Randori and Kata

As I started to show Kenway a bit of one of my old White Crane kata and Brian asked about randori...

This is my old gung fu sifu doing white crane. He could sit mao bu with cinder blocks on his arms at 50 for about 20 min.


And here he is demonstraing qi na. qi na is the fundamental basis for aikido--the joint lock. I worked on the first qi ni book Dr. Yang Jwing-Ming wrote:

Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

Randori can be open hand or with weapons. It is used to practice timing, technique application instinct and is a component of all upper level testing in aikido.

This is a good example of the goal of randori, efficiency:

Note that he is only using a very basic throw for most of these attacks with a second 'face push' a few times.

Here is an example of a more complete randori from an a demo. Note that use uses more complex techniques (dynamically) but moves towards efficiency as the number of attackers increases:


And this is a really good example of randori and moving into the opponent:


This is randori on an upper level test--here the nage is moving more slowly, but applying a large variety of techniques:


And you should learn to use opponents against each other:



When you are practicing tanto (knife), bokken (sword) or jo (staff) randori you are attempting to disarm and control an attacker. (I have heard of multiple attacker weapon randori but I've never seen it.)
This is an example of traditional tanto randori:


And this is a more free-form (but still reasonably well executed) tanto randori:


Multiple weapons