View Single Post
Old 03-16-2011, 02:41 PM   #248
Tony Wagstaffe
Location: Winchester
Join Date: Oct 2005
Posts: 1,211
United Kingdom
Offline
Re: Is your Aikido as a Martial Art up to Reality?

Quote:
Matthew Gano wrote: View Post
Sure, we generally want to use the larger muscle groups (e.g. legs' muscles generate more power by themselves than fingers') but both seem pertinent to "real" self defense...particularly if you consider whole-body self-defense or defense involving firearms. While they're a small part of the overall force generation, the fingers and hands can add the needed edge in real self-defense and, I presume, can convey the whole-body force sought after in internals.
I agree that the simpler techniques are generally the most effective. The fewer operations needed to displace your attacker the better...and from what I've seen casually, at least in the one-on-one setting, I think MMA shows this tendancy toward a handful of basic self-defense maneuvers which typically win. This doesn't mean the other techniques are irrelevent though.
Also, I'm no expert so I'm probably missing something key, but my impression is the internal arts would describe themselves more as whole body balance, not single-leg balance.
...Now I'm curious if that's what is meant when describing one-sided weighting?
Basically just guesses, but there's my 2 bits.
Take care,
Matt
Matt, what you say is true, simple works!! It is possible to attain joint manipulation or locks when you have your opponent down and immobilized, trying to do joint manipulation when your opponent is up and fighting you with full resistance is almost impossible unless you get lucky. techniques such as shomen ate, aigamae ate, gykugamae ate, gedan ate, ushiro ate do work as they are irimi or quick entry or precursor techniques. These can be quickly translated to atemi waza which they essentially are....
Joint manipulation or locks are secondary....
The techniques I mention I have actually used in real self defence and they worked....