BEA expo, Aikido Demonstration

So, yesterday was the big day. We had our demonstration at the BEA Berne expo. Finally we were able to show aikido twice for 15mins. Daniel was quite satisfied with us. Still I had some minor mistakes in my techniques but I did it quite well, at least I'm happy with myself and I'm pretty sure, the visitors were not able to see any mistakes at all :-)

Have a look at my flickr aikido set, I've added some of the nicer pics to this set (the ones which are tagged with BEA and demo).

Yours,

Lemy

Wednesday training - preparing for the demo

It was, as always, a good training over lunch at wednesday. It's always good to leave the office to get some other thoughts and turn off (well, not really, but kind of) your brain. It's so relaxing!

We're still preparing for the demo. Now we got 15min to demonstrate aikido aside of judo, ju-jutsu, kickboxing and tae-bo. Daniel prepared a plan for what we're going to show. We will be 5 people demonstrating aikido, whereas I'm the bloodiest beginner of all of them. There's daniel (of course), markus (2nd dan), rosemarie (??. dan), martial (4th kyu) and me (still 5th kyu). Daniel will show together with markus some jo and bokken katas (I think that's going to be very interesting, as markus also teaches iaido). Rosemarie with makrus the whole kata forms (ikkyo, nikkyo, sankyo, yonkyo, gokyo). I will show some techniques together with martial, whereas I will perform the easier ones (katate-tori irimi nage, katate-tori shiho-nage, ushiro-ryote-tori kotegaeshi and ushiro-ryote-tori kokyu-nage) and martial the more complex ones (yokomen-uchi kote-gaeshi, yokomen-uchi tenbim-nage, tsuki kaiten-nage and tsuki tenchi-nage). I will be uke for martial and he will be mine.

I'm still struggling with uchiro-ryote-tori kokyu-nage. We perform this in a special manner (see picture) and still I got some troubles. But today I was able to make much progress in this. Both daniel and ruedi sensei took the time to train with me for this special technique.

I will go to the training at saturday and (hopefully) martial will be there too, so we can train those techniques one more time before the demonstration (April, 29th).

Yours Lemy

Saturdays Training - Basics

There were only Nathalie, Romolo, Julien and me in the training today. Both Ruedi and Daniel Sensei were on vacation this week. Nathalie took the lead and we begun with Yokomen Uchi Irimi, followed by Ryote Katate Dori Irimi. We performed them both in the ura version which I totally don't like. I always got the feeling I'm behaving wrong when perfoming Irimi in the ura form. I've never had a positive feeling doing this technique so far.

After that Nathalie showed us some kokyu nages. For me as a beginner, kokyu is quite difficult. It really looks like a fake (whereas very fluently and nice, but not functional anyhow) and when I perform it, I always got the feeling this cannot work with an uncooperative partner.

Romolo had to leave after this and we went on to the kata. Julien (4th kyu) focussed mainly on sankyo as this will be his "new" kata to show on the next tests. On my part, I had to focus on shomen-uchi nikkyo omote. I still don't get it fluently. But I was able to make some progress today.

Very good feeling after the training and quite relaxed. It's always hard for me to go to the training at saturday morning but afterwards it's mostly worth it :-)

Yours,

Lemy