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Old 02-15-2014, 08:49 AM   #195
ChrisMikk
 
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Dojo: Mugenjuku
Location: Kyoto, Japan
Join Date: Sep 2004
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Re: does nikyo hurt?

Quote:
Christopher Li wrote: View Post
What I said is that the pain compliance part is:

a) Very easy.
b) Not very interesting, mainly because of (a).
c) Done by every store front martial arts kids class, which also contributes a bit to (b).

The non-painful variant that Shioda talks about is operating along some different lines, IMO. A number of people seem to think that this is a high level (maybe too high a level) thing - but that would just make it more interesting, to me.

I'm not particularly concerned about causing anybody pain, it just doesn't interest me much.
I agree completely that the painful variant is not very interesting. In the Kenshusei Course at Mugenjuku Dojo, we practice only to achieve the non-painful variant.

After about 10 months of Kenshusei, I can perform the non-painful variant fairly consistently on the other course participants. Recently, we started attending ippan classes, and I seem to be able to perform it there, too, sometimes.

I am not ready to say I understand it even 80%, but I think I understand it enough to teach it to other people given certain commonalities in training. It doesn't seem like a particularly high level technique to me, but it is one that--as far as I can tell--requires Yoshinkan posture and body mechanics.

One problem with people's understanding of the non-painful variant seems to me to be that the most basic nikyo/nikajo technique taught is tachi-waza-katate-mochi, whereas the technique is much easier to understand from tachi-waza-kata-mochi and from suwari-waza-katate-mochi.

The keys to doing the tachi-waza-katate-mochi variant are correct maai and not using the arms/hands at all once you have grasped uke's hand/forearm. If you can keep these two elements and make a small shuffle with correct posture, the technique seems to work like magic.

I think correct maai is the real key, and this would explain why the technique is so hard for many people yet I can do it on my fellow students consistently. To achieve correct maai, you need to be able to intuit it in the instant you move the hands into position. This requires sensing uke in a way that most people can't do. Yet in the course, I can compensate for lack of intuition by learning the correct maai for my fellow students.

I would suggest to people trying to learn this technique from kata-mochi. If you get the point of having one hand on the wrist and the other near the elbow, you should be able to perform nikyo/nikajo by simply extending your spine without doing anything else. This isn't powerful enough to take someone to the ground, but it can be powerful enough to break their balance, which really is the technique, anyhow.

As for trying to define what nikyo/nikajo is, I have given up. Of course, I am still a beginner, but after practicing all the kihon variants, I have come to the tentative conclusion that nikajo is actually a name for a collection of techniques that don't all work in the same way, at least from a low level perspective. For example, karate-mochi requires that the arms move little or not at all, whereas in aya-mochi, the arm must cut. And hiji-mochi is a whole other beast that is basically just jujutsu. Or at least, I haven't been able to figure out where the aikido comes in. Further, there are non-kihon techniques that are just pain compliance, which is a fundamentally different mechanism from balance-taking.

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