Thread: Is this true!?
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Old 10-28-2006, 09:09 AM   #18
ian
 
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Dojo: University of Ulster, Coleriane
Location: Northern Ireland
Join Date: Oct 2000
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Re: Is this true!?

Variations on this thread are always occuring. Basically in competition its quite hard to use since people know roughly what you are going to do and are doing speculative jabs to draw you out.

In real life people attack from behind the sides, multiple attacks, and are usually far more aggressive and don't use tentative jabs (just a sudden wallop with which they tend to knock you unconcious or a grab or push proceeding such a strike).

As an illustration, I had to save a karate instructor (an aquaintence) who, in an argument, was just picked straight up and thrown on to his back and then battered from the mount position. (just put a choke on the person who was in the mount position, which also illustrates the fact that ground-fighting has its weaknesses as well).

Learn to strike really hard and fast and learn a bit of ground-fighting, but focus on your aikido, and I think you'd cover yourself well with self-defence. If you want to compete you need to know the rules of the competition and then base your attacks around these rules (even NHB won't allow you to use a bottle or to enlist the help of your drunken friends). For example you could just jump on this bloke unexpectedly and do a rear choke to illustrate this point - this type of attack would pretty much work on anyone, regardless of ability, but you have to know how to do it properly.

Keep your mind open and you're right to question yourself! From my experience aikido works well for a multitude of self-defence situations (if you can also strike and do some basic groundwork), but is unlikely to work well in a competition. Also, the instructors ability to teach and his understanding of self-defence as well as your natural ability is usually more important than the martial art you are doing.

(*) PS this is not 'dissing' karate - nobody is undefeatable.

---understanding aikido is understanding the training method---
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