It is a no win situation (been there) when you are told that aikido cannot be described by words let alone taught by them that the art must be "learned" through the pores of the skin on the mat.Then told to write an essay . I do not think that aikido is "complicated" The principles are basic and familiar to many other martial arts. However once we begin to understand the principles, the possibilities are endless. This is why I am still training after more than forty years. I teach mainly principles and keep it very simple. Move off line, unbalance the attacker, strike throw or pin.It makes me smile when someone after a couple of years "discovers" a princilpe that they were shown in their first days of training. regards koyo
Indeed, what you teach makes absolute sense however, as you indicate it’s a no win situation because, using your comments as the example, you must teach a beginner how to move off line using the appropriate taisabaki akin to: 1. Style of aikido being taught. 2. The method of attack in relation to the application being taught. 3. etc etc Of course I appreciate that with some experience a student doesn't need to take particular hamni or limit his/her thoughts to 'responses' but; to get to that stage students need to be grounded in foundation skills, they are mainly (in my experience) physical or "mechanical" as I described before but, their training should also focus on better understanding gensoku, the principles explain the way and why of our art. With a solid understanding of principle based aikido, aikido becomes IMHO more natural, indeed takemusuaiki ! Not to mention making the aikidoka more rounded both theoretically and physically. As an example, I met a yudansha recently who questioned me about my explanation of shihonage and its close relationship with ken application. Apparently he never knew the correlation between the taiso and bukiwaza, although his shiohnage was passable in terms of technical quality, with an understanding of the ken influence and corrections to his alignment and hanmi his technique was far better.
I was most fortunate in having as my main instructor Chiba shihan who would more often answer a question with "What do you think." causing you to think for yourself. Most instruction would be that he simply applied the technique on you..allowed you to FEEL it.. then watch as you attempted to "understand " it. As you say many students simply mimic the instructors instead of attempting to understand the underlying principles. It has been my experience that students who concentrate on basic principles , more so than the techniques, tend to progress quicker. One thing though. In my early training the partner did not "assist" in any way other than slowing down the attack during keiko (study). During renshu (training) the attacks were always made outside the comfort zone.If you did not move you were in danger of being stuck rather powerfully. If you did not unbalance then you were countered. regards koyo Tada shihan said that you must never allow students to train outside of their ability. Meaning do not assist in the execution of throws.
Many Japanese instructors, especially those earlier students (now shihan) will often teach with little verbal prompting, I too have trained with Chiba Sensei and experienced his teaching with little verbal explanation and also when he's gone out of his way to explain quite clearly what he's teaching, perhaps that's an effect of living and teaching in the US, I speculate on that point however, whilst I fully agree with you about students who understand principles, progress more or less quicker, but, as I said in an earlier post, you cannot teach principles (theory) of a physical thing without practicing the mechanical aspects appropriate to what you are doing, one may then neglect one aspect for the other and in doing so fail to fully understand what there is to know about the discipline one studies. General principles as I see them are those which you yourself stated in an earlier post however, many techniques whilst sharing those general principles also have their own based upon the influences and origins of the waza being studied.
perhaps i should qualify what i meant by complicated from a beginners perspective, tell them that to drive a car will take independant movement of all four limbs, whilst simultaenously maintaining their spatial awarness and timing, they'd look at you gone out yet after a couple of stalls and a few jerky rides it all starts to gel clench hand into fist and direct to target via the shortest path, in the shortest time, with your body weight behind it is a far less complicated concept to understand at the outset than say yokomen uchi shihonage ichi once understood the principles behind the technique make sense and its realisation becomes easier, until then 'punch the fool in the face' makes a lot more sense
Hi Dave thank you for your clarification. Like any skill, practice makes perfect. I'm currently learning to fly "30 sized" (four and a half foot long) remote controlled helicopters - Raptor 30 v2 to be specific.. Now, the principles of rotary wing flight are quite simple to understand (provided you ignore aerodynamic calculuous) - weight vs power vs lift. The principles of control are somewhat more mind bending with potentially 6 channels to command ! but, as with your point, once you start physical practice the mind bending starts to make sense over time. Aikido is no different.
