When practicing with a weaker/smaller/or less-experienced Uke, do you tend to go easy on the technique?

Learning to work with many different ukes is all part of your own training. A newer person on the mat needs time to develop falling/tumblng skills, and build up wrist and arm strength. So, yes, when working with a 'newbie' - or someone of less physical ability - discretion is the better part of valor. My sensei says it's easy to do a hard, fast attack - but lots of times you're only using strength; doing a perfect technique slowly is much more difficult.

As far as 'smaller' ukes - um - well - I'm 4'11", and once I developed my skills, I got tossed around just as much as anyone else!

Everything is relative, while practicing with someone of that level or experience you must adjust everything.

Yeah, leave out small =)

My trouble is finding, for each student, the fine line between too much and not enough. We suggest they give an attack proportional in ..vigor to the throw they feel competent to take. It sort of works. It's a little frustrating when you're working with a dubious/resisting-but-unsturdy/whiny new student..

[QUOTE]Originally posted by zbeth:
Yeah, leave out small =)

My trouble is finding, for each student, the fine line between too much and not enough. We suggest they give an attack proportional in ..vigor to the throw they feel competent to take. It sort of works. It's a little frustrating when you're working with a dubious/resisting-but-unsturdy/whiny new student..[/QUOTE]


That's been my experience as well.

When working with lets say a particular woman in my dojo who is under five foot and has weak wrists, I'm going to do nikkyo a bit different than on one of my college buddies. One should be sensetive enough to be able to use just the amount of force necessary to acheive the desired result, no more and no less.

Joe

I feel you should train to the level of the less experienced practitioner...When training with someone less experienced than you think of it as giving as you are helping and imparting your knowledge. Think how you feel when training with someone better than you... Don't worry about small people though if they know what they are doing give it to them hard they'll only do it back!!
Stephen

Once again it depends on the person, if its a person, wanting to learn, then, regardless of their size etc, you should just slowly increase pressure on the lock, allowing them to react when they feel pain.

On the other hand, a new guy has just started in our class, hes about 6'5'' and 17 stone, a big guy. I watched him training with some of the other people in the class, also relative beginners, as we are all white belts, you cannot tell how good someone is. This guy had the attitude of this stuff doesnt work, you cant throw me etc. I find there is nothing worse than this kind of person, so I waited to the end of the class, where we choose 3 techniques from the class, to perform agaisnt any attack. The 3 I chose were kotegashi, iriminage and hiji-ate kokyu-nage( hitting the elbow breath throw). As expected, he attacked every time with a yokomen/tsuki attack, I thought that kotegashi would be too dangerous to apply fully, so I was gentle, which brought out a grin on his face, obviously thinking this is crap. The next attack was the same, so I used iriminage, bouncing him off the mat, hehe, but the best was the kokyo nage, up on his tip toes he went, and continued to tumble in the air, landing on his ass, skidding a few feet along the floor, I was so chuffed [IMG]http://www.fightingarts.com/forums/ubb/biggrin.gif[/IMG]

I dont mean to sound like one of these aiki bullies or just an asshole, but, this guy was showing such disrescect and ignorance for an art he knew nothing about, I thought I'd show him what it can do, as well as I could. It worked out well, at the end of the class he came up to me, saying that he handnt trained with anyone in the class that actually throw him, and has been in every training session since. Thats when I told him, as he was a beginner, the girls were going easy on him, hehe.