This post is part of the First Year of Budo series

Been very busy this week, hence the late post.

Jodo

This week was warmups followed by paired forms of basic techniques. So one person would have a bokken and the other the jo. Then the Jo person would strike with the bokken person receiving. First we did Honte uchi. With this technique the bokken’s role was to move back just as the jo person was striking such that the jo would end up only a few inches from your forehead. The key for this paired form was that the bokken person must move late. If you move early you can’t judge how far the jo person is going to strike and also it doesn’t give as much of a realistic target.

The second paired form for this was Gyakute Uchi in which the bokken person would actually block the strike a few inches from the temple of the head with that of a sticky sensation. Then they would continue to pivot backwards blocking on alternate sides with each strike. Once again it was necessary to block late to give a more realistic target. It is all part of training Ma-ai(distance) skill, which is probably closest translated to combative distance.

We finished with kata work where I improved my paired form version of kuritskae where I break the opponents center more before locking the sword on them with my Jo.

Iaido

I’d lost the knack of my new cutting technique from last week so I spent most of the warmup trying to get that back which I didn’t really achieve. What I did enjoy was that I was managing to cover a lot of ground with my steps. So when we were practicing cutting and turning I was managing to get a fair bit of slide in my steps. This is nice as it gives a good sense of speeding up to a climax.

That sense of slow-medium-fast (or fast-faster-fastest) called Jo-Ha-Kyu has been the most recent advice for improving my technique. One of my main problems is that there is little sense of rhythm in my movements. I know what to do and can do it, now I need to do it better. All my cuts need to have a sense of this speeding up and then bang! strike. That was the most important thing to take away and work on this week. For the rest of class we worked on the kata that we will be doing for our gradings (in about a month or so), I really need to get in practice time.

Finishing up I managed to order a uniform (finally), just the black Iaido uniform but it should be good to have. It’ll probably take me forever to learn how to put it on properly. Also I bought the Federations official Iaido and Jodo manuals so now I’ll have a ‘reliable’ reference (as opposed to my memory) to what I’m supposed to be doing. It’s no substitute for having someone poke and prod you continually for hours but it’s a useful reminder.