You Need to Stand Up Straight
One of the most difficult things that aikidoka have to do is maintain their structure. In this post I’m specifically going to focus on the importance of being upright. There are many aspects to having good posture and one of those is simply standing up straight. Many people think they are standing up straight but when you look at them it is quite obvious that their spine is bent and they’re hunching over. This isn’t always our own fault though. Almost everything around is is designed to make us slouch.…
Why you need to pay attention at courses
Last month I attended a course in Holland hosted by Ruud Van Ginkel and the Aikido Centruum. The visiting instructor was 8th Dan Shihan Shimamoto Katsuyuki. This is an annual course that is worth every penny it costs me in airfare (from Scotland), food, hotels, fees, etc. There are certain reasons for that and here’s just one of them. When you’re at a course you’re there to learn from someone that you will very seldom get to see. This means you have to pay attention at courses. To everything. You could just…
What About Pressure Testing in Aikido?
There is an idea that keeps cropping up in aikido at the moment. I’m not sure how long it’s been rumbling along for, but it seems to have come to the forefront of social media in recent times. The argument runs a bit like this – Aikido training is worthless because it does not include pressure testing. The first thing to address with that statement is what, exactly, is meant by pressure testing. This is where things start to diverge a little. It may not surprise you to learn that…
Finding a Place to Train
A question that I get asked a lot is, ‘How do I find a new dojo?’ On the face of it that seems like a bad question to be asked. It sort of implies that my students can’t stand me and want to go somewhere else. Happily this isn’t the case (as far as I know anyway). It’s actually a natural consequence of running a dojo in a university. Every year the most senior students graduate and, in many cases, leave the country to start a life elsewhere. Inevitably this…
A Problem At The Heart Of Aikido
The Martial, the Philosophical, and the False Division Over the last number of years I have come to realise there is a fundamental, false division amongst aikidoka. It’s an interesting one and very easy to define. On one side there are aikidoka that are convinced that aikido is a martial art. On the other, there are aikidoka convinced it is not a martial art. What intrigues me about this is that they vehemently disagree with each other. For a group of people studying a system of harmony, the depth of…
That really painful lock? Yeah, it doesn’t actually hurt.
There’s a really common idea in aikido that if it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t work. I can understand where this sentiment comes from. If somebody applies a nikkyo lock to you then it’s usually accompanied by pain. That tends to be how it works. The classic one for this though, is yonkyo. People groan when yonkyo practice is announced because it means they’re in for a lesson of pressure point squeezing pain. The catch though, is that yonkyo doesn’t hurt. None of the katame-waza in aikido actually hurt. They can…
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…
You must remain calm and never poke your uke’s brain
For this months topic we’re going to take a look at one of the more advanced concepts of aikido. This is likely to be much more of a style relevant subject though all aikidoka should strive to remain calm. Some styles for instance seem to go out of their way to ignore this subject but almost everyone’s aikido can be improved by taking this idea to heart and applying it to their technique. This idea is that you really shouldn’t disturb the mental processes of your uke. For the purposes of…
Observe the Line of Attack
There is a well known concept in aikido that it’s almost impossible to be unfamiliar with. Chances are that you came across it during your first lesson. We usually refer to that concept as the ‘Line of Attack’ (LoA). It’s a basic idea that forms a fundamental principle within our art and likely several others as well. The LoA is an imaginary line that connects uke with nage and is the line along which uke attacks. It is generally considered to be straight and the shortest distance between uke and…
The Most Common Mistake In Kaiten Nage
Kaiten nage is a fascinating technique. We can learn many lessons while performing it but I think we often miss one of the most important. It takes place during the uchi form but not the soto. Rather, it is more obvious in the uchi form. It concerns where the elbow in kaiten nage goes. The specific part of the form that we are going to examine here is after the entry under the arm. Just at the point where nage turns to face the same direction as uke but before…