chillzATL

I'm assuming the entire context of this thread relates to moving in aikido and the whole notion of "moving from your center".

One neat little drill that I picked up is to have people pair up and get a jo. They face off and put the jo between them, hara to hara. Nage walking forward, Uke walking backwards. Basically nage's job is to move Uke with the jo. Because of where the jo is placed, the only way to do this is to move from the hips/center first and naturally you have to feel that connection between the ground and the hips to do that. On the receiving end Uke is basically doing the same thing, in reverse. They do this down and back a few times focusing on maintaining a steady consistent pressure between themselves with the jo and feeling the ground driving them in their respective directions.

At first they'll probably drop their stance down lower (not a bad thing) than they're used to and move unnaturally, but after a while that sort of fixes itself and they'll get back to feeling like they're moving normally, but they'll definitely have a solid feel for what it means to "move from your center". It also helps clean up footwork if they're used to shuffling their feet a lot.