Cliff Judge

I was watching this a bit last night, Jon, and I am curious what you think is ikkyo about this. There are a couple of things I am curious about:

- on the face of it, this would seem to be a cycling exchange of ikkyos that fail.
- this lacks the rising and falling type of movement pattern, I think. The spiraling seems to be mostly horizontal.

Ellis's video was also rather horizontal, though I think the up part happens before contact with uke. What I recall him saying about the general movement patterns in Aikido was that ikkyo was rising and falling.

And yes, I have heard about ikkyo curves around the hips but I am not sure I am willing to call those "ikkyo curves". I guess I basically feel like ikkyo leads with rising and has lateral movement as a secondary thing (maybe in Billspeak I could say I feel the water dragon is more important than the fire dragon in ikkyo.)