How To Be A Good Uke

We all want to train the best we can, but without a good uke, that's impossible. Unfortunately, not much time is spent teaching people to be good ukes. My frustration with that resulted in this blog post about how to be a good uke.

http://budobum.blogspot.com/2015/05/...-good-uke.html

What do you think? Did I miss anything important?

I liked some of this. I think that uke is the other half of aikido; not more important or less important than nage.

Being uke is just as important as being nage and I do think some students spend their uke time waiting to be nage again.

While I agree with your point about uke being just as important as the teacher I think it could be misconstrued to mean that uke knows what is best for nage.

I think uke would be better served to listen to the instructor's notes on how to uke if there is to be a variation in the kata practice.

During freestyle or free practice however, I agree with your ideas of variation of speed, tempo and forcefulness.

The whole point of Aikido is to learn aiki. A good responsive uke is essential, especially at first for beginners. Soon, he should not be so responsive - to ever test you - but should still move properly. And so on. No matter the grade, the one who is best at the role of uke has the higher skill and will learn aiki faster. Especially in terms of speedy learning skill. But he will not learn it if he does not make that his target.

There is a time for providing a properly scaled developmental resistance as uke and there is a time to just ride along and enjoy it. Both are fundamental to getting good with Aiki.

Greetings from down under.

If your technique is poor, I am the "uke from hell"

If your technique is good, I am the "uke from heaven"