Thread: Koshinage Ukemi
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Old 01-26-2012, 04:15 PM   #12
Fred Little
Dojo: NJIT Budokai
Location: State Line NJ/NY
Join Date: Apr 2001
Posts: 641
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Re: Koshi Nage - Open Stance or Feet Together

Szczepan --

I'm clearly not Ellis, nor would I claim to speak for him. What I can say is that I first encountered his method years ago and have used it ever since. I'm one of those people who has students taking koshi-nage quite safely by the end of their first class. Most important, I've not had a single shoulder separation from a front roll gone wrong in a class I've taught since introducing the method almost a decade ago. Prior to that, I had personally witnessed just such injuries in beginners' classes in every dojo in which I trained for an extended period, including Eighteenth Street.

While I agree with your prerequisites as a group of desirable qualities, I don't agree with the order at all. In fact, what I've found is that by eliminating the fear of a "high fall" at the outset, this method eliminates most of the fear of falling -- the freeze factor -- that prevents many students from fulfilling the development of perception. By allowing students to practice vigorously, yet safely, from the outset, it also allows them to practice a great deal more, much sooner, than more "traditional" methods, and thus, develop your second prerequisite.

Of course, there are points from which this method would certainly not be viewed as an unalloyed good. In distinction to "the most dangerous situations," I have found that in normal practice, Ellis' method eliminates the routine need for a great many spectacular falls of the type favored by some, and I have seen some individuals with rather fixed expectations become visibly offended when their waza, when applied to someone using this method, results in a rather small and most unspectacular result. It seems to be taken as a sort of offense to the social order. This could be a problem in some settings -- but this is a social problem, not a functional budo training problem.

That said, budo organizations are social organizations and perhaps one might come to a reasoned judgment that the method is not appropriate in a particular context. In experimental terms, were that the case, there are three possibilities that require examination: 1) the method is the problem 2) the context is the problem 3) the fit between the method and the context is the problem. I would argue that insisting on possibility 1) while ignoring 2) and 3) is not a strong analytical approach.

But maybe that's just me.

FL

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