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Old 01-30-2011, 12:46 PM   #21
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: Training With Others

My point if view is colored by my own experience Because I started relatively early, back in 1976, I have always been senior to most of the folks I trained with. Add to that my size, which even in my youngest days was over 200 lbs. So, my "habit" is to help. I never saw much of an alternative. I had no interest in tanking for my partner, neither person learns anything from that. On the other hand, standing there while my partner flounders around doing things I know have absolutely no hope of succeeding didn't make sense to me either. Sometimes I know my "help" wasn't necessarily appreciated. On the other hand shutting my partner down for the duration of the technique was NEVER appreciated.

This would not be quite such an issue if people had a "process" they used in training. 20 years ago or so, I had the realization that half of the folks I trained with had no "process" for moving from the technique that clearly wasn't working towards something that might.

I was training at Chicago Winter camp back in the nineties...got paired with an old friend from my DC days. Since I knew he came from the same background I did, I figured we could go at it just as we did back in DC. The technique was munetsuki kotegaeshi. So I attacked and nailed him in the ribs as he attempted his tenkan. I attacked again and nailed him once again. I thought maybe he was just off due to travel or some such. But I nailed him five times in a row.

I looked at him and asked, "Doesn't that hurt?" He replied, "Yes!" whereupon I suggested he try something different. He was doing the same thing over and over while failing miserably each time. One of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting it to have a different result. Yet here he was doing just that. When I realized that he simply had no mental process for evaluating what he had just done and moving his next attempt towards something that worked better.

After that experience, I started looking at how my various partners approached their training process. It turned out that most actually expected me to make the adjustment when their stuff didn't work. Obviously I was attacking outside their capacity zone and I was expected to adjust my attacks so that they could achieve success. That's when I first realized just how big a problem collusion was in Aikido. We have largely developed and taught a style of ukemi that is designed to make the techniques work rather than the other way around. (The folks who didn't do this tended to train with way to much muscle and tension... but we've discussed that elsewhere a number of times).

The lack of principle based instruction leaves the student with little or no idea of what actually makes a technique work. Without that, how can anyone "reverse engineer" from a failed attempt and have some idea what to adjust on the next attempt. The training process is really like an algorithm. Each repetition is an approximation that gets you closer and closer to some unattainable "perfect technique". But if you have no idea why something is really working, you are stuck with blindly try to duplicate something you thought you saw (often not what you thought), or thought you heard (often not what was meant), or thought you felt (quite often not what was done).

I went to a seminar with an eminent Shihan. There were tons of great folks on the mat from all over the country. The entire seminar consisted of the Shihan showing a technique and the participants doing that technique exactly as they knew how to do when they walked in while the Shihan stood for ten minutes and watched the clock. There was no instruction that I could see...

This is how we can have forty or fifty years of Aikido training and so few great Aikido practitioners. This is why we see people make no substantive change in their Aikido over ten or fifteen years. This whole idea that we should "just train" and it will all become clear...that's a total myth and is given the lie simply by looking at the results of 40 to 50 years of Aikido in America. If that method worked we'd have a lot of folks who were really excellent and certainly hardly anyone would be putting in ten or more years with no real change in their skill level.

I think it is crucially important that we start to understand that 20,000 repetitions of a mistake is now a deeply ingrained mistake. And a lack of a conceptual framework, a principle based understanding of what one is trying for, makes progress merely the 50 million monkeys typing randomly with one eventually typing Shakespeare. The operative reality here is that the other 49+ million were typing gibberish.

Have some people managed to get some skill training this way? Of course. I think that the folks who did so were either extremely intuitive or manged to develop their own analytical framework which served to guide their progress. Just look at the students of the Founder... vastly different levels of skill and sophistication amongst a group of folks who all were on the mat at the same time with the same teacher(s). Chiba Sensei told me once that he thought Saotome Sensei was a creative genius. While a compliment, certainly, I do not think he saw it wholly from that standpoint. I think he was also acknowledging the difficulty of being a teacher who was able to learn things in a manner that most students cannot duplicate. Chiba Sensei himself is one of the most organized teachers I have ever encountered. Measured by his ability to pass on what he knows to a number of students, I would say that he has been very successful in doing so. He is therefore, in that sense, a great "teacher".

On the other hand, the geniuses, the intuitive learners, the ones who could "see" a movement and get it, translate what they saw in to their own bodies on the first or second try, they've had a tough time passing on what they know because their students have normal learning styles.

You know how many great Aikido practitioners turn out to have engineering or technical backgrounds? Saotome Sensei, who is your creative genius, fantastically talented artistic type, turned out to have majored in college in product design and that was his first job. Tom Read, has a deep math and science background, which is evident in his new book on his Aikibojitsu practice. It's like reading the Tao of Physics or the Dancing Wuli Masters. Ushiro Sensei is an engineer with multiple patents under his name.

I think this analytical talent makes it possible for someone to develop his own understanding of the principles operating in our techniques. But whether or not they use that understanding to create a principle based structure that others can use and understand is another story.

I think we have to do two things... first of all, we need to get out and train with people who offer organized, principle based instruction. It can be with teachers from within Aikido or from folks outside. Personally, I do both.

Second, we need to take that framework and teach our students how to use that framework to create a process for their training. I am always asking a student, "why did that not work?" They have to tell me why they though it went wrong. If they can tell me what really was missing, then we have to examine why they didn't do it since they obviously were aware that they needed to. Often we discover that something deeper is going on. That what they need to do is very simple but under pressure they can't do it. This is part of how the Aikido practice can be "transformative".

If they can't tell me, then I tell them. I show them what went wrong, then get them to do it with that element fixed. This is all done so that the student, over time, develops the ability to become his or her own teacher. When a student can self correct or at least has a sense of how to move closer to what he or she is trying for with each repetition, then we can talk about the "perfect world" in which no one needs to help his partner because each student knows how to help himself.

To my mind, that is what every teacher should be doing. It's not about teaching technique. It's about teaching how to learn. We need to teach how to process what we see, how to process what we do, encourage our students to question, and give them encouragement and support in looking far and wide for anyone who can help them get better. In short, it is really the teachers job to make himself unnecessary to the process of his student's progress.

So, I figure that, until that happens, folks who know something, should be willing to pass it on if it seems to help their partner; especially when the alternative is sitting there looking at each other with nothing happening. That's a waste of everyone's time.

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