Not a good week for our Aikido club

Let me start with something good this week. On Tuesday night, we had a randori focus class, Morgan sensei led us doing drill after dirll, primarily working on moving the feet and keeping the ma-ai. The requirement was to block attack and be gone instantaneously. The other requirement was to block attack with corner taisabaki, establish ma-ai behind uke, at the same time uke turned around, immediately attack with Shomen-ate. I think this drill is a very helpful randori practice, it teaches a lot of principle and setup some chain reaction in the mind. To me, if the system is not in the mind, the body will never be able to do it.

Other not so merry thing includes I missed Thursday's class, since I thought no one will show up, but turned out two did show up. Our tatami mats have been used by unknown person in the gym for the third time in a row, they stacked the mats in the wrong ways, which makes mats very dirty, and most importantly they don't know how to handle them right, it will definitely shorten the life of our expensive mats. We have found  three occurrence of which all happens on Friday, this week, it happened on Wednesday. Today we took turn to patrol in the gym to find out, but somehow we haven't found anything yet, maybe this week, those people changed schedules. It is very frustrating, and sad to think of our mats were abused.

I hope we can catch those group of people soon.

At the mean time, below is another excellent demonstration of all 6 of kuzushi waza performed by Kobayashi sensei and Charlie back in 2009 in Waseda university shortly after the international tournament.




Terminology:

Maai	Proper distance 間合
Irimi	Entering 入身