Basic Considerations

Certain considerations are implicit in Aiki techniques. Because they are implicit and not explicit they tend to be very confusing. The first of these is grabs. When people grab us with any grab the assumption is that they are so strong and so skilled that we cannot get them to let go. This means that the technique must work if we cannot get the attacker to let go. The other side of this is that most attackers are not going to be strong enough or skilled enough to hold on so our technique must also work if they let go.

Many Aikidoka forget this second part. Much of common Aikido practice is having people grab your wrist and then you swing them around with them letting you do anything and them holding on. In a real fight the attacker would not be able to hold on and in reality most people who grab just want to hold on for an instant to set you up for something else. They have no intention of holding on. When you point out to these Aikidoka that their technique would not work if the attacker let go they say that they would turn and hit the attacker. To me that is pure fantasy. In the first place it is admission that the technique failed. In the second place they are not training to do that and in the third place do they think the attacker is just standing there waiting to be hit. The point of view here is that these are exercises that can be fun and very instructive but they are not techniques. In a freestyle situation your partner should not be able to grab you. If you get grabbed things have gone wrong.

For some reason Aikido is thought of as an art based on wristlocks. This is a very strange idea. Less than one fourth of the Aiki Jujitsu techniques are wristlocks. Wristlocks are not part of the pure Aikido taught here or commonly used in freestyle training. Wristlocks are part of the Aiki Jujitsu system from which Aikido evolved and they are still taught as exercises. Many students use them the old way to inflict pain. Their purpose today is to teach movement. Students using pain to control their partners still do not understand Aiki or the point of the exercises.

The third consideration is that Ikkyo and Arm Down are both originally arm breaking techniques. In Aikido we use these ancient Aiki Jujitsu techniques to give students a better understanding of Aikido movements. They are exercises and not techniques as commonly taught. They are not basic to Aikido.

The final consideration is that Aikido is a martial art. As such the techniques must have devastating lethal power. If you cannot take life you cannot spare life! As O'Sensi evolved he realized that he had reached a point where he could readily control most situations without seriously harming his partners. This also has to be kept in perspective. His personal students describe him as being rough if not outright brutal. It took a high level of skill to take falls from him. He was a tough warrior. His idea of gentle was very different from our soft perspective. Students I have trained with from Tokyo were brutal! They would break your wrist in a heartbeat.

It is both immoral and illegal to use excessive force. This is not Japan. If you are hurting your partners they will not attack you and you cannot really train. We must be gentle and very careful with our partners! We must not do excessive damage in applied situations! On the other hand, to survive a lethal attack we must be able to deliver more violence than the attacker. I know that violence is not a politically correct word but that is reality. This does not mean that you should use force in your techniques. If you are trying to muscle your partners and use arm strength your techniques will not work well in applied situations, because you do not get it! On the other hand your techniques must be capable of producing lethal devastation if you are doing martial (war) art.

In Pure Aikido the arms are just used to connect you to your partner. There are numerous ways to do this. For survival situations you need to know how to strike. For this reason we have a way of using the arms that allows us to protect ourselves as we approach our partner, strike our partner, and then connect for the Aiki throw.