Why does aikido look fake

Yet even those who train in the mentality of aikidance, as some call it, are likely to benefit under attack if their footwork and ukemi are good. Thus even the most basic elements of Aikido may sometimes be sufficient for effectiveness. Just wanted to chime in and thank you for writing this piece. Reading your many anecdotes helped me contextualise my own experiences, and helped the puzzle click into place. Sun Tzu stated in his book titled The Art of War that all warfare is based on deception.

In combat sports we are taught to always initiate the attack and go on the offensive. We often set up our opponents using deceptive attacks which provides us the opportunity to apply a technique. Miyamoto Musashi the author of the book of 5 Rings spoke about the importance of offense and said by initiating the attack you can forestall your opponent. He refers to this strategy as Ken no Sen. Modern Aikido today in the dojo does not train with strategy because we only train by receiving or reacting to attacks.

Stanley Prainn from Aikido Journal before his passing away spoke often about how the founder of Aikido would initiate the attack in Shomenuchi techniques. Kondo Katsuyuki a student and now teacher of Daito Ryu said in a old documentary video that Sokaku and his son both concealed and hid their true martial technique from the public. They would only show the effective techniques to their closest and most trusted students.

Since Morihei Ueshiba was one of the longest students of Sokaku Takeda I would think he would have hid his true technique from public view. Perhaps the correct way is for Nage to initiate Shomenuchi ikkyo omote and not uke. Bruce Lee wrote about the 5 ways of attack, or strategies of engagement to your opponent. The 1st method is called The Single Direct Attack, 2nd. The attack by drawing in means to expose yourself by which you bait your opponent to attack.

Since you know what attack is coming because you have baiting or invited him to do so, you can move after he has attacked. Miyamoto Musashi called this strategy Tai no Sen to wait for your opponent to strike before moving. I believe most Aikidoka are unaware and have a misunderstanding concerning this strategy. Most Aikido students think that by waiting for the attack they are practicing their intuition and ability to predict a particular attack from uke.

There is value in the intuition of predicting things, but if that only becomes our default action then we will have difficulty resolving a violent attack peacefully in the real world.

The founder of Aikido spoke negatively about introducing competition into Aikido and I believe that many do not understand the huge difference between sparring and competition. The difference is weighted by our intention of outcome.

Sparring is a training tool designed to refine our technique under stress and the relationship between both people is supportive.

Competition however is about wining and defeating another human being for the purpose of glory and pride. Both can be merged together and looked at as if they were the same thing but, competition and sparring can be separated by our intention. What good is our defense when we have no offense? In the real world we might have a friend or love one be attacked. What good would Traditional Aikido be at that moment? Miyamoto Musashi said you can only fight the way you train.

In my opinion I think any person can make Aikido a Martial Art however, the way it is commonly taught today clearly shows it is absolutely not. Assuming your query was not rhetorical, I would say it depends on which Dojo, and what my role is.

When I am teaching, my first responsibility is a safe dojo, then the needs of the students — to help them reach their potential and goals, while being grounded in a serious and fun martial mindset. Hi , I would like to say , when I practice a variant of battlefield technics, in this case aikido, I learn and become aware of its potensials, witch is and has deadly strikes, dangerous spirals and twists, even with no wapons.

I have been attacked by knife and cut in trought while defending a girl friend. I want tosay the nature and nature of human, the world is not a safe place and not kind , often no mercy. Are we battlefield excersizer or what? I just like to avoid fight and hurting self an others,.

I have no grades, yet i am more capable in defending agaist a or multiple knife attack , more effective then my most instruktors ,some have 3 dans. I care a lot about each of them and would risk my life if they found high danger. I read much history 2. I would like and ask the Sensei Guy to enlighten me if he wants to. I know I am wrong in many cases, but hey, by going the wrong way I become aware of the right one.!!

Outstanding points within this article. Very informative and refreshing! Thank you for sharing your perspective and knowledge. My apologies for joining this conversation so late, I realize this thread is over 2 years old. I started training in karate and Okazaki Jujutsu in the early 80s. Instead, I happened upon an aikido dojo that looked nothing like the wispy, flimsy, passive aikido I had seen in the states. This aikido was simple, harsh and painful, much like the dojo it was practiced in.

For me, this was the turning point from competition-based fighting, which in the end has to do with building the ego, to budo. Budo is all about destroying ego; once you do that, you have no desire to fight.

I trained in several aikido dojos after I returned to the states, but I never found one that suited me after my experience.

For the past 12 years, I have had a dojo in my garage where I teach principles in karate, aikido and jujutsu. Competing with other people is not sustainable; challenging yourself is something you can do for the rest of your life.

Thanks for the article. In my Aikido classes I used to get fed up because I had a boxing background, and I would be constantly told not to make the moves quickly. Awareness of, and access to, dangerous and lethal points should be present, but perspective should be maintained mental and physical perspective for the bigger picture of threats and non-violent resolutions.

Georges St. He has background in karate but he has also been very keen on training with the Canadian olympic wrestling team and he also has black belt in brazilian jiu jitsu a belt twice or three times harder to get than black belts in budo or traditional martial arts. He does the kind of things today that Jigoro Kano and the likes did years ago whereas those who blindly follow o-sensei, Kano or someone else are just copying a dated form of thought and a dead form of fighting.

Philosophy and wisdom are not japanese furniture, kalligrapy or dojo-design. It is a process of thouhgt. Seeking growth in martial arts is a path of evolution and search for a better way.

Not in tradition that is merely an external form. I much rather listen to St. Pierre or wrestler Alexander Karelin btw to learn something real about martial arts than worship some old budo-cult governed by people afraid of change. That hit me hard! If Aikido schools would adapt even basic but modern kendo footsteps and strikes, Aikido practicioners would have much better view on efficient sword fight.

Similarly Lisp only works when used with a cooperative compiler. Your claim, if true, would only strengthen the analogy. This is the owl of analogies.

I don't think comparing it to lisp is meaningful. But if you were going to compare, it's not if it had a cooperative compiler, it would be as if it had a cooperative problem. A problem that was super simple, that caused no errors or exception cases, or complicated special cases. Didn't have to be solved real time.

The best explanation I had for the existence of the on the surface of it preposterous martial art of Aikido was that it was a kind of post-graduate martial art for tough guys who already knew a bunch of other stuff.

Frankly most Aikido guys seriously have no clue about how to handle any real situation. Whining that real fights aren't like the UFC is ridiculous, as being ineffective in a civilized gym fight i. Aikido's defenses against blows are contingent on highly telegraphic, committed lunge punches and the like, and their technique against even unsophisticated grappling is wildly overoptimistic unless the Aikidoka in question has a really serious background in other martial arts. I've met some guys with savage wrist locks and some nasty tricks from Aikido and generally good movement, but these guys were serious cross trainers and knew what a real attack looked like non-telegraphic and semi-competent.

As for the bogus versions of Aikido: Generally the process seems like a process of mutual hypnosis. Uke is taught - by pain compliance - to go along with ineffective techniques rather than go completely off script and win , and gradually becomes more and more hypnotized. Thus those ridiculous videos of super-senior people 'throwing' Aikido people by sketching out the barest minimum of a throw in front of them. The other thing that gripes me about the bogus type of Aikido - aside from the fact that is has been the single greatest source of overconfident people convinced they could "take care of themselves" - is the number of people I've met with Aikido injuries.

Having trained Aikido for a while and stopped, for reasons not relevant to this discussion , I have met zero people who trained it in order to be good in a fight - be it "civilized gym fight" or "real fight". I also never encountered anybody who actually had Aikido related injuries with the possible exception of scraped feet among beginners, from poor shiko walking technique.

Reading the discussion here, I get the feeling that many seem to think that practitioners of Aikido somehow think that it's for fighting. Given the demographic of Hacker News, I'm honestly beginning to suspect that this is an American mindset. Do you also rant like this about basketball, tennis, or golf? The most efficient way to win a tennis match would obviously be to shoot the opponent with a handgun and win by walkover.

Yet, nobody complains that this never happens during tournaments, but, astonishingly, are happy that the tennis players Why, then, complain about Aikido being Aikido? Please don't take HN threads into national provocations. It makes discussions turn nasty. Okay, I get it, Aikido is not for fighting. Perhaps we should not grant Aikido such designation?

I've met countless people who thought Aikido was imagine this a martial art. In a shocking development, this seems to have something to do with being good in a fight. It has certainly been sold to people as a way of making oneself less vulnerable to unsolicited physical aggression a skill that has a fair bit in common with the ability to fight, even though these skills are not entirely congruent.

I've also met a couple people with fairly serious i. No-one has ever claimed basketball, tennis, or golf makes you better at subduing attackers and for a fact, the techniques practiced in said sports don't seem to have anything to do with that. If you want Aikido to be judged against these sports, or, say, dance forms, this seems reasonable. In this case Aikido is a really shitty sport with no rules, no score, and no fun practiced by basically nobody, or a really lame dance that no-one wants to do.

I'm always fascinated how the mention of aikido brings out the venom of the "real" martial artists. Always it is the same tired arguments of how "it'll never work in a fight", "mma yada yada". I can only assume these people are somehow threatened by super mean aikidoka, or they're worried that there will be a mass slaughtering of aikidoka when they go defending justice in the night.

I have also noticed a particular venom toward aikido in particular from people who train modern martial arts. I think this comes from the high level of arrogance associated with aikidoka true or not, it is associated. It's frustrating when you encounter someone who does not spar or test themselves in any meaningful way yet is still completely convinced that they can defend themselves against trained or untrained opponents and is willing to share that belief in an arrogant way.

It's the same tired arguments that get used because they still remain true. Agree to a good extent. But less so after going to a few sessions and sparring with the sensei. Had to throw myself around in all kinds of spectactular ways to avoid the pain as he put pressure on my joints.

For a spectator, it may have looked like he was throwing me around and I was playing along and exaggerating. This was something I enjoyed about practising Aikido. As a 15 stone man you don't get an opportunity to be thrown around like a rag doll very often. Sensei I suspect picked on me for just that very reason :.

I assume you are drawing your opinions from practitioners in random dojos in strip malls and from the Internet. But the same can be said about most karate and tai chi studios. Yet no one disputes that there are karate and tai chi practitioners who are very proficient fighters.

System matters less than practitioner. When people ask me who to study with in my area, I send them to a goju ryu practitioner I know.

Does it matter than my core mechanics come from pa kua zhang? Not in the slightest. He's an amazing practitioner and teacher. If you have rolled with Didier Verna or have examples of problems in stuff he has written or otherwise posted about martial its, then point those out.

Discussion of systems is never helpful. The goal of many modern martial arts is to bring the discipline and training to a civilian population. These are fighting techniques that were made more kind, then taught to the population as a mix of exercise, discipline and training.

Not all martial arts follow this, but many do. The goal isn't to teach you how to win a street fight take krav maga if you want to learn that , but to keep you active and help instill discipline through a fighting art.

A good test is this - if there are competitions, it's probably a civilian-ized fighting form. If you used serious fighting moves on someone in a competition, it would be unsafe and you would hurt your partner. In defense of Akido, I know some very good martial artists I'm talking military trained who have been using Akido to focus their muscle memory on less violent methods, primarily for it's control techniques.

It was interesting to hear the conversation go over time from removed disdain for being non-combat YorickPeterse on May 4, parent next [—]. The key is to also understand that it will never help you in a fight of any kind. I used it to great effect in a bar brawl once. I was working security, some guy swung at me and I went straight into an arm lock pinning him to the ground.

Nobody hurt, no problem and I was able to restrain him with a minimal amount of effort til the other guys came and escorted him out. Aikido is great in self-defence situations where someone is coming at you.

Of course the drills are contrived, their purpose is to train your muscle memory not actually to prepare you for combat. It's not great for performance really. The whole "come at me bro, but no not like that" thing is really something that only new practitioners will do because they're amazed by the power of these techniques. The real weakness of Aikido is the pressure on the joints.

I'd love to do it still but my knees can't take it any more. Perhaps you should try a different teacher. I know guys who started training in their 50s and 60s, so it's entirely possible if you pace yourself, and not exceed the current limits of your body. Little by little, these limits get stretched and your physical condition improves. Of course it's easier if you're fit and flexible to begin with, but that's not a requirement.

I do Crossfit, weightlifting and run occasionally; my weight is slightly below average. I wonder if maybe my joint issue is just something with my own body? That said — the class was an all-levels class with full tumbling. Maybe an intro class would be better Do you do Yoga or Pilates? Or anything to help you with flexibility? I thought I was kind of "unlucky" to have a guy swing at me in the first place I'm a wuss I should never have been doing security ever One of the ideas behind Aikido is to not get in a fight in the first place.

In real-life scenarios, it is often very possible to de-escalate a situation and prevent it from deteriorating into violence. Over time, practicing Aikido lets you see these opportunities and solve conflicts without resorting to violence. I have heard many martial-arts instructors voice this same point.

I had more practice 'de-escalating' tense situations on a 1-term clinical skills paper at medical school than in the 6 years I studied across two different martial arts one Korean, the other Chinese. The medical school paper amounted to about 2 hrs on that subject that year - 1 theory, 1 practice. I did some aikido lessons for maybe 6 weeks studied Shotokan for 8 years, but that was a while ago.

The classes I did spent a lot of time on understanding the intentions of the opponent and trying to find a mutual solution, and a lot of time on mastering one's own emotions. It was some of the best training in "diplomacy" I've had, where by diplomacy I mean "the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions" Churchill?

YorickPeterse on May 4, root parent prev next [—]. Self defence techniques such as Krav Maga teach you the exact same, while also teaching you how to actually defend yourself in a variety of scenarios. There's no question that Krav Maga is effective, but whether or not it teaches you to solve conflicts non-violently depends very much on the teacher. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And if all you know is how to knock your opponent out, that's probably what you'll attempt to do in a conflict.

Any martial art that cannot be trained at high intensity against a resisting opponent should be looked upon with a healthy amount of skepticism.

I studied Krav Maga and it taught me nothing like that I had to quit it because it was having a detrimental effect on how I was approaching real life conflict YorickPeterse on May 4, root parent next [—]. This might differ between countries and schools. I practised it for several years, and we had many classes that involved techniques useful for avoiding conflict some as simple as just running away , keeping people at distance, and so on. Well, yeah that was the fundamental principle alright. This even, isn't always the best approach in day-to-day life How would a boxer react?

You learn this in no other martial art. You have brought up some important points, Carsten. How to convey aikido to young people so they are attracted to it? I see dojos closing because less young people are joining. You are right, I am struggling to explain my vision of aikido in a way that beginners can understand, and even have problems explaining to some experienced aikido practitioners.

Maybe we will find a way. Thank you for sharing your amazing experience. I want to do Aikido. It looks very interesting. But at the same time I want to do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Even though, I love competitions, I also wanna do something that helps me be relaxed. I also am not very strong and I get bullied around at school a lot. I want to find a way to defend myself while being able to deafest my opponent without using much strength.

I am a 12yr old kid. Thank you for your comment Andres. You have raised some very good points. What I did when I was a teenager, was to try different martial arts. I was about 24 when I discovered Aikido and I was hooked. What I like about aikido is it gives you options in how you manage someone attacking you. In real life, most of the time, we don't want or need to harm someone who is aggressive.

For young people, I feel that aikido builds confidence to deal with all situations, not only violence, but also performing in daily life. Find a school with a teacher whom you are comfortable with, and give it a try! Ok Thank You so much! My dad is going to take me to see how Jujitsu is and Aikido. The comment really helped me a lot. Now I want to do something that I will do for a long time until I get to black belt at least. Brilliantly written.

We in Sri Lanka also finding it difficult to make Aikido popular. We had a sensei from Japan with us for ten years and after he left , it's an uphill task to take it further. We get Shihan down once a year from Hombu dojo to do seminars. Thank you for this write up.

We can share among our members. Very good article on the true meaning and "spirit" of Aikido. It is very much the calm spirit using the attacker's own force, strength, and momentum against them. Thank you for this remembrance of the times of my youth.

This was a lovely read. I am 32 years old man. Born and raised in London. Having grown up studied judo, Tae Kwon Do, Eskrima and kick boxing. Akido has always fascinated me with huge respect. I will be honest and tell you the reason I found this blog was due to searching the exactly words at the beginning of this boog. But all I see these days is people talk bad of it. I refuse to accept this ideology that it has no use.

Its very humbling to read your blog and all these comments. I feel maybe if more people took the time to just sit and listen and participate in just 1 akido class they would think differently. Most guys my age and younger only have an interest in the big names in ufc and boxing. Hopefully this can change as akido looks such a beautiful art. I would one day love to learn akido. Thanks again. Jordan, London. Hey Jordan, thank you for your comment, I really appreciate the thought you have put into it.

You are right, some things are not so easy to understand, especially regarding their use in life. However, I feel that Aikido will attract people more and more, as they look for an art that helps them discover how their body and mind work together.

I started Aikido in London in the s, and my teacher was born and bred Londoner, so perhaps the stars will align and you will find a school that suits you! Also I have another question. Would aikido work against other martial arts just in case of anything? Aikido is not a combative art like the ones you mention.

You could say it is a defensive art. The aim of aikido is to train to become totally calm in the face of anything. Being calm means not needing to contest with anything. The founder, Morihei Ueshiba, said, "A true warrior is invincible because he or she contests with nothing.

Ueshiba said, "Because it is non-resistant, it is victorious from the beginning. Those with evil intentions or contentious thoughts are instantly vanquished. If the words mean something to you, then I recommend you study aikido.

Gaining black belt is the first stage - learning the movements. After black belt, you learn to master yourself. I remember you and also how I was struck back then by your dedication to the art. So, as you might imagine, after all these years, it was lovely to come across this website and be able to read your words of wisdom.

Hi Charles, I remember you well, too! Thanks for your kind words, really awesome to hear from you. I hope you and your loved ones have been well. Do keep in touch! Thank you, Mr. I read your article through a happy accident.

I was researching based on a character in an urban fantasy book I am reading. She practices aikido. According to your information here, the author has written about the subject with integrity and the transformative ideas you have mentioned. Her sensei is a wise and insightful man who teaches her to be one with her surroundings and calm in any situation. As a result, I am now interested in the discipline and hope to find somewhere near to study.

Thank you for the great information. Thank you Holly, I am glad you have found a meaningful connection with aikido. Best wishes on finding a teacher to support you. Feel free to ask any questions you may have. Your email address will not be published. Subscribe to newsletter.

By Gerald Lopez on January 27,