Iaido 6th Dan Training Session 14

This evening marked the last iai practice with our sensei for a while as he sods off to Japan to try for his 8th dan Iaido. This means hopefully that I will now be able to spend a bit of time just working by myself and getting some shaku in.

This evening I set myself a plan of combining my four chosen koryu with three seitei into 7-form circuits thus gradually making my way through the seitei but getting the koryu practice stuck in as well. I did the 28 forms (woo hoo - 28!) and then my arm started hurting. It was a bit achey before the practice and I think that most dreaded ailment - gardening - might be responsible.

Perversely I am finding the koryu easier to perform well at the moment, seitei is becoming a bit of a drag.

Ah well, this is it for now, not much to report really. Next Wednesday I will be sensei wrangling to maybe no blog for a little bit.

Iaido 6th Dan Training Session 12 and 13

Session 12 - Koryu Development

So I am now more or less decided on my range of koryu to pick from depending on the shitei waza:

1. Shohatto
2. Oroshi
3. Towaki
4. Ukenagashi

I spent this session after being filmed (posted later in this blog) trying to work through shohatto and oroshi as slowly as possible and get the legs in time with the sword. This it seems is more challenging than it appears.

One of the things that I have had uncovered for me is the way of "levelling" the sword as sayabanare is achieved so that it flies in a relatively flat plane into nukitsuke. Counterintuitively, this isn't achieved by consciously flicking the kissaki up. Instead if one exerts a slight amount of pressure so that the back (mune) of the blade presses against its lower face of the saya, at the point of sayabanare the action of the grip changing the force to motivate the kissaki forwards then seems to automatically bring the kensen up to horizontal. This has the additional benefit of course of stopping the sword either rattling in the saya or the kissaki cutting the koiguchi. I stress though that this pressure only seems to work if it is applied lightly.

I am feeling more at home with all my koryu at the moment and I'm pretty sure this is coming about with a strengthening of my legs. More on this in the next blogpost thingy...

Session 13 - IAIDO AND THE ART OF SEIZA

Quite by accident rather than intention I spent most of last Wednesday night's practice physically trying to answer the question posted on this webforum...

Kendo World - Why Iai Kata from Seiza Are Wrong...

I found this post originally quite annoyingly provocative and the post had been answered to death before long. However during our initial warm ups I decided to spend the whole session just doing Mae, Ushiro and Ukenagashi. I found myself remembering that Iaido is 75% (give or take a chunk) about the feet, in fact the whole form was either made or broken by not having the feet right despite what the upper body did.

I rediscovered a bit of truth with nearly every response on the forum supporting good reasons why iai was done from seiza, not least the reason which I regurgitated from Ishido Sensei that:

Iaido was originally all performed outside and standing. In order to make the training harder, more and more exponents begun their forms from a more prone position, stating the rationale that if one could move quickly and fluidly from a more compromising position then it should make one's performance from a standing position even more expedient.

I am feeling the after effects of this training a bit today, in a good way, and I am hoping that it kicks the rest of my performance into shape a bit. I am definately feeling better all round for having my lower body become stronger.

Anyway I think I will do more of this type of training for the duration. My own teacher was quite pleased when I made all the movements in seitei very softly and simply and emphasised that the synchronisation of certain parts of the body, blended with the stillness of other bits are what made a good 6th dan.

To finish I am going to use this blog to critique my own little koryu embu that I did for the record in session 12:

1. Shohatto - maybe needs a little bit more forward movement on nukitsuke; timing of ochiburi and standing needs improving (actually I worked on this in session 13 by triggering my stand just before the sword started moving from the head); need to keep the end of the chiburi movement more forward (also worked on this in session 13 with mae); need to stop pushing sword down at the end of noto.
2. Oroshi - working on moving noto; need to maintain posture a little bit more during kata.
3. Towaki - need to keep body more stable on 2nd cut.
4. Ukenagashi - actually I was quite amazed that I could get my lard-ass to move this quickly; need to move a bit more off the centreline and forward on the cut.

For those who weren't on the new L2 Coaching Course I recommend VLC Media Player for anyone who wants to use video for a similar purpose. It supports most file types and has slow and fast features for viewing.

Iaido 6th Dan Training Session 11

Letting go.

Hard to do but exciting with iaido, easy to do but with a different kind of exciting with bowel control.

There's nothing like getting everyone else to partake in your practice for ensuring that you do some training yourself so given that I had the run of the dojo this evening with a bunch of mostly low grades (thank you London Transport) I decided to get everyone to go through the first few forms of Shoden.

I explained where the style came from and what the teaching purpose of Shoden was i.e. to develop basics, to understand distance, to get the body to move. After explaining and showing Shohatto we all went off and gave it a try. I first asked Cezary to film me doing Shohatto so I could see how I was doing. He filmed me from various angles so I could get a good perspective of the overall performance and he also pointed out that my noto was quite agressive and tending to turn my hips.

During the course of the evening we progressed through to Inyo Shintai. During one of the earlier forms I was asked about whether to stop at the end of nukitsuke and I responded by explaining the difference between tome and tame. The former means to stop and has a nuance or resting - something to be avoided in a kata. The latter means to accumulate or as Yuki added, to charge oneself up (which I thought was a brilliant translation) and is what should be happening at those moments of stillness in a kata where it seems that something is going on but it is difficult to perceive what it is. During this explanation I tried to demonstrate two variations of timing between nukitsuke and furikaburi - one by "stopping" (and by this I mean not resting but "tameru'ing") and one just carrying on moving. This was interesting for me as while I had seen my sensei doing it once or twice I had never done it myself. I did it and surprised myself how easy it was to carry on through from the nukitsuke into a seme action and then into kaburi and kirioroshi. I will have to ask at the right time if I should attempt to do this at the grading, I have certainly seen a few high graded Japanese do it at an embu (not that that should allow me license to do it myself I understand).

The lesson pretty much carried on like this until Sensei arrived and we wrapped up for the evening. On getting home I reviewed the videos and am still quite surprised as many of the problems I thought I might still have are gone and I have improved in areas that I wasn't paying much attention to.



Things that immediately grab my attention are:

• The sword is springing up into a horizontal position just between sayabanare and nukitsuke.
• The timing of my feet and my sword are pretty good.
• My shoulder isn't too high and the grip looks quite strong.
• The seme leading into the furikaburi seems adequate (maybe a bit short but I don't want it to drag).
• The bringing forward of the saya is well timed with the furikaburi.
• I am not overextending my arms or overcutting the sword in kirioroshi.

Things I need to be careful of though:

• My head is a little bit too far forwards in nukitsuke.
• There is a little bit of rocking going on with my body movement during the gaps in forward movement (like my body is settling back after braking hard).
• My head is too far dipped when I am looking down.
• The noto needs to be calmed and made smoother with no extraneous body movement.

Apart from that I am slightly filled with a bit of confidence although I have to go through the videos with a fine tooth comb (AKA VLC media player and slow-mo). The one video which did surprise me was the one taken from the front. Usually I hate my iai from this perspective as everything looks unbalanced and without much effect but this doesn't show up so much this time.

Anyway I am posting one or two of the videos on this blog for posterity, please excuse the funky wall decorations (and the appearance that I have a mohican...).