Keith Larman

No need for an apologia, I was raised in a very "scientific" family. Dad was literally a rocket scientist and I spent years growing up in Madagascar because dad was working at a NASA tracking station outside Tananarive (Antananarivo now I suppose). I think a scientific approach to what's going on in Aikido would be a god-send for many discussions.

However, we'd first need to agree as to what it is. There's an old quote that I wish I could find again that said essentially that every study is biased by the questions we decide to ask. And therein lies the rub for me on many of these questions. First off we don't agree as a community as to exactly what it is we're doing. Is it the totally non-confrontational, relaxed, uber-blending/timing stuff that some excel at. Is it the more robust and acrobatic (no negative intended on my part here) stuff like you see from guys like Tissier. Is the the internal stuff many are now looking at that appears to involve vastly more complex phenomena than would be easily accounted for by just looking at localized muscle and bone structure (consider some stuff going on in functional fitness, yoga, and even high level runners where they're starting to realize that a slight rotation in the hand and wrist can somehow impact the speed of a runner -- why?). And on and on. The problem science faces with this domain, I think, is defining the domain itself before the study even begins. Then deciding what to look at. And do we have good models in the first place? It reminds me greatly of nutrition science. We are greatly limited in our thinking by what we think we know. We start off years ago knowing cholesterol seemed to be a marker for certain health problems. So we advice cutting cholesterol in the diet. Then we find there are different types of cholesterol, hdl and ldl, and one is "good" while the other "bad". Suggestions change a bit. Then they find VLDL, Triglycerides, intermediate density, chylomicrons ... Then we find that maybe it's not the cholesterol per se, but maybe saturated fat. Fat is cut in the diet. Then we find that carbohydrates seem to cause LDL rises and HDL lowering. Then it's transfats in the diet that replaced the bad for you butter (which itself seems to have some interesting compounds that may actually be good for lipid levels). Anyway, the point of this is that the understanding of "what's going on" changes constantly because our vocabulary is limited to what we know. So it goes back to something I've said before -- we need a better vocabulary to talk about some of this stuff. And we need to get more refined and rigorous about what's going on in the body. And then we can start to possibly get a better scientific understanding of what's actually going on. And hopefully get people more on the same page.

At one point in my life I was told the right way to eat was as little fat as possible. Fat, after all, had 9 calories per gram vs. 4 for carbs. So fill up on pasta, breads, etc. Eat some fruit and veggies. And watch out for cheese, milk, eggs and meats. It all made sense *given* what we knew, *given* the models we adapted. And we are the fattest generation ever.

Aikido needs some robust models. And some robust vocabulary. Then, maybe, the scientists have something to work with that will actually give useful results.