Musings on the perceived state of some TMA

so i'm bored at 4+ AM (as of starting this post) having had both coffee and sugar, and am pondering some things re: how and why the modern representation of aikido (read: what we see in plenty of videos and which generally gets poo-poo'd by many, sadly often not without adequate reason) seems to FUBAR so much in terms of how it's trained (as do several arts of varying similarity, such as some taijutsu and JJJ exponents, and even my own karate and kung fu peeps, the IMA in particular generally being very guilty of this). bear in mind this is opinion based on things seen, not personally experienced, and is thus liable to be less than veridical in places (the point is to incentivize discussion by and with experienced exponents via an opinion that might very well be misguided and is thus open to correction, not to presume to state fact, something which i am unqualified to do). also note that my opinion, which shall follow shortly (inb4 'that's because YOU'RE short!' ), is conditioned in part by two things:

first, my own idiosyncrasy, that TMA necessarily should involve, for lack of a better/less cliché phrase, (with heavy air quotes) "killing intent" in its movements in order to be trained correctly, by which i don't mean trying to kill your training partners, which just makes you an external anal sphincter, but rather that your technique and your movement should be informed by what it would be like if your intent were to do it so that it would actually disable your opponent if done for real, inasmuch as such can be adapted into the training parameters used for a given drill or training method (or, more simply, do the bloody movements right, you numbnuts :ban: ).
secondly, by what i've read, heard, seen, etc, both on MAP (courtesy of the local koryu and taijutsu folks, of good old Koyo, the other makotokai folks here, etc) and otherwise (reading about the kata and striking techniques in classical kodokan judo, for example), about the presence of things in the olden days of yore that are not well maintained today (the aforementioned judo strikes, the reasons i think i remember about why the formal strikes of aikido are done like they're done, as relating to its JJJ roots, etc), about the crosstraining of early high-level judo, karate and aikido exponents, and so on.

on to the crux of the matter, i'll latch on to a few commonly perceived and criticized things, opine on them, on why/where i believe they might have gone wrong, and what i'd personally do differently/how my idiosyncrasy would interrelate with them, and then i'll turn the reins over to you guys (particularly guys like dean, jwt, bassai, makotokai, fusen, dunc, etc) for you in turn to give you opinions and (counter?) arguments where you feel them appropriate.

le short list of common criticisms that come to mind on which i want to comment (all of which are linked in various ways, as is my opinion on them):
-lack of resistance training/aliveness/zyblarth/whatever.
-unrealistic attacks.
-training partners falling over by themselves.
-lack of "complete" response to an attack.

point one: lack of "aliveness":
-opinion: yeah, barring folks like Koyo and his makotokai for aikido, with people who actually seem to try to hit each other, there seems to be a lot of folks (and goddamn, this is a fricking pandemic among many TMA in general) who simply don't train with/against a stimulus that makes what they're doing actually develop useful attributes. on the one hand, i am, as a fanatic TMAist, a pretty big advocate of both solo and paired training of formal basics - kihon in karate, jibengong in CMA, the five(?) 'kyo' moves in aikido, etc - as exercises not necessarily done for appicability (that, for me, having its own separate training) but to develop physical attributes. on the other hand, the adage that form follows function, and so to develop motor patterns with carryover to application, the form of the movement must follow the function of the movement, and that cannot be known without being exposed to the situation for which the technique is intended. in other words, if you're going to do something that works off an attempt to bonk you in the head, then have someone try to bloody bonk you in the head. it doesn't have to be full contact, but if the attack stops before contact, or deviates before hitting or whatnot, then you will not develop the skill to deal with the motor pattern used when the attack IS done with full force, therefore your training of the basic technique is useless. moreal of the story: bonk each other in the head to learn how to avoid being bonked in the head. which leads to...

point two: unrealistic attacks:
most of what would be the obvious answer here is expressed in the prior point, so i'll attack it from a different but realated angle: the why of such attacks being as they are. aikido's shomen uchi, karate's oi-zuki, the taijutsu lunge punch, all these are often reviled for their strangeness and for their apparent disconnect from what are considered common attacks (see such concepts as HAOV/HAOPV, for example). i cannot really speak on taijutsu punching, but krotty is another matter. if i were to be asked, i would say that yes, oi-zuki has a use as a training tool: very overt, vary large movement, giving a large margin of error for learning to move with good body connection. as for its use in drills, step sparring etc, the same applies: one the one hand, large, overt movements give the training partner a greater chance to spot and react to bodily cues (thus being a good initial training tool), and on the other hand, i do not see kihon step sparring as application training, but rather as a necessarily controlled environment for initial learning of, and adaptation to, stimuli that approximate that against which your techniques should prepare you for (ie not necessarily a full-force attack meant to split your head open, but still going along all the proper lines* and exerting force in the proper directions). all of this, in my opinion, should gradually be supplemented and eventually all-but-replaced by free-flowing technique training, application drills, sparring, etc, kept only as a way to brush up, as a short step for new techniques where they might exist, and for tradition and fun (yes, i have weird ideas of "fun" ).

*always keeping in mind that form follows function; proper lines: those that achieve the intended objective, not those completely fixed by tradition and that account for no possible reason for variation.

which leaves us with the third category, in which we see such things as aikido's open-handed strikes, which are aesthetically very cool-looking, but in terms of realism in a modern context could be considered somewhat... dorky, i guess . now, again, i don't have experience in aikido or koryu (so please tear this down if i derp), but as far as my second hand "knowledge" on it goes, i am led to believe these are a direct carryover from jujutsu in koryu styles, and koryu styles come from a time period and location where i am led to believe that there was a certain likelihood of being attacked with the weapons that also formed part of koryu styles, among them such things as swords, polearms and other such weapons used with slashing actions (as well as simply having untrained or half-trained people attack you with something, which might mean an angry peasant trying to bash your skull in with a piece of wood). now something like a katana would be swung with full intent to at least attempt to, say, cut you in half or somesuch, and for something like a club or other bludgeon, i think it's fair to say you'd also put a fair amount of momentum behind the blow. now, training this with weapons is somewhat risky, particularly in a time period and location where medicine was less than stellar, so simulating these attacks with open hands starts to make a whole lot of sense; bonking someone upside the head with a stick, minus the stick, equals something like a shomen-uchi, and defending against shomen-uchi, with both attack and defense done with proper intent, prepares you to receive one (one!) similar attack with a weapon, while focusing on neutralizing the person wielding the weapon, rather than obsessing on the weapon and potentially failing epically by ignoring your actual opponent. however, add decades of mutation, abolish fighting to the death, maintain strict ultra-orthodox adherence to established doctrine while ignoring changes to it, perhaps even simply fail to transmit correctly the reasons for a given training method, and form stops following function and becomes its own animal (again, a veritable TMA pandemic). this annihilates the correct intent for the technique performed, and perpetuates a vicious cycle of nothing being trained correctly. following the same caveat of the way i approach karate kihon re: training and applicability, my opinion and prescription is therefore essentially the same as in point one: if you're going to use things like a shomen-uchi to train a set-up for a technique, then you bloody well better do it against someone who will shomen-uchi you like he wants to smash your head straight down into your ribcage, and you better approach it like he IS gonna smash your head straight down into your ribcage. then once you got it down, apply it to more complete and contextually appropriate training against having your head bonked.

point three (goddamn, this is getting long-winded. coffee is bad for me): compliant partners falling over by themselves, not resisting, etc:
specifically for the aikido example, i would think this has two significant points of origin (but again i'm basically speaking out of my **** and corrections would serve both to un-dumb me and to leave a public busting of whatever myth i might be perpetuating): one is the fact that since heavy emphasis is placed on throws and takedowns, some of which involve joint manipulation that can be dangerous to resist if applied with intent and appropriate skills and physicality, heavy emphasis must also be placed on safely surviving said things being trained on one, and another possibly (wild speculation ahoy!) being due to the presumable weapon-use origin of the types of attacks used. easier to swing a sword all the way around to split someone down the middle, and you definitely don't usually get a compelling reason to pull a blow with a heavy bludgeon either, so remove the weapon and you get what looks like an overcommitted unarmed attack, easily used due to momentum to facilitate breakfalls and flipping to bail out of quick joint manipulations, add the aforementioned FUBAR-ing factors, and a healthy dose of pacifism, maybe in some cases remove suburi practice that would have enabled you stop and reverse your momentum such as might be useful if missing a swing or otherwise having to re-balance yourself, and you get what dear Koyo called 'aiki-bunnies', who will do all sorts of crazy acrobatics upon merely being touched, and even in the absence of all these factors, will result, particularly in demonstrations where on actually might want it to look flashy, in even properly done techniques resulting in rampant flipping and rolling simply because it allows both people to train as much as possible at the same time. of course, my beloved old karate is not excempted from this either, albeit more often in ways more related to prior points such as not aiming at proper targets, pulling attacks, not even lightly resisting, etc, and the same thing applies: compliance, in some contexts, has its uses and its place, but it it's out of said place, those uses disappear and it's a hindrance to proper training. know when and where to yield and resist according to what you are working on with a particular drill or exercise (and if you don't know what you are supposed to work on, ask, or try to reason out possible uses and adapt where appropriate).

finally (SOON! this should be a short one too), point four: the lack of a complete response to an attack:
this is i think what is most often thought about when a lack of aliveness is mentioned: lunge punch, stand there while tori does his thing, pretend to die, c'est fini. my reaction to this is to both agree and disagree, as with pretty much all of the above: no, it's not going to teach you how to fight, not now, not in a thousand years, not ever. no, it's not realistic, and no, it's not going to teach you how to apply your techniques under pressure. on the other hand, as an initial step, as mentioned earlier, it can be used as a controlled environment for safe and relatively hassle-free super-basic training. this super-basic training, however, has to be done properly - what i mean by which should be pretty evident by now - and MUST be but a single step along the journey, progressively followed by increases in both intensity and complexity of the drills and practices employed, moving towards free-flow rather than rigid formal technique, semi-scripted drills rather than rigid step-sparring, semi-free sparring in a controlled environment (ie with specific goals, such as successfully applying a given technique, or defending against one, having only one party attack and the other defend, working on a type of footwork or body movement, etc) and MMA-type free sparring within the constraints placed on one by available equipment, insurance, degree of insanity of all involved, etc.

i once read (but can't remember where or from whom) a rather heavy-handed phrase about one of the biggest karate organizations, saying that they produced "the best white belts in the world, but called them fifth dans". the phrase has mainly stayed with me for comedy value, although in truth it's something of a huge insult towards those about whom it talked, however i believe it illustrates a huge part of what i'm trying to say in this insomnia, sugar and caffeine fuelled wall of text: basics are your cradle as a martial artist, but you can't stay in the cradle forever .

and with all that said, it's 6:27 AM so i'll turn this over to you for comments, abuse, or whatever else you might feel like flinging my way. btw, first one to say tl;dr is a no-touch KO peddler. toodles!

:ban:

 

As soon as you take the "fighting" out of an art it begins to die. That's why arts like Muay Thai, Kyokushin, and boxing have all survived for significant periods of time yet have maintained effectiveness, when so many other arts have declined into LARPing and general ineffectiveness.

It is my belief that ineffectiveness in martial arts stems from an absence of hard contact from skilful opponents who are trying to harm you. On the downside, learning to fight tends to hurt and I can sort of understand why some people prefer to LARP. I'm currently dealing with my third blood nose of the week, and I can imagine that sort of hard contact puts a lot of people off. In fact I know that 99% of people that try sparring at my gym drop out after a week, they just don't find a high level of contact enjoyable.

Also... tl;dr

 

No more coffee for that man.

 

Quite honestly there's a lot LARPing and general ineffectiveness in kyokushin too.
They just happen to have a rock hard sparring/competition format that only tough people can manage or, if they can stick it out, makes more normal people tougher.
Kyokushin fighters aren't good fighters because they stand around doing static kihon or ura-kata for hours on end.

 

1) tl;dr

2) I jest, I did read it. Dude...you need to lay off the late night sugar and coffee. But I applaud you for taking the time to write that anyway :happy:

3) To be totally honest your points were all pretty much well reasoned out, logical and with obvious solutions that would make sense except for the people who desperately want to cling to "tradition" or whatever excuse you want to insert. So I'm not sure how much else there is to add to what you have written.

Re. point 1: I'm in pretty much complete agreement. But the problem I've encountered (especially in the Aikido dojo I train at) is not that people don't swing with intent but the people who think that they're swinging with intent but generally aren't. I've not found a way to get those kinds of people to take a more honest swing or apply locks properly without generally winding them up first.

Re. third category: I've always felt that shomen uchi in Aikido could be considered more like someone is going to smash a bottle over your head and yokomen uchi could be considered more like a wild haymaker w/ similar arc and aggression. Which would make it more relevant in a modern context to more people but that's just my view. It's not one I've expressed in the dojo so I haven't really had much feedback on that one.

Hahahaha, that's some serious burn!

 

well, something i like to do is what i refer to as "slow but heavy" and variations thereof. basically hitting properly without full-power, but without pulling the strike (ie don't accelerate it to maximum speed, but try to use good technique for it, and follow through). that lets you use contact without going full pelt, and provides resistance against which one can work, just at a lower intensity. if they have trouble developing that against someone else, i would have them do it with padwork, then with light body-shots and gradually increasing intensity as they figure out that no one's dying or anything. if that still doesn't cut it, i would probably lay down on the ground and cry myself to sleep.

 

I don't really know anything about Aikido, so I could be talking rubbish, but I get the impression that a lot of the strikes in aikido are actually exaggerated grabbing motions. So when someone throws a big, looping, open handed shuto uchi in Aikido, that might actually have evolved out of pantomiming reaching out to catch hold of the opponent.

 

I might add "lack of combinations". Attacking with one fully commuted attack is rather in effective and easy to avoid.

 

that's what i meant by lack of completeness, but i phrased it kinda wonky because it was 6 am . consider it as addressing both incomplete responses and incomplete attacks

 

martial arts without the martial
aliveness keeps the arts alive.

LARPing isnt a bad thing when it comes to preserving the culture of certain styles like replicating the environment of warfare in an alive manner of the samurai days when practising koryuu (the HEMA folks do this)
or the naval warfare methods of hawaiian Lua in conjunction with armed and unarmed combat

 

You are not talking rubbish, but whether grabbing or striking, the motions in Aikido are based primarily on weapons (cutting) rather than unarmed striking. It's more about angles and distance than realism in many cases.

For example, the one step taken by uke before they are in striking range is to allow tori to develop timing. I think maybe a flaw in this timing is with the size of the step taken.

For a punch, the step should be small and start closer together. Then add in a tanto/knife, now the distance is further, so bigger step. Then add in bokken/sword, and a bigger step...etc.

Edit: I don't necessarily mean a bigger step by uke (although there may be), but a bigger step by tori. Uke has a weapon, they don't necessarily need to take a bigger step to reach you, because the weapon adds range. As Tori, though, you will want to be further away to compensate for the weapon range.

The point is that if you are developing timing, start close in and move out... so the ease of two feet away is transferred to being six feet away. IMHO.

 

If you define wasting time as "believing you are training to be better at fighting while not actually making any real progress, or making very slow and limited progress" I don't think people who aren't regularly dealing with punches to the head are necessarily wasting their time. Many arts such as judo, BJJ, and wrestling all manage to impart skills that transfer to some degree to fighting, without having to deal with strikes to the head. Of course if you want to train to be good at striking, or to learn how to defend against striking, then you are going to have to actually practice dealing with strikes. The more you deal with actual strikes, the better you will get. There is a limit to how much progress you can make (and how quickly) if you are not regularly training by dealing with realistic attacks delivered with intent.

 

I have had major issues getting used to contact (and only recently made a major breakthrough) so I find this an interesting question. I believe a coach should be putting students far enough outside their comfort zone that making it through sparring provides a sense of achievement. However, beginners should not be placed so far outside their comfort zone that they feel totally frustrated. If you consistently feel overwhelmed, or up against insurmountable odds, then thoughts of quitting are bound to creep in. I think frustration is a much bigger issue than the level of contact. Most people can cope with pretty hard shots, so long as they feel they are progressing.

 

i'm with kave on that one. also note that while i'm of the gradual progression camp, i also started with some degree of contact pretty much from the get go, and you do need to increase the intensity, rather than consigning someone to a certain level of contact. it's much more practical IMO (and i would argue builds much more mindful training partners) to use relative contact levels on drills, rather than simply saying "light", "full" or whatever. if different people have different striking power, and different pain tolerance, then that's what should guidebwhat stimulus they receive in training, not a cookie cutter parameter shared with everyone else in the room.

 

In my very limited experience I find that if you pressure someone too much too early then they will bail, but if you coddle them forever they risk failing to progress and the best way around this is to do with the timing and when you introduce them to the new stimulus that is frightening them.

The way I did it was to wait until people started feeling at home at the club and then I'd start pushing them out of their comfort zone.

Once they have invested in their training and are beginning to feel like "one of the gang" they tend to be more willing to force themselves to deal with the added pressure of being hit because they see that as a sort un-avoidable part of their own personal training and not just something being demanded of them by the instructor. At the very least I know that's how I experienced getting over my, quite considerable, fear of getting hit. It just got to a point where the club felt like home and I accepted that this was something I'd have to get desensitized to and I found that while training newer members trying to recreate the same atmosphere worked quite well.