After a warmup, we did some ukemi, with emphasis on how to teach beginners to fall.
Walking - focus on not lifting my arms while taking a step, per Pat's recent post.
Releases - We did releases 1-8 and they all felt better today than they have in a very long time. Not perfect, but much better. After my recent frustrations with 2, 4, 6, & 8 in particular, it was refreshing to feel more successful. We talked about the evasion step on 6 & 8 not having to be huge, and it helps the footwork when the step is more reasonable. Again we talked about how to approach the first couple of releases with beginners.
We talked about teaching beginners a lot today, because there's a decent chance I'll be starting a club in my area soon (more on that later, we're waiting on a couple of approvals to fall into place, but I have about a dozen people interested). With that in mind, we brushed up on the aiki brush-off (see what I did there?) and Pat's patented "Cow-Catcher" exercise. The brush-off is to create separation, but sometimes it doesn't work so well; the cow catcher is there to salvage that and still create a little distance while staying safe.
Junana 1 (Shomenate) - transitioned from the brush-off to shomenate, again focusing on breaking it down for beginners.
Junana 11 & 12 (Kotehineri and kotegaeshi) - We played mostly with J12 resulting from a not-quite-right J11. Used the cycle of going back and forth from 11 to 12 and back again. I need to remember to move my body correctly in order to maintain good hand position (as opposed to putting my hands in bad/weak positions just to get the grips).
Urawaza - we worked on urawaza for J6 and J11, which just involved stepping on the other side of the line and countering with J6 or 11 as well.
Randori - I'm getting more comfortable doing randori all the time. Not necessarily better, but more comfortable. I'm getting to the point where I feel like I'm learning from it, and not just learning to do it. There was a neat "wrong-handed" hineri that kept showing up today.
Great notes. You are good at summarizing what we did. Keep it up!
ReplyDeleteGood Luck on the class dude. It's a lot of fun to teach.
ReplyDeleteYeah I heard you had your first class this week - I look forward to hearing how it goes!
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