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The past couple of weeks have been interesting for me. My friends father teaches Karate and so from time to time I'm invited to go and train there.
Usually when this happens all the rest of my friends invite me to train at their place too and so for the past couple of weeks I've been dojo hopping, along side my normal training.
I look forward to a day when I have a dojo of my own and can return the favour.
It's quite humbling to go somewhere else and be treated with a level of respect I really don't deserve.
So I'm very sore and very energised, I'm still mulling over what I can learn from all the different arts and things I've done, it's provoked a few realisations about my ability..........not so much in a technical sence but more in a tactical sence, my ability to adapt my training on the fly has been tested and I'm quite happy.
In particular what's caught my attention is the way I use tai sabaki and mai-ai in sparring matches. I'm very good at not getting hit and very good at getting in close. On one occasion I went in with a front kick and threw a cross, my opponent covered up and I ended up in a situation where I put a tegatana in my opponents elbow and could quite easily have snatched his shoulder, as for chudan irimi nage.
This got my mind working and I started entering in more aggressively and I found that with atemi I can dash in and get VERY close both on the dead and live sides. My opponents reaction was invariably to back off to create room to strike.
The thing it reminds me of is seeing some of the bjj guys dash in and go for a take down. So now my line of thinking is that basically Aikido and BJJ both utilise the same tactics, we both dash in, clinch and take down. Obviously there are major differences in what we do after we break our opponents posture but the theory behind the opening gambit is the same; dash into an opening.
This got me mulling about all the different types of attack we train against, not so much the strikes but the bewildering array of different grabs, morote dori, ryote dori, kata dori etc.
The ones that really interest me are Kata dori tsuki, morote dori and ushiro ryote kata. Obviously at some point someone decided these were all smart ways to attack someone and therefore it was logical to learn to defend against them.
The reason I'm going down this line of thinking is because of the oppertunities I had in sparring to take hold of my opponent, so I'm wondering what happens if you attack someone with one of these holds.
I can get in close, what happens if I take hold of his right shoulder and punch him? What happens if I can get hold of his right shoulder with my right hand? What happens if after I've made him cover up with atemi I attack him jodan morote dori?
Or rather what after I've got hold of him can I do from an Aikido point of view? The entire point of Aikido is to achieve kuzushi from the moment you make contact. If I can achieve kuzushi on contact surely I can take down my opponent before he can react just like the BJJ guys did back in the day except I avoid going to the floor with my opponent?
08-10-2008 08:01 PM 