Thread: Resistance?
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Old 05-24-2012, 08:42 AM   #38
tarik
 
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Dojo: Iwae Dojo
Location: Boulder Creek, CA
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Re: Resistance?

Quote:
Peter Rehse wrote: View Post
The middle road - very Buddhist in its wisdom. Not really sure what it is about Aikido and those that like to comment on it but it sure breeds a lot of extreme statements. I've seen this in the resistance game, but also speed vs static, name your concept.
Passion tends to breed extreme points of view :-)

Quote:
Peter Rehse wrote: View Post
Aiki in my view really reflects an increased sensitivity to your opponent. The ability to respond to their energy in a way that makes it your own. If there is no resistance during training then you can not experience that energy and learn to utilize it. Conversely if you are always working with hard resistance you will never learn to overcome that energy without an equal measure of force.
I look at it this way. When succeeding at aiki, what you do is "non-resistance" relative to the fact that what you are doing never "resists" what your partner is doing, but instead uses it and adds a very little bit to it. Sometimes the, it may appear to be resistance to the uneducated because you can make the feedback loop very tight, but it is not.

But we spend most of our time training to learn this, not doing it, and that can be misleading. To learn, our training must be cooperative and yet also competitive by slowly, increasingly made more difficult over time, through 'resistance' or more preferably, IMO, through a greater application of the same principles by uke to steal back the sente.

If efficient learning is the goal, then the scale to measure shouldn't be based upon ones own opinion about how 'resistant' uke should be to tori, but instead measured upon tori's success in kata based upon on the correctness of their ability to use the taught principles in kata to succeed at the technique at least 70% of the time. Less frequent success could mean that uke is resisting too much, while more could mean that uke is overly cooperative. Even randori is a cooperative, if even a more constructively competitive practice, but at least it isn't kata.

Peter, I think you already mentioned the value in allocating training time between kata and randori. Unfortunately, for many in the aikido world, what is called randori isn't what you and I mean when we talk about the two.

IME, one of the weaknesses in many places I've visited, is the dogma that aikido has no kata, which is then demonstrated as false in practice. Aikido, in fact, is demonstrably taught through kata, sometimes far more so by schools that insist that kata does not exist in aikido. But actual doing of aikido, as opposed to training, is not kata and once could say that doing is the real aikido while training is the "lie" as I believe Ueshiba himself once stated when asked to do a demonstration before the Imperial family.

Best,

Tarik Ghbeish
Jiyūshin-ryū AikiBudō - Iwae Dojo

MASAKATSU AGATSU -- "The true victory of self-mastery."
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