Variations of tokuiwaza

Ok, so now that we've gotten all this "randori is an experiment - not a contest" and "randori is not about winning" business out of the way, how about some real hints on how to really trash some bozos...

This particular hint applies more to judo randori, but i guess you can stretch it a bit and get some aikdio randori benefit out of it.

You need to be able to throw your tokuiwaza (your 1-2 best throws) whether uke is advancing or retreating with their left or right legs.  So basically, you need four variations of a couple of throws.  By the time you start to get significant skill at four variations of two different throws, you should start to have more "success" in randori and be able to start enjoying it more.

I suspect that a lot of folks that get frustrated with randori only have 1-2 variations for their tokuiwaza, leaving significant holes in their game.  If you think that you are doing pretty good at "kata" versions of throws with compliant partners but you often can't make them go in  randori, then you ought to work on figuring out what situations you are having trouble with those particular throws?  That will give you some idea of where you need to concentrate your research in order to cover the gaps in your game.

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Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com

Randori is not about winning

It is not the purpose of randori to see if you can defeat the other guy a few times.  Randori is absolutely not about winning.

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The purpose of randori is for both partners to gain experience in giving and taking various techniques outside of the constraints of kata.  Approaching randori as an experiment, like in the previous post, your intent should simply be to run the experiment many times.

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This does not mean that you should not attempt to throw.  You have to approach the randori honestly, and that (usually) means if you see what you think is an opportunity for a technique then you honestly try to apply it. 

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It also does not mean that you should necessarily go into the randori with the intent of taking a dive for the other guy over and over again.  That is dishonest too.  If the other guy attempts a technique that is insufficient, you don't have to take a fall for him, but if they try a technique that you judge to be "close enough," then by all means,  be a good uke (which means 'receiver').

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One of my instructors used to say, "Randori is not a matter of winning and losing.  In randori there are those who win, and there are those who learn."  Often, they are not the same person.  Sometimes it is your turn to be the "winner" and sometimes it is your time to be the "learner."

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In the immortal words of Sensei Kipling, "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same... 

[photo courtesy of Singapore 2010 Youth Games]

____________________ 
Patrick Parker 
www.mokurendojo.com

Randori as an experiment

In the previous post, I compared randori to a physics experiment.

In a science lab, experiments are often performed over and over and over again, carefully controlling the experimental variables and changing one variable at a time to see how the varaibles affect the system.

Randori can be very profitable when approached in a similar vein.

Often it is not the end result (someone falls down or gets in an armlock) that is the most interesting thing in an engagement.  Often the really interesting part comes 2-3 steps before the fall or the terminal lock.  In such instances, it can be very educational to set up a given condition in randori and then run it over and over again so that you and your partner can experience how that certain situation unfolds.

One example might be repeating release #1 into oshitaoshi (katatetori ikkyo) over and over again seeing how uke falls each time.  Pretty soon, uke (without trying too hard) will start to walk out of your technique, either forcing you to modify your technique or perhaps reversing the technique on you.

Or, you might start in kesagatame and try repeatedly to transition into tateshihogatame with a cross-collar choke.  Even if you try to be really precise every time, pretty soon you'll start to see variation slip in, and both partners will be getting a ton ov experience inside and around and related to those particular positions and transitions and techniques.

So, try approaching your randori as a scientific experiment, controlling certain variables and letting others change and see the results.

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____________________
Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com

What is randori

Randori plays such a central role in judo and in aikido, that I thought I'd spend some time this month writing about this practice, how to "do randori" better, and how to get more out of it.

First, what is randori?

The Japanese word, randori, means something to the effect of "laying hold of chaos" or "taking freedom."

There are basically two classical modes of practice for Japanese jujitsu - kata and randori.  Kata is an exploration and demonstration of the form of a thing or idea - the basic shape that it can take.  As such, it can be compared to learning to write by tracing dotted outlines of capital letters, or learning to color within the lines of a coloring book.  But before you get to thinking that kata is just preschool stuff, it can also be likened to very advanced forms of learning - like demonstrations in a physics or chemistry laboratory.  Such demonstrations always happen the same way, go through the same processes, and yield the same results, but it is still very educational to do these demonstrations.

Randori, on the other hand, is any practice that deviates from the structure of kata.  Continuing with the previous analogies, you might liken randori to writing cursive or freehand drawing or a physics experiment where you don't know the end result beforehand.

Randori is often compared to kumite practice in karate (which I think is also frequently misunderstood).  These days, most folks seem to refer to kumite as sparring, but kumite is actually any engagement match - any practice form with a real partner/opponent instead of a makiwara or imaginary opponent.  In judo, all of our practice is with another person - we have no solo forms, so randori can be compared to the sparring idea within kumite.

Randori is a form of practice in which you don't necessisarily know beforehand who is going to be uke or tori, or which form of what technique will end the engagement.

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____________________
Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com

Nothing ever works

I like to occasionally peruse Henry's wonderful list of principles that make aikido work.  Lately I've been working my way through this list, blogging about my thoughts on each one, and I've worked my way up to #3

 

Nothing Ever Works

 

Also occasionally stated as, "I wouldn't bet my life on THAT!"

 

All martial arts have assumptions and presuppositions.  Axioms that they use as starting points.  One of our most foundational assumptions in aikido is that it is near-useless to rely on strength and speed to get things done because (again, we assume) the bad guy is always bigger, tougher, stronger, faster, and more clued-in to the circumstances of the attack.  This assumption makes sense because weaker, slower, smaller folks don't usually try to victimize more powerful people.  So, it's not too bad a starting point to assume that you're always going to be the underdog.

 

Being the underdog means that Nothing Ever Works.  Any time you try strength, he's stronger.  Any time you try speed, he's faster.  Any time you use your skills, he's more skilled.

 

This means that you have to build your martial art based on strategies that do not require abnormal amounts of strength, speed, or skill to work.  Your techniques have to be robust and fail-soft, and everything has to have a back-up plan.  If you have the co-ordination and athletic skill that it takes to stand up and balance and walk around at a fast walking pace, then you have enough athleticism to make aikido work.  If you are strong enough to push or pull a heavy door open, then you have enough strength.  And by the time you get to about green belt (around 60 mat hours) you have just about all the knowledge and skill that you need to make aikido work pretty good.

 

It's a crazy sort of near-paradox.

 

Aikido works because we start out with the assumption that nothing we do will ever work.

 

It's crazy, but it works.

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____________________
Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com

BOMP Ch. 29 - Relaxation

Please join our ongoing discussion of Steven Pearlman's excellent tome, The Book of Martial Power

In this chapter, Pearlman covers the much-talked about topic of Relaxation.  I have previously covered relaxation in several articles here.  Pearlman doesn't seem to add too much in this chapter except that his previous chapter, Heaviness, really has the meat of the issue in it.

What I did find interesting was Pearlman's typically elegant description of the issue, "...power comes from movement in one or more joints." [as opposed to coming from isometric strength across those joints.]  This brought back to mind the physics definitions of the phenomena under consideration.  I'm certainly no physicist, but basically...

Power is the ability to do work.

Work is the ability to make things move.

Thus, you get work done, or you exhibit power, by moving - not by trying to being strong.  I thought that little reminder was interesting

[photo courtesy of takomabibelot]

____________________
Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com

Ma-ai and the blood circle

If there is one principle that is discussed and trained extensively, perhaps even obsessively, in aikido classes and some judo classes, it is the idea of ma-ai.

Ma-ai is usually thought of as a boundary around your body, the inside of which is defined as your personal space.  So long as uke is outside of ma-ai, he cannot touch you without first moving toward you.  If you allow uke inside your ma-ai then you cna potentially be attacked without having time to respond.  Typically, ma-ai is thought to be the length of your arm plus the length of the attacker's arm, but this distance can flex a bit under various circumstances.

Despite our tendency to obsess about ma-ai, it is easy to get lax in your thinking and practice.  This is something that you have to watch out for in your practice.  A good way to instantly remind everyone about ma-ai is to put a rubber training knife in uke's hand (or in tori's).  You dont have to change anytihng else about the practice, but as soon as someone is holding a knife, ma-ai becomes more obviously important.

A very good expression of ma-ai that is used by the Boy Scouts to teach knife safety is the idea of the Blood Circle.  A blood circle is a radius around the knife-user the length of his arm plus the length of the blade.  Obviously, anything or anyone within this radius is at risk of being cut if the knife-user slips.

At our house, my oldest son has reached pocketknife age, so we've been talking in terms of Blood Circles a good bit lately.  Today, he picked up a bokken to do some jodo, held it at arm's length and turned in a circle and said, "Look, Dad, A really big blood circle!"

I smiled, and promptly the jodo lesson of the day became an emphasis on the interplay between uke's and tori's blood circles.

[photo courtesy of Hani Amir]

____________________
Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com

The art of the collar choke

My judo instructor when I was coming up through the ranks was uncanny with his choking techniques.  He seemed to be able to set a choke from any conceivable position.  Those chokes usually appeared from nowhere.  There's even a great story about him being thrown in a tournament but choking the guy out on the way down, such that he won because the thrower was judged to not have control of the throw (since he was unconscious)!

Some of my students have recently asked me how I got so uncanny good at chokes.  They make me want to laugh because my skill really is very modest. But seriously, my choking skills really have come together lately, and I've started getting these crazy, eye-crossing chokes in randori a lot lately.

So, I thought I'd give out one tip that I think is mine to give.  I say I think, because I don't ever remember being taught this lesson, though I don't delude myself into thinking I'v invented something here.

Do not attempt to grab the collar in any old place and by main force wrench it around uke's neck. 

Place your hand directly on the artery, then gather the collar into your hand.

This way, you will get much better positioning of the choking hand, and the collar will serve to anchor you hand to the artery.

Perhaps another way of thinking about this is - all collar chokes begin as katatejime - set the one hand properly, anchor it in place, then add the second hand in when you get the chance.

____________________
Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com

New schedule for 2012

Starting January 2, 2012, we are going to be expanding our class offerings. The new schedule will look like...

 

Mondays

• Judo - 6:30 PM

Tuesdays

• Kid's Judo - 5:30 PM
• Aikido - 6:30 PM

Thursdays

• Kid's Judo - 5:30 PM
• Judo - 6:30PM

Fridays

• Aikido - 6:30 PM

Saturdays

• Private classes per agreement

 

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____________________

Patrick Parker

www.mokurendojo.com

 

Ritual and spectacle in martial arts

In modern educational circles, folks like to talk about three domains of learning - psychomotor, cognitive, and affective.

• psychomotor - learning to do the skills associated with the subject of study
• cognitive - learning about the subject, vocabulary, history, etc...
• affective - feeling good about, and "believing in" your increased knowledge and skills

 All three are important parts of learning.

 

Some people have a need for ritual and ceremony and spectacle in their martial arts practice.  It is part of the affective domain of learning.  They can practice and increase in knowledge and skill all day long, but until the "rank test" or the "belt ceremony" or the tournament or demo, they just don't feel like they have reached the mark yet.

 

Some instructors are very good at using ritual and spectacle and ceremony in the martial arts to augment their students' affective learning.  Bruce Lee and Ed Parker were brilliant showmen who played the mystique of the East for all it is worth.

 

I am not one of those great affective coaches.  The phoney-ness of having an American Redneck pretending to be Yoda sorta sticks in my craw.  I remember reading about Chuck Norris failing a rank test because all the candidates had to kneel in seiza while the folks ahead of them tested.  He'd knelt on the cold floor for so long that his legs were asleep when his turn was called.  That's kinda stupid in my book.

 

I'd rather run through all your material, taking turns throwing for a couple of hours, than do a formal, strenuous rank test with half a dozen inscrutible-looking sensei in hakama or suits glaring from the sidelines as the student sweats bullets. 

 

I'd rather every class day be a test than build up to one big event.  I'd rather spend the agreed-upon amount of months working on the agreed-upon material and then just toss the next belt to the student after class one day.

 

But there are students that need (or would like) more ritual and spectacle than I provide.  To those students, I'm sorry.  I've tried for years to build dojo traditions and rituals to help provide some of that affective learning, but those traditions seem to always fall to the side and get superceeded by the practical day-to-day running of the club and teaching of the material.

 

I'm not against having some of that go on.  I just don't do much of it.

 

 

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____________________

Patrick Parker

www.mokurendojo.com

 

Changing forms and the thing-itself

The techniques of Aikido change constantly; every encounter is unique, and the appropriate response should emerge naturally. Today's techniques will be different tomorrow. Do not get caught up with the form and appearance of a challenge. Aikido has no form - it is the study of the spirit. - Morihei Ueshiba

 

I remember, as I was coming up through the kyu ranks, it seemed to us that our instructor and his instructors were forever changing things up on us.  They would tell us one way to do something, then a couple of months later (usually after coming back from a big seminar) they would tell us what seemed like a wholly different way to do the same thing.

 

I particularly remember several changes in how we were to practice kotegaeshi.  That thing seemed to change with the phase of the moon.

 

This was always frustrating from the point of view of the student, but looking back at it from a little greater distance, It seems like just the way the thing has to be. 

 

We are studying a huge, complex, and chaotic reality.  You have to have some sort of form to put the thing into to study it, but you also have to understand that after you study one form of the thing for a while you will start to be subject to diminishing returns.  You will need to look at the thing from a different point of view.

 

This does not invalidate the forms of the thing that you have already studied.  It augments them... zooms in and emphasizes different facets. 

 

Often neither the old or the new form of the thing will be the thing itself, but if you have a good teacher then the older and newer forms should sort of bracket the thing itself.  The aiki always lives in the interstices between forms.  But it is the forms that we use to outline the aiki-thing and study it.

 

 

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____________________
Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com

Range of self-defense skills in judo

With respect to tachiwaza (throwing skills) in the traditional Kodokan gokyo, how many of those throws have you ever seen or practiced in a self-defense context?  Or, put another way, how many of those throws have you either heard of being used in self-defense, or can even imagine cropping up on the street?  For me, it's mostly the following list...

• deashi, kosoto, osoto, hiza, ukigoshi
• kouchi, ouchi, ogoshi, seoinage
• sasae
• teguruma or kataguruma
• morotegari

...and that's about it.  With greater than 25 years of martial arts experience, I can only come up with about a dozen of the Kodokan throws that I've ever heard of being used on the street - or that I can realistically imagine ever coming to pass in a fight.  Sure, anything can happen, but we're really not into preparing for every bizarro eventuality.  We're generally more into probabilities than possibilities.

 

So, why do we have 40 throws (or 65 depending on who you ask)?  Why not spend more time on the down-and-dirty dozen that I listed above?

 

For one thing, we're not just practicing self-defense.  The other throws are part of the art.  Also, depending on the ruleset under which you compete, the rules might create situations where some of those other throws might be viable.

 

But personally, I think that the main reason that we have all that extra material is because when you work on those situations, it makes you better at those more fundamental throws that I listed above.

 

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____________________

Patrick Parker

www.mokurendojo.com

 

One thing - Aikido 2012

Y'all remember the old western comedy, City Slickers, with Jack Pallance playing the wise, old, grizzled cowboy named Curly?  Y'all remember Curly's Law?  When asked what his secret was, he held up one finger.  When asked to expand on that he just said, "Choose one thing, and do that one thing."  Pretty good secret cowboy knowledge.

 

For a long, long time, there has been an emphasis in my aikido classes on atemiwaza.  Direct, simple, effective.  And we've mostly got a decent handle on that facet of aikido.  So, I've been casting about for a bit of a new direction to take my aikido classes in next year.  That's when Curly's Law came to mind.

 

I figure we'll pick one thing and focus on it for the whole year and see where it takes us.  And not only are we going to do "one thing" but we're going to do an emphasis on what Ueshiba called, "Thing-One."

 

Ikkyo.  Oshitaoshi.  Udeosae.

 

Sure, we'll continue to work folks up through the excellent teaching system that weve developed over the years.  We're not throwing the baby out wwith the bath.  But I think that a few minutes of various forms of oshitaoshi during each class next year is likely to open up some new  ideas for all of us.

 

And if not, at least I'll know that my students will be the best in the world at One Thing (Thing-One) by the beginning of 2013.

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____________________
Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com

Where we've been - aikido 2011

The technical emphasis in any Dojo changes over time.  Over the past year, I think our Aikido has been characterized by an emphasis on...

Ichikata - especially looking at 90- and 180-degree offbalance pairs and automatically flowing around strength and resistance conditions.

Owaza - emphasis on being able to do this set of techniques from very generalized attacks - as in ryotedori - instead of having to have uke flying at you.

We've ramped up the jo and aikijo this year.

The JW Bode seminar certainly gave me a lot to think about wrt decisiveness, control, and very close range Aikido. For years weve been talking more about synchronization and flow and less about control.  But lately weve been talking more about irimi, atemi, control, and aiki as "instant victory."

So, now the question is... where are we going with our Aikido in 2012? Stay tuned as I collect my thoughts on that...

 

 

 

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____________________
Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com