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Old 03-08-2013, 02:42 PM   #5
Dan Richards
Dojo: Latham Eclectic
Location: NY
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 452
United_States
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Re: Chronic Joint/Tendon Damage

Quote:
Cliff Judge wrote: View Post
Right so in another 20-30 years we will see people with chronic joint issues due to repetitive internal power exercises and such, instead of hard breakfalls.
Not at all. The internal exercises work from alignment. You can't move without being aligned. That to me is a huge insurance policy in and of itself. And there's tons of evidence of this already. Look at 80-90-year-old people who've been doing CMA their whole lives.

I don't even think breakfalls have so much to do with injuries, as just people who don't know how to move more efficiently get up and down off the mats zillions of times over the years. Honestly, the more I look at how a lot of aikido has been trained - it's just plain stupid.

I've seen 90% of injuries occur in aikido not by produced by some nage on uke, but on people all by themselves, rolling or falling or stepping in some way that screwed them up. And in almost all cases, it was the result of unaligned movement. And I don't mean just that particular movement, I mean a lack of overall alignment in all movements - all the time.

And even if there's no specific injury event, there is - what I feel is even more insidious; a slow, imperceptible corrosiveness of the body through repetitive and strenuous movements executed by people with misaligned bodies.

Just because it says "cinnamon" - don't assume it's real cinnamon. In many cases it's not going to be cinnamomum zeylanicum - it's going to be its fake relative cinnamomum cassia.

And like Sugano said, "They're not doing aikido. They're just doing movements."

So, the question might be; "Is Aikido safe?" To which I would answer, Aikido can be quite safe. But just because you go somewhere that has a sign up that says aikido, and you see people training and rolling around in dark skirts - don't assume it's aikido.
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