We had a fantastic revelation tonight. It was found from doing basic tenchinage as a class exercise. In this version, the lower hand draws a line to Uke‘s back shikaku while the upper hand raises right up and under Uke‘s chin, then a hip-twist to protect the groin with the slide off the line and zag-step behind Uke. Another version would be full nagare, or slight nagare the way Ben Sensei does it with stiff ukes.

Here is the revelation from the basic version: assume we are in hidari gyakuhanmi ryotedori and ignore the ten-hand and focus on the the chi-hand for now.

Nage wants to extend Uke‘s lower hand down and to his shikaku behind him to move his center of gravity away from him so he wants to fall. Good ukes will not readjust their stance and will fall. However, we have some larger students and some flexible students and they readjust because they don’t like to fall. In the still below it feels like Uke can step back if he really wanted to.

Kihon tenchinage

I took a flexible student (because he can roll safely) and did tenchinage the way I remember wakasensei does it: the first slide is deep to the side followed by the step behind. When I did that, Uke‘s right leg lifted off the ground and he was unable to readjust.

Wakasensei

Andell was watching and made the observation that by first drawing a line to the left of his right leg (not back), it puts Uke‘s weight on his right leg and he is unable to move that leg. When Uke‘s weight is shifted it is easy to extend his arm back to his shikaku like we originally wanted to do.

We’re going to work more with this to make the basic version work just as well as the nagare versions.

By the way, here is a still of ‘kind of’ the slight nagare I was talking about at the top of this post.

Slight initial nagare