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Graham Old wrote:
PLEASE don't see this thread as an attempt to revive any kind of "does aikido really work?" discussion. Nothing interests me less. Instead, I thought it would be useful to share what I personally love about Aikido...
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Of course what you seem to love about Aikido is it's effectiveness in these areas, so I'm not sure how this thread will avoid the "does it really work" discussion...if for no other reason than someone will want to inject a caveat and then probably want to discuss it. I think the examples you gave are good ones for how Aikido can be helpful, but I also think there are valid counterpoints that have to be included in a discussion about the virtues of these things too.
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If these questions are relevant, it suggests to me that much of what we see in things like UFC is as far as one could get from likely contemporary scenes of violence. Conversely, aikido actually scores quite highly in terms of a practical contemporary martial art.
Any thoughts?
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Well, first off, I think many people would say Aikido is non-contemporary because it doesn't include firearms. Granted, firearms are less present in some places than others, but that's a part of my point: "contemporary" is a somewhat relative issue. Also, I agree UFC trains for a very specific scenario, but in many ways, it's not unlike the very specific scenarios we in Aikido practice. The question of how practical our training is comes in how the individual can translate those scenarios into organic/spontaneous interactions...and I think that is a case by case thing based more on individual people and schools than on whole arts.
Maybe another way to look at it is this: in the grand scheme of practical self-defense there is a lot of ground to cover. Some of us need to focus more on the list of skills you provided while some of us need to focus on something more like "ground and pound" (a gross simplification of MMA).
By two-bits at least.
