I don't know what other people get out of what we call in the Texhomiki line as the Walking kata. my impression is that most folks see it as a balance exercise and a reminder for lightness. I see it as how to evade force(someone trying to whack you or restrain you from whacking them), and how to apply power( which I call strength and speed combined, i can't remember the physics definition and don't really care) to get the most out of a movement. What the walking kata basically says if you evade at the proper angles, hands are centered, and you turn at the right time, and you maintain a good posture and proper distance, and you change hands at the right time then the techniques will take care of themselves. One can cloud watch the Walking Kata for specific movements but everybody is different, and will see one thing when another person sees something completely different.
What I call the walking kata is the same walking as seen by Senta Yamada. It's close to what we do in Texhomiki Aikido and provides a kinesthetic provenance that we are a Tomiki school with pretty deep roots even though through decades of positive isolation from international Tomiki groups we look substantially different than everyone else.
I think that this form of walking kata is probably the best catch all. We do some variations in Texhomiki but nobody can tell me why we changed it up so I default to Senta Yamada. Yamada is a Good reference because he had a good dose of Morty Youshiba before he studied with Tomiki. So the may wasn't full of shit.
I have written that repetitive practice of the walking kata has the side effect of building up your legs. A couple of years ago I did about 1500 motions a night. What I found was that the the walking kata shortened my lower calf muscles to where I could barely walk, so I started squatting sumo/aborigine style to stretch those muscles back out, at the same time I sat in seiza for a few minutes every night and between these three activities my leg muscles began to respond. I don't shikko or do suwari waza on a regular enough basis to tell you what effects these have on Aikido, but I can tell you that they are definately the strength and conditioning of aikido and are out there for a reason.
Strength and Conditioning is the one element that I can say that the Western Practitioner of martial arts has very poor understanding of. We tend to over intellectualize everything, and we think that if we can explain it with enough words, and objectify it, then that is the same as mastery. Slow practice for slow sake seems to compound this problem because you have a dojo full of slow movements that lend themselves to an over analysis. We seem to think that every movement should be a Touchdown, or a score.
You wouldn't stop a kid fifty times before he releases a lay up in basketball, you let the kid do it fifty times to see if he can figure it out and you can figure out how to help the kid, step in when he achieves the amount of frustration to where he'll actually listen to you. Then put him back to work as quickly as possible with useful advice.
It's a matter of practicing with your head or your heart. Just do the walking kata the way Tomiki did and take your vitamins and everything will work out after a few years.
Anyway, here is the Iwama School. Iwama School is a good Aikido Rosetta Stone along with Senta Yamada's walking kata. The first is techniques that start from a mirror sided hand grab so we are talking the 3rd and 4th release. The first thing you'll notice is the lateral evasion step. Straight from the Walking Kata, the next thing you will notice is the atemi( Saito does the knuckle thing, Tomiki preferred the open palm . The third thing is that you hear a kiai.
I'm going to be straight up honest that these the walking step and the atemi or lack there of got me questioning several months back whether the founding fathers of the Texhomiki line of Aikido were full of shit.
Here's my aiki buddy Nathan Himes doing the walking kata. The second step is an evasion just like in the saito clip. Most people dont pay attention to the the little things in the walking kata, but at 00:47 that little dropping action of the hand on the wind up is what Saito is doing to uke that's getting his posture busted. It is in the first 1/3rd of the movement. You can see it really pronounced on the side movements in the walking. The very first hand movement is atemi, filling the space.
The Saito explanation is what I call all Heart. You move laterally, atemi, and kiai. There isn't any explanation of where the weight is, or footfalls, There are just three insurance policies followed by a technique. Which is reality. Tomiki's kito ryu/ kuzushi studies are just other insurance policies. Tomiki figured that there would probably be some sort of wrestling match going on, a guy might pull real hard or push real hard and Tomiki Aikido is actually failure based. It's almost like they talked about the primary and documented the failure of the primary.
Our problem is that we don't allow the first thing to work enough so we are always trying to cock block folks out of the primary ideas. You know you are getting cock blocked out of a primary idea when some one says, " That wouldn't work against a Judo player..." we have obscured the primary so much that we don't see that a majority of all of Tomiki's work was Aikido from a state of failure. The danger is that we take the failure state as the primary condition. That's when everything goes wonky and you get two twenty year old college kids moving like Fred Sanford and Tim Conway.
The side step evasion has been cock blocked so much buy some one saying, "Well, if you do that against a Judo player he'll wacky-gacky-goshi you." well, the side step evasion is to get the hell out of the way of something sharp or blunt and get at a working angle to disarm/ attack. Why do you think that weapon shit is in San kata? So we can look cool?
My admonishment to you, especially if you are a Texhomiki Line Aikido guy is to quit training dumbshit. A lot of you are judo players so you can grab just about anybody and sling them down on the ground. But when you do Aikido, quit moving like you have bad knees when you don't, if you do have bad knees then keep doing what you've been doing with the exception that a strong attack in the real world presumes an attacker has good knees. Quit assuming that there is a judo player around every dark corner, and see aikido as an art that dealt with evasion of a strong attack( weapon based) with a decisive counter attack from a good angle. If you have problems with Aikido from a judo perspective then quit doing aikido, or have the balls to synthesize things and do them differently where they actually work and you'll see this Okie at your next seminar.
Also realize that Aikido has a proactive quality, that inducing a reaction is what precipitates a lot of Aikido. That proactive quality is why Morty Youshiba could presumably wipe the floor with judo players. He goosed them into doing something stupid,"disarmed" them, and out angled them. He didn't wait for em to latch on and then feel for footfalls. Proper maai and footwork to keep maai helps. Atemi helps too. More importantly you have to decide whether you are going to be all head or all heart. You can't be both. Do the Walking Kata the way it's suppossed to be done, its all in the legs. Do randori wrong every once in a while. Break a sweat.
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