I had some free time at work tonight so i played around with tegatana no kata. I went through it once as normal though the second time through i made sure to slow it down just enough to notice each shift and fall and how falling forward works when turning. I did a bunch of moving forwards and backwards with the ideas we went over saturday that the move will naturally place me to the side instead of straight forward.
Something that sorta stuck out in my head as i went through the kata a few more times is how the way i was doing Shomen te Gatane (the straight hand blade) was affecting that drop forward. I was sorta pushing the arm down/forward and it would cause me to step differently. So i went back and forth trying to figure it out and realized that when i bring my arm all the way up and then fall to the side naturally my arm will drop forward with the rest of my body and it ends up in the right place. I thought it was pretty cool. It sorta makes the arm ilrelevant at points. I was going to start going through the kata again and see at what point whichever arm is being used "exsists" and what points its "not there" but i had to leave for the night.
I'm gonna play around with that tomorrow and see what comes up. No wonder all the higher ups can spend all their time on the yellow belt stuff and learn all kinds of things.
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Yeah, tegatana is deep. The guys that are really good at aikido spend a good bit of time thinking about and working on their basic footwork exercises.
Tegatana no kata has a lot of leverage for changing your aikido for the better because these basic motions are re-used in all the techniques in aikido. So, if you improve one of them a little bit, that small improvement is magnified throughout all the techniques in which that motion occurs.
Probably the 2-3 techniques in tegatana no kata that have the most leverage on the rest of the system are shomenashi, hipswitch, and the first turn. Those three motions probably recur the most of any of the motions in the kata. In fact, there is probably not any technique in aikido that does not include some form of shomenashi and some form of hipswitch.
And you're right - adding the arm in changes your motion and makes shomen tegatane a different kind of thing than shomenashi.
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