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Old 05-30-2007, 07:19 AM   #9
George S. Ledyard
 
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Dojo: Aikido Eastside
Location: Bellevue, WA
Join Date: Jun 2000
Posts: 2,670
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Re: Aikido Techniques are Weapons Techniques

This is true if one is talking about understanding the essential "logic" behind the way we practice. Why are the basic strikes shomenuchi, yokomenuchi, and munetsuki? Why do we have so many grabbing attacks? When folks from other martial arts look at Aikido practice they generally comment on the fact that no one in their martial art would attack in that manner. As I found with my police students, however, once you introduce weapons into the interaction, you really do see grabbing taking place. Give your partner a short sword or a katana and it's easy to see the relationship between our very stylized attacks and attacks with these bladed weapons.

But this does not mean that what we do cannot be effective as an empty hand art, you just need to adapt the principles to a different reality. If this is your interest, you need to work with folks who can execute strikes as they are found in karate, boxing and muy thai. Work on application of ones technique with a wrestler, judoka or mixed martial artist. Put some time in with a kali or silat practitioner on knife technique.

The result of this work will be much more impactive than how we generally manifest the principles in our practice but the principles will be the same.

George S. Ledyard
Aikido Eastside
Bellevue, WA
Aikido Eastside
AikidoDvds.Com
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