Koshinage

I slept didn't make the 12:15 class yesterday, but I managed to get to the dojo for the 5:30. OK, it was 5:40.

Mike Jones taught the class and we focused on suki techniques. It was all fairly straight forward, but I had a hard time with some of it. The opening threw me a bit until I got the hang of it.

Things went OK until we got to koshinage. In my mind, koshinage falls into two broad categories. This is probably an artificial distinction, but in my mind it is there.

There's the 90-degree koshinage, where nage's feet wind up perpendicular to uke's before the throw. This is the nice, happy comfortable one for me. ;)

Then there's the 45-degree koshinage, which isn't really 45 degrees, but uke is behind nage and nage sticks his hip in front of uke and uke goes over. It's almost 45 degrees. This is the unhappy, uncomfortable one, for me. :(

Well, of course, we did the latter. I really need to take a sempai aside and work on this, because I'm just not doing it right. Uke winds up almost behind my shoulder and that makes the throw hard and dangerous. Fortunately, I didn't kill anyone.

One woman in our group was taken out, though. Another guy I hadn't seen threw her on her shoulder. Ouch. She was taken off the mat and iced up. I felt sorry for her, but honestly, I was also so glad I wasn't the one to have done that. She was a fairly inexperienced uke and my poor throw could have hurt her, too. I had already thrown her, and I was very careful, but It could have easily been me.

Above is a fairly close version of this technique. That nage is a little hesitant as well.