Jetstopia

Dan Gradings

Had a seminar over the weekend where my dojo had it’s first members going for their Shodan.

As we didn’t have many people available to take ukemi for the graders who where Shodan or higher it was up to some of the more senior students to take ukemi. I was asked to take ukemi.

There were 2 sets of shodan tests and 1 set of Nidan tests. Holly crap I am sore now and this was yesterday. Normally every month or so I get a good throw by my sensei or a senior person and think “crap that was a hard landing”. During the tests I probably had over 10 of those moments, including a kokunage from shomen (Tori come under the arm taking as they go to their knees making you do like a front flip break fall) where I was spun faster and hit harder than any throw I have ever had.

Good fun though and all the students from my dojo, 2 Nidans and 4 shodans past. The exception was a 17 year old brown belt who was asked to do it again when he was a bit older. He past but apparently our organisation isn’t grading shodans until you are 18 now.

Aikido Teaching

I had my second class teaching yesterday and it was interesting.

I was working on the connection between tori and uke and the need for uke to be light and responsive.

There were two ungraded beginners but they could do standing rolls so not that fresh. I was going to do some more complicated things but spent a bit of time on ikkyo from aihanmi and then from shomen - this was going to be my starting point briefly.

I built layers on a technique and it ended up finished like this from a shoment uchi attack:

Step 1: Ikkyo entry but light and moving into uchi irimi entry, kinda getting into a shionage hand shape. (we projected out and uke rolled from here)

Step 2: Then, doing like a backwards box step to spin the uke around into a kind of sumiotoshi position. (we did a rolling sumiotoshi at this point)

Step 3: Then, stepping uchi irimi again but taking sankyo grip and kaiten (I was going to add a kokyuho here as another exit but was running out of time so…)

Step 4: Then, finish with sankyo omote and pin.

The beginners improved their ikkyo footwork and the more senior students managed to dance around a bit with light contact. All in all it was an interesting class and I think everyone got something out of it.

Need to think of something to do next week now…

Aikdio deep end

Yesterday was a special advanced night and we had pre-tests for all our students doing dan grades to prepare for a coming grading in about a month. It will be my dojos first batch of Shodans to go through and we also had 2 Shodans instructors trained elsewhere preparing for their Nidan tests.

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