aikilife

Hannah Goodwin has been kind enough to write an appraisal of her first year at the Shudokan Dojo in Barnstaple, Devon. Have a read!!

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I’ve been studying Aikido as part of the scholarship for about a year at the Dojo. Sensei Andrew Medland offered me the scholarship as a way for me to train even though I couldn’t afford the full mat fees and although many of the jobs I’ve had to do over the past year have been mundane, (such as the cleaning and registers) I wouldn’t change the experience for anything.

 

Aikido, like any martial art, has amazing benefits and the scholarship offers many more. I’ve had to help teach the children some techniques and movements, occasionally when I’ve only just seen them myself (I would like to point out I only assist in teaching the kids, I’ve never taken a lesson). This has worked wonders on my confidence and I think it has helped me understand Aikido better (whether that shows in my movements though is a different story). I enjoy most aspects of Aikido, like the feeling of being thrown well, especially when you can’t feel yourself being thrown until it’s too late and you’re already in the air. If you nail the landing then it has to be the single most amazing feeling you can get!

 

I suffer from a stutter and the scholarship has helped so much with it. I have had to talk to people showing an interest in Aikido; taking their name, contact details, booking them a time for their introduction, and general admin work. I often try to avoid situations where I have to talk to strangers for fear of stuttering, so being forced into that situation helped with my confidence which greatly helped with my stutter.

 

In the past year of Aikido I have made many new friends, both in the adults and in the cadets class (12-15 y/o) there is something with throwing each other around like rag dolls that (thankfully!) creates a lot of trust which means you often end up with good friends both on and off the mats.

 

It’s not all fun and games though, there are some negatives. For me the most frustrating thing about Aikido is the bruises I seem to suffer from. I bruise easier than an over ripe peach, meaning that even simple grabs or meets create bruises on my arms. Not to mention that regardless of the amount of times I have told people exactly how I got the bruises and the fact that I bruise easily, people still seem to think my instructors and fellow Aikidoka are bullies. Which is obviously really annoying.. However me and my mum have had many jokes over my bruises, occasionally at my expense and sometimes my mum refers to Andrew as a bully. (which isn’t true! But it is funny.)

 

Also I get rather frustrated with the breakfalls, how can something so simple be so difficult?! Although my falls are improving, it does feel like slow progress much of the time, this is very frustrating as there are many throws I’d love to experience but I lack the confidence to fall from them (like left flips or high back falls, Sensei makes them look stupidly easy and they really aren’t) and even something as simple as a left or right fall can hurt if it’s not done right (unless it’s just me doing them really badly).

 

I went to the Dojo on a whim, I thought it looked interesting but like many of us I had my doubts as to it’s effectiveness. Yet after that first session I was hooked! I loved it as much in that first session as I do now. I must be honest and say I expected to get bored of it fairly soon, that I loved the novelty of Aikido rather than Aikido itself, but the more I trained the more I realised that there’s so much more than what you first see, and that fascinates me

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