Halloween Aikido

Worked on some more halloween "themed" techniques today.

Worked on rolls with two possible new students.  While they were shown how to do a proper roll we practiced our front rolls, back rolls, front to back rolls and rolls with Tonto's.

The first technique we worked on was a knife strike Shomen style with a blade that played the Psycho knife theme music.  While the knife attack comes from the Shomen we deflect it to the side of us and bringing the blade down and across their leg pass it into a Sankyo lock.  This is important to remember keeping the blade away from your body and passing it across theirs.  If you don't emphasize this you would end up still getting cut and possibly worse if their blade comes loose at you.

Zombie grab with a weave defense.  As the attacker comes to grab with both hands your hand weaves between theirs and knocks one down and then feeds the upper hand into the other for a Nikyo or Sankyo.  This was really cool as Josh Sensei showed this technique.  As the grab comes in from Uke, Nage steps back a bit to draw in the attack whilst the right hand comes across and knocks their left hand down whilst "weaving" over to the right hand and drawing this into a Sankyo lock and a shot to the ribs whilst passing under them.  For Nikyo the hand is simply drawn into the shoulder where the pressure for Nikyo is them applied to their locked up wrist.

Grab from behind to pull them into the dark abyss (one hand wraps body other goes around mouth).  Nage strikes with an elbow to the stomach and grabs their hand from the mouth to put them into a Sankyo.  This one was the classical helpless character is grabbed from the darkness and dragged away.  When Uke grabs around the body and is going to cover the mouth Nage turns and delivers an elbow to the gut which should loosen Uke's grip a bit.  During this window, depending on which way you turn, one of their hands should be lower than the other and near your hands.  This is the arm that is grabbed and continues with the turn you are doing to lock in the Sankyo.  It is important to drop your center when you feel the grab and not to resist and tighten up.  When you elbow them you will naturally turn your body one way, this is the direction you should continue turning in when you apply Sankyo.

Worked on Zombie style randori where the only attack was a double grab the the throat or collar (kinda like zombies walking around during an apocalypse!!).  This was a nice spin on a randori session and was still very exhilarating even though everyone was doing the same attack.  It was no less beneficial and education for me to practice staying calm and evading attackers.  Keeping them from surrounding you is very important and trying to line up the Uke's so they can't all get at you is important and I need to work on that some more.