One of my favorite bloggers, my friend, and an older version of me is Dojo Rat. You know with the intro of "older version of me" he must be a force a nature.
(Dojo Rat is the Washington Wooley guy on the right)
Recently he posted a blog about a yang style tai chi posture called "parting wild horses mane". I enjoyed the blog, and found myself inspired. I have a sweet tooth for tai chi even though I have never formally trained in it. I believe Aiki, Ju and Tai Chi all are pretty much shooting for the same thing. The only separation lies in some of our training methods. I myself try to use any of the training methods I find useful for my goal.
Here is a short film on how to do Parting Wild Horses Mane in form.
After researching the applications for this motion, I found the Tai Chi guys were often applying it like this next fellow. You can see more application videos on Dojo Rat blog.
After watching these tai chi fellows, I wanted to add some thoughts about angle of execution, energy generation and demonstrate some slow applications I came up with. Again I am not a tai chi guy, but maybe you tai chi guys can start stealing our aiki ideas as much as I try to steal yours. As usual, learn from what you like and learn twice as much from what you don't like. I had to keep it slow because I had a newer student that could not yet take some more dramatic falls.
From Parting the Wild Horse's Mane, I am reminded of Tenchi nage and Sokumen Irimi nage. I think they might be similar concepts.
ReplyDeleteVery cool observations. I love doing this, too. Yeah, the first bit from this I think of as gyakugamae ate from a release movement. Maybe #1 release (or #3, then I pass the hand off) or # 2 release where I don't end up behind him as I would traditionally, I just step off the line and enter with the free hand.
ReplyDeleteIn fact I've found I rather like the idea of "splitting" uke, my bottom hand going one direction, and my top hand (the gyakugamae ate hand) going the other. With one hand in the face or arm under the chin or whatever BY ITSELF uke seems to be able to deal with/reverse/etc a lot more often.
The heal for gedan ate, exactly. Took me a long time to figure that out! If I didn't, folks would hop out or float and snag waki gatame on me easy. I think, too, (Nick's been talking a lot about this lately) that any time you have that position you can also throw mae otoshi off uke's far toe.
Good stuff, as usual...