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Old 04-25-2010, 06:25 AM   #7
Kevin Leavitt
 
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Dojo: Team Combat USA
Location: Olympia, Washington
Join Date: Jul 2002
Posts: 4,376
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Re: Cultivating a mind for training honestly.

One thing that comes to mind for me when reading this is a phenomenon that I experience in teaching Level I (beginning) combatives to Soldiers quite often.

In my advance classes and BJJ classes students will of course move "appropriately" and proportionality to the real and "percieved" threat.

However, in the Level I course, many times they will not. They will do things that are completely and tactically unsound.

They will do these things and put me in a hurt locker cause I was not expecting them to do that very thing, or they will demonstrate shear super human strength and power out of something they should not be able to get out of....they will take risk that a "reasonable" and proficient student will not.

AND they are not WRONG!

Sure we want Uke to learn to recognize when they are in danger, but we also need to understand that people will do things that we may or may not think SHOULD happen. They will take risk, especially if they perceive they have something greater to lose.

What ever we do in the dojo, we need to develop an answer and a response for. The guy may be willing to risk a strike to the back of the head or completely pull his arm out of socket to get to you are get out of a pin.

We also need to be careful to not CONDITION uke and nage both to accept and comply as a matter of HABIT, not of training constraint but HABIT...what you do in training, you will do on the street.

So, I love new students and students that do not recognize what is really going on with said technique. We need to not look at them as nuisances, but as a welcome training challenge to improve what we are doing with both them and us.

It is great to have beautiful and perfect aikido where the partners have reached the level of communication where they are both flowing properly through the process doing everything by the book.

On the street on in reality, there is a breakdown in that communication process and it is up to us to gain control of that process...not to blend with it, harmonize with it, or to make him understand.....BUT to completely and utterly CONTROL IT!

Once we have control of it, we have the ability to dictate the terms of the relationship and we can then (hopefully) return to that relationship what we want...that is once he/she understands what roles each of you is playing.

Sure you can always leave room for him to choose a path, figuratively and literally. Choice can be a good thing to give him, but we need to also weigh the risk and make sure we are taking an identifiable an controllable risk.

I think though that it is important to understand that first we have to learn to control before we can restore the balance.

Sorry for the digression, but I think this is important to completely understand this paradigm of the relationship between uke/nage.

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