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Old 09-17-2007, 02:18 PM   #23
G DiPierro
Location: Ohio
Join Date: Mar 2002
Posts: 365
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Re: Aikido vs. Kickboxing (video)

Quote:
Michael Douglas wrote: View Post
...and some of the defenses in this demo were suicidal.
The kneeling (00:10) to let a roundhouse go over the head? Hilarious.
The catching of a high roundhouse (00:15) involved no effective defense of the head and a properly distanced kick would have landed on the head/jaw/neck with a high probability of KO.
Blatant and awful tanking at (00:26,28,29,31). Shouldn't be allowed!
The defense against low kicks appears to be no defense at all, I must be missing something.
Lastly, the kicker is obviously an aikidoka too and loves the flashy falling down bits.
Good analysis. The technique at the 0:30 mark was particularly egregious. Nage taps uke on the side of the neck in a way that has no physical effect at all, and uke takes a forward roll. It's a like Pavlovian response: whenever nage makes a movement that indicates that he intends for uke to fall, uke responds by taking a fall. Might as well just ring a bell and get rid of any pretense of actual technique (like this). Sadly, this kind of thing is very common in aikido, so I can¡Çt say that this clip is any worse than the majority of the aikido out there. Most aikido has become a demonstration art that will not work outside the dojo (and in many cases, won¡Çt even work in other aikido dojos that do not belong to a specific style or organization).

The main problem with this clip is the suggestion by the title that these techniques would actually work against a kickboxer. I don¡Çt think that was the intent of the person who made these clips, and I suspect the attacker in this video is not a kickboxer at all but an aikido student of the person demonstrating in the clip who probably has a little bit of experience in an art like karate or TKD but has by now been well trained to fall at the right times to make his teacher look good. The title seems to have been an invention of whomever posted this to youtube originally; it has been reposted by the creator (along with a second installment that has a few techniques that could actually work against a real attack) more recently under the less ambitious title "geri-waza".

Last edited by G DiPierro : 09-17-2007 at 02:22 PM.
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