This drill is part of a series of exercises that introduce students to evasive movement and its contexts and their resulting levels of force.
I use ideas from different sources as well as adaptions or ideas that have presented themselves from experimentation over the years.
Avoiding tension
With beginners, I'll focus on these exercises being performed very slowly, to encourage softness and breathing to aid relaxation.
It’s common that new people start immediately to tense up in close contact with an unknown training partner, so it’s a useful drill to get people used to proximity of others quickly and to introduce the ideas of thinking about and using their feet as well as awareness of where they are in relation to the other person.
The baseline start of the series is below, I’ll add some more ideas in future posts.
It’s not set in stone or anything, I’ll sometimes start further into the series depending on the group I’m with.