This month, students from Satomi Kai Aikido in Stowmarket took a trip to Oxfordshire for a national seminar at our organisations headquarters in Aylsbury

Teaching on the day was shared by Roy Chandler and Ian Morgan, both senior instructors in the Kai Shin Kai.

The course centred around movement and randori, deliberately leaving perfection of technique to our regular teachers.

Randori is a term used in Japanese martial arts to describe free-style practice. The term literally means “chaos taking” or “grasping freedom,” implying a freedom from the structured practice or kata. In Aikido, randori is almost always practiced with two attackers to one defender.

From the outset the message was not to expect to have the time or opportunity to execute perfect technique in this kind of situation.

Early in the day the students worked on body movement (Tai Sabaki), not just as a tool for avoidance and escape, but also for attack.

Final sessions concentrated on randori using the opponents as missiles or shields – an important strategy being to treat multiple assailants as 1 unit.

All together about 50 people participated in the course, covering all grades from absolute novice to senior black-belts, all happily mixing together for the common good, and everyone had a great day.

The next course at headquarters should be an interesting one as we are visited by guest instructors from Italy.