First off, let me be honest, for the most part I hate the walk. You might know it as Tegatana. In general if find it to be boring. I believe that it has great value, I just don't like doing it all that much.
It's why I stay away from Jyodo.
Pat has a whole bit on how to do better walking on his site. I have no doubt that working dilligently on the walk will better my aikido.
Anyway, my point is something else. The man was a little fired up in class last night and pointed out that we were completely out of synic with one another while doing the walk. His point was that while the walk trains how to do the steps, its greater value is in that it teaches you to be in rhythm from the inital step of the bad guy.
With this in mind, I payed more attention to the walk then usual (that is to say I paid attention at all). What I noticed was that the walk teaches more then just being in time with someone else, it forces you to be in time without changing the length of your step. Its something unique to the kata. Well hello new intrest for me.
When you walk with someone, girlfriend, boyfriend, marching troop, to get in step, you agree to walk with the same leg velocity and to take the same size step.
So, when we work on the chain or releases, I've noticed that I end up taking the same size step as uke. Its a hard habbit to break. It feels ok because most everyone in the club is about the same height and we're going slow.
However, in life, sometimes your "working" with some one who has a drastically longer or shorter step. There's no way to take the same size step, and they're not going to try and meet you in the middle, like an occomidating uke in practice. So, you have to get in rythem with the man by having a different velocity of step so that you have the same footfalls (which is what I think the important part is).
We have to break somewhat the training of life. The key to breaking it, perhaps, is dedicated tegatana work with a partner. Crazy pete! Because you're not linked to the man, you feel less pressure to modulate step size. This frees you to emphasize hitting the footfalls while forcing yourself to take your normal step size. You walk at the pace of the counter not the speed of the counter. Way hard. It's make the walk fun again.
1 comment:
Great point, Greg. The synch thing is really important - not just to look cool and win olympic synchronized kata competitions - but as a training thing to learn how to get into step with someone else.
For another great opportunity for the same thing - make sure that everybody falls and slaps in synch on all the ukemi exercises at the beginning. gets folks into the habit of looking around and knowing whats going on around them when they fall and gets them more practice getting in synch with others.
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