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