminology that has already been in use for years dealing with some of what I've been talking about. It's called the OODA loop. OODA is an acronym for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act, the theory being that all actions are based on decisions which are predicated on observations that are filtered through our individual mental models (orientation). It turns out that the orient and decide stages usually take up the most time and you can even get stuck in a feedback loop in the early part of this model such that you never get to decide and act. You freeze up.

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I wrote in a couple of recent articles about the phenomenon of proper metsuke (eye contact or gaze control) seeming to slow combat down. I talked about an example training exercise in which two partners are doing randori with one constantly shifting his gaze back and forth from the partner. The partners find that the combat seems much slower to the man that properly uses metsuke and much, much faster to the man that is shifting his gaze. In OODA terminology, with a moving opponent, every time you change your gaze angle you create a completely new observation. You start the loop over. And since the second step, orientation, takes so much time, you are restarting with a new observation before you can ever orient, much less decide and act.

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For more info on OODA, check out Chiron's series of excellent articles (especially the earlier ones) and also check out this Wikipedia artcle. OODA has a lot of varied applications to aikido and judo - not only related to eye contact.

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Even more on this topic here and here.

Metsuke and stay-off-me hands

Tonight Jill and I reviewed some of the cool stuf that she missed at the seminar this past weekend. We worked on tegatana a couple of times, first half of hanasu several times, second half of hanasu a couple of times, then moved into chain #2 including techniques like kotetaoshi, gyakugamaeate, and gedanate. We got to discuss and work on slowing the conflict down through proper eye contact and we worked on using the "stay off me" hands to continually brush off and roll the ball right in the centerline (we called this "crazy man randori" at the seminar). We transitioned into randori naming the releases and from there into plain, old randori. It was a good night.

Don't look into the Eye!

Recently Chris at Martial Development posted a comment on one of my articles about attacking in aikido. One of my suggestions was to maintain eye contact to improve the attack. Chris asked:

Didn't Ueshiba specifically say NOT to look into the eyes of your attacker?

I do seem to remember reading that somewhere (I can’t find the source) but I also seem to recall reading that Ueshiba wrote that aiki cannot be written down in a book. The gist of that is, I think, don’t take any partial written description of aikido (even Ueshiba’s) as gospel. Also, blasphemous as it might be, Ueshiba's ideas on aikido were the first - not the last.

If I remember it right, Ueshiba’s proscription about eye contact was related to something about the attacker stealing your soul or sapping your ki or something. And there is definitely something there, though it is hard to quantify. I remember a girl in high school and another one in college that had freaky, inhuman, blue-grey eyes. You couldn’t look at them but you couldn’t look away from them either. They were hypnotic, mirror-like eyes. And it wasn’t just me in my adolescent dorkiness that was affected this way. Virtually everyone did doubletakes when they glanced at these two girls’ eyes and the only way you could talk to them was to look away from them. It is also possible to look into the eye of violence or hatred and be paralyzed, but in the course of about 15 years of randori, I’ve only met one guy whose eyes freaked me out. I just couldn’t look at him. He had his way with me during the randori session too. Which hints at the value of metsuke (eye contact) in aikido.

The first tactical motion in nearly all aikido techniques is to get your body off the centerline, while occupying the centerline with your unbendable arms. When you are able to do this, uke’s attacks tend to miss and tori tends to automatically intercept uke. Controlling the centerline of the attack is key, and this centerline is defined by eye contact.

The point is to not shift your eyes from one focal point to another (i.e. face to hand to center to feet, etc…) because this constantly changes your perception of the centerline of the conflict. It also changes your perception of distances and angles. The only way to develop accurate perceptions of these timings, distances, lines, and angles is to focus your eyes on one point on the attacker’s centerline and keep them there. We actually tell people to look between uke’s eyes at the bridge of his nose- so you don’t really have to look directly into uke’s eyes and risk getting lost there.

In my post on attacking I suggested using eye contact as a sort of measuring stick to determine when tori was in shikaku, which can be defined as the ‘safe spot’ or ‘dead angle’ or even ‘blind spot’ with relation to uke. If uke can easily focus on your centerline then you are not in his blind spot and you are not safe.

So, in summary:

• Tori should look at one point on uke’s centerline, I suggest the bridge of the nose.
• Uke should lock onto one point on tori’s centerline. It makes him more of a viable threat.
• Tori, as part of his motion, should seek positions and motions that break uke’s visual lock.
• Uke, in response, should seek to regain that visual lock.

What's up, doc?

Tegatana concentrating on small steps and medial balls of feet. Hanasu as a warmup into Chain #2, including kote taoshi, mae otoshi, hiki taoshi, and oshi taoshi. Nijusan concentrating on shomenate, aigamaeate, and gyakugamaeate. After class, Patrick M. and Kristof demonstrated Nijusan 1-10 for our new guy. Patrick has made some particular improvements in the atemiwaza (1-5) of Nijusan. #4 and #7 still need some work. Kristof did well with his demonstration, but still needs to clean up #10 (wakigatame) and the pins on #6, 7, and 8.

I’d like to introduce our new guy, Kel. He comes to us from an aikido class in the vicinity of Purdue University where he studied under Dr. Thomas Burdine. I like to ask new guys that have done aiki stuff before if the stuff we do looks the same or different – Kel responded, “Yes.” Dr. Burdine shares some aiki lineage with us, having trained under Tomiki as well as Tohei, and Burdine sensei must still using some of the Tomiki structure because Kel told me that he recognized pretty much all of the nijusan that Patrick and Kristof demonstrated and that he’s seen it in similar format.

As for my current posture quest, after each repetition I made a point to rock my head back and look upward a couple of times to get the feel of what a little more neck extension might feel like. Working this I made an interesting observation. Tori doesn’t have much trouble working with good neck extension but uke pretty much has to break this neck posture in order to do an event as athletic as an attack. I think this practice might have helped me some without really trying to remain rigidly upright. Head/neck posture has some interesting interactions with the concept of eye contact (metsuke) too.