Martial Arts, Well Being, and Sweat.

The only reason I do Martial Arts is because I need a reason to get off my butt and get out the house and move around.  Unlike Jogging or going to the gym and lifting heavy stuff and running on a complicated electronic hamster wheel, it comes with some pleasant problem solving and frustrations that keep you wanting to come back.  But for me its the relaxed feeling I get for a couple of days, the good hangover.  I noticed especially when my boy was small and liked to be picked up every five minutes that the day after a good a Aikido work over( as opposed to a work out) that he was lighter.

Taking the tension out of your muscles makes them stronger, who would have thought?

I  have started doing Brazillian Jujitsu because of that feeling.  Not that I dig MMA, but because it maybe the best martial art that gives you that relaxed feel good.  I'm not doing it to shore up weaknesses in my game,   or because I find Aikido lacking  It just delivers the goods.

Because I always saw the martial arts as a way to exercise I tend to avoid and ignore the common hassles and personality conflicts, and  pyschological needful things that people look for in the martial arts.  I have been around folks who really wish they were born Japanese, as if that were going to make them better. I think Zen is okay, but the more you want a calm mind the more it aint gonna happen for you.  I like that whole shinto there is a spirit in every rock and tree thing.  But I think its a laughable thing that turning Japanese will get you manly respect and more chicks.  It will probably do the opposite.

I have also tended to ignore the self defense side of things.  Rory Miller said it best when he said that folks expect Martial Arts teachers to be experts on violence.  And this is not the case.  Self defense wise, I think that martial arts helps in self  in an indirect way.  Being used to contact and folks being in your bubble,and understanding how the body bends and reacts here and there is a useful thing.  It gives you a 1up, but it doesnt make you an expert.

I don't know how many times I have heard an aikido guy explain to me how to handle a puncher or a kicker, and they have never been punched or kicked in their life.  Head shots you tend to see stars, body shots hurt like hell and make you want to take a step or two back, where you get the head shot. It is an endless deep shizznit cycle from which there is no easy technical solution, except do it to the other guy first.

I also lament the misunderstanding and omission of Tanto Randori in the Geis line Tomiki Aikido.  Karl Geis made a decision for everyone when he decided he wasnt into it.  While technicaly it isnt pretty, it provides an avenue for sweat and struggle.  I think that he had concerns that it wasnt effective way to teach self-defense because it didnt address the cutting function of the blade.  But its always been my opinion that any knife  self defense "expert" is full of crap.

 The knife keeps cropping up over the last several thousand years because it is a hard thing to defend against. Before law and justice, packing a knife was a pretty good  idea.   And at most any one who survives a knife, especially a martial arts person, is probably aligned with the 80/20 principle.  The reason why you get out of a hairy situation is because of 20 percent training and 80 percent dumb luck.

Tanto randori is the fun strength and conditioning tool.  You get stronger by doing it.  Folks tend to forget that Morty Youshiba was a fitness fanatic before people even had a need for fitness.  He liked farm labor, and did Aikido as a "break" between bouts of farm labor.  How much of his "aiki" was that he was a natural athlete that was in incredible shape?  If he truly was as good as folks say, you may be looking at Micheal Jordan type.  A one in ten million type of guy that comes around every 20 years or so.

And because we dont do it, the randori as strength and conditioning, us Geis-ryu folks, I have to get it through BJJ.  Its going to be a fun ride, hopefully.    

Folks tend to forget the place of physical education, physical activity had on society.  To keep people out of trouble you needed some sort of avenue for them to get energy out of their system.  Kano, if I recall it right, was influenced by western educational ideas as was Tomiki.  Randori is a western idea.  Take your kid to soccer practice, or basketball practice. How much of it is drill and skill, and how much is some sort of smaller game that relates to the game?

You never see an athletic team doing a kata to get better at anything.  Kata was a way to supply that 20 percent in the old days. Life, especially in hard times, tends to be 80 percent dumb luck. Kata is a method for preserving a set of techniques and movement principles. Its the slow road to building skill. But it provided a jumping off point for folks to improvise their way out of trouble because they had numerous models of interaction socked away.

But nowadays, people tend to get frozen in kata.  They think that the kata speaks directly to a situation like a recipe for making biscuits.  All a kata provides is the motion of making biscuits in a straight line.  Walk two steps forward, grab imaginary bag of flour, pour it into the imaginary bowl.  In two man kata, the linear situations are the imaginary.  People tend to move all over the damn place in real situations.  And you can also confuse a making the biscuits kata movement with a "knife defense" kata.

Most of Tomiki's weapon kata spoke more to timing than actual make the biscuits application.  Folks who try to fix san kata, especially the tanto parts, run the risk of making a situation worse.  Putting a realistic response to a silly looking attack.  Where the silly looking attack was just a creature of timing and not an actual attack. Its like the kata is saying, " you know that timing is important don't you?"  over and over and over.

I have had folks say that the koryu kata are not neccessary because they were a product of Hideo Ohba.  And they tend to get on me about studying books and film so much, but if they bothered to crack a book and look at these films over and over they would understand that the Tomiki parts of their Aikido besides San Kata are the drills and methodologies that train up to Randori.  Obha was actually the more classical thinker of the two.  Tomiki was of the sweat it out school of thinking.  That making Aikido into a sport would give more folks an avenue to get better at getting along, and going along.

The one thing about BJJ, I dont think there are any kata to slow things down. Not two many points to argue about, justify, explain, or ponder on.  Just shut up and wrestle with a guy for two minutes, and then wrestle with another guy for two minutes.

The physical activity has been replaced with distraction.  Instead of focusing a persons energies on doing, there are numerous ways nowadays for people to get distracted by looking.  I have told young folks that there isnt much difference between cigarette smoking and smartphones.  And if everybody would go back to smoking cigarettes we would get a lot more done, and I wouldnt be afraid to walk accross the parking lot at walmart.  and I really dont know which is worse.

Fast food is killing us. Millions of Cow farts may be the death of us.  Folks try to blame obesity on the lack of willpower.  But you can't blame a fish for swimming in polluted water.  There are less reasons to move, and more reasons to stand still, eat, and look at something.  This is why I get kind of irritated at the folks who think they can master things by moving slow.  Moving slow for an hour is great as long as someone doesnt want to stop and talk about it.

 Moving at a good pace helps you sweat out the crap, and also gives you a reason to want to slow down and talk about it.  The rest is the best part of the hard work. A cold drink and good conversation.  Not I'm going to talk about it to justify it or avoid doing it.

The guys that appear to move slow, and complete techniques with out a lot of hassle are also the ones who have probably done it longer than anyone else.  Its another bone I got to pick with the Geis Methodology.  Its a noble effort to try to teach soft from the get go.  But there is a difference between faking soft and becoming soft.  You become soft by learning the hard way.  Thousands of hours.  Dozens of lesson learned.  hundreds of asskickings.

There are plenty of upper dan's out there who have never even tried to go at it.  They weren't allowed.  So instead of getting a sense of been there and  done that confidence, they look for answers  from stupid human trick peddlers.  Who try to sell the no sweat, move less, approach which goes counter to what Kano or Tomiki wanted.  A wrung out society that wanted to sit down with a cold drink and visit, instead of complain or argue, or look for a a reason to get their feelings tromped on.  

Next time you are about to get into an argument in the 12 items or less line, think about how things would go if both parties were physically wrung out from some good sweat.  Not exhausted, just wrung out real good.  How less of hurry you would be in, how the little things dont matter.  why in the hell do i care if this guy has 14 things in his basket?  That is the lesson of slow and easy.  A stressed out person can't become soft by just rule and philosophy alone.  People become soft, and easy and agreeable.  You can't fake it. Or replace it with distraction.  Its something you get from sweat.  

The Okie-Do Take on Judo Taiso Era Tomiki Aikido

I have been doing technical archeology of Geis -Ryu Tomiki for a couple of years now.  I have always said that a real Okie has to tell a couple of stories before he gets to the point.  Well, this blog was the couple of stories. And this post is the point. If I offended folks, especially Geis-ryu folks, I want to apologize here.  When somebody tries to digest something new to their system they usually fart a lot.  And there was a lot of verbal farting going on in this blog.  Sorry for cropdusting your room.

I have always enjoyed Aikido.  What I have had a problem with is the Judo model to explain the motions.  This isnt because I don't respect judo, in fact I would rather be thrown with Judo than talk about it.  Getting thrown down tends to be enlightening and sometimes fun.  The simple reason to why I watch birds on most Geis-ryu Aikido analysis is that I don't do Judo.  I think that I have learned somethings by osmosis, but still at the end of the day I am not a Judo player.  As a school teacher, I recognized that all the Judo talk was an attempt to supply common knowledge and a point to where things can be explained and further expanded on.  When two farmers get together they talk about farming.  Judo players tend to talk about Judo.  In the early days of Tomiki, every student was a Judo player.

Judo motion, however, doesn't explain aikido motion.  There are points of convergence, and Geis-ryu players are masters of this convergence zone, with the caveat that a lot of prior Judo knowledge must be present to master this convergence zone.  I recognized that I was never going to be able to access this prior knowledge.    So I had to do some digging..

The walking kata, the way Senta Yamada performs it, supplies a method of installing a prior knowledge through motion.  It supplies the motions to be discussed and labeled, and then practiced. It should supply the reference point of connection: "It's like in the walking kata  when you...."

I am becoming set in my opinions in that I think that the Judo Taiso Era Tomiki, the Miyake/Yamada era was probably the Golden Age of Tomiki Aikido.  It is the best model to supply and understanding to what that crazy wizard Morty Youshiba was up to.  I am of the opinion that the system rapidly jumped the shark once competive Tanto Randori was seen as the primary point of emphasis.

Geis-ryu folks also jumped their own sharks, when they reduced motion on the basis of Judo analysis and confined motion to a set of principles that were more instructional talking points than actual principle.  The shark jumping on their part had nothing to with their Randori model which can be seen in other systems like Tai chi, wing chun, and other chinese arts that have pushhands/sticky hand exercises.  Although I don't think the explicit intention was to make randori into a Chinese Exercise, that is essentially what happened.  It was a moment of serendipity.


I think that the Judo Taiso era aikido is composed of these elements:  The walking kata,  the 8 releases,  the 15 kata, proto-san kata ideas, and proto-yon kata ideas.   Also, I think that the system revolves around the principle of hando-no-kuzushi: resistance of one technique leads to an opening on another technique.

The walking kata

Instead of doing a blow by blow analysis I'm just going to broad brush it here.

A)The unsoku teach tsugi ashi.  It also teaches foot work to  drive an offbalance, to position to employ hiprotation as an offbalance, and to use body turn as a method of offbalance.  I think that the omission of the forward tsugi ashi/backward tsugi ashi is a terrible decision by the Geis_ryu folks, but the inclusion of the diagonal step is a master stroke.  I don't believe that it was a change made by Geis, it think it was always there as an obvious reality especially in the application of Oshi taoshi.  

B)The walking kata links to the 15 kata, not the 17 kata.   The 3 attacks appear to hold a strong relation to the first three hand blade movements.  Shomenate/ gyukugamae ate/ aigamae ate.  The key to seeing this is that on the handblade movements(the circles) yamada starts with his hand palm up( the initial touch in shomenate.  The second motion is palm down.  Both ideas circle into their technique.  Aigamae ate can be explained when you perform it in yon kata style as a counter to the first release movement.  but it happens to be represented in both the 15 and yon kata with the same motion and offbalance position.

C) The second and forth release  motion appear to be the primary idea of offbalance in the walking kata  If you play with the motions starting from palm down or palm up, and reverse motions you will see it.

D) Also hipswitching positions can be seen by simply taking a stepforward from same hand same foot postures.

E)The first three motions describe 15 kata" attacks".  And when combined with forward chalice stepping they describe what you see going on in Yon kata the way that the rest of the tomiki world does it, not in the Geis-ryu interpretation.  The first sweep/second sweep is an aigamae movement where you chalice step forward and perform a high second release.  In gyukugamae it is a chalice step combined with a high fourth release.  You can always drop to your knee.

F)  The turns or the pet the dragon/deliver the pizza motions are multipurpose.  They represent an Aigamae ate relationship.  They also represent a tactical turn when an uke has recovered from a second/forth release and attempts to reorient his center on yours per yon kata.  The missing peice on these motions are that they describe the wrist techniques when you combine them with a hipswitch.  Both mawashis/ both kote gaeshis  are in the 15 kata but not the 17.  If you watch Tomiki on his Aikido Kyogi go through the wrist techniques you can see suggestions of this idea.

G)The hipswitch alone also aligns to the two shihonage movements but that is an easy connection to make. The senata yamada 180 turns in his walking kata address the amount of carry/ or energy added by the uke to perform shihonage.  They are two of the underarm release motions.  


15 kata

This kata has been described by many as Tomiki's rough draft, or just a stage in his evolution of the 17 kata.  I tend to disagree,  This is the basic kata of Tomiki.  Shodokan Aikido still teaches the grips even though some of them are not in the 17.  Once Tomiki started playing with his ideas to develop a randori method I suppose these are the ideas he started with.  But as he was watching the kids play he saw a lot of Judo being thrown around, so that is where the tanto idea came in.  My speculation is that once folks started playing with a tanto he started seeing a lot of the things that eventually found thier way into the 17.  Tomiki had labels for all the new things that turned up and put them into the new kata, and took out the things that didn't work or were dangerous. ( remember the old film shows him playing with kote mawashi in a backfall)   My educated guess comes from watching Tanto Randori matches on Youtube.  The things he added tend to be the only things that you see happen, besides some sort of shomenate.  This just isnt a hairy coincidence.


Randori

It gets obscured a lot in Geis-ryu because of the repurposing of 17 kata movements to fit the softer randori model, but both katas the 15/17 are not organized only bodypart, but by the principle of hando-no-kuzushi.  That if it doesnt work one way because of resistance turn it the other way, and if that doesnt work then hit the guy.  Geis-ryu wants to achieve light touch sensitivity much in the way tai chi push hands works.  But since they don't play with Randori in a resistant mode this connection is lost, but eventually found through other means.  Things start in small circles of input/output until someone commits an error in movement then the circles widen into techniques and throws.  

Another point missed is that the 17 kata is also organized to address backward and forward linear movement by the tanto player, especially in the case of Atemi waza.  Since the forward/ and back tsugi ashi movement has been omitted from the walking kata.  The butterfly movements are also a product of tanto randori because with a tanto involved techniques need the reinforcing factor of two hands.  This two hand reinforcement is not present so much in the 15 kata.  Hiki taoshi is often performed one handed, and no butterfly like movements are involved.

In my view there are two models of randori.  The softer randori to teach fine mechanics and sensitivity( I have made the observation that Geis-ryu folks seem to be very good at free-styling wrist techniques which I think fits the 15 model better than the 17 model)  The hando-no-kuzushi randori should be a more hardheaded randori.  There are just some techniques that need a wider range of movement that simply isnt there in soft randori, and once you start practicing hando-no -kuzushi randori the linkages in the kata start to appear very obvious.


The release actions

These can be soft function ideas, but I believe they are an extension of hando-no-kuzushi ideas.  what doesnt work one way will work the other way, and if works one way real good then it can go back the other way real easy.   A critical insight into the nature or releases can be made when watching Senta Yamada explain actions in a circle.  And really working release movements in a circle with either the second or fourth release explains the nature of aikido movement.   It explains everything you see in Yon kata, Geis's release chains, and his 23 kata.   I have had trouble with both the chains and the 23 because they often pass up a couple of ideas on the way to execution and sometimes contain redundancies.  Since I follow the hando-no kuzushi model,  I already see the releases and the 17 kata in circular form.  It chains naturally and doesn't need much labeling.  But if softer forms of randori study are your goal I can see great benefit in chaining and the 23 kata.


The nature of Judo and Aikido

Judo starts from an idea that both players are equal.  But with the right Judo guy equal don't last long.  Aikido begins with the idea of constantly keeping things non equal.  There is no matching timing ideas in Aikido.   Tori seeks to speed up the uke, or to turn recieved speed into more speed.  And that is nature of Aikido offbalance.  Every interaction is predicated on non-equality.  My Geis-ryu associates have derided tanto randori sometimes as a whole lot of nothing going on.  But it contains a central point of Aikido.  The tanto player keeps things unequal.  The tanto player is the Aikido player.  He can keep things from going equal.  The rules restrict his range of movement to linear and he can only counter under a set of slim finely defined curcumstances.  But look at how much he gets the other guy to jump, hop, and twist and turn. Now image if the Tanto guy said enough of this crap, dropped the foam tanto and applied a 17 technique.  This is how Aikido is meant to function.  You always have to set yourself up to keep things unequal, by forcibly controlling maai with movement and atemi.  Once you try to control maai in a reactive mode all Aikido ceases to function.

Anyway,  I figured out the what is what in my Branch of Tomiki Aikido.  Now all I need is about 10 years worth of good mat time with good people.  Then I may be qualified to teach it if the accident wills.