Newbie

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[Dave de Vos]

Hello everyone,

Greetings from a newbie from the Netherlands.

I'm a 41 year old husband, father, software developer and go player.
For a while I had been thinking that I should take up an activity to improve my fitness, which at the same time would stay interesting, even many years from now. Sports in general don't interest me very much, so I knew that team sports or going to the gym would not do it for me.

As a child and teenager I've practised some judo and jiujitsu and my son took up kyokushin karate recently, but although these martial arts surely appeal to me, I felt I may be getting too old for these fairly soon.

Then someone suggested aikido to me. He explained a bit about aikido and he also told me that ageing is much less of an issue with aikido. The next saturday I went to the dojo where he trains and had my first aikido lesson. The atmosphere appealed to me a lot and I also found out that aikido is challenging indeed. It is hard to learn the moves. It felt like a martial dancing lesson. But this was good, because I was looking for a long term challenge.

Since then I've trained in the dojo for about 30 hours and last month I even had the opportunity to participate in a seminar by Shimamoto sensei. My enthousiasm is growing, so I increased my dojo training time to 3 hours a week. Besides my dojo time I try to spend a few hours a week training solo at home (stretching, turning and after each lesson trying to rehearse the techniques of that lesson with my wife) and training "soft eyes" whenever I can (like when driving to my work).

Of course I'm still very much a beginner, but I'm making progress. I hope I can improve steadily, but I'm not in a big hurry, because I feel I still have many years ahead of me to practise aikido.

[guest1234567]

Nice introduction..
Of course you have time, if you like Aikido, it is for the whole life:)
Greetings from Gran Canaria

[Dave de Vos]

Of course you have time, if you like Aikido, it is for the whole life:)

Thank you, I hope I get to train for a few decades :)

[akiy]

Hi Dave,

Welcome to AikiWeb and thank you for your introduction.

-- Jun