| 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. |