Charles Krause: Personal Snippets, News, Triva, and Thoughts

Well, it has been one week of Aikido. That is, 3 basic Aikido technique classes (moving the body) and one Aiki-ken (moving a sword) class. I still havn’t made it to the Aiki-jō class (moving a long staff), but that’s next Tuesday.

Apart from discovering aches and pains in muscles I didn’t even know I had, I’m having a great time. It is all pretty overwhelming. The general instruction strategy seems to be that they throw an entire block of technique at you at once. They don’t expect you to pick it up all at once though. They do seem to throw the same block of technique at you each and every class, and you pick up a little bit of it each time. Sensei Zimmermann keeps saying, “we’ll show you ten things; you’re doing well if you manage to remember one”. He also says, “it’s all actually getting stored away in there. Learning to retrieve it is harder”.

I’ve been very pleased with the groups general attitude toward beginners. I’ve met a number of very patient people. It helps that it seems to be a practice to attach newer people to a practice pair in rotation with the other two, rather than just pairing people off. That way the “new person” tends to get the technique explained to them twice, gets to practice (sometimes an abbreviated form of the technique), and the more experienced students still get “actual” practice on each other as well.

Things I’ve noted/jotted down this week:

General

• The style of Aikido taught by Toronto Aikikai is the Aikikai “style” as practiced and taught by Mitsunari Kanai. Thus Toronto Aikikai as associated with the Aikikai Foundation in Japan.
• “Slow down, go faster”. That isn’t some Japanese grand master martial artist, that’s my Father, but it seems to be especially apt in Aikido training.
• On the flip side, don’t let going slow let you stop either. Push as hard as you can, without letting the pushing mess up the results
• You can tell a whole lot about mistakes you’re making in technique by listening to, and looking at, your body the next day. “That bruise is because I didn’t roll on my arm properly during forward Ukemi (the art of falling down/being thrown and not getting injured in the process, and being able to roll back up quickly) and smacked my shoulder into the mat. My neck hurts because I’m not tucking my head far enough away from the forward roll. That hip pain is because you were stupid enough to try Ukemi on your own without warming up first!” etc.
• Learn to mirror the technique being presented to you by the teacher, not match it. Trying to match them head on gets the left and right backwards.
• Knowing all of this intellectually does not translate into being able to do it properly! But it does allow you to observe and critique your own techniques, correct mistakes, and try again. Hopefully.
• Having someone observe and correct your technique is valuable, but it it important to learn how to observe, critique, and correct your own technique as well.
• Learn to stretch, learn to bend, work on flexibility! A daily regime of stretching exercises is a good idea. Replicate the warm up exercises at home as much as possible.
• Ego really doesn’t have much place in a dojo. So what if you have to be shown something 5 times? Does it really matter if someone has to show you how to dress properly again (how to wear a Gi 101)? If you don’t know something, how about just being quiet and listen to someone teach it.
• Likewise, don’t be overly attached to quickly over attached to learning everything quickly to fill a perceived “knowledge gap”; I’m not trying to “catch up”, I’m trying to learn at my own pace. This doesn’t mean I can relax and take it easy; I think I should push as hard as I can without the effort starting to screw up the results, both in learning techniques and with my physical conditioning. But the only person against whom I should be gauging and judging progress against is myself.
• If I just can’t let go of the ego thing when I seem to be particularly dense picking up a movement, I have to remember that people have had that problem before, some of them are (or have been) in my own class. I am neither uniquely good, nor uniquely bad, at this. Relax.
• Seiza is a lot harder than it looks, but as it is the basis of basic dojo etiquette, learn to do it right. Seiza can be practiced easily enough at home; all it takes is 2-3 minutes practice every now and again, scattered liberally though one’s time at home. One writer about Iaido practice suggested getting into seiza for a few minutes at the beginning of each commercial break while watching television. I can’t do that as I don’t have a television, and the programs I watch through downloading them through the internet don’t have commercial breaks, but I’m sure I can adapt this idea.
• I’m very skeptical about how wise it is to have a beer after class, but it does seem to help with the muscle tension.
• Pain comes in many flavors: there’s a difference between your body saying “Ow that stings”, “I don’t want to do that because that muscle is stiff and/or sore”, and “Hey! Don’t do that, I don’t work that way!”. The first two you just suck up and move on anyways. The third you have to pay attention to.
• There is a natural tendency for me to pay more attention to things I understand, or find more interesting. For example, I’m drawn to the Aiki-ken techniques because they’re sword techniques, therefore I tend to concentrate a higher level of intensity of attention on those techniques, and therefore it seems easier for me to “grasp” aspects of it (even though it might not make it any easier to do them). I need to learn to bring the intensity of attention of all aspects of training up to match that shown to my “favorites”.
• Each of the senior students leading the warm ups seems to have their own favorite set up warm up exercises. That’s OK, just do the routine presented to you.

• I am a functional learner. This means that it is very hard for me to grasp something unless I know the why and the purpose of something. It is very hard for me to remember to do something by rote. “We step to the outside as you push your partner down because because this is just what we do at this point in the technique” doesn’t stick in my head very well. “We step to the outside as you push your partner down because it pulls them off balance so they can’t get their downside arm on the ground and keep themselves from going down” – now that I can understand. I know why we do it, and what is going on. Things make more sense to me as a functional flow. Perhaps I would benefit from studying descriptions and diagrams of techniques as well as learning to do them on the mat.

Aikido

• Ukemi is an absolutely critical part of Aikido. If you can’t fall down or be thrown safely, and then get back up again, you won’t be able to train without injuring yourself!
• Learn to visualize what you’re doing, and not “look at” what you’re doing. It is sometimes tempting to “look where you’re going” during Ukemi, but this isn’t they way you need to be holding your neck!
• A lot of Aikido is basic mechanical physics: Understanding leverage, inertia, and angular momentum goes a long way to understanding why something is done in a particular way.
• Aikido techniques seem to be based on movement around a pretty solidly placed “center of gravity”. Movements seem to pivot around this center. Hence they seem to be mostly driven (at least so far) by rotations of the hips, changing one’s angular momentum around that center, etc. and not by extension or “pushing” with arms and legs as much.
• Aikido techniques seem to come in two “flavors”. There are probably a lot more than just two, but I’m noticing there always seem to be at least two: same side to same side, and cross sides (i.e. a left handed “grab” being met with both right and left body techniques).
• Extending one’s arm outwards from the center of one’s body as one is being thrown, transfers a lot of your body’s angular momentum to your hand. This slows you down (conservation of angular momentum, or the exact opposite technique that a figure skater uses to speed up a spin by drawing their limbs inwards). Hitting the mat with the flat of your hand first can therefore “bleed off” a lot of the rotational energy of your body into your hand (which is tough), and not your hip, or shoulder (not as tough). I find this especially cool!
• Smacking into the mat is actually conditioning your body to be able to absorb smacking into the mat. Eventually bruising should be a rare event. So they tell me. I’ll get back to you on that.

Aiki-Ken

• Basic stance is critical. Feet pointed forward, left back and straight and just enough off to the left of your body’s centerline to make you stable. Right leg forward slightly, calf still strait up and down, bent at knee. Left foot rocked up so weight is on ball of foot. Hips square, back straight; center of mass should be in your spine pulling you straight down.
• Pay attention to footwork. Position, orientation, rotation, and inclination are all important. These are not only important in a static position, but in moving from one stance to another.
• The proper grip on the tsuka (the hilt, or handle portion of the bokken) changes with the technique. Pay attention to handwork as well as footwork.
• Focus should be in two places: the tip of the blade, and the center of gravity “pivot point” of the sword. This defines a position in space and an orientation simultaneously. Note: the placing of this “sword vector” is critical as well.
• In basic stance, the end of the tsuka should be about a fist distance from your body, pointing at your hara (your physical center of gravity located in the abdomen three finger widths below and two finger widths behind the navel), with the tip of the blade (kissaki) pointed directly at the eyes of your imaginary opponent.
• Pay attention to extension of limbs, and angles of joints. Holding the “sword vector” out of position can open up vulnerabilities where an opponent could attack through before you can respond. Over-extending a leg or an arm can leave your body exposed, or open up an opportunity for an opponent to lop it off!
• There are several cutting techniques (I think), but they all seem to rely on the right hand being somewhat relaxed on the tsuka, just behind where the tsuba would be, acting as a fulcrum, with the left hand near the end of the tsuka, levering the sword around the pivot point, whipping the tip around at high speed. This cutting can be augmented by large circular swinging movements of the limbs, and followed up by a lateral “drawing cut” once the blade has “bit”, but this seems to be the basics.
• Keep looking at your (albeit imaginary) opponent! You can’t tell what they’re doing if you’re not looking at them. Conveniently for you they just happen to be the same size as you.

I think that’s it for this week.

It seems to be a lot! However, knowing and jotting this down doesn’t mean I’ve learned it yet. It is one thing to be able to abstract and reason something out, another to remember all and keep it in mind, yet another to assimilate it into the way you think and do things, and yet a fourth to program the movements into “muscle memory“.

We’ll see what else I pick up next week, especially as I’ll be taking Aiki-jō for the first time Tuesday.