Quote:
Dan Harden wrote:
By and large joint locks are marginally effective, and dicey with anyone traned. I just had an all day session with DR Aikido and CMA folks, with joint locks brought up and completely neutralized at every turn. People really need to get past these ridiculous assumptions of effectiveness, and help each other learn to stop these type of things. Leave it for work on non martial people. Maybe good for LEO on drunks or domestics. For us, learn em, know em, forget em.
It is the how and with what that you can neutralize them that has value. For that training also leads to neutralizing throws, and getting heavy hands and legs to strike.
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I don't disagree but this is an entirely different argument. I am saying that
if you are going to train joint locks, there are effective ways to do them and ineffective ways to do them. If you look at the aikikai hombu dojo test requirements, fully seven out of ten techniques listed are joint locks. Once you say that joint locks are marginally effective and not worth spending that much time training in, you are pretty much tossing out largest part of the art of aikido as it now exists. Now you might be right to do this from the perspective of your reasons for training, but I think most people in aikido really don't care about that. They like their dojo and they like to go there and get some exercise and play at being a martial artist with their friends. That's fine, but given that aikido is (mostly) joint locks, why not at least train them in the most effective way possible? You still might not be doing the most practical techniques in the world, but at least you would be doing
something well.
Ideally, it would be great to see aikido people move beyond training in joint locks with compliant partners and do more freestyle, but I don't have high hopes for this. Most people in aikido probably wouldn't even be interested in better ways to do the techniques they already do, preferring instead to keep doing it the way it their teacher or organization does it, even if that doesn't work, since that's what's expected on their rank test. But I think for people coming from the environment of mainstream aikido, spending some time on how to do joint locks effectively makes sense since that's something they will understand. With beginners, I spend very little time on joint locks, since they are too hard to do in freestyle (although I still often use them myself when working with relatively untrained people) and there are more important things that I think need to be learned first.