Aikido is that fantasy martial arts. The kind that only works when the opponents are in on the ruse.
Blockchain is like the Aikido of technology.
Blockchain is like the Aikido of technology.
Is BJJ not fantasy? Give me my aikido-whackin’-sticks and I’ll reckon I could bludgeon most any BJJ practitioner within an inch of his / her life.
Is judo not fantasy? What good is your throw when someone punches you in the face or pops on a wrist lock?
Is krav maga not fantasy? When do you really get to practice your eye gouging for real?
Is MMA not fantasy? I find it aesthetically distasteful, but what little I’ve seen, there were clear opportunities to kill the other person, which would have expediently ended the match.
All martial arts are fantasy, and if you think one is “better” than another, that’s your problem, as you haven’t even figured out the rules of the game.
I train aikido 6-10 hours a week. It’s my third martial art. Why do I train aikido? It’s not because I intend to use it for self-defense. I train it because it’s wickedly good aerobic exercise that allows me to push my own body and mind harder than anything else I’ve done. I never in my life thought I'd be able to respond to as wide a range of physical attacks—not necessarily martially, but certainly athletically and safely!
I jokingly refer to my own aikido practice as “fight cult” and “samurai LARPing.” All martial arts is LARPing, and people who say otherwise just haven’t figured out what they’re doing yet.
I trained in aikido long enough to get a shodan, and what made me leave the art was seeing my instructor trying to teach some utterly ridiculous knife defenses to a prison guard. The guard didn't stay in the class long (thank God), and my gentle questioning of the instructor (had he actually practiced these techniques against a resisting opponent?) fell on deaf ears.
Indoctrinating students with the belief that they are learning effective self-defense when they are not is morally indefensible. It gets people hurt and possibly killed.
No martial art can perfectly recreate the real-world conditions under which it be used - not without compromising student safety - but some disciplines do a better job than others. To claim that aikido has flaws that are equivalent to many other more realistically-taught ones (krav maga, some schools of systema, judo, bjj, etc.) is to indulge in false equivalence. There is simply no substitute for a resisting opponent, even if the resistance takes place under sport-like rules.
In science, no models are perfect, but that doesn't mean that the historical geocentric model of the earth is equivalent to the modern heliocentric one.
Want my wallet? With my complements! Cell phone? I'll unlock it for you! Would you also like me to loosen my bowels as a show of respect? You got it!
I am glad to be training in a dojo that is realistic about what martial arts do and do not teach. I feel like there's so much value to aikido (and other martial arts!) training for people who understand this.
We've had people walk through our dojo door who are clearly wrapped around the axle of self-defense. I recommend those people take a self-defense course. In other words, find the style of martial art that shares your threat model.
My threat model is that I'll get old and flabby and die of social isolation and heart disease. Being in my late 30s now, I can't imagine another art being as good at helping me address that threat model.
From p9 :
> The question of adequacy in martial arts is equally nonsensical — although a frequently asked question. Is such or such martial art adequate (efficient) in a real fight? You trained bare hands so what do you do in front of a knife? You train with a knife, but then what do you do in front of a gun, or an atomic bomb? Back in the middle ages, martial techniques could be considered adequate or not in such or such situation, but today, the point is different. In the modern sense, the purpose is education and self-development through martial techniques. This is what led Japan in the transition from martial techniques (Bu Jutsu) to martial arts (Budo) during the Meiji era. So just as a piece of music is adequate as soon as there is one person to enjoy it, a Budo is adequate as soon as there is one person to enjoy it for personal development
Well, it is nonsensical since MMA proved beyond a shadow of doubt that BJJ beat everything else... We haven't yet settled on what programming language beats everything else however... But it is not LISP!
Back when tournaments like UFC started, ground fighting and grappling were not part of the standard repertoire of tournament fighters so those guys won. Now it is. Back in the heyday of Pride, champions like Mirko CroCop were definitely not BJJ guys. Of course they trained BJJ but it's not their only tool.
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.
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.
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.
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
How many Aikido practictioners are successful in the UFC. I'm guessing ZERO.
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.
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.
[1]: http://www.ufc.com/discover/sport/rules-and-regulations#15
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.
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..
But your point that a style that trains ken exclusively is going to be more effective at ken than a style that trains a mix of ken and open handed techniques is not contested.
On the other hand, I reckon that the worst aikido dojo spends a lot more time on ken than the any BJJ dojo. Point is, it’s what you choose to spend time on.
I was somewhat recently visiting a judo dojo where an instructor recommended that I don’t bother training myself to throw ambidextrously. The rationale was that the opportunity cost of training my non-dominant side was larger than the competitive benefit I’d get from polishing more techniques on my dominant side.
I won’t deny that approach is probably more effective at winning, but it’s also not helping me improve what I want to improve.
Again, when people tell me the “problem” with aikido, I’m open and receptive, because I’ve got my own pet list. But where I start eye-rolling is when I hear people fundamentally misunderstanding why it is that many of us train and what we “should be” optimizing for as part of our own practice.
If Aikido schools would adapt even basic but modern kendo footsteps and strikes, Aikido practicioners would have much better view on efficient sword fight.
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.
Similarly Lisp only works when used with a cooperative compiler. And jazz is most effective when played with fellow jazz musicians, and/or for an audience that appreciates jazz.
Your claim, if true, would only strengthen the analogy.
> Blockchain is like the Aikido of technology.
This is the owl of analogies.
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.e. 1:1, no weapons, etc) is not some magic predictor of being effective in a real fight unless your training is markedly more like the real situations somehow.
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. "OK, so you separated your shoulder when someone did a shoulder lock on you that wouldn't even work against a resisting opponent". Sigh.
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... well, play tennis. Why, then, complain about Aikido being Aikido?
Okay, I get it, Aikido is not for fighting.
Given this information, however, why do we still call Aikido a _martial_ art? Perhaps we should not grant Aikido such designation?
Please don't take HN threads into national provocations. It makes discussions turn nasty.
Depending on how you measure it, HN's community is about 50% in the U.S.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm a wuss I should never have been doing security ever ...
I am still not very flexible - but with lots of practice I am softer than most of the flexible people who join the dojo :)
Things like wrists/ankles/knees need time to (many months) to adapt/get conditioned.
And there is some utter nonsense out there, definitely. But we're hardly unique in that.
(b) Krav Maga is clearly a highly time- and energy-efficient tool for hand-to-hand combat; why should any martial art strive for any different metrics? (other than coping with exceptional circumstances via malicious compliance, such as that old French martial-art that focuses entirely on kicks not fists)
(b) has been treated extensively in many discussions. These usually are usually oriented around the role of conflict in daily life and the suitability of these arts as a way of dealing with them, for instance.
Good grief! I can't imagine the amount of paperwork that would accumulate if fighting was a day-to-day occurrence in my life (except in Army during wartime, where assault is the job instead of a crime).
I have heard many martial-arts instructors voice this same point. -EDIT: I do not know whether this may be emphasised more in Aikido- but it is hard to regard it as a serious argument when the amount of time spent on learning about this aspect, and practice of how to apply this aspect and the techniques to achieve it seems to be almost invariably a few minutes a year at most.
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.
That said - if you want to learn to fight, then learn to fight!
I can't speak for the efficacy of Aikido against an actual trained fighter in some other code, but if it worked the way it was meant to you'd pretty much be watching one guy dodging another guys attacks until eventually he pins him in an arm lock. Fight over.
It's like using a slipper to bang a nail into a wall. Yeah it kind of works but that's not what it's for ...
If my memory serves me right, Jiu-Jitsu wasn't used in the professional (western) fighting scene for quite a while. Today it's pretty much a must-have for MMA.
The same goes the other way around. Being an expert in Jiu-Jitsu means squat when your opponent is holding a gun, and standing 10m away from you. In other words: different flavours of martial arts/self-defence have different applications, though I would certainly consider some to be very ineffective in most situations.
We agree about that. The thing is, if Aikido could deliver what it promises, namely that you are able to effortlessly throw people to the ground when they try to strike you, then you could be sure fighters would use those techniques.
You throw a hardened fighter through the air and he'll hit the fence or the canvas and bounce back up.
This is precisely what you don't want to do, Aikidoka or otherwise. You want to gain control and retain it for the full 5 minutes.
> This is precisely what you don't want to do, Aikidoka or otherwise.
I'm sorry, but are you joking? I don't think you have even watched 5 minutes of MMA (and I'm certain you've never trained) if you actually believe that.
I think dulcimer would be a more appropriate analogy.
In the real world, if you want something really effective without any pretensions to being a sport or an art or anything, do Krav Maga.
If you want to fight for real, look at aggressive combat styles, like Krav Maga or Systema, which try to deal as much dammage as possible, in the shortest ammount of time, without considering the concequences to the opponent (= possible death). By the way, these are banned in UFC, beacuse they are too dangerous to the opponent. UFC is still a spectator sport.
Note: I'm an ex aikido practitioner and a current krav maga practitioner.
Correct. Self defense should more or less follow this pattern:
1. Situation Awareness (being aware of danger)
2. Avoid (leaving before trouble occurs)
3. De-escalate (using words)
4. Evade (run)
5. Force