Happy Birthday to Mokuren!

Mokuren Dojo (the blog) is one year old today! No longer an infant, but a massive toddler! I started this blog out as a sort of a training diary for myself and some of my students and nearly 400 posts later it has grown into something much more!
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Check out the graph above. I started tracking these stats about 6 months ago and about 4 months ago I had a glitch that made me have to start over with the tracking - but the graph still shows the gist of the idea.
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Thanks to all you great readers who keep coming and keep checking out my ideas and leaving me comments to let me know where I'm right on and where I might be getting off track. I love the comments - Keep on coming, keep on reading, and keep the comments coming!

Two kotegaeshi exercises

Kotegaeshi is an entire group of techniques - not just a few common forms, as seen in the video I previously posted. Kotegaeshi is really most anything in which uke is curling his arm and tori is following. This can lead to throwing it by crushing into uke or moving away. Tori can catch it with otoshi or guruma timing. Virtually any floaing throw with uke's arm in a curling action can be called kotegaeshi.

This is not just a point of terminology. My point is that there are a lot of kotegaeshi forms between and beyond the few common forms practiced, and if our goal is to harmonize with uke in an aiki-like fashion then we have to be able to flow and execute the kotegaeshi that the uke-tori relationship calls for.

Here are a couple of kotegaeshi exercises that will improve your sensitivity to the kotegaeshi relationship:

• Face uke and take his right hand in a kotegaeshi grip with tori's left hand. uke relaxes and tori takes all the slack out of the arm without cranking it. Move uke's arm right up to the end of the range of motion of the shoulder, elbow, and wrist joints - but don't press it further. No pain. Now, here's the trick: Tori makes an unbendable left arm that still floats at the shoulder. Wherever uke moves, tori's left shoulder will float but there is still a one-sided restriction on uke's wrist, elbow, and shoulder and there is a motion restriction because of the unbendable arm. Ok so far. Here's where this gets cool: tori, take your right arm and palm-bump uke on the chest or shoulder or face or wherever. Doesn't have to hurt - just make uke vibrate or oscillate a little. As uke moves around to accomodate to the bump, float the left arm with them and take up the slack (still not cranking). See can you get uke to sit down and look confused because he doesn't really know why he couldn't stand up.
• Second exercise: face uke and take his right hand in kotegaeshi with tori's left hand as above. Take up the slack as before. Uke and tori begin stepping back and forth in synch (uke's right leg, tori's left) while the other feet remain planted. Watch for the time that uke sets the moving foot down in front and tori, stretch your step. Make uke think you're going to step down with him but float your left foot farther in time and space after his foot lands. You can stretch by stepping closer to uke's center, down the line of his feet, or by retreating away from uke's center. Watch to see if you can get uke to pop up onto his toes.

I'll have to try to get some video of these two exercises to post here, but if you try to work through the text descriptions above you can probably play around and get them pretty close to right. These two exercises - taking up the slack with a floating unbendable arm, and stretching the step after uke plants the moving foot - will make a world of difference in your sensitivity to which kotegaeshi uke is trying to fall for.

Silver Award

Hey, check this out! I just found out today that Mokuren Dojo has won the World Wide Web Awards Silver award for, "clean and organized design, user friendliness, quality content and informative information for visitors." I'll display it in the sidebar for y'all to admire.

Measuring punching force

You've gotta love this video, whether it's for the gratuitous use of cool hi-tech equipment and imaging, or whether youre trying to learn to hit harder or defend against tough guys. Check it out...

The most interesting part is not that the boxer hits hardest, but how clean and effortless his form is compared to the others. The other guys make this look hard, which means that they are taking a lot of recoil from the target. The boxer appears effortless but look how much oomph he puts on that poor dummy!

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Also particularly interesting is the cool graphic explanation of coup-contrecoup injury.

Class cancellation

We won't be having class the remainder of this week - not because I knocked my head, but because it's the last week of my vacation and our wedding anniversary is this weekend, so I have a hot date with my wife - a hot, out-of-town date! My wife sure does a great job of putting up with practices four times per week, constant aiki obsession, and all my other quirks!

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Y'all get ready to pick back up where we left off next Tuesday and make some progress. I have some ideas festering in my mind about where to go to make some good progress...

Concussion

A vital skill that is perhaps sometimes overlooked in some martial arts syllabi is First Aid. I recommend that everyone participating in martial arts classes obtain and maintain a First Aid and CPR certification equivalent to either American Heart Association or Red Cross standards. At the very minimum, these certifications should be prerequisite to black belt rank or teaching functions in a club.

Today I creased my skull working on putting up some vertical blinds for my wife. Classical concussion symptoms - that is, head trauma followed by change in mental status. In my case I was mildly confused and disoriented for a couple of hours after the six-foot long 1x6 board fell onto my head. I seem to have gotten over it - rested for a while, took a bath and washed the blood out of my hair, and HEY, the blinds look fabulous!

But seriously, concussion is a good thing to be able to recognize, because if it is severe (vomiting, amnesia, drowsiness, staggering, or crazy speech) you should seek medical attention. Repeated concussions, even mild ones, have been known to cause impairment disproportional to the apparent severity of the trauma. Children are particularly succeptible to sudden death from second or third concussions.

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So, get some training, know when to seek medical attention, and know when to discontinue practice and get medical clearance to resume.

Kotegaeshi, kotemawashi, and wakigatame

As rat mentioned in his comment to the previous post, kotegaeshi seems to occur much more often in randori than does kote mawashi (nikkyo). Tomiki noticed the same thing as he was putting his fundamentals kata together. He originally thought there would be roughly fifteen techniques (including kotemawashi and kotegaeshi), but through a period of randori it must have occurred to him that people just don't put themselves into mawashi-type situations as much as they go for gaeshi-type positions. He didn't discard mawashi, but his next version of that same fundamentals kata included seventeen techniques and did include kotegaeshi but not mawashi. We have found through the years that kotegaeshi and wakigatame (gokyo) are probably the two most commonly occurring locking techniques in randori. Resistant ukes seem to always be pushing into wakigatame or snatching their arms back into gaeshi. because these two techniques transition into each other so much, we work a good bit on flowing between them in chain #3.

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Stay tuned for some discussion about the nature and use of locking techniques in general and kotegaeshi in particular.

Kotegaeshi

This guy has many well done demonstrations of aikido techniques on his website, including this video of kotegaeshi thrown as a response to several various attacks. Kotegaeshi is one of a handful of techniques that people hit my blog looking for more info on. This particular technique seems to be one of only two or three that folks really associate with aikido.

Since it's what everyone wants to know more about, I figure to write about kotegaeshi for a few posts, but for right now, enjoy the video and check back here for more in the next few days.

Yeah! What they said!

For the past couple of days the Formosa Neijia dude has posted some interesting videos (see below) with some cool movement in them. He took a fair amount of grief from a couple of his commentators about the martial applicability of the motion in the videos. Well, I just wanted to jump in and say I think I see where Formosa dude is coming from in is discussion of the value of freeplay in martial arts. In fact, I posted a similar pair of posts a while back (see below) about contact improvisation and silk reeling. I think he's saying what I was fumbling around with in April. Dojo rat has also posted a couple of really interesting videos on some unusual but still valid and potentially valuable motion exercises.

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If you're interested in motion for its own sake as well as martial applications of motion, I recommend this series of articles. I'd like to hear any comments from anyone who can put these various ideas together into a cohesive thing in their mind.

http://mokurendojo.blogspot.com/2007/04/separating-martial-from-art.html

http://mokurendojo.blogspot.com/2007/04/unfettered-motion.html

http://formosaneijia.com/2007/dont-do-you-got-me/

http://formosaneijia.com/2007/the-value-of-play/

http://dojorat.blogspot.com/2007/06/one-for-grapplers.html

http://dojorat.blogspot.com/2007/06/nice-sun-style-bagua-form.html

Judo stories for the Rat

Dojo Rat asked me to expand some on my previous post about the matches between the Judo and jujitsu guys early on in the history of Judo. To avoid retelling the whole thing I've looked up a few good articles for you.

Basically, the koryu (pre-Meiji restoration) jujitsu guys had kata as nearly their sole training method (See this article by Tomiki). You did kata then you went out and fought death matches or went to war as the only real test of your skills. Well, Kano comes along and collects the techniques of several jujitsu schools together and organizes them based on this idea of maximally efficient use of power into what he calls Judo. He also develops and implements a randori system, so his players simply get a lot more practice at testing the viability of their techniques than do the kata-only guys.

So, the eclectic Kano iritates a bunch of the older jujitsu teachers because of these changes that he's making, and the Metro police sponsor a tournament between the Kodokan and the old jujitsu guys. The Kodokan guys win all of the matches except one, establishing a batch of several new Kodokan demigods. Bear in mind that these were not the friendly little tourneys we're used to. These guys said goodbye to their relatives before they competed. These were death matches. The one Kodokan guy that failed to win his match stalemated the jujitsu guy for over an hour and still felt like a failure.

Well, in my opinion the take home lesson of this tournament is the point I made in the previous post. You have to have a randori system and you have to practice in that mode a lot.

Determinism in martial arts

One kind of nutty idea in some martial artists' minds is determinism. That is, the idea that, "Bad guy does A and I respond B which causes him to do C, to which I respond with D, forcing him to fall like so..." This idea of cause and effect is tenuous at best. Actions don't cause other actions, though they do influence them. James Ebert quotes Vietnam war army lieutenant James McDonough:

We would learn how little our decisions determined our futures. Rational decision making or technical and physical skills may save you once or twice. But a man in combat is exposed a thousand times. A gust of wind blows at the right moment to take a mortar round ten yards farther to explode. A tree grows fifty years only to absorb a grenade fragment that would have otherwise entered your heart. A blade of grass or bent branch deflects a speeding bullet enough to send it harmlessly through your flopping shirt - or savagely through your brain or liver. (from A Life in a Year)

I don't intend this to suggest fatalism. It is wiser to stand behind the 50 year old tree than beside it when people are shooting at you. You can improve your chances intelligently, but you can't determine your own future absolutely. You must build your martial system around probabilities and tendencies, not pre-determined cause-and-effect events. So, how do we figure out the probabilities of a given thing happening or the likelihood of a technique working a certain way?

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Randori - and lots of it. A system without randori (or sparring or push-hands or freeplay of some sort) is simply not a martial art. randori - and lots of it. That's why Kano's Kodokan judo excelled over the koryu jujitsu players they went up against. That's why the Gracies excelled in the 1970's and 80's in Brazil.
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Randori - and lots of it.

Aikido with my son

Tonight was just Whit and myself, so we warmed up counting 1-Jigoro-Kano, 2-Kenji-Tomiki, etc... up to 8-counts. We did ukemi, including forward kneeling rolls and forward standing kindergarden rolls. Wrist releases #1 and #2 with #2 chained into #1. The performance goal for #2 was "walk backwards around me until you turn me around, then do #1. Worked great. We played these releases seeing how fast Whit could get behind me when I grabbed him. This was a neat exercise and Whit figured out pretty rapidly how to control his momentum so that he could run behind me without slinging away. We did suwari kokyudosa (kneeling knockdown) throwing each other onto laser beams. Then we repped #6 from nijusan, oshitaoshi (shomenate ikkyo omote).

Fish belly white

This morning, since I'm on vacation from work, I spent a couple of hours working on my base tan. HA! I put the white in whiteboy! I'm sunburnt already, after my first swim of the summer. Seems like I'd have learnt my lesson sometime in the last 38 years.

Anyway, it sure made wearing my judogi (or, oven mitt, as Andy calls it) unpleasant. Today Cody came to aikido and we worked on fundamentals. Ukemi, tegatana (footwork), evasions, wrist releases, and finished up with shomenate and aigamaeate. Good sweaty class. Crikey, my skin burns!

A sensei is...

Different people expect different things from a sensei/sifu/master. Great teachers come in many different forms. What do you most want your martial arts teacher to be like? Y'all tell me...