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Old 01-18-2013, 09:02 PM   #19
hughrbeyer
Dojo: Shobu Aikido of Boston
Location: Peterborough, NH
Join Date: Aug 2010
Posts: 653
United_States
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Re: easily accessible videos of Internal Training in Aikido?

Jun asked for a little more detail about what I was describing above rather than just a reference to it. Let me see what I can do.

I was on the mat with Imaizumi Sensei most recently. He showed a sort of morote-tori kokyu nage where nage responds with a tenkan and then (assuming uke grabbed the right wrist) a horizontal clockwise movement of the hand ending by sending uke outside, to nage's right. The hard parts were, how to keep connection throughout the clockwise movement and how to send uke off to the right without forcing the movement.

My partner and I struggled with this. Every time my partner tried, at the last part of the movement I just let go--not because I was trying to be a jerk, but because it was so obviously unnecessary to hold on. I'm not sure what I was doing, but it wasn't working any better. So I got Imaizumi Sensei to throw me and it was essentially magic--no force on the contact point, no opportunity for me to regain balance, and on the final throw no force into the point of contact and therefore no reason or opportunity for me to let go--and yet I was irresistibly taken off balance and thrown.

So my partner and I get back together and we're still struggling because what was that, anyway? And then it clicks--Imaizumi is not putting pressure on the point of contact (the wrist grab). In the concepts that Dan teaches, he's using elbow power (ki out the elbow, not along the line of contact). He's using yin/yang at the point of contact (as much as he's coming in on one side, he's taking back on the other so that the point remains neutral). He's using 5+5=10 (as much intent on one side of the point of contact as the other) and then rebalancing (7+3=10) to lead uke offline and into the throw. Once I started applying those concepts, the throw started to work.

Now, I have no idea if Imaizumi formulates what he's doing to himself at all like that. But those concepts, which I got from Dan, helped me to make sense of the throw in a way that my partner, one of his students, recognized as being closer to the mark.

BUT--to bring this back to the topic of the thread--a video wouldn't show any of that. You'd see me taking the fall for Imaizumi and not for my partner and say it must be Shihan syndrome.

I'd say the same thing about the Ikeda video, BTW. When people try to do what Josh describes, they put force on the thumb or little finger and letting go is easy--desirable, even. My sensei can do this to me when I'm attacking open palm, so all he has to work with is my pressure into his center. It's not about angles and leverage. But you can't prove that with a video.

Evolution doesn't prove God doesn't exist, any more than hammers prove carpenters don't exist.
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