Aikido.. The reality?

[Gerry Seymour]

Okay, but we're talking about MMA and competitive MAs not reflecting a street fight, and you saying that a Judoka needs to be adaptive.

I'm saying that a Judoka doesn't need to be all that adaptive for his training to be effective, because their training is almost entirely throwing people who are resisting them. Further, their training snowballs because the more skilled their opposition becomes, the better they become at throwing. Thus, the final product is someone who is EXTREMELY good at throwing someone.

Maybe I misread something he said, but I thought Jobo's point was that the adaptability of a Judoka wasn't really a consideration, since that's not who you (or me, or that Judoka) are likely to face in a self-defense situation.

 

[Flying Crane]

Douch? I never really got that impression. His whole martial arts journey" thing strikes a positive chord with me. He gets it wrong sometimes, but overall, I think he's sincere. He's also young and there is a lot he still hasn't seen.

Ok, I admit I haven’t looked at his list or whatever it was that he deemed necessary to put on the internet telling the world that X and Y and Z systems are worthless. I won’t grant him my time. But do I have that right? He put something on the internet telling everyone that these particular systems are worthless? I haven’t seen it. I haven’t looked at anything he has done and dont know him. But if I understand this correctly, if what I describe above is accurate, then he is a douche.

sure, we all have a journey and we all figure it out for ourselves, eventually. We all feel that certain systems aren’t right for us, and we choose to do other systems instead.

But someone who needs to proclaim to the world that he has deemed a certain list of systems is worthless, is just a douche. How is that part of his “journey”? He isn’t enough of a grown-up to realize that different strokes for different folks? He really thinks he has it figured out, and needs to proclaim it to the world? And by extension, anyone who practices X or Y or Z system is a fool and hasn’t figured it out yet , so he is here to tell them and set them straight.

yup, he is a douche.

 

[Martial D]

Neither do I, I've written you and the other two a novel at this point and have only met absurdity, strawmen, fallacy and reductionist arguments instead of any actual consistent logic or even polite conversation from you. Once again, that's not the same as proof that Aikido doesn't work, its just a problem with your logic and communication skills.

Hold on bucko, my logic has been flawless. You have not directly addressed it. I'm not expecting you to at this point, but let's not be disingenuous sir. It's all here in writing.

 

[JowGaWolf]

That really is an unfair rundown of that process.

I don't see anything unfair about it. Do you think he would do the same things if he had been successful at applying Aikido techniques?

We really can't blame someone if they join a MA and they realize that the system their practicing doesn't view fighting as important or even a part of the system.

Not my problem, Not your problem. I'm not blaming him for anything. For starters, based on how he carried himself with that Zen Ton and movement, he clearly didn't take Aikido for fighting. That was his choice and there's nothing wrong about that choice. But somewhere down the line he forgot why he originally join Aikido and made the assumption that he could use it simply because he trained it. Maybe all of the throws that he practiced gave him that assumption.

Some people look at Martial Arts as a mental health thing. Others look at it as fighting thing. No matter which one we choose, the thing that we must not do is to get the two confused as being the same. Don't think that fighting and sparring with the martial arts is the best path to health. Don't think focusing on health is the best path to fighting.

The system really doesn't have a focus. It's the person who decides what focus to take. People can train boxing and still suck at fighting.

Further, you're placing the blame entirely on the practitioners. The blame frankly should be leveled at MA schools who are simply advertising falsities and are being dishonest to their students.

Nope. Again. I'm not blaming the practitioners. As a practitioner you choose what your goals are and how long you want to keep those goals and when you want to switch those goals. Do schools mislead? yes. But somewhere down the line he should have been thinking. I wonder how I'll do against someone who doesn't train Aikido. I'm assuming he has friends. As a friend to join him for a friendly sparring match so he can safely test his skills.

When you want to test your basketball skills, you play basketball.
When you want to test your baseball skills, you play baseball.
When you want to test your running skills, you race against someone else.
When you want to test your tennis skills, you play tennis

When you want to test your aikido fighting skills, you do drills? Nah. not today. The tone that I hear often is "TMA is the exception to those rules." Too man TMA practitioners think that their system is so special that it is the exception to everything that is the rule. I've heard that same tone in her but I kept my mouth shut about it.

If you want to test anything then you must apply it in the context that you are measuring. Meaning. It is impossible to test fighting skills without fighting. It's that simple. No magic, no exception. It follows the rules that everything else follows. There's nothing that's so special about Jow Ga kung fu. That I don't have to put in the work and run through the same fires to test my fighting skills. People talk about Ego in martial arts but, I swear TMA often have the biggest egos out there. That's not me slamming TMA. I like TMA. I'm just calling it as it is and how it usually plays out.

Had he been able to apply his Aikido he would have never called out Wing Chun or those other systems.

f a student is questioning their MA and they test their MA against a highly established system and get creamed, or if they simply observe other martial arts and recognize that there's a planet-sized whole in their training, why wouldn't we expect them to do what people like Rokas did?

I think questioning your MA is counter productive. The first thing you should be doing is trying to see if you understand your martial arts enough to be able to use it. It's through understanding it that you'll discover things that aren't honest. If anything question your training. Does your training follow the "Universal norms" of learning how to fight. How does boxing train, how do other fighting systems train. Are you doing similar training?

Questioning your MA will bring doubts and that will work against you. When I do Jow Ga techniques, I have to be all in with that technique. I can't be indecisive or second guessing the technique. Success or fail I have to be all in. If I fail then I have figure out where I went wrong.

People don't do that because of ignorance or some sort of hatred of TMA. It's a combination of bad marketing on the part of TMAs, people being suckered into believing that all martial arts will turn you into Bruce Lee, and the piss-poor work effort of many Americans.

Yeah they do. When my Jow Ga school screwed me over, you don't think I was pissed off at Jow Ga or TMA? The only difference between me and Roka is that I cleared my head by asking a few questions.
1. Why did I take Jow Ga in the first place. Was it to impress a Sifu or another Instructor? Answer: No
2. Did I like doing Jow Ga before I got into the school? Answer: Yes
3. Am I going to let 2 people who screwed me over destroy my passion for what I do? Answer: No

I could have easily gone on a rant about not trusting TMA, Don't sell out to them. I could have easily tried to get back at TMA for what I went through. I could have easily said. Don't believe that TMA line about being family.

But I didn't. I kept with 1 and 2, and #4 which is to be a good representation of Jow Ga.

People talk about how Aikido is good for spiritual and mental growth, yet look at Roka. He turned out to be a regular human being. So much for Zen.

 

[Shatteredzen]

Hold on bucko, my logic has been flawless. You have not directly addressed it. I'm not expecting you to at this point, but let's not be disingenuous sir. It's all here in writing.

Oh holy hell? What now? WHAT hasn't been answered to you? If its your same broken record routine about why Aikido isn't in the UFC then I'll take a pass guy, you aren't nearly as fun as you think you are to argue with and no you don't avoid logical fallacy. You don't accept anecdotes, great, my life experience says your full of **** and have probably never been in a fight or used martial arts, at least not enough to have anywhere near the experience to have this discussion in a meaningful way, so you make up for that by being snarky on the internet.

Don't believe Aikido works? Fine. love off. I'm not here offering to teach you or recruit you. I came here to answer questions because no one else from the community was. I didn't come here to dick wave with you or Mr Kumite. Now here's the great thing about arguing martial arts on the internet, you can believe the exact same thing about me, Aikido, Wing Chun, Qi Gong, etc, and it doesn't make you right, in fact, your just some slovenly fat guy talking out of the side of your mouth who doesn't know anything unless I assign my respect to you and decide that what you say is significant. We are two people having a conversation over a distributed medium that requires mutual respect, you can believe me or not, but I'm not here to have a debate with you and I'm sick of giving honest answers and getting your bonehead, rude and confrontational replies about how I am weaseling out of answering them. Your entire argument is: Aikido doesn't work because I haven't seen it, there's no video and its not in MMA. Great. I have seen it work, more than once, that doesn't win our internet karate duel, it does mean the universe says your an idiot on my end. Now, if you want anymore effort or time on my part, drop your crap, ask a technical question and carry on an adult conversation or get lost.

 

[jobo]

Where as you are saying it does because street fighting is easier.

I'm saying it's a high probability it will be a lot easier than mma, if we assume that most street fight have a winner, though admittedly some are an honoury draw( so we can call them both winners), and that almost non of these winners could turn up and compete at even a basic mma tournament( infact only the ones who were already doing mma or similar), then yes there seem a good chance that any particular street fight will be a lot easier than an mma tourment bout( as you probably already realise which is why you stick to fighting drunks)

unless your living in street fighter 2, then obviously its different

 

[Martial D]

Oh holy hell? What now? WHAT hasn't been answered to you? If its your same broken record routine about why Aikido isn't in the UFC then I'll take a pass guy, you aren't nearly as fun as you think you are to argue with and no you don't avoid logical fallacy. You don't accept anecdotes, great, my life experience says your full of **** and have probably never been in a fight or used martial arts, at least not enough to have anywhere near the experience to have this discussion in a meaningful way, so you make up for that by being snarky on the internet.

Don't believe Aikido works? Fine. love off. I'm not here offering to teach you or recruit you. I came here to answer questions because no one else from the community was. I didn't come here to dick wave with you or Mr Kumite. Now here's the great thing about arguing martial arts on the internet, you can believe the exact same thing about me, Aikido, Wing Chun, Qi Gong, etc, and it doesn't make you right, in fact, your just some slovenly fat guy talking out of the side of your mouth who doesn't know anything unless I assign my respect to you and decide that what you say is significant. We are two people having a conversation over a distributed medium that requires mutual respect, you can believe me or not, but I'm not here to have a debate with you and I'm sick of giving honest answers and getting your bonehead, rude and confrontational replies about how I am weaseling out of answering them. Your entire argument is: Aikido doesn't work because I haven't seen it, there's no video and its not in MMA. Great. I have seen it work, more than once, that doesn't win our internet karate duel, it does mean the universe says your an idiot on my end. Now, if you want anymore effort or time on my part, drop your crap, ask a technical question and carry on an adult conversation or get lost.

Well then, you really showed me how an adult should comport themselves with this expletive heavy emotional outburst.

I don't expect you to directly answer any of the questions I have put to you, but for the readership I will list the questions I have asked and the ways that you have sidestepped them.

I initially asked why is aikido not successfully implemented in a demonstrable way in competition?

-To this you vaguely handwaved by saying it's different because rules.

I asked which rules. To which you did not answer at all, besides two incorrect assertions reflecting your ignorance of MMA rulesets(claiming wrist locks are illegal, and claiming MMA fighters grease with Vaseline) When corrected, you reasserted these things, and were corrected a second time.

You then cited the fact that MMA fights tend to last longer than street fights, as if that somehow supported your assertions about the effectiveness of aikido vis a vis 'the streets'.

When asked how these were at all related you did not answer, instead offering anecdotes about how many times you've beat people up with aikido and how you've fought in Thailand.

At some point, you admitted that aikido has no answer for striking or grappling, but maintained it was still effective, but not in a cage, again citing 'rules' without specifying which rules or how (un)said rules apply.

When I realized no answers were forthcoming from you, and stated as much, you offered this final expletive ridden rant,complete with personal attacks, which in my experience is the last resort of someone that has painted themselves into a corner.

At no time did I say anything negative about you personally,nor did I say aikido sucks, or anything of that nature. I only addressed your claims.

 

[Shatteredzen]

I don't see anything unfair about it. Do you think he would do the same things if he had been successful at applying Aikido techniques?

Not my problem, Not your problem. I'm not blaming him for anything. For starters, based on how he carried himself with that Zen Ton and movement, he clearly didn't take Aikido for fighting. That was his choice and there's nothing wrong about that choice. But somewhere down the line he forgot why he originally join Aikido and made the assumption that he could use it simply because he trained it. Maybe all of the throws that he practiced gave him that assumption.

Some people look at Martial Arts as a mental health thing. Others look at it as fighting thing. No matter which one we choose, the thing that we must not do is to get the two confused as being the same. Don't think that fighting and sparring with the martial arts is the best path to health. Don't think focusing on health is the best path to fighting.

The system really doesn't have a focus. It's the person who decides what focus to take. People can train boxing and still suck at fighting.

Nope. Again. I'm not blaming the practitioners. As a practitioner you choose what your goals are and how long you want to keep those goals and when you want to switch those goals. Do schools mislead? yes. But somewhere down the line he should have been thinking. I wonder how I'll do against someone who doesn't train Aikido. I'm assuming he has friends. As a friend to join him for a friendly sparring match so he can safely test his skills.

When you want to test your basketball skills, you play basketball.
When you want to test your baseball skills, you play baseball.
When you want to test your running skills, you race against someone else.
When you want to test your tennis skills, you play tennis

When you want to test your aikido fighting skills, you do drills? Nah. not today. The tone that I hear often is "TMA is the exception to those rules." Too man TMA practitioners think that their system is so special that it is the exception to everything that is the rule. I've heard that same tone in her but I kept my mouth shut about it.

If you want to test anything then you must apply it in the context that you are measuring. Meaning. It is impossible to test fighting skills without fighting. It's that simple. No magic, no exception. It follows the rules that everything else follows. There's nothing that's so special about Jow Ga kung fu. That I don't have to put in the work and run through the same fires to test my fighting skills. People talk about Ego in martial arts but, I swear TMA often have the biggest egos out there. That's not me slamming TMA. I like TMA. I'm just calling it as it is and how it usually plays out.

Had he been able to apply his Aikido he would have never called out Wing Chun or those other systems.

I think questioning your MA is counter productive. The first thing you should be doing is trying to see if you understand your martial arts enough to be able to use it. It's through understanding it that you'll discover things that aren't honest. If anything question your training. Does your training follow the "Universal norms" of learning how to fight. How does boxing train, how do other fighting systems train. Are you doing similar training?

Questioning your MA will bring doubts and that will work against you. When I do Jow Ga techniques, I have to be all in with that technique. I can't be indecisive or second guessing the technique. Success or fail I have to be all in. If I fail then I have figure out where I went wrong.


Yeah they do. When my Jow Ga school screwed me over, you don't think I was pissed off at Jow Ga or TMA? The only difference between me and Roka is that I cleared my head by asking a few questions.
1. Why did I take Jow Ga in the first place. Was it to impress a Sifu or another Instructor? Answer: No
2. Did I like doing Jow Ga before I got into the school? Answer: Yes
3. Am I going to let 2 people who screwed me over destroy my passion for what I do? Answer: No

I could have easily gone on a rant about not trusting TMA, Don't sell out to them. I could have easily tried to get back at TMA for what I went through. I could have easily said. Don't believe that TMA line about being family.

But I didn't. I kept with 1 and 2, and #4 which is to be a good representation of Jow Ga.

People talk about how Aikido is good for spiritual and mental growth, yet look at Roka. He turned out to be a regular human being. So much for Zen.

Well what it does show is that he wasn't learning what was being taught. It doesn't mean its his fault, it could have been his instructor, he could have had different expectations. When I started training the Aikido, I was told, "hey, this stuff is the core of my system but its all gonna be hit or miss, you are going to need everything else worked in to avoid getting your *** kicked". I accepted that and over the course of learning, I saw how things needed to be tweaked, applied and how hard it was to make it work during sparring, or really even just uke nage if the partner wasn't "good" ie helping. We even went to Japanese schools to watch them and see if there was anything different in style/method, etc.

I ended up picking up a book on the history of Aikido with a big bunch of pictures in it, it might have been Ueshiba's "secret teachings" I don't remember, but it was entirely dedicated to Ueshiba's life and advice and it had a pretty good set of pictures in it for most of the traditional Aikido techniques. I started to see notes from Ueshiba that were not in the training, like the heavy emphasis on striking before applying certain techniques. Ueshiba's quote on Kote Gaeshi for example was that it takes three good strikes to get the average person ready to be thrown with Kote Gaeshi. Come to find out, if you hit someone in the face first or strike them a few times while they are grabbing onto you and quickly move into something like a kote gaeshi, it works great. So is that applicable to MMA? Nope. Does it quickly end a street fight or a violent confrontation for most people in most realistic circumstances? Hell yes it does.

Rokas didn't learn his Aikido alongside other arts, he didn't ever train on practically applying it, he walks into a room with some BJJ/MMA coach with no experience actually fighting and of course he is going to look like a kitten in the ring. He probably fell back to the wrist locks just because he was so darn lost, he doesn't even know to keep his guard up as he moves. Had that been a real encounter, he would have eaten punches that whole time. In my opinion he would have been perfectly justified in being upset if he had been told false promises of what he was getting, but he spent 15 years supposedly doing it? He NEVER questioned before then "maybe I should get in a fight"?

Rokas, like a lot of the community, built a house out of false pretenses. He assumed, he could go to one place, get some hours clocked in and become some kind of warrior, well, the reality of that is you don't ever become a warrior by training an hour or two a week in a strip mall, they don't do boot camp three hours a week over five years. When a Samurai, for example, started learning Budo, he went to one school for swordsmanship, another for horse riding, another for archery, another for mounted archery. Then he probably studied under at least one Jitsu-ryu and took a class for wrestling. He didn't slip being a warrior into a class or two a week, it was his whole life, every day from childhood. So why people think they can hit a class, even with a good teacher, for an hour or two a week and become this big badass is beyond me, but the expectation is there and after 15 years of $50 an hour, there's some entitlement issues also.

I started learning Aikido, had the same issues, sat down with it like a rubics cube and then started to integrate it with everything else, instead of treating my prior instruction in TKD, capoeira, bujinkan sillyness, the Marine Corps martial arts, karate as a kid, etc and alongside what I brought to the table we were also learning the BJJ, Judo and Kali stuff. We adopted a policy of "train what works" and ditch the rest. So we started streamlining what we were teaching and spending time working on and also started encouraging the students who were coming in to resist, interject, give opinions, etc. What we ended up training, a few months later, looked nothing like Aikido, except it absolutely was, still is, Aikido, it teaches all the same principles, techniques, it just adds to it and tweaks some stuff but if you sit there and listen to me for example, explaining the Muay Thai clinch, how to enter or receive to setup the clinch, how to manipulate the movement of the opponent, etc, you would quickly say to yourself "oh man, I'm in an Aikido class".

Im sure, given some time and some open mindedness or curiosity, the community will fix itself and adapt and do the work to bring Aikido forward more than it has. The talk between Rokas and Chris Hein really stuck out to me, because Rokas comes around, admits his personal ******** and endorses Chris and his Aikido and even says he is thinking of coming back around and training some Aikido again. The great thing about the Aikido community, more than others I have seen, is he can come back and no one will make him eat his humble pie, there just isn't that sense of malice you get in the MMA gyms or here on the internet where everyone feels like they need to posture against one another. Rokas lost some of my respect with his challenge videos but he got it back with that interview and his Wing Chun response. Part of me thinks that if he can be that honest with Aikido and Wing Chun, then maybe a good natured "prove it" type challenge could be good for the community. Aikido could definitely benefit from knocking off the post war hippy stuff and a few hundred brains trying to get it to that next step of modernization. I'd love to open a school and help, but I cannot with my current work schedule and I'm not going to give up my real career to go make peanuts teaching martial arts, I can't even stand charging for lessons.

I think there is actually more frontier out there than most think. There's tons of work to do, but there's so many martial arts with some really promising stuff that could be worked on. For everything MMA has "solved" its created a stagnant, petulant martial arts community around it and there's not a huge amount to do with it, as it is other than to get your BJJ classes in so you can get off the ground if the fight goes there. What the MMA community does do, is give an outlet for all the kids who just want to jump in and learn how to fight so they can stop peacocking long enough to become actual martial artists in the classical sense of the word. Respectful students of a lifelong pursuit towards mastery.

 

[geezer]

Ok, I admit I haven’t looked at his list or whatever it was... But do I have that right? He put something on the internet telling everyone that these particular systems are worthless? ....

No, not really. At least that's not at all how I took it.

Here's the first video in which he challenges certain arts, including Wing Chun, to send him videos of their art being applied against a non-compliant partner in a free sparring context.

Next, after receiving a huge response, he posted this video with a pretty positive reaction and retracted his previous statements as being over generalized and mistaken. He did continue to assert that those schools that do not spar and train against resistance cannot know that their techniques will work. They remain untested. here is the second clip (the same one I posted previously:

While I do not entirely agree with Rokas, I believe he makes good points and is sincere. I also don't think he comes of as a douche ....like that other guy.

 

[jobo]

We bring our own criteria if we are not thinking critically. Which is fine for religion, karate or Bundy. But less useful for discussing practical things.

even critical thinking requires to be run through the perception filters of the critical thinker, they cant switch them off no matter how hard they try, hence spock having to be an alien, though some are better than others, this doesnt seem to include you

there a considerable degree of subjectivity ( let's call it interpretation) with in science, which means that scientific facts are also some what open to interpretation, that's why PhD are doctors of philosophy, not say physics, as philosophy is the only actual science 3everything else is just interpretation using philosophical principals.

and that's dealing with actual science, most of the things most people think are factual are most certainly not,

when you run the case that not only are they being subjective, but being subjective,about things that arnt objectively true, you can see how it is that grown men dont know the geometrical shape of the planet

 

[Shatteredzen]

Well then, you really showed me how an adult should comport themselves with this expletive heavy emotional outburst.

I don't expect you to directly answer any of the questions I have put to you, but for the readership I will list the questions I have asked and the ways that you have sidestepped them.

I initially asked why is aikido not successfully implemented in a demonstrable way in competition?

-To this you vaguely handwaved by saying it's different because rules.

I asked which rules. To which you did not answer at all, besides two incorrect assertions reflecting your ignorance of MMA rulesets(claiming wrist locks are illegal, and claiming MMA fighters grease with Vaseline) When corrected, you reasserted these things, and were corrected a second time.

You then cited the fact that MMA fights tend to last longer than street fights, as if that somehow supported your assertions about the effectiveness of aikido vis a vis 'the streets'.

When asked how these were at all related you did not answer, instead offering anecdotes about how many times you've beat people up with aikido and how you've fought in Thailand.

At some point, you admitted that aikido has no answer for striking or grappling, but maintained it was still effective, but not in a cage, again citing 'rules' without specifying which rules or how (un)said rules apply.

When I realized no answers were forthcoming from you, and stated as much, you offered this final expletive ridden rant, which in my experience is the last resort of someone that has painted themselves into a corner.

At no time did I say anything negative about you personally,nor did I say aikido sucks, or anything of that nature. I only addressed your claims.

We never got into technical discussion, you cherry picked answers to other people and kept going with the same reductionist quips like your summary here. Although its already contained in other posts you never bothered to read, I'll explain everything again here, together.

- Aikido isn't taught competitively, there's one school that has tournaments. Aikido, on its own, is not the best candidate for dueling between two athletes in a ring. It's boring to watch, it doesn't particularly finish anyone off, its not taught with striking very often. Even if someone was going to get booked to go into a ring, had the pre-requisite MMA experience, what is the Aikido practitioner supposed to do? Have you tried doing Aikido in MMA gloves? Many of the techniques are also aided by small joint manipulations when faced against a resisting opponent, these are against the rules in MMA. MMA fighters generally wear nothing but shorts, many Aikido techniques are answers to someone grabbing onto you and give a response to that, there's a difference between being grabbed and grappled. Add in again, theres a padded floor, so you punch and kick and I am supposed to throw you but my hands are gloved and you get padding? Sweat and vaseline are absolutely an issue, it makes you hard to grab.

The existing repetoire of Aikido techniques, by themselves, are not really suited to fighting another martial artist, they don't work correctly without practical training and experience, both of those issues are not solved by the general publicly available schools. Atemi, striking, is taught in Aikido, outside of striking, it has no answer to things like a double leg takedown, there are no ground techniques. What you and everyone else would demand of Aikido is for a purely vanilla Aikido practitioner to go in and dominate an MMA ring, that wont ever happen, if the same Aikido guy uses a handful of other techniques like anyone in the MMA, you and the other children will simply say "well that wasn't Aikido". You apply a misinformed standard to what MMA is, how useful it is, how applicable it is to the real world.

Your overall reverence for MMA is an unfounded idea that because there is a high level of resistance, perhaps higher than any other training method, that this transfers directly to combat and a real altercation. It does not. It might be close, but there are many habits that have become common within MMA and BJJ that translate to getting kicked or otherwise struck once or twice, at the beginning of the fight and then becoming disabled. I have watched several BJJ enthusiasts knock themselves out on other people knees, get kicked in the face or the best one was one guy laid on his back in a guard and got kicked in his balls. You also falsely equate what you see in a professional fight to what YOU or other practitioners are physically capable of. Just because a UFC fighter can do X or Y has nothing to do with your skill and ability.

The average MMA fight is a albeit bloody sparring match between two professional athletes. The average bout is nine minutes. Saying that you or any normal person needs to train to that level or is even capable of that performance level is silly. Real fights do not last that long, they aren't against two trained pro athlete martial artists. IF you ever get into a fight as an average person, its because you are likely fighting a drunk or getting robbed. That's it. Most people go their whole lives without fighting. That being said, your average Aikido student from even a basic level of competence and training is probably going to be able to use it to defend themselves, even against someone who might have some of their own training. In the end, it comes down to the individual. Fighting does not work in the framework you are trying to argue it does. You have a better chance of winning the lottery than getting into some kind of magical kung fu/ninja fight on the street and chances are you don't and have never competed. So what is the point of training to be a gladiator in a cage match in the first place, especially when the things the rule set protected you from are going to happen to you in the real world if you do run into a trained opponent. Your entire claim and argument hinges on Aikido having to be competitive to be effective, it is not a competitive art, it can still work as advertised, which is to protect the individual and to provide a method to deal with conflict without causing undue harm, that's how its advertised.

Is Aikido going to win the next UFC? No. Can it work and save lives? Yes, I've seen it, do with that what you want, I don't care. Aikido does not have to beat every other martial art to be a viable, living, useful system. End of Story. So there it is, all that and more has already been written in this thread, thats why you got told to pound sand, because your a broken record arguing something that was never being discussed, from a false position of superiority and under false pretenses.

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

We never got into technical discussion,

Let's start some Aikido technical discussion.

As an Aikido guy, what will you do when you apply wrist lock, your opponent raises his elbow joint to release the pressure?

 

[Hanzou]

I don't see anything unfair about it. Do you think he would do the same things if he had been successful at applying Aikido techniques?

He didn't even need to be successful in applying Aikido, all he needed was a foundation to base successful Aikido on. That's the problem; There is no concrete basis to gauge the successful application of Aikido. All you hear are folktales and legends, and when you see people attempt to apply Aikido successfully in a pressure-tested situation, it simply fails. You ask questions about this, and you get shot down and told to just keep practicing. Meanwhile, you look over the fence and you see BJJ and MMA guys being successful and asking tons of questions and getting nurtured for it. Those guys have a foundation to base success upon, so that pressure simply isn't there.

Not my problem, Not your problem. I'm not blaming him for anything. For starters, based on how he carried himself with that Zen Ton and movement, he clearly didn't take Aikido for fighting. That was his choice and there's nothing wrong about that choice. But somewhere down the line he forgot why he originally join Aikido and made the assumption that he could use it simply because he trained it. Maybe all of the throws that he practiced gave him that assumption.

If we're talking about Rokas, he DID originally take Aikido to learn to fight since he grew up in a town where gangs would go around and attack people. Beyond that though, as an instructor you encounter people who want to learn your martial art for self defense. Some people feel guilty if they feel that they're not teaching someone to actually defend themselves. Rokas was one of those individuals, and he began to have doubts about the efficacy of his system.

Some people look at Martial Arts as a mental health thing. Others look at it as fighting thing. No matter which one we choose, the thing that we must not do is to get the two confused as being the same. Don't think that fighting and sparring with the martial arts is the best path to health. Don't think focusing on health is the best path to fighting.

Again though, there are martial arts who claim that they can teach you how to defend yourself, and in reality they simply don't. We can't blame people for being outright misled by false advertising.

Nope. Again. I'm not blaming the practitioners. As a practitioner you choose what your goals are and how long you want to keep those goals and when you want to switch those goals. Do schools mislead? yes. But somewhere down the line he should have been thinking. I wonder how I'll do against someone who doesn't train Aikido. I'm assuming he has friends. As a friend to join him for a friendly sparring match so he can safely test his skills.

Uh, I'm almost positive that he did exactly that, which led him to eventually try his Aikido against a MMA practitioner.

I think questioning your MA is counter productive. The first thing you should be doing is trying to see if you understand your martial arts enough to be able to use it. It's through understanding it that you'll discover things that aren't honest. If anything question your training. Does your training follow the "Universal norms" of learning how to fight. How does boxing train, how do other fighting systems train. Are you doing similar training?

But again, if there's no foundation to base successful Aikido on, how do you know what you're working towards? Also I fundamentally disagree with the notion to not question your MA. You should ALWAYS question your MA, and people in your MA should allow you to question it openly.

Yeah they do. When my Jow Ga school screwed me over, you don't think I was pissed off at Jow Ga or TMA? The only difference between me and Roka is that I cleared my head by asking a few questions.
1. Why did I take Jow Ga in the first place. Was it to impress a Sifu or another Instructor? Answer: No
2. Did I like doing Jow Ga before I got into the school? Answer: Yes
3. Am I going to let 2 people who screwed me over destroy my passion for what I do? Answer: No

I could have easily gone on a rant about not trusting TMA, Don't sell out to them. I could have easily tried to get back at TMA for what I went through. I could have easily said. Don't believe that TMA line about being family.

But I didn't. I kept with 1 and 2, and #4 which is to be a good representation of Jow Ga.

People talk about how Aikido is good for spiritual and mental growth, yet look at Roka. He turned out to be a regular human being. So much for Zen.

Here's the thing though; You wouldn't have been in the wrong to leave Jow Ga behind completely because you were kicked out because you were actively pressure testing your MA. You chose to tough it out and go out on your own, which is fine, but it's also fine to look to something else if the culture is backwards and anti-intellectual.

 

[JowGaWolf]

The talk between Rokas and Chris Hein really stuck out to me, because Rokas comes around, admits his personal ******** and endorses Chris and his Aikido and even says he is thinking of coming back around and training some Aikido again.

I didn't watch that video yet. But from what you say it sounds like it falls right in light with what I stated. Below it's always the same pattern.

Then he get to the "Apology phase" where people show that he's wrong in his statements. MartialArtTutor did the same thing. Then somewhere down the line he may get back into training Aikido provided that someone can show him a functional version or he may just decide to teach to kids.

Rokas lost some of my respect with his challenge videos but he got it back with that interview and his Wing Chun response.

I'm not sure where he is located on my respect graph, I never put that much thought into it. I just know that few people will admit that they were wrong and even fewer will do so publicly. I rather know someone who has the ability to do that than one who can never do it. I know less than 10 people who can do that. There are 3 things we rarely hear done on the public stage.
1. "I was wrong."
2. "I was sorry."
3. To be honest and sincere about 1 and 2.

The average MMA fight is a albeit bloody sparring match between two professional athletes. The average bout is nine minutes. Saying that you or any normal person needs to train to that level or is even capable of that performance level is silly.

I train 1 - 6 minutes rounds depending on how many people are there. I do a 1 minute round and then have fresh body come in after every minute. This way I'm always fighting someone fresh. If most people start to gass out at 30 seconds then I want to have a comfortable 30 seconds fighting or running away. Most people in the U.S. or obese. I say take advantage of that.

Most people go their whole lives without fighting.

I won't put my safety on something like this. If I can't guarantee that I'll be one of those "Most People" then I'll keep training. The worse that will happen is that I'll be in shape and can actually fight if I ever need to. If I neglect my training then the worse thing that could happen is that someone beats me to death or injure me so bad that I wish I took my training seriously.

Most people don't get stabbed in the chest at school, but she did. I'm pretty sure she would agree with you up to the day she got stabbed. Now she probably agrees with me. "you never know".

 

[jobo]

He didn't even need to be successful in applying Aikido, all he needed was a foundation to base successful Aikido on. That's the problem; There is no concrete basis to gauge the successful application of Aikido. All you hear are folktales and legends, and when you see people attempt to apply Aikido successfully in a pressure-tested situation, it simply fails. You ask questions about this, and you get shot down and told to just keep practicing. Meanwhile, you look over the fence and you see BJJ and MMA guys being successful and asking tons of questions and getting nurtured for it. Those guys have a foundation to base success upon, so that pressure simply isn't there.



If we're talking about Rokas, he DID originally take Aikido to learn to fight since he grew up in a town where gangs would go around and attack people. Beyond that though, as an instructor you encounter people who want to learn your martial art for self defense. Some people feel guilty if they feel that they're not teaching someone to actually defend themselves. Rokas was one of those individuals, and he began to have doubts about the efficacy of his system.



Again though, there are martial arts who claim that they can teach you how to defend yourself, and in reality they simply don't. We can't blame people for being outright misled by false advertising.



Uh, I'm almost positive that he did exactly that, which led him to eventually try his Aikido against a MMA practitioner.



But again, if there's no foundation to base successful Aikido on, how do you know what you're working towards? Also I fundamentally disagree with the notion to not question your MA. You should ALWAYS question your MA, and people in your MA should allow you to question it openly.



Here's the thing though; You wouldn't have been in the wrong to leave Jow Ga behind completely because you were kicked out because you were actively pressure testing your MA. You chose to tough it out and go out on your own, which is fine, but it's also fine to look to something else if the culture is backwards and anti-intellectual.

why would he need a concrete base?

 

[Hanzou]

why would he need a concrete base?

In order to know that the claims made by the system are true.

 

[Martial D]

We never got into technical discussion, you cherry picked answers to other people and kept going with the same reductionist quips like your summary here. Although its already contained in other posts you never bothered to read, I'll explain everything again here, together.

- Aikido isn't taught competitively, there's one school that has tournaments. Aikido, on its own, is not the best candidate for dueling between two athletes in a ring. It's boring to watch, it doesn't particularly finish anyone off, its not taught with striking very often. Even if someone was going to get booked to go into a ring, had the pre-requisite MMA experience, what is the Aikido practitioner supposed to do? Have you tried doing Aikido in MMA gloves? Many of the techniques are also aided by small joint manipulations when faced against a resisting opponent, these are against the rules in MMA. MMA fighters generally wear nothing but shorts, many Aikido techniques are answers to someone grabbing onto you and give a response to that, there's a difference between being grabbed and grappled. Add in again, theres a padded floor, so you punch and kick and I am supposed to throw you but my hands are gloved and you get padding? Sweat and vaseline are absolutely an issue, it makes you hard to grab.

The existing repetoire of Aikido techniques, by themselves, are not really suited to fighting another martial artist, they don't work correctly without practical training and experience, both of those issues are not solved by the general publicly available schools. Atemi, striking, is taught in Aikido, outside of striking, it has no answer to things like a double leg takedown, there are no ground techniques. What you and everyone else would demand of Aikido is for a purely vanilla Aikido practitioner to go in and dominate an MMA ring, that wont ever happen, if the same Aikido guy uses a handful of other techniques like anyone in the MMA, you and the other children will simply say "well that wasn't Aikido". You apply a misinformed standard to what MMA is, how useful it is, how applicable it is to the real world.

Your overall reverence for MMA is an unfounded idea that because there is a high level of resistance, perhaps higher than any other training method, that this transfers directly to combat and a real altercation. It does not. It might be close, but there are many habits that have become common within MMA and BJJ that translate to getting kicked or otherwise struck once or twice, at the beginning of the fight and then becoming disabled. I have watched several BJJ enthusiasts knock themselves out on other people knees, get kicked in the face or the best one was one guy laid on his back in a guard and got kicked in his balls. You also falsely equate what you see in a professional fight to what YOU or other practitioners are physically capable of. Just because a UFC fighter can do X or Y has nothing to do with your skill and ability.

The average MMA fight is a albeit bloody sparring match between two professional athletes. The average bout is nine minutes. Saying that you or any normal person needs to train to that level or is even capable of that performance level is silly. Real fights do not last that long, they aren't against two trained pro athlete martial artists. IF you ever get into a fight as an average person, its because you are likely fighting a drunk or getting robbed. That's it. Most people go their whole lives without fighting. That being said, your average Aikido student from even a basic level of competence and training is probably going to be able to use it to defend themselves, even against someone who might have some of their own training. In the end, it comes down to the individual. Fighting does not work in the framework you are trying to argue it does. You have a better chance of winning the lottery than getting into some kind of magical kung fu/ninja fight on the street and chances are you don't and have never competed. So what is the point of training to be a gladiator in a cage match in the first place, especially when the things the rule set protected you from are going to happen to you in the real world if you do run into a trained opponent. Your entire claim and argument hinges on Aikido having to be competitive to be effective, it is not a competitive art, it can still work as advertised, which is to protect the individual and to provide a method to deal with conflict without causing undue harm, that's how its advertised.

Is Aikido going to win the next UFC? No. Can it work and save lives? Yes, I've seen it, do with that what you want, I don't care. Aikido does not have to beat every other martial art to be a viable, living, useful system. End of Story. So there it is, all that and more has already been written in this thread, thats why you got told to pound sand, because your a broken record arguing something that was never being discussed, from a false position of superiority and under false pretenses.

Did you..
*blinks*
Unless you are talking about fingers..which..I've not heard of an aikido finger lock..
You just asserted those same two things about wristlocks being illegal and mma fighters greasing...a third time?

Mind blown.

And the time thing too. wow. Somehow being able to last longer and being better at techniques means the mechanics of a fight are different when instead of a cage wall there is a regular wall, and the participants do everything at a lower skill level(you hope at least)

I just can't anymore, this is getting ridiculous. Good luck everyone.

 

[JowGaWolf]

He didn't even need to be successful in applying Aikido, all he needed was a foundation to base successful Aikido on.

If he goes out to see if he can apply aikido techniques then yes he had to be successful. Successful applications during sparring means that you are getting things correct. It's important because it helps you to gauge your level of understanding for a specific technique. Not being successful means there are some gaps in your understanding and possibly your training.

It's like a high dive competition. You don't pick the competition day to figure out if you can actually do a twist with a double front flip. So success matters. And it's stuff like this that drives me crazy. So when it comes to Aikido, or any other TMA, people start pulling out exceptions and saying things like no need to be successful in applying Aikido when it was clear that Roka was testing his Aikido Skills.

There is no concrete basis to gauge the successful application of Aikido.

Of course there is. Easy.
1. Did you try to use an Aikido technique? If yes, then goto #2
2. Were you able to apply the technique successfully and get the result that the technique was supposed to give you.?

There's nothing more concrete than that.

All you hear are folktales and legends, and when you see people attempt to apply Aikido successfully in a pressure-tested situation, it simply fails

The reality about folktales and legends. They are stories about other people, not about you. It's what that person did, not what you did. So if the legend isn't about you , then don't assume that you can do what was in the legend. No one on Martial Talk is going to read the legend of John Henry and then 15 year think they are going to beat a machine laying downing train tracks.

Legends and folktales have lessons and moral values in them that inspire people. If you hear a folktale or legend and then think you can do what they do in the story, then there's a good chance you missed the point of that folktale and legend. But again, we all understand this but make an exception for TMA. We ignore the lesson about how hard they work and sudden assume that because they beat up a Japanese army that we can do the same simply because they did it.

Uh, I'm almost positive that he did exactly that, which led him to eventually try his Aikido against a MMA practitioner.

Nope. that's not what he did. He even admitted that he never "pressure tested" his stuff as part of regular training. Common sense tells you to practice first until you can pull it off in practice then when you get to that then go test your ability against someone else.

Why would you test your ability on something you don't functionally train? That's like not studying for a test and expecting to do well on the test.

 

[JowGaWolf]

But again, if there's no foundation to base successful Aikido on, how do you know what you're working towards? Also I fundamentally disagree with the notion to not question your MA. You should ALWAYS question your MA, and people in your MA should allow you to question it openly.

Because questioning your martial arts makes the assumption that you aren't the problem.

Martial Arts tutor questioned his MA. Trained MMA and a little Kickboxing and discovered. It wasn't the system that was the problem it was him.

Roka question Aikido. Trained MMA, asked some BJJ gues and discovered. He was the one not doing the wrist lock correct. He was the one who wasn't pressure testing. He was the one that wasn't training his Aikido functional. Don't take my word. He even says what I'm saying here. He didn't question his Instructor. If you can't use your martial arts, the first thing you should do is question yourself, then you should question the person teaching you. By the way. All you hear is stuff about Zen and spiritual stuff.

You know how my students saw me as? They saw me as the guy in the school who knew how to actually use Kung Fu. No one ever sees me as the guy with Zen. I got problems just like everyone else.

 

[Oni_Kadaki]

Did you..
*blinks*
Unless you are talking about fingers..which..I've not heard of an aikido finger lock..
You just asserted those same two things about wristlocks being illegal and mma fighters greasing...a third time?

Mind blown.

And the time thing too. wow. Somehow being able to last longer and being better at techniques means the mechanics of a fight are different when instead of a cage wall there is a regular wall, and the participants do everything at a lower skill level(you hope at least)

I just can't anymore, this is getting ridiculous. Good luck everyone.

For reference, finger locks are a thing in Aikido.