My Doctor Doesn’t Get It

Aikido injury management is a frustrating thing. We all know it because we’ve all been there. Sitting in a Doctor’s office due to some random injury trying to explain to them that aikido is not like judo while they tell us not to train.

That would be fine except for one small problem. None of us is going to listen to that advice; because we are martial artists and therefore never show our pain nor listen to Doctors that don’t understand the training. Over the years one of the most common things I’ve encountered is people asking other aikidoka whether or not they can keep training with a certain injury. That injury may have come about during training, or be completely unrelated to mat time. The result is the same though, attempts to explain to a GP what aikido is, and a rejection of advice not to train.

This inevitably leads to questions in places like Facebook groups along the lines of, “I have X aikido injury, my doctor says I shouldn’t train, what do you all think?” The problem with this is that it generates a lot of advice from people who have no knowledge of the persons medical background, specific injury, physiotherapy programme, or nature of their training. Although well intentioned the advice given should be universally disregarded due to those reasons.

This doesn’t solve the problem though. Now we’re left with making a judgement call. In these modern times that just shouldn’t be necessary. Pictures tell a thousand words and moving pictures even more so.

Realising that this is a problem for us I’ve created a video that can be used to show health care professionals the nature of the training that we undertake in aikido. It has a few qualities that will help in this regard:

• It’s short, at just over 3 minutes this video can be viewed during a consultation
• There is no audio so undisturbed conversation can take place
• It includes a range of techniques that are likely to be encountered during a standard class
• The techniques range from Kihon to 1^st Kyu level
• The techniques show the sort of twisting and turning that is likely to take place as well as the various styles of falling/rolling
• 31 Step Jo Kata is included (it’s entirely possible that with most types of aikido injury weapons can still be trained)

The only locks that are included are kote gaeshi and nikkyo. Part of the reason for that is brevity. Another is that nikyo and kote gaeshi are at opposite ends of the wrist. If you aren’t allowed to do either of those chances are you shouldn’t be doing any of the others.

The footage is reasonably old (taken from nidan days) which explains the poor technique in places, but it should suffice for the intended purposes. Also the weapons work is sped up a bit.

With luck you’ll find this useful and be able to show your GP/Physiotherapist/Surgeon something that will actually inform their opinion.