The New Morning Routine

A few weeks ago when Sensei said he was taking a break from teaching morning class, I became worried. You might even say I panicked. I'm pretty hooked on this morning thing and on Aikido in general. But worse, there is no realistic way I could possibly train so much without morning class. One of the things which made it so easy to leave the old dojo 3 years ago was the fact that even 2 evenings a week was causing some serious marital disharmony. And understandably so - Melissa is a stay-at-home mom and the last thing she needs after a day with these boys is me coming home from work, wolfing down some food, and saying "bye honey. off to the dojo. see you in a few hours". The last 3 years there has been virtually zero marital stress with regardss to my training. And I've been doing 5 classes a week!

Things shook out pretty quickly, however. Sensei took my recommendation from a few months ago to reduce the number of morning classes to 3 a week. You see, we're down to a skeleton crew with only 4 regulars and no irregulars (vs about 8 or 9 regulars and as many irregulars when I'd joined 3 years ago). And where all of the other regulars go only 2 or 3 times a week, that meant Sensei was showing up a lot with just little ol' me there. It was great for me in some ways. But realistically, I need a diversity of partners. And he needs a diversity of students. Not so great. Reducing classes to 3 a week made sense since then we'd have 4 students in almost every class. I had to recommend the unselfish thing.

And fortunately Sensei found a couple of very capable volunteers to take over those 3 classes a week. K. takes over Monday and Wednesday, and R. takes over Friday. To be certain I enjoy K's classes more, but R's I still enjoy as well. But hey, K has been doing Martial Arts since he was 5 years old, and he's presently 20 years younger than R. It's quite understandable.

When the new schedule came into effect last week, I decided that I was going to be stubborn and still show up on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It's not qiute the same as real training with a partner, but there is a lot a guy can do on his own. Fortunately I had a set of keys since I recently got elected to the Board of Directors.

So this is what I do on Tuesdays and Thursdays :

• tai sabaki - or footwork. About 15 minutes.
• Saito 20 Jo (staff) Suburi - about 20 minutes. The Youtube link is of Saito Sensei himself doing it. I do 10 reps of each exercise, on each side. Though I'm currently only doing the first 13 since they are all I can recall on my own. But it works out well this way, time-wise.
• 300 chops of the bokken (sword) - about 15 minutes. Not centerline shops, but parry, yokomenuchi, then parry other side, yokomenuchi other side. Then back to the first side. I find this exercise helpls considerably in learning to move from my center
• shikko - or knee walking. Oh hey, my first hit on a Youtube search comes up with this guy, who is pretty good at it. I do about 5 minutes.

Right now for footwork I'm doing :

• irimi #1
• irimi #2
• irimi #3
• tenkan
• double tenkan
• reverse tenkan (foot change)
• tenshin #1
• tenshin #2

I do 10 reps of each on each side.

Then I do 50 or 60 reps of a particular combo. This morning I was doing double tenkan followed by tenshin #1, which is a very common combo that's used.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the best part of the new program - Melissa really understands how important it is for me to keep training with my old Sensei. He still teaches the 9am to 10:30 am on Sunday, so now I get to go to it regularly! So even though I have technically gone down from 5 classes a week to 4, I've actually gone up from 5 to 6! Sure, my Tuesday and Thursday routine is something I could be and should be doing at home every day on my own. But truthfully I just have not been able to find the time for it, between work and the family. So this new routine is actually shaping up to be even better than the old one! Especially since the Sunday class is pretty high paced with mostly black belts, and lots of training partners. So I get to push myself a bit harder than I used to have to.

All in all, pretty happy about the whole thing.