Aikido people- Does aikido actually work? Please respond?

I don’t think using strictly Aikido techniques you would win many fights but knowing the principles is helpful.

Akido works but only in specific situations. Akido will work anytime that someone grabs or pushes you. In fact, it is devastating in these situations. It can also work well against run of the mill street fighters who throw haymakers. However, Aikido does not work well agianst skilled punchers and tends to fall short. There is nothing wrong with learning Aikido, especially if you are going to be in a lot of situations that involved being pushed or grabbed as in law enforcement. I would also consider Aikido if you are in a school that offers decent training in other aspect of fighting as joint locks can be incidental if not accidental at times (according to Paul Vunack) so you need to develop a full range of skills to deal with a full range of situations.

Quite simply you won’t see clips of Aikido fights as it is a style that is not about confrontation or competition. That being said, I can say from experience that yes it has been of use to me in situations in the past. These were situations where I was either grabbed, pushed and/or had someone come at me. I was able to create some sort of deflection or tie-up and reverse or get out of the situation using Aikido footwork as well. It’s a very good style that requires good dedication and understanding.

Edit: A lot of the responses point to the issue of resisting opponents. Resistance is actually a good thing and once you develop a good understanding of how people balance and move you can use it to your advantage to shove them or pull them around you. However the key is to close the gap. If you cannot draw the opponent towards you, then following into the opponent while he is resisting or pulling back is the other alternative. Once you gain attachment to an arm, wrist, sleeve, finger, whatever, immediately following in can help to bridge the gap giving you access to followup with something else (i.e. shoving his resisting arm to the side by the elbow turning him and getting to his back).

I’ve seen a couple videos on YouTube showing it being trained in a fairly alive manner. Taught well it can be very effective. It gets a bad reputation because some schools don’t train with a lot of resistance so the defenses look staged and planned out. Another common criticism is that it can take a while to master much of it.

The principles are great to learn and if you find a school that trains in a realistic way then you can bet that it’ll be effective. Find out what’s available in your area and check the schools out. Consider whether you’re looking for exercise, self defense or a way to bully people. If you’re looking for exercise then just about any martial arts school should do the trick. If you’re looking for self defense then spend the time to find schools that train with resisting opponents on a regular basis. If you’re looking for a style to kick people’s asses on the street then you’re wasting everyone’s time and you need to grow up (maybe harsh but it had to be said).

The philosophy behind aikido is one of defense. Not just for yourself but for others as well. Your techniques can hurt but they shouldn’t inflict lasting damage. You’ll also be told time and again to avoid fights whenever possible. Walking away is almost always an option and this is why it can be difficult to find real applications of martial arts in self defense situations.

Good Luck.

The majority of Aikido training that I have seen has had a distinct lack of resisting training or sparring. Drilling techniques with a compliant partner is an important step, but if you don’t practice against someone who is fighting back you ussually won’t be able to apply your techniques in a real situation.

There are exceptions to this.
- Tomiki aikido and the Tokyo Police Academy are noted for integrating sparring into their training and their no nonsense approach.
- Some of the tactics tend to work well for controlling inebriated people or when used by individuals who are perceived as a dominant authority figure by their opponent i.e Law enforcement
- People who have cross-trained in other, more alive, martial arts like Judo have the attributes needed to make use of Aikido techniques and strategies very effectively.

What exactly is a real fight? Who are you fighting? Why are you fighting? What is his goal, and what is your goal?

People say “real fight” as if there was a universal standard of a real fight. Perhaps as defined as a life or death fight with Andre the Giant in a dark alley while surrounded by 30 ninjas. In reality, there are many types of “real” fights. A real fight, to me, is any confrontation where there can be real lasting consequences. This might be as simple as yelling at your girlfriend, and as complex as the 30 ninja army. You may have a motive of beating the guy senseless, or simply wanting to get away.

Aikido – to me – has the largest range of conflicts that it is suitable for. You may not ever use a nikkyo on your girlfriend – in fact I don’t recommend it, she won’t like it! – but the principles of the art will work verbally as well as physically.

In a bar, you might very well find yourself in a fight against a 7 foot tall man who is 400 pounds. Aikido says, try to leave if you can. Honestly, most arts should also say that in this situation.

For everything in between, Aikido offers you the option of how hard you want to beat a person. As you get better, your options of beating them less and less become greater. For many people, like myself, this is nice. I don’t want to break anyone’s bones because he’s mad I accidentally spilt my drink on him. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t break the bones when you have to. It is based on ju jitsu, and good schools teach how to escalate a conflict to include these movements if needed.

An Aikidoka intentionally avoids fighting. Meeting force with force is against the principals of the art. We prefer to be assertive than aggressive, protecting our own space and reserving others space to them. But some of the people in our class have jobs that require them to be more assertive than normal, and it has proved useful.

What makes Aikido special are not the moves. The moves are taught in many other arts, self defense classes, police and prison guard training, I’m even seen them in 15 century European sword manuals (which was really cool!). Human bio-mechanics don’t really change wherever you go. What sets it apart is the philosophy that your attackers life and well being is just as important as your own.

Like all fighting styles, the moves are highly useful in the right situation, and pretty useless on the wrong situation. A kick from 10 feet away is useless, as is a punch that is intercepted by a block. You have to make your own openings and take advantage of them. This is true of all arts, and true of Aikido. If you are able to do so, it can work amazingly.

I’ve only seen one video of an actual Aikido street fight – it was removed later on – and it wasn’t very clear that he was using Aikido. Usually, it’s the fancy falls that clue you in – falls that you train to make. The one I saw had a man face planted on asphalt after one move and then a 2 minute wait for an ambulance. Kinda boring really, and a little bit sad. If you don’t know how to fall, it can seriously hurt.

In all honesty, I would recommend that you visit a class and see for yourself. If you can feel why it works (which isn’t obvious when watching) then you may be able to make up your own mind about it.

when was the last time someone offered you thier wrist in a real fight?

I would say that from what i’ve seen of aikido (and i’ve seen a lot more of it in the last few weeks since i last commented on it here- hence the more detailed description now),

it would seem to me that against a person that has any idea what they are doing, it is rather simple to resist and punish.

if they have to fight you into a position at all- they are using two hands on one in most cases leaving the oppponent a free hand to beat the crap out of you and all they need to do is to prevent the hold long enough for you to do so- which is actually not hard in most of thier cases.

IMO- the guy who is untrained is the one who will leave thier hand out there and be surprised that an aikidoka is actually manipulating it, but much of what i’ve seen in aikido, is easily thwarted.

not to mention that as a general rule aikido schools don’t train with any real degree of resistance.

no doubt you can really hurt someone if you put them in a certain sjm aikido type lock (small joint manipulation), but the $10,000,000 question is CAN you get a person who is fully resisting you in that position to do it?

herein lies the problem, if an aikido school doesn’t train to do that becasue (excuse: “its too deadly”) then how do you learn anything?

its one thing if a small percentage of the material was untrainable for this reason, but most of aikido is not trained at any real level of resistance.

Yes, it can work in a real confrontation. Now here’s the BUT….

But, the practitioner has to train in a manner that prepares for that circumstance. Just like a practitioner of Karate can’t learn to fight only doing forms or an Escrima player can’t fight just by twirling a stick in the air, an Aikidoka cannot learn to deal with a real confrontation by trying to learn techniques in some prescibed, aesthetic dance that has no aggression or energy from an attacker. Not every attacker will attack in the way a fellow practitioner in the dojo might.

AND in the street it won’t look like it does in the dojo. After all, the counter point to a Nage is the Uke. Someone will throw and the other will fall. Ukemi is what makes Aikido visually impressive.

In reality, the guy isn’t going to flip when you apply a technique like a kotegashi. Something like a wrist is going to break. He’s going to land on his head. Hell, you may not keep your footing like you do in the dojo.

Some arts and some teachers prepare a student better for real confrontations better than other. You just have to find a good teacher.

Here is one link showing Aikido being used in the streets by a cop:

i believe real aikido like the one you search for died along with the founder mureihei ueshiba…after all he was all about inner peace with well philosophies by the way…if you want to learn to defend yourself without any crap go for aggresive arts..

eddie,
I find this interesting. Everyone that studies Aikido currently will say that it works in the street. Others that either have never studied the real art, or have only a little training in it will say it is of no use. Let me ask you this question. Do you really think that Aikido would have been handed down to so many new generations if it did not work for real? Lets face it, Aikido is one of the harder martial arts to master. Like other martial arts there are good Aikido instructors and bad ones. Having been in the martial arts nearly 42 years, I can say truthfully that I’ve seen a lot of really bad Aikido. BUT, I have seen a few Aikido masters that are truly amazing. They changed my beliefs about Aikido and its effectiveness. Bottom line is it is the instructor not the art that makes it. In my experiences that has always been the truth.

All the techniques work.

The spirit of Aikido is not about fighting, though, it is a self-defence martial art. There is a difference. But the throws really throw, the locks really lock and the submissions really submit. The reason you don’t see much of it in the UFC and so forth is that it would make little sense for a UFC athlete to learn Aikido, when they could spend their energy learning Jiujitsu, BJJ or Judo, which are more focused to this type of competition. The techniques are often the same, but the context in which they are taught is very different. For one thing, Aikido will teach control: Students learn you don’t always have to apply at full force to get the result you want. Police forces often teach aikido because of its focus on restraining without harming (very good in the legal context in which they operate). Police forces don’t generally waste time training officers in useless things. And I think it’s silly to consider the UFC (a very particular setting) to be the measure of all things.

And that whole bit about people just giving your their arms and not resisting with everything they’ve got, etc… True, but a lot of people apparently don’t understand the difference between an exercise and a fight. The exercises teach the mechanics. They are very important in Aikido. As students become more advanced, unpredictability is added gradually and more free forms appear.

You tell me.

aikido works and I speak from experience.
it’s the law of distilling the useful from the training. a lot of the exercises in aikido, or any other art for that matter are purely training and have no practical use but you need those exercises to grow in an art and learn to truly apply your teachings.
the first rule in aikido is still the most sound one in a self defense situation. whatever comes at you be out of it’s way. an aikidoka is a master of evasion aikido works best when you surprise the opponent, since he won’t know what’s going on till it’s too late. it’s harder to surprise a trained martial artist than some one with no training but never impossible. a true master of aikido can usually act without his opponent seeing or feeling anything.

The joint locks you learn in class can be used with a devastating effect if “properly” aplied break limbs, dislocate joints or even kill if necessary but the main purpose of aikido is to be the art of peace to learn an art so that you find no need to fight