Recent Blogs Posts

We've now got ourselves a nice new association logo courtesy of our friend Josh Smith. Josh trained with us in Aberdeen for some time before returning to the US and while he was in Aberdeen was amongst other things the designer of the Aberdeen club logo. So a while ago I asked him if he would be willing to donate some time toward an association logo for us, and here it is. You can find Josh in our forum under the username toosuto, so big thanks to Josh for his much appreciated ...

Just a quick blog to mention to those who don't know. We're changing our banking arrangements for the Windermere Club in the next few weeks, this will mean that as of the end of September or possibly sometime in October we'll be moving to a new payment scheme, this will be the use of monthly fees rather than individual fees charged per lesson, these monthly fees would be paid via standing order. So, instead of the £6 per lesson paid now a monthly fee of £22 would be charged, when viewed over a 12 ...

Last night in the dojo in Windermere we spent a great deal of time working on some ideas we brought back from the recent Isshinkai summer school in Andover. A large proportion of time spent last night was on getting uke to go forward, the distinction being that uke must provide (at least for the exercises we were doing) most of the effort. This is difficult for the skeptical to deal with as they view this as uke basically throwing themselves and nage doing very little, it can easily seem fake. If ...

A Dojo (道場) is a place for training in 'the way', historically associated with temples in Japan and with Budo (which also was historically associated with temples and shrines in Japan). They are now most commonly places associated mostly with the Japanese martial arts. In the past a Dojo was usually a purpose built structure but now they are commonly rented spaces such as community centres or church halls etc.

So, that's what a Dojo is, but what should a Dojo be? The short ...

Had a visitor to the dojo in Windermere the other day, he's from a more traditional style of aikido than us (though what exactly traditional is in reference to aikido eludes me - but that's for another blog post). We happened to have two beginners on the mat on this particular evening and for reasons of convenience it ended up being myself, our visitor and the two new guys in one corner for about 20min. I was showing the new guys unbendable arm when our visitor said "Oh yeah, we do that too". ...