by Nick Lowry
Thinking back to the aikido I learned in the 1980s ….The ukemi and the Walking are mostly identical to what we do today.
The 17 was very linear and clunky, but still very strong. Movement and angles were narrow and prescriptive, with precise and minimal handwork (two handed balance breaks) and homolateral footwork for control positions of structural power. Eight Release exercise did contain flowing movement and a far more dynamic engagement but still was narrow in focus on irimi-tenkan footwork, wrist control, and centering. Big Ten was a bit more fluid than the 17 and really brought in tenkan, floating back step, and dropping concepts into our footwork toolbox.
Our work with the higher katas was pretty much limited to San kata and Yon kata and also by the 90’s we had smattering of Go kata and parts of Roku as well. With all of that as the technical basis there were still some significant gaps in building skill for randori. We did have a few randori exercises ….gaeshi to hineri drill, sticky hands, free hand to the face and such, but mostly hand randori was just approached as trial and error. If you did it enough, long enough, eventually you might get it.
Until 2000 there were few explicit methods to build skill sets for elements like hand change, throwing on the move, or working from failure. The development of the Release Chains ,and more specifically the renzoku concept, addressed these areas throughly and even began to reshape our approach to the foundational work of the 17, eight releases, and big ten. With these developments, our basic curriculum expanded significantly, dynamic grappling skills improved, and the system as a whole shifted from being more kata driven to being more randori driven overall.
Still,even after the development of the chains, some skill sets of randori remained elusive. Particularly elusive were the more subtle randori skills such as:
- Kaeshi waza as a flow of shared initiatives
- Balance break in static applications
- Isometric control for kuzushi and postural dampening
- Pure body drop loading without bridging
- Psychological triggering for optimal sensitivity
- Conditioning psychological resilience to overwhelm
- Proprioceptive and targeting confusion with mirroring
- Absent feed back and pre loaded kuzushi effects (all of which are now covered in our YouTube library, in one form or another).
Much of my research and development over the past five years has been addressing these more subtle gaps. This has unexpectedly opened up some new insights into the evolution of our approach to aikido.
To recount: I have gone from exploring Tomiki’s own historical development and looking into the predecessors of our various katas and kihon, as well as the various lines of development stemming from Tomiki’s seminal work, and incidentally recovering some of the discarded forms.
I also made a survey of a very wide variety of kuzushi effects and the methods of building those kuzushi skills within other systems of training, including
- Kito ryu influenced Judo,
- The more mainline hombu Aiki forms,
- The Daito ryu forms, and
- The innovative work that came out of Russia as Systema.
Each time with the aim of replicating their results within the context of our paradigm. From this experience, I see now more clearly the differing approaches to creating “aiki” that arise in Kito ryu and Daito ryu systems and also how they converge in Tomiki’s system and furthermore how they express themselves in our particular branch of that system.
It is clear to me now that our aikido has developed with a much more Kito ryu emphasis (certainly as far back as the 80s and even more strongly since the technical shift in 2000), and that much of what appeared as gaps in the subtle kuzushi skill sets were elements more derived from the Daito ryu side.
Many of these subtle skills still show up in our advanced hand randori–we are very familiar with them– but nonetheless, they were not methodically or explicitly addressed in our training. In fact if they were addressed at all, it was as if they were just exceptions to the rule, or outliers, or cheating, or just spooky stuff. It was as if we had no coherent language to contain these skills. Few ways to describe how to get there from here.
This is why I so highly value the opportunities we find in training with folks like George Ledyard and Howard Popkin since they both have arrived at very highly refined and sensitive kuzushi skills but from the other side of the Kito/Daito paradigm and consequently have teaching methods and explanations that I believe can significantly broaden our perspective and fill in the gaps. They are also a lot of fun.