covering with the inside leg

Hi everyone,

I've been working on ukemi with one of the Sempei at our dojo and he was saying that you should always try to cover yourself by keeping your inside leg forward when being thrown. Most of the time this seems to happen naturally since most attacks involve stepping forward on that foot anyway. On techniques like irimi nage with a tenkan or kaiten nage ura though, most people seem to take a step with the outside foot and open themselves to a strike to the groin. The person I'm working with can actually move the forward/inside foot to follow nages movement but I have a very hard time duplicating this (it also seems to make it harder to take his balance). The other minor downside is that it often forces me to roll with my legs reversed. That's not really a problem except when I work with someone who doesn't know what I'm trying to do and they tell me I'm doing my ukemi wrong! Anyway, I was just curious what people think about that style of ukemi.

On circular irimi nage ukemi, I find sliding the inside foot around as your lead foot to be very efficient, both for staying protected and for quick movement, since the circle it travels has a smaller circumference than that of the outside leg. It does take a bit of practice to get used to though.

And as for the fall, if you do a quick pivot on the inside foot and turn to face the direction of the throw , you end up with the correct foot forward. This also takes some practice to perfect. Try unweighting a bit so you can use the ball of your foot as a pivot point and avoid excess torque on the knee.

how do you do a groin kick in the middle of an irimi nage? I'm trying to picture it, but it's not coming (then again, that's my weakest technique).

Paul Mihalik (Largo) wrote: how do you do a groin kick in the middle of an irimi nage? I'm trying to picture it, but it's not coming (then again, that's my weakest technique).

Just after you tenkan (at the same point you would start reversing direction) just bring your inside knee up. I don't think you could pull off a real kick unless you were doing the technique at a distance like Ikeda Sensei does in some of his videos. I also think that if you did this (knee or kick) you would have to finish with a different technique (kaiten nage comes to mind) because uke would probably be doubled over and falling forward.

Okay...that clears it up a lot.