Warborough jujutsu dojo

01/05/2024

Excellent grading last night. From left to right, congratulations to Neil (4th dan), Chris (2nd dan), Michael (brown belt) and Mike (orange belt).

03/05/2023

I recently came across a brief interview with Tanaka sensei, one of the people who taught me Daiwa Ryu in Suffolk. It's only three minutes long so won't take much out of your day. The piece at 1 minute in should be familiar to those who were training with me last night!

The life and teaching of Shihan Eiichi Tanaka, master of traditional Japanese acupuncture and Daiwa-Ryu Jujitsu. Film available at Line of Intent Publishing ...

19/03/2023

Just back from a fascinating seminar with Alister Gillies concentrating on aikage and aikisage - two of the fundamental principles which you are shown in your first few aikido classes, even if not named. Decades later I'm still trying to get my head around this stuff!

01/03/2023

An evening spent work on irimi nage. There are a number of techniques that come under this umbrella - some starting with a straight entry, some with a tenkan. I suppose the common feature is the projection of the arm across uke's upper body.

22/02/2023

Another week concentrating on various forms of nihonage. As well as going through a number of the variants that we've done before I was keen to work on an entry from hakko dori that I've been contemplating for the last couple of weeks. Valentine's Day meant last Tuesday was an inappropriate time to try it out.

I also took the opportunity to try out a nasty little pin learnt on Goldberg sensei's seminar a while ago.

30/11/2022

Congratulation to Chris on achieving his shodan (black belt) in Daiwa Ryu jujutsu and to Michael on achieving his 5th kyu (green belt).
Both performed excellently in the grading and this sis a thoroughly well deserved outcome.

02/03/2022

Last night we concentrated on aikinage, throwing by disrupting the opponents balance; corkscrewing one shoulder forwards and down, the other backwards and up. Made more sense if you were there!
We looked at the Daiwa Ryu kata, some similar techniques from aikido (tenchinage) and, as ever numerous variations on the principle.

26/01/2022

We've gained a couple of new starters over the last few months so last night I tried to reign in my usual approach to class and we spent a chunk of the evening looking at shodan gi suwari waza - the first few techniques in the syllabus. The suwari waza bit means that they are taught from seiza, the formal seated position. This inevitably meant that after a while we had to stand up to stretch out ankles not use to the position and then played around with a number of techniques not strictly on the syllabus.

Photograph is from a course in Berlin may years ago. The course was courtesy of the now defunct aikido-l mailing list

03/01/2022

First session of the year tomorrow night. Should be fun!

08/12/2021

We've been quiet on Facebook for the last few months but have been back training honest! Slowly getting back to grips with things, alternating between reviewing the kata and concentrating on fine details with interspersed session of doing what seems like fun at the time.

This week started with looking at some of the entries common in the first few techniques you learn in an aikido or other Daito Ryu derived jujutsu class. Playing around with those we found some dead spots where, without excessive effort or striking, the technique became blocked. Concentrating on that bit we started to find subtle manipulations which allowed the technique to continue to work. All very reminiscent of the Daiwa Ryu and Daito Ryu aiki work.

And then things degenerated into rolling around on the ground in judo style newaza. It's so good to be back on the mat!

09/10/2021

Turns out that we were not the only ones to invent "sticks on the green" during lockdown. Wandering through the Abbey Meadows in Abingdon this morning I came across an escrima class being run by Can Do Martial Arts.