Deashibarai & gyakugamaeate - perfect first day lessons

Why is deashibarai the first technique of the gokyo?  I have wondered this for a long time, and (in my spare time) sought an answer.  I've come up with a couple of possible answers.

• The timing and footwork and mechanics of deashibarai teaches the timing and footwork and mechanics skills for all the rest of the throws.

• Deashibarai is easy to teach beginners to throw in a controlled manner so that the thrower can act as a spotter for first-day fallers with highly imperfect ukemi skills.  I demonstrated just last night that with five minutes of sit-and-rock and controlled backfall instruction and 5 minutes of technical instruction on deashi, first day beginners can practice throwing and receiving deashibarai in a mutually beneficial manner.  These same beginners spent about 20 minutes during their very first class doing real randori with deashi.  Win!

For a long time - basically forever - we've heard and taught that shomenate is the first thing we teach in Tomiki aikido because it is a good backup plan whenever the other techniques go wrong, and that the mechanics of shomenate teach the mechanics of the rest of Junana.  I'm not sure, though, that is the whole story.

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What if we look in larger, broader chunks?  We're not really teaching (just) shomenate first.  We are teaching atemiwaza (what the rest of the aikido world calls iriminage) first - and that is a great first lesson that handles a ton of problems.  Basically it is a programmed response that says, "Any time an attacker gets inside ma-ai, get slightly off line, grab his face however you can, and throw yourself on top of him."

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Shomenate is one of several forms of atemiwaza/iriminage that we teach first, but gyakugamae-ate has some benefits for first-day practice that suggest we might save shomenate for a bit later.

• Gyakugamae-ate places us in the much-preferable shikaku (behind the arm) position, which we would like to teach early for self-defense reasons.

• Gyakugamae-ate allows the first-day thrower to help the first-day faller to the ground in a controlled manner to a much greater degree than shomenate.  Shomenate is more of a smash-your-way-out-of-a-bad-situation backup technique.

Guess what we're going to be working on tonight at aikido class and Thursday at judo class?

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Patrick Parker
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Tech distorts our sense of time

I've been assured by all the Baby-Boomer curmudgeons out there that too much access to smartphones and Facebook and Internet and television and computer games would make me stupid.  I'm sure that is how I sound when I tell my kids that it is the God-given absolute gospel truth that McDonalds and Burger King do not actually sell food, but rather disgusting plastic food-like toxic simulacra.  Fortunately for them, I have repeated that enough that I think they've begun to believe it.  Fortunately (maybe) for me, I've heard the curmudgeons rant about smartphones making us into idiots long enough that I've started to believe it.

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So how is it that tech makes us stupid?  What specific forms does that idiocy take?

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One form of this self-induced retardation that I have noticed is that tech screws up our sense of time, and of normal (human-paced) rhythms.  

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I suppose it is because we can have instantaneous gratification of virtually any intellectual whim.  Don't know the definition of "proclivity?" Say, "OK, Google, Define proclivity" and it'll pop up in a second or two.  Need to know what is 284 times $0.87? Type or speak it into Google and presto blam-o!.  Want something new to read?  No need to drive to the bookstore and wade through all the dead trees.  Open up your Kindle and it'll tell you the next dozen books you should read and you can buy one and have it delivered wirelessly in a few seconds.  Don't like what's on TV?  Flip to one of the other 300 channels.  Missing your buddy on the other side of the country (or ocean) Skype or text them.  Everything is instantaneous.

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It's really cool and convenient - until it isnt.

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What about when I set out to walk the dog and I set myself a goal of walking a mile (12 blocks), and not even halfway through I start speeding up and wondering if I'd counted wrong because this is a never-ending walk.

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What about writing productivity?  My Dear Constant Readers can attest to the fact that I used to be far more prolific on this blog.  There were several years where I churned out more than an article per day, all of them pretty good (for me).  Sometimes I'd go on vacation and miss a few days so I could sit down for an hour and churn out six or eight 500-1000 word articles and schedule them for posting.  Now, more often than not, I pop up a blank blog screen and stare at it thinking, "I don't have time for this!"

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How about push-ups?  Usher made us do 20 pushups at the beginning of every class we ever went to.  I did sets of 20 pushups several times per week for years.  I despised them (that's another story) but I can still churn out 20 push-ups in a few seconds.  But after about seven, every one seems to take forever!  I have time between each pushup to think up 2-3 excuses why I should stop.  What the hell!? Why can't I even do 15 seconds of exercise without my brain rebelling?

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I used to think nothing of driving 3 hours to Starkville or 5 hours to Jackson TN or even 13 hours to OKC, and now a 45 minute trip to Hammond takes a lifetime!

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I suspect the only reason I am still even remotely functional is because of my frequent weekend camping and hiking treks to places with no reception.

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Patrick Parker
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Performance Measures

In preparing for the start of a new class tomorrow, I ran across this set of performance measures that we have used in the past to judge the viability and righteousness of what we are doing in our classes.  These ideas date back to our college club.  I suspect Michael Denton and Dale Thompson had a hand in drafting these - maybe with the help of John Kirby.

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What do you think of these as a self-assessment of our classes that we are participating in?

Performance Measures

How do we know if we are on the right track with our practice? Ask yourself the following questions periodically.

• Is each individual student progressing?
• Can you see a distinct difference between students of different ranks?
• Are we all “going forward together?”
• Is there a spirit of “mutual benefit?
• Are we working toward “Maximum efficiency with Minimum Effort?”
• Do we keep a wide variety of people in the club?
• Are members staying for extended periods of training (years)?
• Is everyone learning in a fun, comfortable, safe environment?
• Are club members sustaining avoidable injuries?
• Is it believable that a smaller, well-trained practitioner can be effective against a larger opponent?
• Are black belt students given progressively more teaching responsibility?
• Are black belt students given progressively more freedom to explore and adapt the art for themselves?
• Do the black belts generally understand and agree on how we are teaching what we are teaching?

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Patrick Parker

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Gracie University and distance learning

There's a lot of folks that talk a lot of smack about Rener's Gracie University distance learning program, but it looks to me to be a good program, and this video is a good demonstration of that fact.  I enjoyed this narrated roll very much - especially watching how a distance student handled live rolling.  Rener was, admittedly, keeping it playful, but this guy is definitely speaking the language and able to flow and roll.  He's on the right track.  Kudos to this guy, and to Rener et al for designing a good distance learning program.

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Patrick Parker
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Can, should, and must

Here's a photo of our buddy Jules.  The photo comes from an article in which he discusses (among many other interesting things) instant gratification vs. slow, careful internalization of the art.

This is related to a lesson in martial arts that is perhaps the greatest lesson that I want my kids to get - that is, the difference between can, should, and must.  I think the world would be a better place if more people (especially world leaders) had a more visceral understanding of this concept.

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Just because you can do something does not mean you should do that thing.

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You may have a Right, but that does not mean you have to exercise that Right.  You might just have the Responsibility to hold that Right in reserve.

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Even if you think you should do a thing does not mean you must do that thing.

A lot of aikido practice is about waiting - almost procrastinating.  One of my instructors often preached to us, "Never solve a problem right now that can wait till later.  Solve right now's problems right now and leave the future for the future."  The problem with solving future problems is they are often imaginary - that is, they don't exist and may never exist and even if they do come to exist they may not have the impact you predict - so by proactively solving problems, you are necessarily creating a mess of unintended consequences that makes your future even more messy.

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So, in aikido, sure we are learning skills and actions that we can do (that is the jutsu), but we spend a lot of time in practice waiting to see what will be the consequences if we do not exert our wills upon the world.  We are trying to achieve a deep, abiding understanding of can, should, and must.

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Can (jutsu) is generally easy - we all have a lot of knowledge and power and skills and ability to do things.  What we are trying to achieve is the should/shouldn't and an understanding of when we absolutely must act and when we can wait for the picture to become more clear.

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Patrick Parker
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Circle walking

A common feature of many of our arts is many instructors use a foundational footwork/body management exercise.  In Tomiki Aikido we use "The Walk" known in various groups as Unsoku, Tandoku Undo, or Tegatana no Kata.  I'm always looking for interesting looking exercises, and this looks to be a good lesson on a fun footwork exercise.  Don't be surprised if you show up one day and find a circle chalked on my driveway.

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Patrick Parker
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Learn aikido in 20 hours!?

So, Malcolm Gladwell suggested in his Outliers book that it takes something like 10000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert at any field.  But then along comes this guy - Josh Kaufman and says that's too long - WAY too long!  Kaufman is not so much interested in becoming an expert, rather, he wants to be able to learn things to a pretty good level of proficiency - and he found that you can pretty much learn any skill pretty good if you follow these four steps...

1. Deconstruct the skill - figure out what the central skill is that you want to be able to do and what are the sub-skills that make up that central skill - then practice the most important sub-skills first.
2. Learn enough to self-correct - you don't have to learn everything about your domain of practice - just learn enough to be able to tell if you are on the right track (leading toward the central skill) or the wrong track.
3. Remove practice barriers - like procrastination and scope growth and feeling like an idiot
4. Practice for at least 20 hours

So, if we were to apply this to learning aikido...

• What is the central skill in aikido that we should be working toward?
• How much of which sub-skills would we need just to be self-correcting?

  

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Patrick Parker
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Tesla on human fragility and The Secrets

A couple of thoughts from a renaissance man - probably not a stretch to say this is applicable to aikido and judo...

“Everyone should consider his

body as a priceless gift from

one whom he loves above all, a

marvelous work of art, of

indescribable beauty, and

mystery beyond human conception,
and so delicate that

a word, a breath, a look, nay, a

thought may injure it.”

“If you want to find the secrets of the Universe,

think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration."

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Patrick Parker
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Martial arts as fine arts

Aikido and judo are martial arts - a form of fine arts like dance or art or poetry.  Just like other arts, you can use them for a lot of different things.

• You can compete (as in dance)
• You can demonstrate (as in music)
• You can use the art to re-shape the media (as in sculpture)
• You can use it for the practical (as in commercial art) - or self defense
• There are realistic martial arts but there are also impressionistic or abstract martial arts. In fact, each martial art has elements of realism and abstraction
• Some people do art for themselves just because they enjoy it. Others produce art for other people to see, or consume
• You can stretch your own horizons and learn new skills (self-improvement)

But don't just take my word for it...

Nothing is ever random

A few years ago I noticed something in my martial arts practice and I asked a group of higher-ranked players if what I was seeing was real or if it was just some random coincidence.  One of them replied, "Nothing is ever random."  That statement has stuck with me and made an impact on my martial arts.

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One place we see this non-randomness is in the taiso, or warmup exercises that we do.  Following is a video of one of the footwork exercises (unsoku).

There's nothing (that I know of) that says you always have to start these things off on the left side.  You might just as well start left or right or do 25 left one class and 25 right another class or something.  But...

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Tomiki always started off to the left first, and everyone I've ever seen do this exercise has always started on the left - as if it is a kata.  Why is it that way?  Who knows?  It's just random, except nothing is ever random.

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Then along comes Merritt Stevens and condenses Tomiki's aikido primer down into ten or so movements that are especially useful in tactical situations like self-defense or police DT.  To make it fast and easy to teach, Stevens taught his system one-sided - always stepping to the left out and around  an attack.  This makes sense in this context because statistically the vast majority of "street" attacks are right-handed, So stepping to your own left would usually put you behind the attacker's right arm or shoulder.

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So, it turns out that the first movement that Tomiki taught and always practiced first can be seen as primary because it is the most useful single piece of footwork in the system.  It just took someone like Stevens to make it obvious and explicit.

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Nothing is ever random.

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Patrick Parker
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Things Karl taught me

There was so much that Karl taught me, and so much that Karl taught my teachers who then filtered the lessons to me, that it is difficult to condense it to a handful of memorable teachings,but here goes...

• Karl was a master of heuristic-based teaching - He was very good at coming up with specific, measurable, rules of thumb to guide practice, but he always phrased them as absolutes, like,"always keep your arms exactly centered and unbendable."   This sort of rules-based aikido got a lot of us emulating some form of jutsu pretty quickly, but the rules-based thing is a self-limiting form of aikido.  He would often tell us, "There will come a time to break all the rules, and that moment will make itself known.  Until then, follow this rule religiously and it'll make your aikido work better."  Even with him telling what he was doing, it was years before we figured out that they were rules of thumb instead of absolutes.
• And that brings up eidetic learning and the difference between explicit and implicit teaching - There is always, necessarily some difference between what a master teacher tells you he is doing and what he is really doing. A lot of times the masters are not even sure what they are doing to make something work, so they grasp at straws trying to describe it.  The secret is you have to know this phenomenon happens and carefully watch for yourself what the instructor is actually doing (as opposed to what he says he is going to do) so that you can "steal the technique."  Karl taught us this, or else we learned it from dealing with Karl.
• Karl was a master of finding aiki in fun places in everyday life and bringing it back to the dojo in innovative ways - We were always experimenting with ping pong, dart-throwing, tango, BOSU boards, electronic surfboards... the list goes on and on.
• What Karl called "Kihara" in the later years was essentially what Ueshiba called "takemusu aiki" in the early years.  A lot of folks gripe about the changes Karl made in his class structure and teaching methods around Y2K, but I think they are probably missing that he was looking for a way to get at that ineffable mystery that Ueshiba had described years earlier when he said, "Whenever I move around, that is what aiki is."  They were both getting at a kind of movement that is spontaneously generative of infinite technique.
• Do it while it's fun, and when it's not any fun any more, stop doing it - Similar to Becky's proclamation that she "has a religion and aikido ain't it," Karl often advised me to "do aikido and judo while it is fun, and if there comes a day that it is no fun, then stop."  Several times during the last years of his life he told me that he wanted to move away from Houston to some tiny Nowhere-ville and start over with maybe a half-dozen brand new students at a tiny house dojo (similar to mine).  I don't know if he was blowing smoke up my ass, or if that was a real dream of his that he never got unstuck from, but like the rest of Karl, it was interesting and memorable.

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Patrick Parker
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Things Becky taught me

Becky adopted me into her Baton Rouge dojo after I graduated from college and moved back south.  I spent 2-3 years sometime around nidan or sandan  travelling an hour and a half to and from her dojo every Saturday to continue my training.  I think a lot of what Becky was putting out, I was not ready to pick up.  She was always saying things like, It's about the feel in the hands.  Look at this.  Can you feel that!?"  I would always look at her dumbly and she'd say, "Exactly!" and move on to another partner or to the next thing.

• Do not underestimate little old ladies - Or, as Karl would later put it, "You never know who you're standing next to."  Despite the fact that she was a sweet old eccentric Southern woman teaching a gentle, "peaceful" martial art, she was a scary woman, and it was impossible for anyone not to recognize that she had a lot of potential for that red hair to burst into flame.
• Repetition, repetition, repetition - She, and her primary students, Usher and Gary, were big proponents on high repetition of technique and kata.  It seems like a lot of days she'd only work on 1 or maybe 2 techniques per class.  I know there were many days when Becky would tell me, "one more time" so many times that I would have rather died than continued with that lesson.
• I've got a religion, and aikido ain't it - At that point in my life I was into aikido in a BIG way.  I was consumed, and knew for certain that I wanted to do martial arts every day of the rest of my life.  I could not comprehend how someone could do a martial art for 20-30 years and then just stop and do something else. Soon before she retired and turned her dojo over to a couple of her students, She told me,"I've got a religion, and aikido ain't it."  I was impressed, and have pondered that for years - and it turned out to come in handy.
• You can't just yo, you've got to yo-yo - This harkens back to Becky's and Karl's and Mac's lessons on gentle, rhythmic kuzushi.  She likened it to a yo-yo.  If you just throw the yo-yo real hard (interestingly called "yo" in Japanese, it won't do it's function, But if you tweak it gently at just the right time, it functions perfectly and effortlessly.  She called this "yo-yoing instead of just yoing."
• It's my dojo and I'll do what I want to, wear what I want to, smoke if I want to... - Becky made Karl crazy in her dojo because she took his advice as advice instead of gospel.  He hated her wearing the Korean TKD dobok jackets that she preferred (softer and better fitting on a woman).  Lots of people have told me over the years that they'd tried out aikido at Becky's in Baton Rouge and just couldn't get into it because they came looking for the ancient oriental sage with the long white beard that they'd seen on the kung-fu movies and what they got was a chain-smoking, intimidating, unashamedly American, Southern, and Christian teacher.

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Things Mac taught me

I beat my head against the proverbial wall of judo for a long time until Mac came along.  He was a compassionate encourager and put things in a way that made us feel good about what we were doing. Among the lessons I gleaned from Mac include...

• Ju and aiki are supposed to be gentle, soft, natural - almost easy.  If they are hard or difficult or painful to you (like they were to me) then you are deliberately trying to do them wrong.  You have to take each piece, one at a time, and figure out how to do it gently, naturally, softly, and easily.  Eventually enough of judo will be ju-ish that the whole thing will fall into place.
• Mac told me I had a really nice ashiguruma.  That encouragement impressed me and made me work even harder on ashiguruma to try to live up to his estimate of me.  Eventually ashiguruma became one of my tokuiwaza!
• Mac had a fantastic osotogari-haraiTKashi combo that I have long sought to imitate.
• Mac also had an amazing oguruma!  He would turn in (in shiai even!) and lazily throw a leg across uke's hips, daring them to hunker down and grab his leg.  Then he would stand there on one leg looking bored until uke tried to figure out the next step.  Problem is, to make the next step (any next step) uke had to rise out of that defensive posture and then Mac would pull the trigger and up-end uke!
• People joke that Mac was the reason they outlawed Kanibasami in judo - he hammered so many folks with that that they took away his favorite toy to balance things out a bit.
• Mac was the ultimate go-between between the aloof masters and the flunkies.  Once we were all sleeping on the mat at a clinic and Henry was snoring so badly that noone else could sleep. But none of us were brave enough to go wake Big Bad Henry, so I was reduced to walking around in a stupor.  Mac asked what the matter was and when I told him he just walked directly over to Henry and kicked him awake and said, "Henry, You're snoring, turn over."
• I made the mistake of asking Mac how to do sukuinage one time, problem was, we were on the porch drinking whiskey at  the time.  Mac said, "Easy!" and grabbed my arm and nudged me into offbalance, then as I rose, he slipped behind me and slapped me on the inner thigh real close to my old kujukies!  I jumped into the air thinking, "This is where my life ends." but he caught me and set me on my feet and said, "Like that!"
• Mac always emphasized assymetric kuzushi separated by 90 degrees.   He never pushed or pulled on uke with both arms at the same time.  Rather he'd put an impulse on you with one hand and then on the next step he'd put an impulse on you with the other hand but 90 degrees off of the direction of the first kuzushi.  Tick-tock. back and forth until you fell apart enough for him to snatch you out of your root.

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Patrick Parker
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Things Usher taught me

Before Becky and Henry and Mac and Karl, there was John Usher. Usher-san was my first aiki instructor, and was the instructor I spent the longest with, so he has been most formative of my aiki thinking.  Over the 20+  years I've been working with Usher, he has taught me many things besides a bunch of techniques, a handful of which include...

• Embrace your slowness and weakness ASAP - At some point in your life you will get to where you are unable to beat your opponents by being harder and stronger and faster than them.  At that point, if you continue martial arts, you will only be able to do so by embracing the slowness and gentleness of aiki and ju.  And because there is a long learning curve on aiki and ju, you need to embrace those qualities while you're still young - long before you reach the point where you can only function in slowness and gentleness.
• Learn to diagnose and solve your own problems - Around the time we were shodans or nidans Usher began inoculating us with the idea that unless we figured out for ourselves what was good aiki and what was bad aiki and started diagnosing our own problems and coming up with a plan to fix our own problems - then we would always suck at aiki.
• If something malfunctions at a high level, there's always a problem with the foundation.  We were hammered on ukemi and walking and releases and kihon every single class - and it paid off!  When we would go to seminars people started asking us why their stuff didn't work and we would reach back and pull out an Usher kihon lesson.
• Kata is kata - when you do kata for real, it becomes Real Kata.  Usher is a bigtime kata proponent - it is how he thinks and how he teaches.  But he always managed to walk that path without becoming a kata nazi.  Usher did his sandan demo in Seitei jodo kata in Houston in front of all of the big-name teachers, and afterward, Henry-sensei told us that Usher was one of the only guys that level that he'd ever seen who looked like he understood what was happening with a jo and a sword.  On the other hand, Karl-sensei once told Usher-san after a shodan or nidan kata demo, "That was real pretty, now would you like to learn how to make that kata Real?" Tomiki called this real level of kata, "Painting the eyes of the dragon,"
• Randori can wait till later.  Until we were around nidan we had no clue what randori was or how it was different from sparring or what the goals were.  Usher's feeling was that until around nidan we did not have a technical foundation, ukemi skills, or time on the mat to understand how to do productive randori.  It turns out that I just heard that lesson indirectly from Henry-sensei a few weeks ago through a long-time direct student of his.

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Patrick Parker
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