One step ahead

Monday’s class was some sort of a cumulus of the previous ~4 classes, which mainly studied grabbing attacks. Among the particular situations studied during the last trainings, there were

• one wrist grabs with one hand (katate dori) – both from ai hanmi¹ and gyaku hanmi² stances
• one wrist grabs with both hands (morote dori), both from ai hanmi and gyaku hanmi stances
• both wrists grab by two hands (ryote dori), i.e. hand-on-hand grab
• one wrist grab from behind (ushiro tekubi dori),
• both wrists grab from behind (ushiro ryote dori), front and behind shoulder grabs etc.
• We even studied a particular and most interesting scenario with nage vs. two uke-s – I don’t know for sure how this is called, but I’d describe it as a “double morote dori” attack (both uke-s grab each of nage’s hands with two hands).

***

Sensei emphasized the importance of reacting quickly to a grabbing attack – as soon as you see somebody has the intention to grab you, you should react quickly, quicker than the attacker even, and preferably grab him before he grabs you.

The idea is to always be one step ahead the attacker. The tricky part about this is that the “one step ahead” catch is actually a concept – it’s not something limited to a physical fast and precise response to a particular attack intent, but it’s a whole mindset.

In many life situations you are confronted with difficulties – and this is not something limited to a physical attack – and you should always be “one step ahead” the situation. That is, you should never be overwhelmed by what comes, you should never allow yourself to be surprised by anyone or anything.

Sensei said something like:

The ability to react “one step ahead” the attacker or the particular life situation you’re in should be an inner mental trait of yours. You should never allow yourselves to be surprised. You should be the one who takes the attacker by surprise. Still, be aware of the fact that if you keep repeating to yourself that you are the one to surprise the attacker or control the particular life situation you’re about to be confronted with, this still is not the right thing to do.

Instead of bearing in mind “I have to raise a potential surprise to any attack or situation”, you should be able to do this without thinking. That is, you should have this capacity inside yourselves, as a reflex and not as an act of rational thinking.

Of course, this can only come with time. With proper hard and long mental training and by continuously developing your awareness, you should be able to grow this capability as a reflex.

So, the “one step ahead” thing is not as simple as it seems at a first glance.

***

After Friday’s class, somebody asked whether there were some of us willing to go out for a beer. It was a good idea and a nice thing to do, especially for him and for me – one of the newest people in the dojo who were opened towards socializing with the others; so 6 of us (including Sensei) went out for a beer.

One of the people there, another great storyteller, the eldest from our dojo, was particularly interesting to listen to. He kept telling stuff like “when we went to X place” or “when we landed in X place”. I began to be curious and I cautiously asked him whether he used to pilot planes. He said that yes, indeed, he piloted planes around the whole world, mostly cargo planes, but he also transported civilians too. Really impressive :) Anyway, what he said about this was interesting:

You know, when flying a plane, let apart the whole responsibility thing, you must always, always be in control. You can’t allow yourself to be taken by surprise. Also, you can’t allow yourself to think and to act in the same rhythm with the plane – I don’t know how to explain this to you exactly, but you should always be “one step ahead” the plane, ’cause if you let the plane and the situation get ahead you… well… you’re bye-bye.

I suddenly must have made an ‘enlightened’ figure, I was already starting to think about this “one step ahead” philosophy and wanted to say something, but the ex-pilot got ahead me (!) and said:

So, you see, this is why I find Aikido so useful. It trains you to think fast and act fast. It makes you surprise the surprise. Aikido is like piloting a plane, if you want to put it this way.

It’s surely insightful to have the occasion to talk to many people and see the impact Aikido has in their daily activities or to see how they correlate the way they ‘get around’ life situations with Aikido principles.

________________________

¹ – ai hanmi is the name of a stance where both uke (the attacker) and nage (the one who defends) have the same foot forward, i.e. either the right, either the left one

² – gyaku hanmi is the name of a stance where uke and nage have opposed feet forward, i.e. uke: right foot and nage: left foot or uke: left foot and nage: right foot

Mental training

Mental training is of capital importance in any aspect of life… in any martial art, not only in Aikido. A trained mind can achieve far more than a ‘normal’ individual who only sees the surface of things.

…Wait, what am I talking about here? Sure, mental training as a general concept is OK, but… what exactly am I referring to? It’s a hell of a large concept actually and this is why it’s kind of slippery, since it’s got so many sides to tackle.

When I was a teenager, I had a very interesting talk with a fascinating semiotician, on… just about everything. One of the things that he said then and struck me as being so ‘natural’, yet profound, was something like:

Evolution is the engine of all life. Ah, you can’t imagine how glad I am to be part of an underdeveloped species such as the human being. And you know why? Because if man would one day touch his full potential, mental and physical, then that day would be the day when all evolution stopped. That would be the day when the human being would be dead as a species.

Interesting perspective. So, getting back, this is what I’m mainly talking about: mental training as a way to explore more in-depth the human being’s potential.

Instead of lecturing on the philosophical and psychological facets of this problem, activities for which I might be under-qualified, I’ll just write down a tale that Sensei got us to know when trying to analyze with us the mental training concept:

It is told that a long while ago, when there were no grades in martial arts, when somebody received the title of ‘Master‘ after many years of training and then could teach others himself, the students were selected by far more rigorous standards than nowadays.

In essence, a “valid” student was one who really wanted to learn, by all means, and who showed determination, willpower and patience. Also, the student should have been a fighter, not a quitter.

The story says that one day a young person approached a great Master and asked whether he would be allowed to train and to learn from him. The Master answered he could become his student only if he was truly prepared and if he was able to follow directions. The student said he was ready.

Then, the Master told the student that his training shall start with an exercise. He asked the student to walk on the sides of the dojo, exactly on the edges, at the point where the floor met with the walls. Moreover, the student had to be at all times fully aware of what he was doing, at the way he stepped, he had to follow the line exactly without tripping or falling over, he had to have a perfect posture and balance, the steps had to be firm and even etc.

The new student was surprised and skeptical about this, but did what he was told. To his surprise, the Master didn’t say anything and continued with what he was doing, apparently without paying any attention to the new student.

After a while, the student asked whether it was alright and if he could stop. The Master answered him that it was the student’s choice if he was to continue his training or not. If he wanted to go on, he was to follow instructions without questioning them.

This way, days passed. As time went by, the Master prepared new drills for his student. Although they all seemed dull and un-connected with anything practical, the student went on.

After a long time (weeks? months? years?), the student asked the Master whether he was ready to start actual training, like the other students, to learn real techniques. The Master told him that when the time comes and he will consider the student is ready, they will go down on techniques too. Until then, the student should discipline himself and perfect his skills and do his drills.

A long time passed yet again and, since the student didn’t quit and did everything he was supposed to, the Master started to teach him techniques. They went on to the “real training”.

To the student’s surprise, the amount time they spent on the “real training” was considerably smaller than the time he spent – seemingly uselessly – on his drills. The Master explained to him that if he learned, while doing all the drills, to exercise his mind, then the techniques were less important, because they were the physical teaching that almost anyone could learn and master. The mental training was important.

One day, the Master told the student that his learning was over. He was now ready to become a Master himself and to pass on to others his knowledge. The student thanked the Master and when he was packed and all, the Master offered to accompany him on the road for a while.

So they started walking for their maybe last promenade together and kept talking. Somewhere on the path they came over to a large abyss; the two sides were connected by a frail and narrow piece of wood.

The Master said that was the point where their paths would separate. The student knew he had to go on and pass on that bridge, but he was afraid. He feared the bridge would crack beneath him or that he might lose his balance and fall. While standing there and thinking what to do and what to say to his Master, he saw that from the other side of the abyss there was somebody approaching. Watching the stranger getting closer, he noticed he was blind and he used a wooden stick to find his way. The blind man came to the edge of the abyss and he searched with his stick the bridge. He then stepped on the bridge and, continuously ‘touching’ it with his stick, he came to the other side, effortlessly.

While the student watched, perplexed, the blind man passing by them, the Master told him: “You see, this is the last test for you. I know you can do it, but you don’t know it yet. This is why you need to prove to yourself that you’re prepared, that you’re finally ready to face anything. What good all these years of hard training if you can’t overcome your fears and just let go? Let go of everything. See how the blind man passes the bridge naturally? He knows there’s an abyss beneath, but he can’t see it. He’s guided by his tactile sense only and by his stick. If he can do it, you can do it too.”

Then, the student had a “snap” in his mind and finally came to understand that his years and years of drills prepared him for anything, but he had to take a final mental leap in order to value and put to practical use all his knowledge. With this in mind and with the certainty he was indeed prepared, he crossed the bridge and went on his path. (Presumably he became a Master and taught other people, passing on his knowledge.)

I don’t know if the way I related this story is perfectly accurate or if all these really ever happened – it’s not the details that matter, but the essence of the whole story.

So… above all, mental training!

You can help, too

No matter how unskilled you might be, you can be sure that you’ll always be of great use at ‘fixing’ stuff, guided by others.

As a child, I used to spend many weekends and my grandfather, who is an engineer, watching and helping him “do stuff” around the house, such as mounting a new door, projecting a building a new shelf, fixing the car tape player, projecting a custom PC table with power on/off switchers for general power, scanner, printer, etc. I recall finding all these stuff fun and useful. That was when I got in touch with tools. Invaluable skills :)

Last week, Sensei announced us he’d like to start working on the dojo, which was not in an excellent state, starting with the roof, in order to prevent water infiltration. A few guys said they can help with tools and finding materials to buy and we were all asked whether we want and can help at the work, during the weekend. Yesterday (Saturday) was the day. I said I’ll come too – although I never fixed a roof before, I imagined I could be of some kind of help.

It turned out I was right. A total of 7 people (including myself) spent exactly 12 hours on re-enforcing the roof, mounting new tiles, securing them in screws, heating the tiles and pressing them, replacing some old and rusty boards with flexible and thick plastic and cleaning around.

It was one of the most fun Saturdays I ever had. Of course, you can’t understand how much fun it is to heat and press tiles on the roof of the dojo and pause for a brief second to take a sip of warm beer until you’re actually doing it, hahaha. Priceless moments… such as arranging 3 benches in line, in front of the dojo, between construction materials, arranging the boxes of pizza on them and then hearing somebody joking “Yame! Zaho!” just before we all sat down. This is a commonly heard phrase in Aikido, meaning to stop from whatever you might be doing and to pay attention to the one speaking (“Yame!“) – usually the instructor – and the request for everybody to sit down in seiza (“Zaho!“). Priceless.

(Nope, the photo above doesn’t picture us and our roof, it’s just the first ‘roof’ picture found by Google image search; it just fitted in very well.)

Apart from being helpful, you will certainly learn new skills… you know, if you ever quit your current job, you can always start over in constructions :) Apart from ‘technical’ things, you can learn invaluable stuff, such as climbing on an un-even and un-straight roof without falling, keeping your balance on the steep roof and slowly become comfortable at running on it etc.

So “I don’t know how to fix roofs” is only an excuse. If you do want to help, there will always be something that you can do. You can do more than you realize.

In my concrete case, I only found it natural to be there and help, since working around the dojo I train in is like working on something for my own house. After all, apparently the dojo is becoming my second home…

The only downside is that I won’t be able to play foosball on Monday, at work (erm… during the breaks), since my palms and fingers feel numb. Ah well, haha.

Motivation

N o t e :

This is a late-night essay inspired from a great post of Uchi Deshi and other related blog entries that I forgot where they came from since I read them. Discovering, at the beginning of my journey in Aikido, that others found it hard too and had their doubts… I realized I’m not a singular case. Sometimes you just need “a good kick in the butt to get back on track” :) A big “Thanks!” for everybody who shared their feedback on the times they were not-so-sure.

Motivation. Maybe it’s not the most inspired title, but it’s somewhere around the whole point… I’m not referring to “motivation” as in “why do you train?”, but as in “why do you keep training?”. It’s a huge difference. So maybe the right term for the post’s title should have been “eagerness”, “willpower” or even “stubbornness”, I don’t know.

Being able to find a motivation or to keep being motivated is an enormous step forward, in anything you’d try to do. I’d like to point out though that this is a fairly large concept, which is why it’s necessary to distinguish between inner motivation (or eagerness, for instance) and outer motivation.

Since the outer motivation depends strictly on what a given situation might provide (e.g. “If they give me credit for it, I’m motivated to do it.”), it is clearly something that changes according with the, let’s say, environment. So it doesn’t come from within your very being.

As opposed to this, the inner motivation starts, grows and stays alive all within yourself. It’s what kicks you to a good start, it’s what keeps your interest, it’s the sum of reasons you create for yourself in order to keep doing something.

You might often find that it’s more easy to decide upon starting something and, given the nature of the human being, you expect some palpable results to come sooner or later. This “sooner or later” is what might be disappointing sometimes. People tend, especially nowadays, to “run through” things. They seem to have lost their patience. And remember, patience has always been considered a virtue :)

So what becomes in this case of the inner motivation? I think all the possibilities rest solely within ourselves. You can abandon or you can pursue. You can try hard or you can lie to yourself.

This sounds fine in “theory” but it’s not that simple in “real life”, some might argue. It’s the same with Aikido. There are people of incredible will and there are also quitters. I often felt unsure of my training, of my progress, of my capacities… and I still do. But it seems to come down to mental training. No, not “optimism” – that’s as silly as the thought of “being lucky”. Train your mind, sharpen your spirit, broaden your vision. Take your time to look back and visualize where you started from. Change is in the human nature, it’s the main consequence of evolution. The concept of “evolution” itself is to step forward, to aim for, to improve, to perfect, to polish. Adaptation. Willpower. Eagerness. A trained mind can achieve anything.

When you stop striving for, aiming for… you’re getting against the natural tendency. You’re getting in conflict with “the flow”, with everything. People change, places change, the world changes… and you think you can allow yourself to simply quit?!

By counting myself among the living ones, it means I still have the chance to move on, to better myself, and I’m going to take full advantage of it.

I use the same strategy when doubt and frustration come in the way. I might be clumsier than 99% of the population and I might be the world’s most slow learner… but I want to go on. I know improvements are possible and tangible, even for me! So why quit? Clumsy? Slow learner? Just show up. This is the secret of Aikido. Just remember: it’s all within your mind, it’s all inside of YOU.

Weights training

D i s c l a i m e r :

Don’t regard this post as a proposed ‘method’, not even as a general or particular truth. It reflects solely my own views and the extremely little experience on light weights training and its impact on my Aikido training.

One of the first things I considered when starting Aikido was that, since I’ve led an extremely sedentary life, I’m not “cut out” for this kind of thing. I thought that my poor physical form was going to be a problem, at 165 cm height and poor muscle tone. Only after a while it occurred to me that Asian martial arts masters were often shorter than me. So I got over the height thing, but the low physical strength problem remained.

About 2 or 3 years ago I bought two light weights, of 3 kg each, but I found I was too lazy to exercise regularly i.e. for long periods of time. However, last summer I actually exercised for about a month and my physical shape improved.

So, when starting Aikido, I said to myself “What the heck, if I’m capable of changing my daily routine in order to ‘fit in’ the training schedule, I might as well try to weight lift regularly, who knows – maybe it might actually help”. Apparently this does help.

So, once again, I’m not talking about heavy weight lifting, I’m talking about the ‘fitness’ type of weights, light weights, in the range of 3 to 5 kg each. If you want to improve your shape, you don’t want to pose any danger to your joints, so you just need to stimulate the muscular system, the blood flow and the cardiac rhythm. I find light weights for this to be ideal.

Also, I’ve found out by experimenting on me that it’s best to do slow motions, good for overall muscle resistance.

Keep in mind that the most important stage in weight training is the recovery stage: this is when the muscles recover and when you actually ‘put on strength’. So you most certainly don’t want to play Superman and lift weights until you’re sore and then you ache for 3 days at each move :)

Just train daily or once every two days and design a series of exercises that work best on you. Don’t run through them! Just inhale, lift, exhale and then come back slowly to the initial position. For a series of exercises with a “count” of 20-20-20-20-20-10 that I found to “work out” for me, the results are visible in at most 2 weeks.

I’m not interested in growing muscular mass – that’s not useful, at least not for my purposes; I need muscular tone, ‘muscular fiber’ so to speak, good mobility and overall endurance, so this is why I chose light weights training and slow motion moves. After finishing the 20-20-20-20-20-10 series, I go for 10-20 push-ups, 10-20 abs and 10-20 squats and then, if I feel I’m able to, I repeat the weights series.

Overall, excepting the visible physical result, I found another advantage to these ‘force series’ that I do at home. At the end of April and beginning of May, with the Easter and all that, there were about two weeks when the Aikido classes were not held. The trainings for “getting in shape” for the grade test started just then (after the two weeks pause). I was very disappointed that I got out of shape really bad. It felt I was clumsier than ever before. However, one thing alone was OK after the interruption: apparently my light weights training program was good for my endurance and flexibility.

One day during those trainings I was practicing ude osae (or ikkyo) with another (then) white belt. The guy was fairly big comparing to me and really solid. Large and strong joints, large hands etc. I was the uke (the attacker) and, after he stepped out the line of attack, the atemi (strike to a part of the body performed by nage, or the one who defends, in order to make uke lose balance), after the un-balance and the tai sabaki, he got me in the final ude osae pin. Still, something didn’t feel right. Although his grip on my wrist and elbow was firm, I didn’t feel like tapping out. Basically, he was just holding me pinned to the ground: I couldn’t get up no matter what. Since the form of Aikido we practice is focused mainly on efficiency and realism, Sensei teaches us that, each time we pin, we should use whatever we can to do an effective pinning. So, in the case of, say, ude osae (or ikkyo), nage’s knee on uke’s side is used as a third pinning point (apart from the hands used on the partner’s wrist and elbow), usually going onto uke’s shoulder.

So, since the guy was solid and his grip was firm, I couldn’t get up but he didn’t determine me to tap out either. I told him that, from his perspective, he should twist the elbow inwards (towards him) and the wrist outwards (in the direction opposing him). Then, while keeping the twist, he should keep the elbow on the ground and pull the wrist up, slowly, until I tapped out. However, although he apparently understood and his motions were slow in order to prevent injury, he was so concerned not to harm me that he didn’t twist how he was supposed to. The main forces couple I could feel was the push-the-elbow / pull-the-wrist one. I told him what seemed wrong and, just then, Sensei passed by. He observed us and told my partner the same thing I did and then, reconsidering, he stopped everybody from their practice to make out his point.

He basically explained the difference between mere force versus technique. Again, I was the uke because “this is best seen on somebody flexible” such as myself. I was like “Huh ?!” because I was never actually flexible. Oh well. So I was again down in the ikkyo pin, I couldn’t get up, and then he proceeded showing that if only force was used – namely the push-the-elbow / pull-the-wrist forces couple I wrote about before – it would have taken a longer while and a bigger effort to make me tap out. The force was applied gradually so there wasn’t any risk of getting hurt and I finally tapped out after a while. Then, from the same ikkyo pin, he showed us how the technique way worked better, being of course more effective and requiring less effort from nage: push-the-elbow-and-twist-it-inwards / pull-the-wrist-and-twist-it-outwards. Well, that definitely worked!

After class, I asked Sensei something and, after answering me, he asked me if I was into some form of ‘force series’ exercises lately, because something definitely changed. I admitted that yes, I try my best to bare with a few push-ups, abs and squats and I try some light weights too. He said this already starts to give out results, because, comparing to the shape I was in when I started, I now have increased physical endurance and flexibility. Yay!

So balanced light weights training is good. There can’t be an universal ‘receipt’, you have to experiment with yourself and listen to what your body “tells” you. Don’t push it. Just start with what seems reasonable for you and, once you feel you’re up to more, gradually increase your counts / motion time / practice time, whatever suits you best.

And remember: big muscles aren’t necessary strong muscles!