Home Workout: Internal Ukemi + Core
Channel: Aikido Chuseikan
Date: 2020-05-09

In this 30-minute home workout video, Sensei Guy Hagen combines exercises and concepts from Yoga, Systema, Feldenkrais, and Primal Movement to help you make all of your rolls softer, quieter, more graceful, and more powerful.  All you need is a yoga mat or padded surface, some loose clothes, and about 8' by 12' of floor space free of obstacles or pets.

Human locomotion – walking – is one of the most efficient forms of animal movement, because it is basically a constant "falling forward" motion.  What if you could harness this same efficiency for your forward and backward rolls?  Instead of using a lot of external muscles or momentum to push your body through rolls, you could instead harness gravity to do most of the work by finding and using successive "tipping points" inside your body.

This video introduces the concepts of internal "fulcrums" or "balance points", where (once the core is engaged) a very small extension or contraction can let gravity pull you forward or backward through your ukemi (rolling) sequence, even into rising.  A "fulcrum" is a point at which something precisely balances upon, where half the weight is one one side of the point and the other half provides a perfect counter-balance.  At any given time and position, if we engage our core we can often find a fulcrum within ourselves.

The specific fulcrums that we explore in this video are:

- Sacrum / "sit bones" fulcrum
- Hip socket / pelvis fulcrum
- Femur (upper leg bone) fulcrum
- Shin bone fulcrum
- Upper spine / shoulder fulcrum (spinal axis)
- Side-shoulder (humerus axis) fulcrum

Another goal of this video is to identify the internal barriers to clean, balanced movement; tight hips and shoulders, fear of compressing the stomach or curling the back, muscular resistance; and finding slow, measured, safe patterns for letting your body move through them to explore new paths of motion, balance, and stability.

CAUTION
Please explore these movements with wisdom and patience.  There is nothing shown in this video that should require you to force through resistance, or to feel pain.  If you have a neck, back, or joint injury, make adjustment to let the movements be less extreme and threatening for yourself; use props, touch the floor with your hands or elbows for additional support, or skip the exercises which might exacerbate an injury.  The goal is internal exploration and perception, not forcing yourself into new shapes or rushing to accomplish how you think you should look.  Try these movements, take one that feels interesting, and spend five or ten minutes every day exploring it until you find change within yourself and your ukemi.

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The ASU Aikido Chuseikan of Tampa Bay dojo is affiliated with the Aikido Schools of Ueshiba and Aikido World Headquarters, and provides quality adult and family martial arts instruction in Tampa, Florida.

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