Aikido Club of WA

Well the time has come to close my club. Unfortunately falling student numbers and an ongoing injury mean that I can no longer participate to an adequate level to teach when I have only 1 or 2 students so I've had to make the difficult decision to end my Aikido teaching career. Thank you to friends and followers for your support, long may your journey continue...

Aikido prepares us to face the challenges of daily life with a positive and energetic mindset. Some challenges are small, some are great, one challenge I didn't expect tonight was a huntsman spider guarding my Gi. What's higher than 5th test?....

Congratulations to Ross for passing his 1st Dan and Joye for passing her 3rd Dan! A fantastic effort by both!

It's 43°C in the shade, so what do you do on a Saturday afternoon? Practice Aikido of course!

Photos from our recent sword course. Transitioning from bokken to katana is very beneficial for the extension of Ki.

Days 2 and 3 of the course switched to indoors. It was a great mix of Ki development and free-flowing aikido to remove the focus on exercises. Finished off with multiple partner tanto randori and bokken randori. Fun!!!

Catching up after an excellent 3 day course a few weeks ago. Thanks to Sensei Adrian for flying over from Brisbane to share the teaching. Day 1 (Friday) was an amazing start with open-air classes in the local park.

Sensei was unavailable yesterday so Ross and I worked together on some chosen techniques, tanto and Kata for our respective 1st and 3rd Dan gradings next year

Hi grade class today. We focused on tanto, finishing with tanto randori (each partner with a tanto). It was great fun and helped the students with blending, leading and following resulting in some "creative" exercises. Sorry no photos we were all to busy trying to hold on to weapons!

And Chris against the bokken.

Interesting class last week mixing Brown belt and 1st Dan exercises. Created a good opportunity to compare Shihonage with a tanto and bokken. Ross practicing against the tanto.

We're in between Brown and Black belt again! I think this is a fantastic point in a student's training, "not many new exercises to learn, but a lot of training time, so what am I meant to do?" I hear. To me, this is the point where the student needs to transition from just doing exercises to finding their natural balance, so they can naturally extend Ki and blend with their partner(s). It's a difficult, and individual journey, but so satisfying!