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The Tuesday night triple-play. I'd been at the chiropractor earlier that day and my back was (and thankfully still is) feeling great. I'm not going out of alignment, but my back is snap-crackle-popping a lot. Little things go in and out here and there and he puts them back in place. What I'm concentrating most on now is keeping my posture all the time.
First class was an intro class, so we did some rolling review and a bit of basic nikkyo work. I'm all for the rolling review because the more I roll, the better I get at it. It's funny though, I depend a lot on momentum. My static rolls, from kneeling, aren't very good. That's something to definitely polish.
The nikkyo work was really interesting because Toyoda Sensei said something that really stuck with me. It was a quote from one of his sensei, something to the effect of "Imagine yourself as a piece of long rope. Stay extended. You can shorten a long rope if you need to, but you cannot lengthen a short rope." I've completely murdered the quote, but the point is to maintain extension constantly.
Class two was with Parks-Casey Sensei. We did lots of tai sabaki work from ikkyo forms. I like that kind of stuff because my body really does seem to learn the patterns and the flow of things better than pure technique.
She added a bit of break fall work and an interesting ikkyo technique where you lead uke around by the back of the neck while they are looking at the floor. It's pretty scary not knowing where you are being thrown, much less not being able to see where you are going. My rolls are not great on one arm yet, and the ukemi was to take a roll from a single arm, so I was particularly awful. At the very end we were doing controlled roll-outs while someone was holding our hands. Splat, oof, bang, crunch. My body made all of those noises and then some.
Weapons class turned out to be more than just weapons class. We started with a number of interesting rolling drills. Forward then backward, forward and pivot to another forward roll, all at high speed. As usual Sensei was pushing us hard. Her point was to try and move us beyond our comfort point to make us better. I'm all for that, except I took one bad roll and it tripped me up.
Jo nage was the theme of the rest of the evening. The hardest was doing a koshinage throw. None of us could do it well, so we spent lots of time loading uke on our back and taking the ukemi. Rough stuff.