Opinions on Aikido?

Training
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[quote]jimmorgan wrote:
For every 10 people who train in aikido, 1 will actually “get it”. There are more subtle things going on than what you think you see. There are some core concepts such as timing, balance, and entering and redirecting an attack that are more important than the techniques. [/quote]

This is actually one of the problems I have with Aikido. Let me use boxing as a counter example, but you can substitute any art with full contact competition. I feel like if a boxing coach trains someone, they are at least, bare minimum, going to learn to throw a proper jab, cross, hook, and uppercut. I’d say 90% will get those basics (there’s always the 10%). 80% will learn to keep their guard high and their chin low. 50% will be able to put it all together with some effective footwork. The 10% in boxing are the ones who “get it” to the point where they can be amateur fighters with a shot at winning a local title, but most of the rest still learn useful punching and movement skills. The point is, boxing doesn’t hide the techniques, it teaches the basics as basics. I wouldn’t take a student and hide the fact that I’m using my legs to drive my uppercuts, I would do drills with him until punching with the legs is the only way he ever throws one. Does Aikido have an equivalent system of drills for teaching timing, movement, and entering and redirecting, or are students just supposed to learn by performing the technique improperly until they have a revelation? I ask in all seriousness, because the aikido class I saw only taught basics for breakfalls, everything else was full techniques without any breakdown on things like how to step in.

If your art only successfully imparts useful knowledge to 10% of the students who can figure out your “hidden techniques,” are you really teaching anything useful or would those 10% have been excellent fighters under any system? I’m betting on the later. Further, while you studied at a school with hard striking, I have participated in classes where the strongest strike thrown on high level students was a choreographed overhand right. This strike is completely implausible from a trained fighter, and trying to stop my hook with the same technique used in class will get your head knocked off. Yet these students (dangerously) think they are “Aikido masters,” and not only able to defend themselves on the streetz but qualified to teach other people their hokey voodoo nonsense fighting. I’m not saying all aikido is bad, I understand there are some schools that teach how to stop real world attacks, but it seems to me that there is more bad, let’s play dress up in hakamas, modern dance aikido out there than good, realistic aikido. Perhaps as a system the good schools should join together and for an accrediting body for those schools that can be taken seriously, because right now I lump them all in with the bad ones.

I’m not saying Aikido is the only system with this problem either. I’ve seen terrible unrealistic Krav Maga that presumes a 120 lb girl can drop a 200 lb man with a single knee strike. I’ve seen laughable tae kwon do that assumes a yellow belt can not only intercept a punch, but perform a two-strike combo on the arm before it is retracted. Even BJJ is not immune, some instructors teaching it for self defense need to learn what a knife is, where the femoral artery is, and why open guard in self defense is a bad thing. The point is, aikido as a system seems to be more infested with the nonsense than many other arts, and unless I saw evidence to the contrary at a specific school I would give it a wide berth.

82

the guard in general is a bad thing in self-defense. Top-game or no game

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[quote]jga wrote:
As a part of my college curriculum I need to take two physical fitness classes. I have been interested in learning about Judo and was planning on taking the course that the school offers, but it conflicts with the rest of my schedule. I was planning on waiting another semester or two until I could fit it in, but in the mean time I need to find something else to take. The only other course that seemed mildly interesting was aikido, but I don’t really know much about it other than what I have read on wikipedia, so I was curious to see what people thought of it.

Shortened Version: What is your opinion of Aikido?
[/quote]

I’ll chime in here since I do Aiki-jujutsu.

Summary: Aiki-jujutsu is a very old system in Japan and mostly is typified by a system called Daito Ryu (=Great Eastern School). This was headed by Sokaku Takeda and Daito Ryu is considered still to be a family possession of the Takedas.

Ueshiba, who was not a samurai but a fantastically gifted athlete, studied under Takeda and became probably his best student. There are many tales of Ueshiba doing amazing feats, but again, he was a world class athlete and that is no joke. Ueshiba had a religious experience in the 1930’s in which it was revealed to him that he was a re-incarnated Shinto god (The Green Dragon King). Ueshiba then made a far kinder and gentler version of Aiki-jujutsu which he called Aiki-do. There is a huge story there about Ueshiba, but suffice to say he became a dedicated Shinto fundamentalist and did quite a bit of missionary work for his particular sect.

I do an offshoot of Daito Ryu (and have for 26 years), so this is my home turf. Aikido is a small fraction of the older art precisely because Ueshiba wanted to make a walking meditation in line with his religious convictions on upping the world’s peaceful karma. Anyone who claim Aikido was ever intended to be anything else is at odds both with what Ueshiba himself said and with the historical facts, ok? Can the techniques be used to hurt people? Sure, but you can do that with, say, Rugby too. Matter of fact, Rugby would be a better source of training for self-defense purposes than Aikido because it has large components of heavy contact, timing and conditioning.

For instance, take those wrist locks. Aikido defanged the original ones (they are real tear jerkers, btw) but more to the point, destroyed an understanding of the context in which they are used. Wrist locks are a small part of the curriculum and are applied either to someone who is not really engaged in hurting you (such as required by law enforcement on an unruly but otherwise harmless suspect) or as a very late-game control move after the opponent has been slammed on the floor. You will not run up to a boxer and lock him as he jabs. (On the flip side, they can teach you a lot about how joints work, so jettisoning them completely on strictly practical grounds like a lot of MMA-ers do is, I think, very ill-advised. This is more than a footnote, but a whole book…)

I agree with comments on the list that the majority of people that do Aikido I’ve met are mostly New Agers that want to be Japanese. There have been very few Aikidoka (as practitioners are called) I thought much of as martial artists, mostly because they cover the built-in technical failings of their system with either an appeal to authority (“Ueshiba did it that way”) or some weird pseudo-religious juju about feeling the other person’s Ki – which lowers my opinion of them as people.

I post on various forums a lot and always try to be as sober in all my assessments as I can. Why? Because Truth really is, as Des Cartes put it, congruence between thoughts and the external world. It is the therefore the highest aim of any martial art to further both the awareness required by a predator and its understanding (which entails very non-trivial moral and ethical questions, I might add – you might very well have to make a split-second decision about whether someone else should die). Most people lack sufficient imagination to understand reality IMHO, so good martial arts training is, I think, a must for anyone.

Aikido is certainly amusing and they will teach you to fall which is actually quite useful. I would expect very little else from them though.

– jj

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[quote]jimmorgan wrote:
For every 10 people who train in aikido, 1 will actually “get it”. There are more subtle things going on than what you think you see. There are some core concepts such as timing, balance, and entering and redirecting an attack that are more important than the techniques. Just like every thing else, what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. I trained at a dojo where we learned how to strike and if you did not deliver a serious attack you would get a kick in the gut or a bloody nose. Keep in mind not every martial art will work the same for everyone. I am 5’9" with a short reach, so I am not going to try to box someone taller with a longer reach. I also powerlift and hit the heavy bag, aikido works perfect for me. I have used it effectivly in several situations including one where a guy came at me with a knife. The thing to remember for all you guys who like to badmouth something you don’t understand, the biggest mistake anyone can make is to underestimate the other guy. Do your best, train hard.[/quote]

This is a pedagogical failure then. A system that is designed for general self-defense should have good reproducibility (so you can get other people to do what you just did), a standard to show if such a technique is being effective and ways of tactical assessment to know where you are in the fight. If you find an Aikido school that does that it is a tribute to that specific teacher. The system itself is mostly mute on those issues because the system is not intended to address them. In any case, Ueshiba was such a talented athlete he probably never had to address those issues.

As I tell my students, only about 20% of any martial art works. The trick is that which 20% varies from attacker to attacker so being able to size up the opponent is one of the most crucial skill you can acquire. One size fits all belongs to the real of large caliber firearms (and we all know that marksmanship from a prone position is the only actually know combat-tested floor fighting there is, don’t we? ;D ;D )

– jj