I Trained 5000 Hours of Aikido in Japan

Yes, you read the title correctly. I trained 5,000 hours of Aikido in Japan across about three years. How I ended up doing so is a twist of fate and coincidence that is well beyond the scope of this video, but it's something I can cover later on the channel if you want. All you need to know is that my background is in karate, which is mostly full contact in my case, and Judo. And yes, Aikido. But Aikido, at least prior to Japan, was always my least favorite of the three by a huge margin. It was something I mostly did because it was being offered at the dojo I trained at, and for me, it was just more training. If it was going to happen after the classes I was already taking anyway, might as well sign up. Most YouTube content dealing with Aikido typically has the creator learning a bit of it and then drawing conclusions, which is totally fine and reasonable. Not everyone can dump 5,000 hours into a new art. But given Aikido's reputation, I wanted to give my impressions of the art from the perspective of someone who not only live spars often, but also as someone who has dropped a massive number of hours into the art, in the country of its origin, and in, as you'll soon find, a very serious training atmosphere. So without meandering any further here, let me talk about the good and the bad. I'm going to start with the positive things because it's really going to inform some of the bad things in the second half of the video. One good thing that I think a lot of commentators miss about Aikido, which really starts to become evident the longer you do it, is that there actually is an internal logic to it, and it's pretty grounded in reality. Folks often get caught up in the minor wrist manipulations or the bombastic execution of takedowns, but a lot of that is missing the forest for the trees. Aikido fundamentally has three major goals that it, at least in my experience, typically checks for in the following order. Goal number one, separate the opponent's elbow from their torso. This is actually a grappling 101 concept, and it's the reason why wrestlers keep their arms tucked so often. It's been a minute, but Preet Mikkelsen on Defensive BJJ talks about this quite a bit. I'm pretty sure Jordan on Jordan Teaches Jiu Jitsu does too, and it's a really fundamental wrestling concept in general. You'll probably hear it in most high schools, if not explicitly, then certainly implicitly. I have a lot more to say about whether or not Aikido is a grappling art at all and how it differs from grappling because I actually think shoving it into this category of grappling art sometimes really cripples the way that people approach it and therefore cripple their development as well. But that isn't to say that it doesn't use these foundational grappling concepts like separating the arm from the torso. In Aikido, this is often attempted with joint manipulations. If that fails, usually the next goal, goal number two, is to take the back. I feel like I don't need to introduce why taking the back is a good thing. What is somewhat unique to Aikido, though, is that while you're attempting to joint lock a wrist, usually the opponent tucks their arm, pulls away, or otherwise just gets really focused on not getting locked up. This puts them in a dilemma because they aren't protecting their face from strikes if they're tucking their arm. I'll return to the issue of strikes later. Or their focus on defending their arm in a hand fight opens up an opportunity for entry into their back. And finally, when one or both of these things fail, you can aim for goal number three. Control the head and or hips for a takedown. This is, again, just fundamentally grappling. Now, I'm totally oversimplifying things here a bit for the sake of communicating the idea concisely, but essentially Aikido does have a systemic logic to it. If you've ever seen one of those BJJ technique flow charts, that's basically what this is. Now, do people try to turn this into something magical and hokey? Yes, they absolutely do, and that's really stupid. And Aikido does, in fairness, approach these common grappling goals with some fairly unconventional concepts. Most grappling arts put a lot of emphasis on taking away posts, usually people's legs, or getting under someone's center of mass. Aikido mostly seeks to take people down by moving their torso away from their center of gravity and uses movement to achieve that. I've talked very little about joint locks in the context of takedowns here, but that's because most of Aikido's joint locks, at least in my view, aren't really concerned with being takedowns. If that happens, then great, but most of the falls Aikido people take out of joint manipulations are really done for training purposes and because taking a fall is often less painful than just getting your wrist tied up and standing. In my view, most of the arm and wrist manipulations exist mostly to take away balance or put people under threat of a lock to open up other opportunities. If you get a complete lock or takedown, that's just kind of the cherry on top, but I think viewing those standing locks as failures when they don't result in a takedown is kind of a misnomer. So this is the first good thing. It's not sorcery. It's not magic. It's not cultish, satanic ritual, whatever else people are saying. It really is just a kind of grappling. An odd one, for sure, but it shares many of the fundamental goals as just about any other grappling art on a physiological level. Second great thing about training in Japan was that I was in a university club. Now, don't misconstrue the word club here to mean something recreational. University clubs in Japan are much closer to university sports teams in terms of expectations and intensity. One criticism I have of a lot of Aikido, even in Japan, is that it rarely seems to be an art done by people who actually want to take it seriously as an athletic pursuit. There are tons of overweight guys or people with two left feet online who are more than willing to pontificate on theory or philosophize about the moral underpinnings of the founder's worldview and never really have punched anybody in their entire lives. These are very rarely the same people who actually train hard. This was not an issue in Japan. We were training for about 30 hours a week, not including film study, private lessons, informal practice, or the week-long training camps. If you were injured, you were still expected to be there. You were expected to sit in the corner and take notes. If you showed up late, that's 100 consecutive breakfalls. If you commit infractions of etiquette, that's 100 consecutive breakfalls. If it's cardio day during a training camp, it's sets of 100 consecutive breakfalls. If you give up during 100 consecutive breakfalls, then you owe the remainder and another 100 consecutive breakfalls at a future date. Fitness and conditioning was handled very well, and flexibility was also expected. There was just zero tolerance for slacking on your fitness and conditioning. One final good thing was that the level of training was just very high quality. Something I really enjoyed about the club, and granted this is a bit subjective on my part, was that things were rarely hand-fed to you. You would get instructions, you would get advice, but if you ran into a technical problem, it was kind of up to you to find the solution. There was a lot of support, but the implication was very much that your development is on you. In the post-internet, consumer-driven age, a lot of martial artists want to see progress quickly and tend to put most of the burden to produce those results on the gym or on the coach. But here, it was kind of the opposite. You had to want it. If you didn't want to put in the time, then you can always just quit the club. No big deal. I think this approach was especially useful in the context of Aikido because getting techniques to actually work can be very technically demanding. Given my Judo background, for example, when I was developing a new technique for my game, I could often compensate with strength or general athleticism when something went wrong to still pull off a throw. In Aikido, although there is some of that, I found that the line that divides success from failure is as absolute as it is thin. If your technique isn't on point, things just fall apart. It's either you do or you don't. There isn't a whole lot of gray area. And I know many people would judge that as a negative thing, that it's proof of the techniques being low percentile or whatever. But it really breeds this mentality for technical perfection that I haven't really experienced anywhere else. Again, in Judo, most guys are totally fine with maybe being 85% technically in the ballpark and then 15% of muscling through it. In Aikido, a lot of my peers would be like, no, I stepped at a 50 degree angle instead of a 45 degree angle. We need to keep drilling. Or, no, it was completely wrong. I felt myself muscling it slightly more than I should have back to the drawing board. Back here in the states, there's so much emphasis put on the result that the process typically takes a back seat. Over there, it was very all or nothing and I appreciated that level of attention to detail. Alright, now for the stinkers. The things everybody probably wants to hear about or wanted to when they clicked on this video. There are a lot and some are more common than others, so I'm going to try and pick up the pace here so we can get through all of them. First, there's no live sparring. Yep, you've heard it a million times before and it's still an issue. Some styles of Aikido, like Tamiki Aikido, have kind of tried to fix this problem and I appreciate their sentiment, but I honestly mostly disagree with the way they implement competition. Something very weird about Aikido as compared to other martial arts is that Aikido could really care less about defeating itself. It's a very asymmetrical martial art in that regard. In Judo competition, you're against a Judo guy. In boxing, it's two boxers duking it out. But in Aikido, it's not necessarily like we attack with quote-unquote Aikido techniques and then counter with more Aikido techniques. This makes a pure Aikido competitive format kind of janky, I think. I have sparred with Aikido and it slots well into Judo or Karate just fine. It's just that those arts technically have banned or they don't reward Aikido techniques, so you have to get consent from your partners to actually train and you're never going to be able to take those things to actual competition in those formats, which is another problem for Aikido. People place the burden of live sparring on Aikido itself, but because pure Aikido formats are kind of trash and most formats have its techniques banned, there are very few places Aikido can actually go to test itself live. BJJ isn't a super great option because you end up just tossing takedowns out because most gyms and competitions, well, they aren't really a thing, as everybody online pretty much knows at this point. MMA would be ideal, of course, but as we've seen from Rokas over at Martial Arts Journey, Aikido is hardly ready for that. I think there's going to have to be a lot more incremental progress before we can start tossing Aikido into MMA, and even when it does make it to MMA, it's going to have to be mixed with a bunch of other things because, well, pure anything against MMA suffers greatly. Another option would be to figure out its own competitive format, which is why I do appreciate what the Tamiki guys were trying to do, and I think it's plausible, but I don't really want to take the time to speculate too much on that in this video. We would be here all day. A second big problem with Aikido is pedagogical in nature. There are a lot of goofy attacks in Aikido. I'm particularly thinking of the chops and the punches that just stick out in space forever. And yes, I understand they represent sword cuts and thrusts, but markability is important and very few people care about sword cuts and thrusts in 2023. Early in an Aikido career, I don't think these are horrible attacks to deal with because a lot of people start with crappy coordination and timing. These attacks just naturally allow beginners more time and space to figure stuff out. But eventually, probably around the intermediate ranks, most attacks need to graduate into more realistic grabs that you would see in, for example, Judo. More emphasis on positional training with controlled resistance would also be good, although I honestly think this problem would start to solve itself if Aikido had an competitive outlet. A third problem that seemingly no one talks about but bothers me profusely is that Aikido is really ambiguous on whether or not it wants to be a no-gi or gi art, which is an important distinction to make. Attackers are free to latch onto the gi in Aikido, but the person doing a technique is rarely allowed to do so in practice. This is odd to me because Aikido people in the past used to use the gi all the time. The reason we need to make this clear is because it would allow Aikidoka to know where to spend their time. Another hole in Aikido's pedagogy, for example, is in gi grip breaks. If this is a gi art, then we need to spend time developing grip breaks, or at least borrowing them from another art like Judo or BJJ. If we aren't a gi art, then we can use entries into a Russian two-on-one from wrestling or something like that. If we want to be both, then we probably need to be teaching two separate classes. A fourth issue deals with those strikes that I mentioned earlier in the video. We certainly talk a lot about striking in Aikido, but basically zero time is given to polishing what is often considered to be a pillar of the art. I get that the techniques in Aikido proper demand a lot of time and attention and careful focus on detail, but if we're going to point out where we should be striking and how we should be striking, we should probably properly practice striking. Aikido people of the past, like Saito, Nishio, and Kuroiwa, and even Shioda all resolved this with cross-training. It is clearly important, but the art just doesn't treat it that way. This is, again, though something that I think would start to resolve itself if there was a competitive component to the art. People would start to naturally get better at the striking if they sparred and kept getting bopped in the face. It would certainly motivate them. A fifth pet peeve of mine is the lack of foot sweeps and kicks, and I know that the Aikido traditionalists in the crowd are clutching their pearls that I would even dare suggest we use such heretical, dirty attacks, but I've never heard a logical reason why we don't. Effortless takedowns are, at least on paper, Aikido's whole brand, and well-timed foot sweeps are like the most effortless thing to do in the world once you get proficient at them. I'm not even saying we need to do Judo's major foot sweeps, but Muay Thai type stuff all seems like a no-brainer addition to me. And in that vein, Muay Thai teeps or Sanda's pushing sidekicks as a way to bail out of joint lock attempts and create space also all seem like they have a clear niche in the art that is just waiting to be filled. I have a less coherent argument for this, but leg kicks also always seem to be right there whenever I'm fiddling with people's wrists. And that's really all I have to say about Aikido for now. I tried to keep this video very compact and to the point, but I actually have way, way more to say on this topic. Things about Aikido like how it's dying due to people aging out or how I don't really have a problem with demonstration Aikido as long as we're clear that's what it is or how Aikido has all these old orthodoxies that it wants to both evolve beyond and yet for some reason perfectly preserve. And I know the internet's general view on Aikido is that it's all just a big cult and that the people that do it, even the ones who have good intentions, have fallen victim to a kind of sunk investment fallacy, etc. etc. I understand that point of view, but I also think the quality of Aikido internationally has dipped heavily since the 90s and the early 2000s, as a lot of more martially minded practitioners of the art have retired or passed away. In my view, the ship was sinking long before Rokas pointed it out on YouTube, but a sinking ship, at least to me, implies that it must have once been seaworthy. I definitely believe Aikido has some questionable presumptions and had those presumptions from the very beginning, but knowing all the history that I do and experiencing what I have in Japan, especially since I've been very harsh on Aikido for most of my life, I don't think it's a good idea to just toss the whole art out. Extracting the martial core from the art is going to take time, though, and I think even in a best case scenario, we've got years of obstacles and failures to navigate first. Personally, though, I want to see as many martial arts succeed as possible, because it's just more options for we the martial artists. A rising tide raises all ships. Anyway, that's all for now. I'm actually looking at going back to Japan, which would be an absolute total content farm for this channel, so if you want to support me in that endeavor, you know the buttons to push and the ways to engage. I am always grateful for your support, and I will catch you in the next one. Peace.