University Training

This week was quite busy with training Aikido 5 times (3 times Shoshinkan and twice Aikikai), BJJ no Gi and Rugby! One of the students from the dojo is a student at the local university and they have their own martial arts gym there. The university is only just around the corner from where I live, so it is really convenient. He arranged for us to use it on the Wednesday night for 2 hours. It is usually used by the large university Kendo club, but has a large number of tatami mats. I had 5 people join me including 3 of them from the university and 2 from my club.

It was great to try a new place and see the potential for maybe doing more training there. I would definitely like to open a university club as part of our dojo, it seems there is a lot of potential for an Aikido club there if we can find times that work. Something we will have to look at is the tatami mats moving as they slipped around a lot during our training, but I think if we get some non slip mats to go under them it should work well.

for the lesson I tried something a bit different inspired by a friend who posts online about his Aikido. We did variations of kokyunage from katate mochi on the right hand side only. I wanted to cover as many as I could in the time and see if we could play with them some doing some mini-jyuwaza. Out of the 14 techniques I prepared, we covered 8 and everyone seemed to pick them up really quickly. I am excited if we can do it again and add to those first 8 techniques and maybe even develop doing them on the left hand side. I practiced the same techniques with Bruce the following Friday class as no one else was there for the first 30 minutes and we added two more to a total of 10 variations and extended it to the left side practice also.

Hopefully we can look at extending the University classes and maybe start something regular with students from the university.