Quote:
Josephine Fan wrote:
I was wondering what everyone else's take on resistance and how teachers should address it in the practice of Aikido....
I always thought it was so that we could learn the techniques cooperatively, and not turn it into a competition. If it's understood between nage and uke that you are helping each other train by giving a bit of resistance to help eachother fine tune their techniques...thanks for your thoughts!
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So there seems to be several things to unpack here, and maybe I am commenting/asking about the part that mattered the least to the OP?
There seems to be two sets of exercises.
Ushiro ryotedori, I learned uke would grab firmly - not stupid crazy, but firmly enough that nage can't just do it wrong. Same with some (not all) morote dori and kokyu doza. Not so much resistance as a feedback mechanism. These usually involve raising a limb that uke is holding, so the martial crowd says, "no one attacks like that on the street!" Connections, timing, a lot of the same kinesiology as beginner power lifting.
The second set of exercises, there's kokyunage, kaitenage, udekimenage, higikime, iriminage - the line between badly done technique and good alignment is valuable, but the neck or elbow gets damaged easily. The line can be very fine, and really it is more about timing than placement and alignment.
So, I can throw and pin some people, but I am not always able to do it without risking injury. I like the Judo practice where a pin is applied and then uke tries to escape. It is safer with some pins compared to others. No beginner will likely know where the line is.
In randori/jiyuwaza, if I meet resistance I change. I never want to learn to chase the clashing. So, stupid practice is someone sticking their head down and demanding that I do iriminage instead of kaitenage, or forcing one's head up for kaitenage because I am not going to force the head down when the whole torso just opened up for strikes.
Posture testing has a narrow role for specific practices, but I would not call it resistance though it is progressive resistance. I hope that makes sense.