Tuesday, Thursday and free training
We started with a new technique, where Uke (the attacker) grabs Nages arm with two hands; Nage first steps away and raises his free arm and then enters the attack.
On Tuesday, when we where doing the technique for the first time, I was not feeling comfortable with it yet – however, I was not feeling as uneasy as the other times when doing other techniques for the first time. Maybe that is because I’ve been developing some kind of basic “movement memory” (meaning maybe my body begins to grasp what I want it do, veeeery slowly)?
The special hour of stretching on Thursday was wonderful – almost completely concentrated on shoulders / neck / throat muscles. I’d been having a lot of cramped muscles all week, and after this hour they were feeling great and ‘loose’ again. I should try doing this at home more often! 
Free training today on Friday was great once again. We started with Flow Drills: first we repeated the new complicated technique very slowly. It worked better than last week, but we still kept bursting out laughing because I lost the rhythm again and again. Repeating the other two techniques after that seemed quite easy suddenly – both techniques being shorter and thus at least a little easier…
After that we did a lot of rolling exercises – I think I found out why my knees have been hurting since one or two weeks ago: on the one hand, they tend to be too far in front of me and not enough outside of the movement during back rolls and when I stand up after rolling (I don’t do that consciously, but that might be part of the problem), and on the other hand I am still not able to control the back roll completely, so I touch the mat with my knees first, sometimes with quite a lot of force/speed. I’ll definitely have to practice that.
Afterwards, I received hundreds of valuable tips for the new technique for which I was immensely grateful. I understand the basics by now, but now there is once again the question what to do EXACTLY with my hand / leg / hips / arms etc.
Finally I repeated the basic sword positions and the beginning of our kata as far as we’ve done it yet, and I rolled again for 15 minutes. When I take the time to relax consciously, the right forward roll works from really high and really smooth. During the normal trainings I feel I don’t have time for consciously relaxing, as we can’t take that much time for rolling exercises there, so I look forward to exercising and deepening this in the free trainings.
