Changes that would be considered pretty far outside of “Aikido” by most of the old guard
Changes an instructor can make in the way a practice is run:
- Encourage actual martial fitness. Regardless of style of martial art or training level, a human who is strong, quick, flexible and has cardiovascular fitness is going to have a better chance in a martial confrontation (street or sport) that somebody who is not in as good of shape. As a start, it wouldn’t hurt to throw some pushups, sit ups or almost any kind of bodyweight exercise into the class warmups.
- Teach how to attack. The attacks in Aikido are pretty limited but a lot of practitioners couldn’t knock out a baby with their punches. Get some pads or a heavy bag in there and teach people how to attack with power and intention. This will crank up the whole martial feel of the art. Get a Karate instructor to come in once a year teach some basics. Send the Aikido instructor to the Karate class to teach ukemi.
- This goes for weapons practice, too. Teach people how to slice, stab and hit. Weapons training may be a bit archaic, but its fun and has a lot of connection to Aikido’s empty hand techniques. I think my dojo focuses on weapons way more than Hombu dojo does. I think all high level Aikidoka shouldn’t consider themselves well rounded in Aikido without extensive weapons experience. That being said, especially for tanto/knife practice, it would be great to work on/with/against some more realistic knife attacks.
- You don’t have to do the whole waza every time. I often think that a very useful part/concept of Aikido is dealing with one big attack that has a lot of intention and force behind it. One hard punch. A swing with a pool cue. Getting out of the way of that first attack and into a better position in crucial. I would like to see some practice time devoted to dodging that yokomen-uchi over and over with increasing attack speeds without the time-suck of the long waza after it. If Aikidoka all get knocked out by that first fast punch, it doesn’t matter how many fancy throws they know.
- Put on some protective gear (mouthpiece, headgear, MMA gloves, cup) and do the normal practice just a bit harder. Less need for the uke to pull a punch and everybody can get more of feel for realistic speeds.
- Practice random attacks at all speeds.
- Practice attacks that are outside of the normal Aikido attacks. Kicks. Takedowns. Headbutts, knees and elbows.
- Spar.
Changes a dojo can make:
- Allow instructors to do the things listed above.
- Cultivate some cross training. I do a different martial art now, but while I was only doing Aikido, I had the chance to some limited cross-training in other martial arts like Judo, Karate, Shorinji Kenpo and others. I was initially astonished at some of the similarity of technique that I saw. It was a cool opener to see similar yet different ukemi in Judo and similar yet different wrist throws in Shorinji Kenpo. I found it to be useful, fun and informative. I found these training opportunities on my own, but it would be great if dojos openly encouraged it without feeling territorial.
- Bring in some new blood. Have demonstrations that aren’t just for other Aikidoka. Rent a space at a festival and have a little taiken area and throw drunk people around. Advertise. Make YouTube videos.
- Video. My current martial arts dojo makes extensive use of video for every single class. This helps people review what we did. Clips from each class are posted on our public page. We also take video of sparring sessions that get posted to our private page so nobody has to feel embarrassed about their performance, but can still review how they did.
- Feel that it’s ok to do some old school hardcore training. All of the older shihan always talk about how tough the training was back in the day. The same shihan usually also talk as if that hardcore training made them into the martial artist they are today. The same shihan then do not impose anywhere near that level of strictness or hardship in their own classes or dojos. I think we all see the disconnect here. I don’t think we need to beat people, deny water breaks or belittle people, but we can still practice harder than we do now. It doesn’t even have to be every time, but some of the time would be a start.
I’ve had a lot of these ideas for a long time but have never put pen to paper. I’m sure I will think of 16 more ideas as soon as I hit the send button.
I (naturally) think all of my ideas are great! If Aikido as a whole followed them, the individual practitioners and the art itself would be elevated to new heights (for sure!). The real problem is that for every fix or solution that is mentioned in the article above or from my own ideas, there are actually other martial arts already practicing that way. From the point of view of a guy who wasn’t fully satisfied with his Aikido experience and did try to advocate and actualize small changes and improvements in his dojo, it was ultimately just easier to leave Aikido for another art that suits me much better. That is both liberating and sad. If you read this and you think that you are satisfied with your Aikido instruction, then I have absolutely no problem with that. If you read this and your dojo has implemented some of the ideas listed here, I think that is great, too. Martial arts are a very individual journey and no two paths will be the same, nor should they be.
I personally wish that Aikido could be like Rionne or I visualize it to have the potential to be. The reality is that a lot of people inside of Aikido don’t even see that there are any problems. People who have practiced for 20-40 years probably haven’t seen much, if any, change in their dojo aside from the average age rising along with their own over the years. There is a lot of inertia in the Aikikai organization as a whole that has kept it rolling (fairly successfully, I would say) for this long. It would take something pretty dramatic to make any sweeping changes become reality. A drastic enough dip in enrollment might do it, but how long until then, and what would any changes look like? I’m 46 years old, so I have to train now, while I can still make gains.
Great article! We have talked about these topics a bit before, but it's nice (if disheartening) to see all of your thoughts laid out and organized.
I left my Aikido dojo at the beginning of 2021. The two main reasons were that I felt my martial ability had peaked in Aikido and that my dojo’s practices were getting lower and lower in quality over the years. Now, I don't think my martial ability has peaked, I think my martial ability in Aikido had peaked. For many of the same reasons you listed above, I was not getting any better martially in Aikido. I have been practicing another art and it is way more suitable to making me a better martial artist going forward.
I was a lazy unathletic kid when I started (sporadically) training Aikido in university, and Aikido gave me a lot in the way of getting into ok shape, learning how to use my body (coordination, movement, etc.), fantastic ukemi skills which occasionally come in handy in real life and in other martial arts, and a basic sense of martial concepts (distance, timing, offense, defense, application of power, etc.). My interest in Aikido led to my interest in Japan and coming to live here. So, I am and will be forever grateful to Aikido for awakening all of that in myself.
What I didn’t learn from Aikido was how to punch, kick or grapple beyond a very basic proficiency. I didn’t learn how another person would likely attack you in either a self-defense or sport/sparring situation. I didn’t learn how well I actually stacked up against others in free sparring (at any speed). I have trained at a number of Aikido dojos in several countries, and it is basically the same everywhere. Watch the sensei do a technique, pair up and practice that technique. If you have a good partner, you can go fast and push the boundaries a bit, test each other and improve your speed and coordination.
I have even had great teachers that would sometimes show some “old school” techniques with extra atemi, or explain how the techniques could end in a real situation, with bone/joint/ligament damage, as opposed to the way we usually take ukemi. Those were great glimpses behind the curtain, but unfortunately too few and far between and always as an aside or a bonus, never as a main point. I sometimes think of Aikido as “the Kobudo that made it”. Aikido has a lot more in common with Japan’s 753 other Kobudo (old/ancient martial arts) sword and weapon styles than it does with contemporary martial arts systems.
Like you, I often spent time fantasizing just what it would take to bring Aikido into the 21st century and reclaim its place in the sun. I had even dreamt up a system of categories for my proposed changes. I will list up a few here. These are all ideas that would forge better martial artists (IMHO):
Changes that wouldn’t change “Aikido” from what it has been for the last 70 or so years
Changes an instructor can make in the way a practice is run:
- Encourage advanced students to pair up and really push their limits. Nobody wants to see an injury in practice, but you are going to get injured in the ring or on the street if you don’t push your limits every once in a while during practice. Teachers should make an effort to balance the need to have advanced students pair with beginners for teaching purposes and advanced with advanced so that those on the high end can push each other to get better. And a good teacher will know when to ask those high-end students to get out of their comfort zone.
- Make randori great again. This is a major weakness at my dojo. Randori ends up being almost slow motion half-hearted vague attacks that 83.7% of the time end up with a quick throw that I would hesitate to call a technique. I would like to see varying levels, 1v1, 1v2, 1v3, half speed, three quarter speed, variation in attacks, etc.
- Try to create more awareness of how real-world attacks may happen. It’s Aikido, so of course we are going to do wrist grabs no matter what. But, grab the wrist and then throw a punch. Or, grab the wrist and push, pull, lift or drag. nobody will ever grab a wrist and………stand there forever. Static grabs are perfectly fine for beginners or new techniques, but instructors need to have a conscious plan to scale things up over time, or even within one practice. There are very few combination attacks in Aikido. If you have ever watch two humans fight, it’s all combos. I used to try to work this kind of thinking in with my partners all the time, if I grab their wrist and they stay within range of a punch from my other hand, I slowly throw it at them to show they how they are exposed. No need for speed or power at a basic level to raise this kind of positioning awareness.
- Get some big fluffy mats and work a lot more on some of the more difficult ukemi. Then go faster and harder.
Changes a dojo can make:
- Have an advanced class. You covered this quite well. I trained at one dojo that had a “hakama-kai” advanced class and it was a good chance for higher level students to go faster and test themselves a bit. It wasn’t perfect, but a step in the right direction.
- Try to bring in a younger generation. It’s a bit of a Catch-22. Young people don’t want to practice Aikido in its current form, but changing Aikido might need a bit of a youth movement.
- Fail people. This is pretty dojo specific. In my old dojo, students didn’t really decide when to test. The sensei would generally tell you, “You should go for 3-kyu at the next test.” when they thought you were ready. Same for the dan levels. That’s fine, but also almost everybody outside of the university students would pass their tests. I would like to see a bit of a higher standard applied. Maybe if somebody fails, they don’t have to pay the testing fee again to re-try so that it doesn’t feel like a money grab? Again, this is very dojo and teacher/shihan variable. However, overall kyu and dan inflation exists. It usually doesn’t bother me, because about 30 seconds into practicing with a partner for the first time, I have a fairly good grasp of their overall level regardless of their rank on paper.
Hi Rionne. As for the Yoshinkan and its offshoots, I would say 95% are no longer training martially, let alone athletically. It's shameful, but the hard training ways of Gozo Shioda's uchideshi and early senshusei programs are gone. There are still a few bright lights out there, but the Yoshinkan hombu is not one of them. I have gone through periods of frustration in my own search. It has come down to training different things in different days, depending on who I have to work with at the dojo on a given day. It's frustratingly inconsistent, but I can't afford to uproot my life to move to Vancouver or Melbourne to train with Robert Mustard or Jo Thambu where I know I would have more of a chance to get the training I want. At least now I have enough influence over the dojo that I can push for us to raise the bar and encourage athletic development in the students, if not real hard training. I suspect that trying to continue training at Aikikai hombu will be forever frustrating, just as it would be if I lived in Tokyo and trained at Yoshinkan hombu.
Hi Michael, thank you very much for your comment and my apologies for the late reply. I appreciate the time you took to write this!
It is quite interesting that both our styles have a very similar problem. From talking to some of my judo friends, it seems that judo is also no stranger to this problem.
One thing you can't blame the Aikikai Hombu for is having a bunch of in-house fighting like Yoshinkan and Shodokan seem to have. It's maybe one of the few positive things they have going for them right now.
Indeed, you are right when you say it's frustrating at Hombu. I hope we can both find our paths that we seek!
comment part II:
Changes that would be considered pretty far outside of “Aikido” by most of the old guard
Changes an instructor can make in the way a practice is run:
- Encourage actual martial fitness. Regardless of style of martial art or training level, a human who is strong, quick, flexible and has cardiovascular fitness is going to have a better chance in a martial confrontation (street or sport) that somebody who is not in as good of shape. As a start, it wouldn’t hurt to throw some pushups, sit ups or almost any kind of bodyweight exercise into the class warmups.
- Teach how to attack. The attacks in Aikido are pretty limited but a lot of practitioners couldn’t knock out a baby with their punches. Get some pads or a heavy bag in there and teach people how to attack with power and intention. This will crank up the whole martial feel of the art. Get a Karate instructor to come in once a year teach some basics. Send the Aikido instructor to the Karate class to teach ukemi.
- This goes for weapons practice, too. Teach people how to slice, stab and hit. Weapons training may be a bit archaic, but its fun and has a lot of connection to Aikido’s empty hand techniques. I think my dojo focuses on weapons way more than Hombu dojo does. I think all high level Aikidoka shouldn’t consider themselves well rounded in Aikido without extensive weapons experience. That being said, especially for tanto/knife practice, it would be great to work on/with/against some more realistic knife attacks.
- You don’t have to do the whole waza every time. I often think that a very useful part/concept of Aikido is dealing with one big attack that has a lot of intention and force behind it. One hard punch. A swing with a pool cue. Getting out of the way of that first attack and into a better position in crucial. I would like to see some practice time devoted to dodging that yokomen-uchi over and over with increasing attack speeds without the time-suck of the long waza after it. If Aikidoka all get knocked out by that first fast punch, it doesn’t matter how many fancy throws they know.
- Put on some protective gear (mouthpiece, headgear, MMA gloves, cup) and do the normal practice just a bit harder. Less need for the uke to pull a punch and everybody can get more of feel for realistic speeds.
- Practice random attacks at all speeds.
- Practice attacks that are outside of the normal Aikido attacks. Kicks. Takedowns. Headbutts, knees and elbows.
- Spar.
Changes a dojo can make:
- Allow instructors to do the things listed above.
- Cultivate some cross training. I do a different martial art now, but while I was only doing Aikido, I had the chance to some limited cross-training in other martial arts like Judo, Karate, Shorinji Kenpo and others. I was initially astonished at some of the similarity of technique that I saw. It was a cool opener to see similar yet different ukemi in Judo and similar yet different wrist throws in Shorinji Kenpo. I found it to be useful, fun and informative. I found these training opportunities on my own, but it would be great if dojos openly encouraged it without feeling territorial.
- Bring in some new blood. Have demonstrations that aren’t just for other Aikidoka. Rent a space at a festival and have a little taiken area and throw drunk people around. Advertise. Make YouTube videos.
- Video. My current martial arts dojo makes extensive use of video for every single class. This helps people review what we did. Clips from each class are posted on our public page. We also take video of sparring sessions that get posted to our private page so nobody has to feel embarrassed about their performance, but can still review how they did.
- Feel that it’s ok to do some old school hardcore training. All of the older shihan always talk about how tough the training was back in the day. The same shihan usually also talk as if that hardcore training made them into the martial artist they are today. The same shihan then do not impose anywhere near that level of strictness or hardship in their own classes or dojos. I think we all see the disconnect here. I don’t think we need to beat people, deny water breaks or belittle people, but we can still practice harder than we do now. It doesn’t even have to be every time, but some of the time would be a start.
I’ve had a lot of these ideas for a long time but have never put pen to paper. I’m sure I will think of 16 more ideas as soon as I hit the send button.
I (naturally) think all of my ideas are great! If Aikido as a whole followed them, the individual practitioners and the art itself would be elevated to new heights (for sure!). The real problem is that for every fix or solution that is mentioned in the article above or from my own ideas, there are actually other martial arts already practicing that way. From the point of view of a guy who wasn’t fully satisfied with his Aikido experience and did try to advocate and actualize small changes and improvements in his dojo, it was ultimately just easier to leave Aikido for another art that suits me much better. That is both liberating and sad. If you read this and you think that you are satisfied with your Aikido instruction, then I have absolutely no problem with that. If you read this and your dojo has implemented some of the ideas listed here, I think that is great, too. Martial arts are a very individual journey and no two paths will be the same, nor should they be.
I personally wish that Aikido could be like Rionne or I visualize it to have the potential to be. The reality is that a lot of people inside of Aikido don’t even see that there are any problems. People who have practiced for 20-40 years probably haven’t seen much, if any, change in their dojo aside from the average age rising along with their own over the years. There is a lot of inertia in the Aikikai organization as a whole that has kept it rolling (fairly successfully, I would say) for this long. It would take something pretty dramatic to make any sweeping changes become reality. A drastic enough dip in enrollment might do it, but how long until then, and what would any changes look like? I’m 46 years old, so I have to train now, while I can still make gains.
David Fulvio
Aikidoka (at heart)
comment part I:
Rionne,
Great article! We have talked about these topics a bit before, but it's nice (if disheartening) to see all of your thoughts laid out and organized.
I left my Aikido dojo at the beginning of 2021. The two main reasons were that I felt my martial ability had peaked in Aikido and that my dojo’s practices were getting lower and lower in quality over the years. Now, I don't think my martial ability has peaked, I think my martial ability in Aikido had peaked. For many of the same reasons you listed above, I was not getting any better martially in Aikido. I have been practicing another art and it is way more suitable to making me a better martial artist going forward.
I was a lazy unathletic kid when I started (sporadically) training Aikido in university, and Aikido gave me a lot in the way of getting into ok shape, learning how to use my body (coordination, movement, etc.), fantastic ukemi skills which occasionally come in handy in real life and in other martial arts, and a basic sense of martial concepts (distance, timing, offense, defense, application of power, etc.). My interest in Aikido led to my interest in Japan and coming to live here. So, I am and will be forever grateful to Aikido for awakening all of that in myself.
What I didn’t learn from Aikido was how to punch, kick or grapple beyond a very basic proficiency. I didn’t learn how another person would likely attack you in either a self-defense or sport/sparring situation. I didn’t learn how well I actually stacked up against others in free sparring (at any speed). I have trained at a number of Aikido dojos in several countries, and it is basically the same everywhere. Watch the sensei do a technique, pair up and practice that technique. If you have a good partner, you can go fast and push the boundaries a bit, test each other and improve your speed and coordination.
I have even had great teachers that would sometimes show some “old school” techniques with extra atemi, or explain how the techniques could end in a real situation, with bone/joint/ligament damage, as opposed to the way we usually take ukemi. Those were great glimpses behind the curtain, but unfortunately too few and far between and always as an aside or a bonus, never as a main point. I sometimes think of Aikido as “the Kobudo that made it”. Aikido has a lot more in common with Japan’s 753 other Kobudo (old/ancient martial arts) sword and weapon styles than it does with contemporary martial arts systems.
Like you, I often spent time fantasizing just what it would take to bring Aikido into the 21st century and reclaim its place in the sun. I had even dreamt up a system of categories for my proposed changes. I will list up a few here. These are all ideas that would forge better martial artists (IMHO):
Changes that wouldn’t change “Aikido” from what it has been for the last 70 or so years
Changes an instructor can make in the way a practice is run:
- Encourage advanced students to pair up and really push their limits. Nobody wants to see an injury in practice, but you are going to get injured in the ring or on the street if you don’t push your limits every once in a while during practice. Teachers should make an effort to balance the need to have advanced students pair with beginners for teaching purposes and advanced with advanced so that those on the high end can push each other to get better. And a good teacher will know when to ask those high-end students to get out of their comfort zone.
- Make randori great again. This is a major weakness at my dojo. Randori ends up being almost slow motion half-hearted vague attacks that 83.7% of the time end up with a quick throw that I would hesitate to call a technique. I would like to see varying levels, 1v1, 1v2, 1v3, half speed, three quarter speed, variation in attacks, etc.
- Try to create more awareness of how real-world attacks may happen. It’s Aikido, so of course we are going to do wrist grabs no matter what. But, grab the wrist and then throw a punch. Or, grab the wrist and push, pull, lift or drag. nobody will ever grab a wrist and………stand there forever. Static grabs are perfectly fine for beginners or new techniques, but instructors need to have a conscious plan to scale things up over time, or even within one practice. There are very few combination attacks in Aikido. If you have ever watch two humans fight, it’s all combos. I used to try to work this kind of thinking in with my partners all the time, if I grab their wrist and they stay within range of a punch from my other hand, I slowly throw it at them to show they how they are exposed. No need for speed or power at a basic level to raise this kind of positioning awareness.
- Get some big fluffy mats and work a lot more on some of the more difficult ukemi. Then go faster and harder.
Changes a dojo can make:
- Have an advanced class. You covered this quite well. I trained at one dojo that had a “hakama-kai” advanced class and it was a good chance for higher level students to go faster and test themselves a bit. It wasn’t perfect, but a step in the right direction.
- Try to bring in a younger generation. It’s a bit of a Catch-22. Young people don’t want to practice Aikido in its current form, but changing Aikido might need a bit of a youth movement.
- Fail people. This is pretty dojo specific. In my old dojo, students didn’t really decide when to test. The sensei would generally tell you, “You should go for 3-kyu at the next test.” when they thought you were ready. Same for the dan levels. That’s fine, but also almost everybody outside of the university students would pass their tests. I would like to see a bit of a higher standard applied. Maybe if somebody fails, they don’t have to pay the testing fee again to re-try so that it doesn’t feel like a money grab? Again, this is very dojo and teacher/shihan variable. However, overall kyu and dan inflation exists. It usually doesn’t bother me, because about 30 seconds into practicing with a partner for the first time, I have a fairly good grasp of their overall level regardless of their rank on paper.
Hi Rionne. As for the Yoshinkan and its offshoots, I would say 95% are no longer training martially, let alone athletically. It's shameful, but the hard training ways of Gozo Shioda's uchideshi and early senshusei programs are gone. There are still a few bright lights out there, but the Yoshinkan hombu is not one of them. I have gone through periods of frustration in my own search. It has come down to training different things in different days, depending on who I have to work with at the dojo on a given day. It's frustratingly inconsistent, but I can't afford to uproot my life to move to Vancouver or Melbourne to train with Robert Mustard or Jo Thambu where I know I would have more of a chance to get the training I want. At least now I have enough influence over the dojo that I can push for us to raise the bar and encourage athletic development in the students, if not real hard training. I suspect that trying to continue training at Aikikai hombu will be forever frustrating, just as it would be if I lived in Tokyo and trained at Yoshinkan hombu.
Hi Michael, thank you very much for your comment and my apologies for the late reply. I appreciate the time you took to write this!
It is quite interesting that both our styles have a very similar problem. From talking to some of my judo friends, it seems that judo is also no stranger to this problem.
One thing you can't blame the Aikikai Hombu for is having a bunch of in-house fighting like Yoshinkan and Shodokan seem to have. It's maybe one of the few positive things they have going for them right now.
Indeed, you are right when you say it's frustrating at Hombu. I hope we can both find our paths that we seek!