Mat abuser are gone!

Before I forgot what we did in week of April 22-27, I want to run a quick recap here.

First breaking news, after putting up new yellow signs on the mats, our mats stay intact each time when we came in, we didn't catch the mat abusers, but it seems that the new signs scared them away, hopefully it will keep this way.

Tuesday night class, we have both Morgan sensei and Branch sensei. After warm up, we did several round of tasabaki drill. Then followed by a lot of kuzushi waza practice. At the end of the class, we did self kuzushi practice, what it means is that we pretend being attacked by a invisible tori, so we have to show all the kuzushi and fall ourselves in each technique, it was a funny scene that all of us act like zombie. :-)

Thursday night class, we have Branch sensei. More kuzushi  waza and tasabaki practice, and again we practiced the self kuzushi uke, it is fun and it is kind of reminder of all principle of the techniques. Then on the extension of that practice, we added with tori, the goal is that the kuzushi made by the tori should match with those as if the uke does the self kuzushi, that way you can easily tell whether tori is doing a good job or not, uke can teach tori by telling him whether he has the right kuzushi or not.

Saturday morning practice, we did quite a few things, mainly focus on suwari waza, cross hand grab junanahon and mirror hand grab junanahon. Branch sensei stopped by, and gave up some advices on suwari waza.

1. In general, meet uke before he raised the hand, meet early, use that connection for kuzushi.

2. On 1,3,5 and 7, don't forget to do the full shikko step so you end up close to uke when he falls, get the knee up and pull on to it.

3. On 2 and 8, body torso should turn 180 degree 

4. Last but not the least, use live toes the whole time.

Found a interesting site where those pictures display actions and kuzhushi very very clearly and precisely, http://www.shodokan.narod.ru/sports.htm. They have old but clear pictures of the techniques performed by Nariyama sensei. Below pictures are from there. I guess that is where the source of those animated pictures I found earilier.

Noticed in pictures marked 2, in both pictures, uke was twisted by the kuzhushi.
I am going to try to practice for that kind of effect