jonreading

As a preamble... when I started aikido, my sensei was athletic and my early curriculum was stressful and vigorous. He was a multiple-martial artist and felt taiso was important to practice. I played sports all my life until then and also practiced in a few arts by the time I came to aikido. Thinking back, I believe this was one of the reasons why I choose to remain in aikido after my first few classes - my instructor had a dojo culture that was inclusive of my athletic culture and physicality. It also happened that he was skilled in fighting, and was [easily] able to work with me to show how good skills could come from training. That said, we had hard training. Not injurious, but hard. After practicing for many years, I came to realize not every [read "most" here] dojos did not train with the physical focus we had. Honestly speaking, I am not sure I would train in an aikido dojo now if I was starting a new art and I am grateful that I was lucky enough to meet the right instructor and the right time.

After training for a [too] long time, I came to find some very good mentors who shared important perspectives about training, aikido, fighting, and life skills. These perspective helped to bridge the gap between the notion that my chances of actually fighting someone in life is very low, yet the amount of money, effort, and time I put into aikido was very high. Oddly, reaching back to my earlier days of sports training was a big part of my shift back to a [more] useful combination of training to make my body the best tool I could for whatever I was doing.

For me, it is a foreign thought that conditioning is not training. I think for a while my training led me away from that fencepost. We all get enamored with techniques, and weapons work, and all of the precise movements we learn. But then I worked out with some pretty good people who just didn't care what you did, aikido didn't work. That kicked some of my competitive genes into high gear to figure out what they were doing; I was surprised to see the importance of body management at the top of the list and that was something that clicked with me.

History aside, I think I would loosely say that taiso is the single-most important thing you can do to remain a heathy, functioning martial artists for an extended period of time. Athleticism is a multi-faceted gem - physical conditioning is one side, but also competition, but also healthy habits, but cognitive reasoning, but also... We don't have to be fit to be athletic, but rather an idea of habits to take care of our bodies. We don't have to be good at sports to be athletic, but rather an idea of what good competition looks like and an appreciation for the success achieved in that competition.

As an aside here, I know a lot of aikido people who say they are not competitive and don't care about fighting. The well-used and tired argument I point out that person took time to clean their bodies, smell nice, and appear pleasing to the eye. Why? Because we are competing for attention, even at a base level. Not being competitive is different than avoiding the displeasure of 'losing." Mostly, I would argue when someone says they aren't competitive what they really mean is they don't enjoy losing and would rather not participate in an activity that invokes that displeasure. I think athletics is a good place to learn how to learn from losing, even enjoying the competition. Michael Jordan once did an interview shortly after retiring. In the interview he was asked about being the greatest basketball player, with a record number of game-winning shots in his career. In answer, he basically said that he remembered the number of game losing shots he took more than the number of game-winning shots he made. Jordan was considered by many people to be one of the most competitive athletes in modern sports. Yet, losing was one of the best tools in his toolbox to motivate his training.

We can't all be like Michael Jordan (ah, the old commercial jingles that come to mind..). But, I think we can compete against ourselves as a motivational tool. I think a poisonous apple in aikido is the notion that you need a partner to train. I think this for a variety of reasons, but in this thread I think it because eventually you have to train without social reinforcement. If you are not doing aikido for yourself, eventually you will fatigue and lack motivation to continue. Even doing it for yourself does not guarantee success and longevity.

The notion that athletes can't do martial arts because their muscles are too big, or they can't stretch, or whatever is largely false. Bodybuilding (a specific exercise routine to grown defined muscles) is not athletics. The biggest argument for aikido training is that isolated muscle movement [in any capacity] is not whole-body movement and therefore not aiki, by definition. Plenty of us regular people don't lift weights and we'll suck at aikido because we move using muscles in isolation. Training your body to move in unison is both athletic and proper body movement and that is why I say that taiso is aikido. Someday, you won't care how you grip someone's hand because when you move with your whole body it won't matter. So we learn our grips while we train for that moment. This is the concept of using form until you don't need form.

So we train. Discomfort and injury both are painful; discomfort is progress, injury is regression. So, give yourself metrics of success for challenges that can be accomplished safely. Rolling hurts. Why? Poor technique, poor flexibility, poor condition on the body, whatever. How do you prioritize which comes first? Sensei can help, but you can, too. Figure out what hurts and fix it first. Then, figure out what hurts next. Its a ball of string that you need to unravel - enjoy the challenge.