Aikido West - Redwood C.A.

Hi

After an exhausting sightseeing throughout San Francisco, I went today to the Trainings at Aikido West in Redwood C.A.

Due to high traffic around S.F., I returned a little late and the basics training was already ongoing. They were doing some basic Jo movements. Meanawhile, I was warmly welcomed by Paul who let me fill out the needed information letters and showed me around the Dojo.

The dojo itself is within some kind of a hall but very nice built up (see some pictures below). A nice Kamiza, some mirrors and paintings.

Paul told me that it's not a problem to join the training at any time and so i did. Jane, who led the basics training welcomed me too and I could grab one of their Jo's and directly participate.
The basics training was very fundamental and it was very good for me to repeat all these movements (Shomen-Uchi, Block, Tsuki). After that, some of the more advanced students threw us with their Jo's and it was a good warmup rolling exercise for me. We finished this training with Kokyu-ho which I gladly could do with a 2nd kyu student and made me already some sweaty.

The following General Training was led by Paul. The warmup session was a long endurance of basic movements (mainly tenkan). After that, we did the basic pins of ikkyo, nikkyo and sankyo all on kata-tori. I struggled a little bit with the initial movements as we rarely perform these pins on this attack.

All in all, these trainings were very good and it was very interesting to see some slight differences in the technics-details to our trainings.

The people of Aikido West are very friendly and I had some good chats afterwards (they even invited me for a beer or two which I had to refuse due to my sister waiting back at the motel to get some dinner).

If I get back to California (which I definitively will at some point), I will definitively visit them again.

Following some pictures:




Yours,

Lemy

ACLA

Hello,

I'm currently travelling through california and planned to train aikido in some dojos during that time.

My first stop was at Venice Beach, so I googled around upfront for a nearby dojo and found the Aikido Center LA as the nearest place to join a training session.

I arrived in L.A. on Saturday, March 7. On Sunday we visited the 6 Flags Fun park, so there was no time to join a training session. On monday then, I went for the fundamentals training there.

The trip to the dojo was longer than expected. I directly hit the rush hour traffic on the highways of L.A. during that time. Luckily I planned enough travel time so I arrived on time for the training. When I entered the dojo, I was quite amazed. It's a very nice and neat dojo they have there. It turned out they just moved in recently - so no showers for the time beeing. See the picture below indicating the dojo as it is today:


When I entered, there was a Black Belt in discussion with a white belt on the tatamis. Besides them, the dojo was empty. I introduced myself as a visitor from europe and that I would like to join a training. They warmly welcomed me and asked me to fill out a questionnaire (name, initials, aikido background, insurance details etc.) and to pay the mat fee of $20. Because of that, I was about 2 minutes late to start the training. There were only 3 other students on the mat and the training was unfortunately not led by their current main sensei (it turned out that he changed recently due to the passing of Kenshu Furuya, 6th Dan Hombu) but by one of their insturctors (unfortunately don't remember his name). During the training, another black belt joined us and introduced him as "Ken". After the training I had a quick chat with him and it turned out that he was actually the new sensei of this dojo - Ken Watanabe, 5th Dan Hombu).
I had the pleasure to train with him ikkyo on shomen-uchi and it felt just great (he was very relaxing and flexible as both, uke and nage).

Overall, the trainig was very exhaustive. We started with some sokumen-irimi stretching exercises, sokumen-irmi, irmi-nage, kote-gasehi and kokyu-ho at the end. One of their main students (white belt - always uke when showing the techniques) was very advanced and I had quite powerful sessions with him. Funny story, when performing kotegaeshi with him, he once threw me quite dynamically (had to do a high fall), the instructor asked him to be more friendly with the visitor (me) - but this was not a problem, as I did exactly the same with him afterwards, heh! Interesting: He was doing the high fall very very smoothly, something I'm still working on myself (kind of falling leave falling).

I initially planned to go to the training the day afterwards (tuesday) but due to an extensive trip to the universal studios, which took longer than expected, I had to skip this one.

Next, I plan to visit Frank Doran at Aikido West in Redwood CA. I'll post another one in case I can attend a training there.

Keep you updated!

Lemy