Brain=yes, body=no

A three day seminar of Iaido may have moved my sword work forward a little but it left my knees extremely battered!  Almost as battered as my boken from doing tachiuchi no kurai (the paired exercises we do) which is now partly held together with cricket-bat tape.  There were a number of small but important things that were highlighted to me.  These, combined with some comments from last nights class got me thinking.

• I’m tending to lean forward, and this is impacts on the form I am practising.
• I keep bringing my legs into a line, like I’m walking on a tightrope, so I become unsteady.
• During some techniques I turn my feet out, causing my hips and centre to face away from my attacker.
• I’m using too much muscle strength, and not using my hara/centre to execute the cutting actions.
• I need to slow down, yet still maintain the rhythm with each technique, until I get it right.
• My nukitsuke (the initial draw and horizontal cut) is not right – I fail to extend the iaito forward enough due to the action of my arm and wrist.

As I read that list I think that most of that could apply to my Aikido.  Also, I know logically that this is all bad form but my body still carries on doing it.  If I stop halfway through a technique then I become aware and can correct the issue.  The brain knows it’s wrong, the body is just refusing to go along.

This week my Iaido instructor said that having a weapon in your hands is distracting.  It moves you away from thinking about your body and you concentrate on what is in your hands.  My old Stav instructor was also of this view.  Both stated that ideally people should concentrate on learning weaponless martial arts in order to understand body movement better.

So this week I am not going to pick up any of my weapons before next class.  (The nukitsuke can wait for now).  Instead I am going to concentrate on the body movements and repeat them until eventually it becomes brain = yes, body = yes.  I realise this doesn’t make for a very exciting blog post, but then this blog has primarily been about jogging my memory!