View Single Post
Old 10-28-2008, 10:56 AM   #7
Erick Mead
 
Erick Mead's Avatar
Dojo: Big Green Drum (W. Florida Aikikai)
Location: West Florida
Join Date: Jun 2005
Posts: 2,619
United_States
Offline
Re: How to help shy women to have confident training

Quote:
Mary Malmros wrote: View Post
If they're "very shy about training", I'd say stay out of their faces. Really. Let a senior woman handle it.
I don't know. I let her hit me with munetsuki. I haven't gotten in trouble for letting a girl beat me up yet. And this has worked several times, but I teach the class.

I ask her to hit me and suggested how to improve her strike to make it hard enough to not want her hitting me again. Then -- and only then -- I showed her how to slow, but not misdirect, the strike so as not to HAVE TO hurt the target unless she chose to. That helped to free alot of unworkable inhibitions and put new and more appropriate ones in place, and those changes in taking responsibility for not hurting someone in the RIGHT way in a situation where you actually could, seems to positively affect both ukemi and nagewaza. Works for the reticent male, too FWIW, but the repetitions are usually fewer to get to the acceptable discomfort level.

Cordially,

Erick Mead
一隻狗可久里馬房但他也不是馬的.
  Reply With Quote