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Old 09-02-2009, 09:09 AM   #14
Rob Watson
Location: CA
Join Date: Sep 2005
Posts: 697
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Re: Inefficiencies in the Aikido Training Method

Quote:
Drew Ames wrote: View Post
SNIP

Even further back to the original question: is this what Ellis is referring to when talking about inefficient aikido training?

Regards,
Allow me to interpret Ellis Amdur "As a technical corpus <ie., fight with this technique or that>, it was and is remarkably rococo, a very inefficient way of training, one I found no interest in pursuing."

To me this means train for 10 years and find out 95% (or pick your favorite number) of the techniques are simply irrelevant in a knock down drag out. Rococo essentially means, in this context, technique build upon technique, etc resulting in a great excess of movement.

While I can sympathize with this assessment I think similar arguments can be made in most any fighting art. There is a corpus of techniques within a system but when the rubber hits the road only a handful of those techniques are used.

Another way to look at is that most, if not all, the techniques of aikido are actually conditioning excersizes to reach the goal of takemusu aikido in which techniques (new ones never before seen) are spontaneously expressed in the heat of the moment. To reach this point of ability takes a very long time and is therefor not efficient.

Thanks

"In my opinion, the time of spreading aikido to the world is finished; now we have to focus on quality." Yamada Yoshimitsu

Ultracrepidarianism ... don't.
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