Hacker News Reader

Comment by RHSeeger | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious as to your opinion of Aikido. While it's certainly purely defensive in nature, it's always seemed very effective at that goal to me.

View on HN

The complaints are usually made against the training methods not the moves. Aikido moves are hard, the training partners response is usually rehearsed, and there’s much less focus on competitive sparring. It’s hard to learn something for real when the reactions are rehearsed. Other self defence focussed martial arts (Judo, Brazilian jiu-jitsu) have a lot more emphasis on live sparring. I’ve done all three at different points in my life. Only as a jiujitsu practitioner am I confident that I could handle myself without injuring the other party.

What's even better is that there is no longer the need to theorize about which of the martial arts work and which don't, because we already ran that experiment (UFC). Turns out that what actually works is a combination of kickboxing, wrestling, and jiujitsu. Everything else is just basically hollywood acrobatics.

UFC is a contrived scenario as well. A "real" environment is rarely so uniform or open. Jiujitsu is the best approach for the Octagon because most fights in this kind of environment end up on the ground, and ground-based grappling is what this art is optimised for.

I agree, most fights end up on the ground, and that is what jiujitsu is optimized for.

Most fights where it's two guys going at it while bunch of other guys stand around yeah ...

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.

I’ve done Krav for years, and while the principles are strong the lack of sparring makes it nearly useless in most real combat situations. For example, we’ll drill kicking someone in the groin repeatedly on pads but ignore the fact that it’s actually really, really hard to land a kick to the groin of a resisting opponent. I’m glad that I have the striking experience I’ve picked up from Krav, but I’d trust my jiu jitsu training way more in a real fight.

It's a key factor - if you are fighting more than one person then you don't want to go to ground!

If your goal is to beat another guy in a cage, you may be right. But many "self-defence" situations in the real world rely much more on your approach and behavior. De-escalating a situation verbaly is the prefered way of "fighting" your opponent, at least to me.

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.

the "my art is too dangerous" argument as been disproven so many times, many of the BJJers would happily fight any of the krav or systema guys ( and have done ). The thing most of the "my art is too dangerous" guys fail to understand is becomes hard to do anything "effective" with someone who knows what they are doing, who works on establishing control and position and then works at finishing. It's a hard progression to stop if you don't know what they are doing.

> But many "self-defence" situations in the real world rely much more on your approach and behavior.

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

“Systema” is Russian aikido dressed up in a bunch of mysticism about how it’s ~so deadly~; there’s no meaningful distinction between the two. Krav is some useful principles crippled by the lack of sparring in most (but by no means all) schools. I’ve trained both Krav and BJJ (and traditional karate), and the only one of the three that I think would be actually useful in a fight is BJJ because I actually DO use it in combat situations as part of regular training. Fighting someone is a physical task just like any other, and like any other physical task the more practice you have doing it the better at it you’ll be, no matter how good the theoretical aspects of a different art that doesn’t get that practice are.

There is a reason why Aikido is not used in MMA: Because it's completely ineffectual in a real fight.

It's not great for entertainment value either. I mean it's an art that has at its very essence the eschewance of conflict.

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.

I had a feeling someone was gonna post this argument: that Aikido is in actually too effective to be used in MMA. It's in fact so good defensively that there is no point in even using it :^)

It's not that it's too effective for MMA, it's that it's wholly ineffective as a sport ...

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 ...

Something not being used in MMA doesn't necessarily mean it's completely useless, it just means it doesn't fit MMA. The sport isn't static, instead it changes as new ideas and techniques come and go.

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.

> Something not being used in MMA doesn't necessarily mean it's completely useless, it just means it doesn't fit MMA. The sport isn't static, instead it changes as new ideas and techniques come and go.

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.

This is a good point. Again I think it speaks more to the cosy contrived environment of the Octagon vs a real world situation.

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.

> 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.

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'm not sure what you mean? You said it yourself you never see a fighter doing this ...

Thing is, given a number of actual fighting contexts, jiujitsu is super effective. Not so much with aikido, it's like the air guitar of the martial arts world. The gun argument is meaningless. Anything of any use and effectiveness can always be imagined in a context where it wouldn't be useful.

it's like the air guitar

I think dulcimer would be a more appropriate analogy.

There wasn’t really any MMA-style professional western fighting scene before jiu jitsu. Boxing is strikes only, and (traditional, non-WWE) wresting is very close to jiu jitsu in a lot of key ways. MMA as we know it was literally invented by one of the pioneers of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as a venue to promote BJJ by showing its effectiveness against other martial arts.

Here is good Aikido in combat story from Terry Dobson who studied directly under the Morihei Ueshiba: "Aikido In Action - Doing combat with the essence of love" By Terry Dobson https://www.context.org/iclib/ic04/dobson/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com