[kalekold]

> Aikido is that fantasy martial arts. The kind that only works when the opponents are in on the ruse.

This is the biggest fallacy people spout when evaluating Akido because they only see it being used in practise situations.

Your partner has to be 'in on the ruse' so they don't get hurt! Aikido is full of extremely damaging techniques and if your partner doesn't go where you're leading them or if they don't flip and fall as you want, they would end up with a broken wrist or neck.

Find your nearest dojo, have a go and see.

[kod]

Studied Aikido for many years.

Can confirm it is "that fantasy martial art".

Your partner has to be in on it because otherwise you'd never have the opportunity to apply the technique; no one's going to let you e.g. just grab a wristlock off of their punch.

This is all down to how it is trained, training with no resistance leads to fantasy land bullshit.

Watch black belt level Aikido randori. Contrast with judo, wrestling, bjj sparring. The difference is obvious, one group is dancing in response to choreographed zombie attacks, the other is learning how to really apply techniques against resisting opponents.

[peatmoss]

Have done judo, and it’s just as fictitious. It just operates by a different contrived set of rules.

And yes, of course aikido is choreographed. That choreography is hard as hell. On the other hand I’m pretty fearless about getting thrown. I’ve been to judo dojos and traditional jujitsu dojos where my training partners had breakthroughs because I was willing to commit completely to my attack rather than hedge my attack for fear of “losing.”

Aikido is metal, because the curriculum is sprawling and deep, the ukemi is far and away the hardest part of the practice (harder than applying the techniques), and the psychology of the practice is often inscrutable to people who are fixated on an incompatible model of instrumental utility.

[formula1]

Jeet kune do teaches speed and improvision. If you can react to your opponent, your at an advantage. If your opponent cannot react to you, you are at an advantage. Simple and true.

While knockout/stamina/appearence of futility/tap out may be a path to a win condition, there is nuance to when you have multiple opponents, are in grab/hold positions, when you want to be in a location and/or keep your opponent(s) in a location.

Aikido offers a way to use momentum and joints against your opponents allowing you to have more control over space and situation you normally would. This is also helpful for transitioning into submissions or broken limbs more elligently than punch, tackle and look for an opportunity.

My experience is that aikido is often taught with a delicateness and with less importance on competition/hunger. While I certainly enjoy adrenaline, winning i believe favors the adaptable which aikido seems to provide

[keithnz]

this just doesn't work out in practice, I have cross trained with aikido guys, trained with ex aikido black belts who now do BJJ, they struggle to make anything work. Most of it just doesn't work with a resisting opponent, and the time you take to try and do whatever it is you wanted to do tends to cost you losing position or being joint locked or choked out. About the best thing from aikido once you learn BJJ and learn to establish position and control is some nice wrist locks

[peatmoss]

This depends a lot on the lineage. Most dojos won’t remotely throw a new person until they are sure the new person can take good ukemi.

I came to my current aikido dojo from a background in judo and jujitsu. I already had pretty solid ukemi—good enough to protect myself in judo shiai. But... my ukemi wasn’t remotely up to snuff for the intensity that senior members of my dojo are prepared to throw.

I only know this in retrospect because, with judo-level ukemi as my starting point, it’s taken me three years to get to the point where I can take most of our ukemi at intensity.

Most people never learn how hard aikido ukemi can be because they don’t stick it out long enough to be trusted not to get hurt. Again, I walked into my current dojo with solid breakfall fluency, but had someone popped on the chicken-wing variation of shihonage? I’d certainly not have been using that shoulder again for some time. Can I throw myself in an arcing breakfall when that happens today? Yeah, but I worked up to it with a lot of sweat.

Also, I’ll say that there are some lineages and dojos that do practice a very soft form of aikido. There’s nothing wrong with that practice; it’s simply that they are working on a different problem.

If anyone wants to try an athletically challenging lineage of aikido, I currently train in a dojo that is a mix of USAF (Yamada) and Birankai (Chiba) lineage. Yoshinkan aikdo looks like pure terror-sauce to me, but also looks to be high on physical / light on metaphysical.

[LandR]

> This is the biggest fallacy people spout when evaluating Akido because they only see it being used in practise situations.

How many Aikido practictioners are successful in the UFC. I'm guessing ZERO.

[mathw]

More or less zero, yeah, because in general aikidoka don't train to fight in the UFC.

This comes up again and again. Aikido's useless in MMA competitions, useless in cage fighting, useless in UFC. So what! If you want to do these things, do them. Find the best path to success in them. Don't expect me to want the same things out of life and my training and my art.

Aikido gives me physical and mental discipline and training. It gives me something deep and rich and fascinating to explore (but based on very, very simple rules with a lot of emergent complexity). It gives me a very solid, very reliable self-defence system if I want it. All these things are taught at my dojo - the latter starting with how not to have a fight in the first place. Conflict de-escalation is a vitally important part of self-defence. Why would I go to a competition where fighting is the purpose if I don't want to fight? That's why we do aikido.

Someone's going to think they're being witty by claiming that we don't want to fight because we can't. I have no illusions on my ability to "deal with" attacks from a skilled boxer, that's going to be fast, accurate, relentless and full of misdirections and feints designed to get an opening against someone else with the same kind of skillset. They're also highly unlikely to be the person who's accosted me in a dark street demanding I hand over my wallet. That scenario I can do something about. Or at least attempt to - who says I'm going to win? But I can give it a really good shot.

So don't judge my aikido against your arbitrary standards. Those standards are not why I'm doing it, and ultimately "successful in the UFC" means nothing in the world I'm interested in. For what I want it for, aikido works.

Background: I'm a 2nd dan in Yoshinkan aikido, taking 3rd dan this July, hopefully. I do a mix of my own training and some teaching.

[stefantheard]

You should take a look at Rokas Leo's journey on youtube. I feel his journey is identical to what any open minded aikidoka will go down eventually. He trained for 13 years before beginning his journey and only recently got to the tail end and made a few important distinctions about why he will keep training aikido and how his teaching techniques will change, similar to a lot of the stuff you have echoed here.

edit: with some exceptions, he no longer believes aikido can help with self defense in any form (including against untrained attackers) at this point but does believe it has great benefits for other reasons.

[ken]

Why do you ask about UFC? That sport specifically disallows small joint manipulation [1], which is the basis for most of the aikido repertoire.

[1]: http://www.ufc.com/discover/sport/rules-and-regulations#15

[peatmoss]

Not to mention the use of bokken (wooden sword), which I believe is still issued to LAPD mounted units for crowd control.

Or jo, which I reckon would be pretty hard for your average UFC to defend against. I mean, I get a nice whooshing sound out of my jo on a kesa strike... can't imagine that feeling good on the side of someone's head.

EDIT: My point isn't to disparage MMA (though I don't like it for philosophical reasons), it's to point out that MMA is LARPing just the same as aikido. If you want to LARP about hammering, don't bitch about the people LARPing with screwdrivers.

[riku_iki]

Aikido effectiveness of bokken usage is also not that obvious. Try to use your technique in kendo competition.

[peatmoss]

Sure aikido straddles the boundary between open handed and weapons. Kendo is going to do way better at ken than aikido. On the other hand, most aikidoka will have spent more time training bokken takeaways.

[riku_iki]

> training bokken takeaways.

against canonical aikido bokken waza. I never seen any aikido technique which could be applied against "small men" - most popular kendo strike. The same is applied for boxing jab, and wrestling legs takedown.

In my views the main aikido problem for self defense is that it is too focused on 80 years old canonical techniques, while world around continues progressing..