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Analysis of Aikido techniques and practice with the aid of Physics
As far as I know there's only one interesting book that deals with the Physics side of Aikido, 'Ratti, Westbrook':Aikido and the Dynamic Sphere', but it's just a description with nice illustrations; the few other essays I've met spend just a few and usually wrong words, using terms like 'lever' that are not correct. So I'll try to have an exchange that can make our knowledge of Aikido richer and also, I think, stimulating.
In these last years I spent part of the week teaching Aikido to Elders. In the beginning it was a Region's Course on Elders' health, focused on the prevention of falls; but since in Aikido the very first lessons teach you to roll while falling -a prerequisite of every technique- it was only natural to include Aikido in the teaching.
We used to talk before and after the lesson, and as things go this led me to delve in the most recent parts of neurophysiological research (with which I had some familiarity eons ago);
first thing we discovered was that many of the common held beliefs were no more true, especially one quite interesting for elders: it's not true that dead neurons are not replaced; research of the last few years in Italy ( ref 71)), Australia and United States had seen that in certain conditions that you find in some martial arts like TaiChi, Aikido and also in Yoga -namely physical activity together with mental concentration- neurons can regrow. And this opened a whole world of opportunities for prevention (and even healing) of degenerative illnesses like Alzheimer.
But this was only the beginning, since the research on brain, consciousness, healing has made some giant steps.
I'll try to sketch some of these (a complete reference is in my book 'The Physics of Aikido and the Body-Mind Unity) in the following posts, but the first thing to underline is that is not just the usual advice to make physical exercise in order to feel well and age well; the research has gone deeper into the mechanism of aging, for example, and one of its resuts is what I stated before: is not just exercise but a combination of exercise+mental concentration that works
..and you could do worse than practice Aikido in order to reap its benefits.
08-30-2024 08:57 AM 