Benjamin Green

There are clever ways to escape from nearly everything - unless you want to be really brutal and just snap it through - and most of them you'd not think of on the spot. You probably wouldn't even work out what was going on on the spot, human reaction times aren't that good.

When I fight I don't think about techniques; strikes and throws and so on. They're just something they're sending at you on the end of a movement executed with the entire body. It's like asking whether the thing on the end of that arc is a fist or a palm or a grab or a foot or.... Who cares? It's following the same arc whatever it is.

I don't even think about techniques on my side of things - it's more like a beat, a rhythm. If they're throwing slow energy at you you can drop sharp beats - strikes - into it to mess it up. If they're throwing a sharp beat at you you can wrap it up and sweep it around. But I don't consciously think strike strike strike beat throw sweep or anything. It just so happens that different movements are suited to different tempos, distances, angles - and as reactions you've trained in they come out naturally in response to your sense of how things are. It's far more like a jam with session - weaving tunes around each other. Except here the aim's to trip the other person up.

Oh admittedly it's not quite that simple. You don't see everything - and when you're in close and up against someone's body it's not so much seeing as feeling where their weight is and how they're moving.

But I digress, my point is that just being able to stop a technique doesn't tell you a great deal that you're actually going to be able to use. And him being able to make it work against you trying to stop it doesn't tell him a great deal he can use. Fighting's not like that - it's not a chess game of move and counter-move. You only really interact in a fight along the very edges - much of it's automatic: become aware of something and react, and it either works or it doesn't very quickly.

Training extensively to polish techniques to work against counters is a waste of time. I know many people who are incredibly good at applying techniques; who, even if you really try to stop them doing it, once they're actually doing the thing it's very difficult to stop, however much you struggle. Their technique's sharp, it's violent, it's incredibly polished - it's everything one might want of a technique. And it tells you nothing about whether they could actually do it.

A vast part of the application of any martial art - and something you can only really get from experience with an opponent who's not just going along with you - is how to adapt to varying responses to attempts to apply different techniques, different degrees of technique failure. Not in terms of once, whether you've got the pickup and started to apply the technique, you can make it work, but in terms of whether you can start to apply the technique at all and once.

If you've the choice between training an understanding of distance, timing, tempo and so on; of getting experience with different ways of responding to people throwing attacks and responding to what you do in return for that - and it, has to be said, generally of just observing how people move when they're doing certain things so that you recognise it - ; and a choice of training your techniques to be incredibly polished and effective. Take the understanding. Understanding will let you make crappy techniques work reasonably well, but polished techniques will never let you make a lack of understanding work against anyone of even moderate experience.

So, if I look at someone's practice and I just see them sharpening techniques; not focusing on developing insight through training with people who throw different things, who move in different ways, who react differently.... While there's the possibility they train, or have trained, those things elsewhere .... If that's the extent of what they're doing, I don't think they're training something right there as aikido that's particularly effective in the sense you seem to mean.

Experience counts for a heck of a lot.

So does consciously drilling certain things in, and blending different movements into each other - there's a reason that students of kata-based arts used to be expected to go and make up their own and throw different parts of kata together. Just as experience is important, there are things you can do to hone particular aspects of your responses and develop new ways of moving that shouldn't be neglected. And I see fairly few people doing them too.... Just a thought.

Fortunately for those who just train techniques, most people really really suck at fighting. The standard you have to rise to, for self defence against your average drunk, is generally so low that almost anything will do. The anti-social people who put any sort of serious thought into this sort of stuff don't tend to think of it along the lines of fighting - they tend to think of it along the lines of getting what they want. And if you were aiming to use violence to get what you wanted the last thing you'd want to do would be to get into a fight where the other person was defending themselves. You set the situation up from the outset so that you've got so much of an upper hand it never becomes a fight.

So the part of the use of force spectrum where leet ninja skills are important in modern society tends to be kinda small for most people.