View Single Post
Old 08-27-2014, 09:47 PM   #283
Chris Li
 
Chris Li's Avatar
Dojo: Aikido Sangenkai
Location: Honolulu, Hawaii
Join Date: Dec 2000
Posts: 3,313
United_States
Offline
Re: Demonstrating aiki, demontrating aikido.Same thing ?

Quote:
Ron Ragusa wrote: View Post
Well, Rocky Marciano comes to mind. 49 fights, 49 wins, 43 KOs, 0 losses, draws. I'm pretty sure boxing has never produced another heavyweight of Marciano's caliber. Does that imply all other heavyweights since have somehow taken the wrong path or that the path is lacking?

IMO the whole "Aikido hasn't produced another..." argument is a red herring employed in order to popularize whatever the agenda DuJour happens to be. Enough already, Aikido doesn't produce anyone; it's people that produce Aikido.

Ron
I was going to step out, but this is a slightly different topic so I'll step back in for just a bit.

This is a false argument becuse it's an unreliable metric.

Boxers are fighting against each other - records reflect not only one's own skill, but also the skills of one's opponents. Training has become more uniform and it should be expected that there will be a smaller disparity between competitors - this is the overall pattern in other sports as well.

On the other hand, if you look at athletic performance in things like track and field you will see steady improvements over the last hundred years as training methods and sports science has progressed (as one would expect - at the very least, one would expect that performance would not show an average decline). Here's a study that reflects that:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18723588

Quote:
Overall, the relative improvement of athletic performance was higher in women than in men, being nearly doubled across the different specialities. The biggest increases were observed for javelin throw and shot put, in both men and women, respectively. Conversely, the improvement in race time was directly related to the race distance. We also observed a consistent significant linear model of WRs progression in time, although the improvement has substantially stopped or reached a plateau in several specialities.
Performance has nearly doubled on average, and hasn't declined anywhere (on average, of course). Can you say the same in Aikido, for which there is a similar timeline?

In any case, my personal observation, from training with many first generation students of Morihei Ueshiba down to the fourth or fifth generation today (sometimes more) supports the case for a general decline in skills. Not a few of the first and second generation folks have expressed the same sentiments to me - Mitsugi Saotome recently expressed a similar sentiment in an open room, FWIW.

Of course, my personal obeservations are not scientific, so folks will have to decide for themselves. If you think that things are great the way they are then that's great and you should enjoy it.

"Or perhaps, even if they hit that wall they are unaware of it and just continue on doing the same thing."
-Kanshu Sunadomari


And with that....I'll step out again.

Best,

Chris

  Reply With Quote