The second iteration of the NTNUI martial art seminar has been concluded. As last time the participants were Judo, Taekwondo, Aikido and Karate, and we each got one hour to show the other groups what our martial art was all about.
The day started with Judo. Our instructor, Georg, showed us some of the basic throws in judo, but first we had to learn to to fall correctly. In judo correct falling and rolling technique is very important to avoid injury, and is a lot harder than it looks. Once we had got hang of the roll and fall (and stopped injuring ourselves), we were ready to try our first throw. The first throw Georg showed us was “Ogoshi” the hip throw, followed up with “Deashibarai” the foot sweep. At the end it was time for a match to see what we had learned.
Taekwondo took over after judo. Whereas judo spent a lot of their time on the ground, taekwondo spend most of their time standing up (or maybe in the air?). Sverre, our taekwondo instructor, gave us an introduction many different kicks in taekwondo. We got to try our hand (or rather foot maybe) at the basic front kick, the powerful sidekick, the surprisingly difficult roundhouse kick. Finally, we all got to channel our inner Bruce Lee for the flying kick.
After lunch it was aikido turn to show us how to be real samurais. We had already learned how to do a roll from judo, but Viktoria from Aikido showed how to do a correct roll in aikido. Whereas judo ended their roll in the ground to soften the blow of falling, aikido ended their roll standing up. We got to try both forward and backwards rolling, this too was much harder than you would think. Viktoria had even prepared a little game for us where there were three balls, that we threw at each other. If you got hit, you were out, and the only way to get back in the game was if someone rolled over you. After we were done with rolling, we were handed a “bokken” (a wodden sword) . Wolfgang showed us how to correctly handle a sword, and we even got to try a simple sword fight versus another person.
The final act of the day was karate. Karate took us back up from the ground, and Torbjørn introduced us to some basic techniques in karate. Taekwondo had already taken us through kicking, so Torbjørn focused mainly on pushes with a self defence twist. The most common attack you could face in a self defence situation is the roundhouse punch. We learned a simple way to defend against this attack, and some follow up punches that would give you the upper hand. It became clear to us fast the in this style of self defence anything goes, and overkill might even be necessary.
The seminar was a great success this time as well. It has been very interesting to see how the different martial arts we got here at NTNUI partises, and how their style differs from our own. Hopefully we can turn this into a tradition, and maybe even more of the martial arts groups at NTNUI will come and show us what they are doing.
© Anders Johannessen, NTNUI Karate
ntnui-aikido.com 