06/25 After practice thought

On this Tuesday night, we have a almost full class, everyone seems to be in good spirit. 

After warm up, we did sword practice, walking straight line with sword in hands. It sounds easy, but it is difficult to do. Holding the sword make you sensitive of where the weight is, you have to be very careful maintain the balance so you walk straight and steady. We also did some hip turn exercise, shift weight to one side, rotate on the weighted leg with arms wide open to your side.

Then Q&A time, I brought up that I felt Kotehineri is the hardest technique of all, sensei decided to test all of us how well we do on this technique, not surprisingly we failed. We spent the rest of the class rotating through sensei, correct our kotehineri one by one. My takeaway is use thumb rather than fingers to do hineri on uke, and really need to see uke's arm as a stick, drive it to uke's center, maintain it throughout.

Been a while

Wow, my last post was more than a month ago! I admitted being bad. Here is a quick post to capture a few thoughts.

Over last week, we spent a lot of time on kotehineri and kotegaeshi which triggered by a question from Ilya. Both sensei felt that we did horribly on those two techniques, they dedicated half a class time to train us for just these two. My take away are the following: 

1. Kotehineri:  Must get hineri firmly at the beginning, lock the elbow, create connection to the center, then use the other hand to push into the center, once you moved to the weak line of the uke, it is important to maintain the connection, so that creates the double back kuzushi, avoid collapsing arms, avoid lifting the uke's arm, if you do, that means you didn't have the good connection to create kuzhushi on uke, thus one tends to push them back with their arms. After double back kuzushi is created, pull to front leg and turn, thus throwing the uke, avoid push with the arms again, use the maintained kuzushi.

2. Kotegaeshi: Go with uke when he retracts the arm, use idoryoku, take him to his weak line, then take his hand to gaeshi, extend arms always, adjust footwork if needed, but be sure to maintain my own structure.

Tuesday (6/18) nights's class, we did some bokken draw. Sensei determined that our structure is horribly corrupted during practice, doing bokken exercise should help our structure problem.

• Holding bokken, left hand on bottom, right hand on top, loose grip
• Shoulder down, raise the elbow to raise bokken, think of it extending elbow out vs. lifting shoulder
• Blade should be pointing towards uke's eyes
• Never lay bokken on floor, bad luck and dangerous
• Never let bokken tip touch the floor
• Right hand holding the bokken, arm relax, hand next to body is the least threatening pose
• Bokken in left waist position, both arm relax, both hand next to body is the a bit more threatening pose
• Bokken in left waist position, left hand on bokken, right hand ready to draw, most threatening pose