Marginal Gains Applied to Iai
Have you ever noticed that when you address one issue in your Iai performance other parts seem to suffer? One’s ochiburui isn’t quite right, you take your senior’s advice and knock it into shape and then your noto becomes jerky and imprecise. You keep your back foot absolutely straight in relation to the axis of the kata and you start bending your leg at the knee when you’re supposed to keep it straight. I make the analogy of putting up a tent: You pull on one guide rope to straighten up the canvas and then it lurches to one side so you have to tighten the opposite rope and it leans in another unexpected direction due to the vector of forces being applied. It becomes a never-ending cycle of adjust this and that goes out. Adjust that and this needs reigning in. Most of us accept this cycle of ‘adjust, deviate, readjust’ throughout our Iai careers and hope the deviation from the ideal of our performance is minimal when we go for a promotion grading. What’s going on? If yo
