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Old 07-10-2009, 08:32 AM   #5
lbb
Location: Massachusetts
Join Date: Jun 2006
Posts: 3,202
United_States
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Re: Best karate style for aikido?

I don't think it ought to matter, to be honest. Just pick a karate dojo that is a good representative of its style and a style that is a good representation of karate -- not a style and school that's aikido with kicks and punches. Karate is karate and aikido is aikido, and if you need the two to be as much like each other as possible in order to train in both, then maybe you should reconsider whether you should do both. I also think it's totally barking up the wrong tree to try to figure out which approach is "doing it right". They're two different paths up the same mountain, and if you want to look at it a certain way, each one is going to be missing some things that you encounter on the other path.

I trained in karate (shotokan) before I trained in aikido, and I switched to aikido for the sole and simple reason that I moved and aikido was all there was. There were many things in aikido that didn't make sense to me for quite a while -- things where I thought that the karate solution to the problem made more sense. The aikido way makes sense to me now, but that doesn't mean that the karate way doesn't make sense -- it's not an either-or thing. Each approach has its tradeoffs. If you can understand that, I think you can benefit tremendously from training in two martial arts (under some circumstances -- a lot of other things have to fall into place too). If you're constantly trying to make one into the other or figure out which is better, IMO you're wasting your time. A lot of people favor this approach because it sounds like taking the best from both worlds, but it isn't. It's constantly cherrypicking, never integrating, always criticizing, always looking for the fly in the ointment instead of accepting things as they are in the hope of coming to an understanding through practice. It's a waste of time.
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