Resisting Aikido Shihan

Giancarlo,

You and I shared a dojo together for almost a year.
Please tone it down. I know where all the skeletons are.

Chris Parkerson

Chris Parkerson wrote: Giancarlo, You and I shared a dojo together for almost a year. Please tone it down. I know where all the skeletons are. Chris Parkerson

And the plot thicken.... <insert Alfred Hitchcock movie soundtrack here>

Boon.

Sorry Giancarlo you are totally missing the point when you compare resisting techniques on the mat to a real fight.
An Aikidoka generally knows what is going to happen and more importantly is more flexible with stronger wrists than the guy in the street.
The guy in a real fight, as someone rightly pointed out, is giving you a committed attack. He does not, however, know what is happening when you react and I can assure you even a poorly applied sankyo, kotegaeshi or nikyo will cause serious pain to anyone who has never experienced it.
As to your claim to having fights in the Dojo! You would only behave once like that in my Dojo or any of the numerous Dojo I have trained in and you would be shown the door.

its interesting giancarlo posts so much about resisting this resisting that, resisiting shihan, but i do remember some of us turning the tables on him at a seminar (before he was banned from ours and countless others dojos), and he screamed "ST0P RESISTING ME!"

this resulted in him taking refuge in our locker room feigning stomach problems and he finally left.

251 Posts and what have we learned?
GDP:
1. No longer has a Dojo or students
2. Is a "teacher" that teaches by personal "skill" and not by rank. Actually doesnt have any rank or any confirmed rank in any Aikido Organizations or Iaito Styles.
3. Endorses resistance training in Aikido practice.

And it took 251 posts in this thread, a couple of other threads to figure this out.

In all, a lot of discussion some friendly some not so. I think we can all agree if you invite someone to grab hard/firm then you are inviting uke to try and stop you. How you judge this type of training is up to you. At least prepare yourself for a contest and don't get bent out of shape when you are resisted. When in fact it is you that set the table for this fight.

If you get stopped by Uke because you invited this type of attack or training, then the blame is with you. Resisting during a cooperative training period equates to behaving like a tool. Any knuckle head can throw a wrench in the works during practice when practicing the same throw, lock or whatever, over and over.

One last thing stopping a Sensei isnt exactly an accomplishment or wearing a badge. Once I stopped my teacher because I was, and still kind of am, a big heavy lug. I "stopped" him because his knee gave out while using me for Koshi Nage, sending us both to the floor. Luckily I was able to roll out and not land on him. So my claim to Aikido fame would be that I stopped my 6th Dan ranked Sensei by squashing him with my weight????????? Hardly the moniker I want, Bill the Sensei Squasher. Now I will be faced with endless challengers pitting their knee's might against my enhanced "center".

What is funny is how GDP spouts what an accomplishment to have stopped Saotome sensei. When in fact he did eventually throw you. You may have prevented him the first few tries but he did get you in the end. Thats like saying yeah I threw 2 pitches past Barry Bonds for strikes. Nice job but the 3 rd pitch was for a home run. Now claiming Saotome Sensei, or any other Shihan for that matter, could never throw you and proving that beyond a doubt would be something worth mentioning in certain circles.

Yikes....how about a gracefull death?

Oh, sorry, too late...

Best,
Ron

Hi folks,

Can we please return to discussing the issues rather than the persons and personalities involved?

Thank you,

-- Jun

sorry jun, however difficult, we'll try to reel things back in...

so my sempai was telling a story about how he was able to see watanabe shihan (known for his 'touchless throws' at dai nippon aikido embu) when he was at hombu. he watched watanabe sensei repeatedly put his 'compliant' uke on the mat and couldn't believe they were 'just falling' for him. so sensei, notices the look on my sempai's face, and motions for him to come and attack. he went full blazes, and grabbed sensei's arm letting him know he wasn't screwing around

when watanabe sensei realized that, he laughed, cracked my sempai in the face a few times, and drilled him into the mat. and that's when my sempai realized what the magic of atemi was. the next 3 waza went by relatively smoothly.

i think what the shihan buster fails to realize after 'all his years' of training is that, as chiba sensei has pointed out, a grab isn't just a grab. its the representation of an attack. it can be someone coming from the side to hit you with a bottle, or a punch. any uke who walks up to tori and stands right in front of him and holds his hand and doesn't want to get moved will get hit. or should be hit.

Honestly I think this thread has probably reached the end of its useful life now that the peanut gallery has descended unto it, and I'm not going to bother to respond to those kinds of comments. However, I would like to make one statement just to clear things up for anyone who has not been following very closely what I have actually written (which seems to be a lot of people) and is confused or mislead by what other people are mistakenly attributing to me.

Let me make it very clear: stopping any one person, of any rank, means nothing to me. My experience training with resistance is that getting stopped happens all of the time. For the overwhelming majority of people, if not everyone, if you are not failing at least some of the time in the execution of your technique then that is a very good sign that you are not training with any real resistance. I suspect that if you look around at people that do other arts with resistance training they will you the exact same thing.

Therefore, when I hear about an aikido teacher who supposedly trains with resistance and is unstoppable in that context I am curious to find out more. If this were true, I would be very interested in training with such a person. So when I go a seminar and give some level of resistance to a teacher for whom these claims are made, it is not to prove that I can stop him, but to simply find out for myself if that person actually is unstoppable (at least by me). You can imagine my dismay when I find out that these teachers are not only not that difficult to stop, but that their reaction indicates that they are not accustomed to nor interested in such training. Despite the claims, my experience is that they expect the same kind of compliant ukemi everyone else does.

As I've said many times before, if you want to do compliant training, that's fine by me. It doesn't mean that what you are doing is totally worthless, it just means that you aren't doing resistance training, and for me personally that means that I'm not that interested in it. In fact, if all you say you do is compliant training, I'm not going to waste any time at this point to come seek you out and see if I can stop you. It wouldn't make any sense. The people I'm interested in seeing are the ones who claim to train with resistance, since that's what I'm interested in doing. And if they are alleged to be unstoppable despite people attempting to resist them, then I'm very much interested, but I have yet to touch hands with anyone in aikido for whom I have found such claims to be true.

The comment that originally led to this thread, if you look back to the other thread from which it came, was simply that Kato trains with too much compliance for my taste. Not that he's a bad person -- in fact, I made it quite clear that I thought he was a very nice guy -- but that he doesn't train with enough resistance for me. I don't care about what you think he might be able to do in a real fight, I care about how he trains, and based on my direct experience having touched hands with him, it's not what I'm interested in. That is all.

We can go back and forth on this for another 200 posts but what is the point? If guys like Kato and Saotome cannot physically convince me of the value of their training by putting their hands on me, how do you think someone else is going to be able to change that via some words on the Internet? I think you've all made your best effort over the past 3 weeks and you can see that my opinion is no different than it was before.

Son of Tennenhouse...

The sequel!!!

Sorry Folks I could not resist.

William Hazen

Enough said.

Thread closed.

-- Jun