Up To Heaven, Down The Loo

“Excuse me?  I have a question.”  One of the students among a threesome raises his hand at a recent Aikido practice.  

The group of mid-kyu students are working on an iriminage.  They are doing okay for their level, which means, they get the basic gist of the technique.  They know the general pattern and sequence of movements.  Yet, it does not mean everything is hunkie dorie and that there are no rough spots.  

One of the many tasks of an instructor is to allow students the room and time to experiment and try.  As much as we love to help them improve, sometimes we just have to bite our lips and let them make mistakes.  Keep an eye on them, but give them the opportunity to figure things out without intervention.  Unless they are doing something dangerous or that they ask for help, leave them alone.

“Yes, Sir.  What can I do for you?” I find myself sounding like a server in a fancy restaurant.

What the student describes is a rather common with iriminage: As nage, he has a hard time staying connected with the uke.  When he does tenkan, his partner gets further and further away from him as if she got spun out.  Even if he manages to hold the parties together, he cannot execute the throw.  She would not fall down.  

“Why does it look like that?  It is not working!” he says.

To confirm that I understand his problem, I quickly do a reenactment.  Happily, he immediately says, “Yes, that’s it!”

“Your partner is your mirror.  What they do is a reflection of you.  When you move in only one dimension horizontally like a big pancake, how can you expect your partner to move vertically and end up taking a fall?

Even though your footwork resembles tenkan, you are turning backwards, not forward.  As you start moving backwards, you lose your relative position to your partner.  You started with pushing your partner when you were behind her.  As you slipped into being behind her, you switched to pulling.  With the rotation and pushing/ pulling, it is reasonable to see that partner get spun out by the centrifugal force, like soapy water from your laundry in a washing machine. 

What makes it even more problematic is that your partner is pushing up with rather stiff legs, correct?  To me, the important question is: Why do nages tend to press their partners down?  Since people do not scrunch up like aluminum cans, ukes under pressure have to support and preserve themselves by instinctively pushing with their legs.  Because the leg muscles are already engaged to counter your downward force, they cannot be used simultaneously for moving around to take ukemi.  That’s why it feels like your partner was standing her ground.”

😮😮😮

I grab the same uke and show the iriminage again.  She moves around swiftly and falls down like a feather.

“You see the flow?  Watch the path in which everything is moving:  In iriminage, the nage’s flow is an upward spiral that goes to heaven.  The counterpart to it is a downward spiral that goes to the center of the earth.  That’s why the uke feels like they are being flushed down the loo!”

😓😓😓

😆