Quote:
Mario Tobias wrote:
The reason why you need your arm to be an unbendable arm is because there are situations wherein you need to do flying forward rolls, either because you were thrown very high (koshi nage for example) or there's an obstacle in front of you that it's dangerous to do the typical front fall and you need to jump over it.
If in those cases, the arm were to bend then most likely the elbow will be the first one to contact the ground which will either break your elbow, shoulder or something much worse. The 2 arms need to be acting as a connected wheel.
You need to condition your arm strength via doing hundreds or thousands of ukemi. This exercise doesn't only help in your ukemi but your techniques as well. You can only get better in aikido if you get better in ukemi as they say.
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Thinking of this as an application of arm strength is misleading, IMO. After all, I suspect that very few aikidoka can do one-handed handstands, and so very few aikidoka can *really* support their full weight on just one arm.
There are also applications where uke is fully airborne and doesn't touch the floor with their hands or arms at all.
I do find that telling beginners to think of their arms as forming a wheel is helpful. You need extension to keep the "wheel" from collapsing, but thinking in terms of strength seems to cause stiff arms and square rolls.
Katherine