Martial arts stuff

[ironphoenix]

I think my test time at aikido is coming soon... I should skip Wednesday evening games at Carleton more to practice up. My "grid", as it's called, is pretty much settled, and now I'm just trying to drill the specific techniques into my hindbrain. The grid is a matrix of five basic throws by a dozen basic attacks; one constructs a set of techniques for each combination which cover the different directions and basic variations of the techniques. The particular choices made here are quite individual, and they become one's "hip-pocket" techniques. The other bits are mostly okay, although I still could use more multiple-attacker work and maybe a little disarming practice against staff and sword as well, just in case. There's one hip throw that I really want to get right, too... the fellow who showed it to me nicknames it "the choo-choo train", because of the circular motion of the hip used to drive the throw. It's a throw in a style favored by one of our senior instructors whom I see too seldom, and I'd like to drop it in on my test as a bit of a tribute.

The recent change of Friday evening classes to kenjutsu makes things a bit tricky, since that has long been one of my usual practice nights, and now I can't really use it for aikido test prep. On the flip side, I think I may have more of a talent for kenjutsu than for aikido, so the sense of relatively rapid progress is a welcome change. Of course, it might also be that my aikido practice has trained me to be better at learning this kind of stuff.