Originally published on www.atemicast.com
“I Cheat at Aikido”
I have a confession to make. I teach my students how to cheat. In fact, I tell them “this is my cheat, try
it this way.” I’ve been studying martial
arts now for over a decade, and I’ve been teaching aikido classes for just over
a year now. One night lying in bed, it
occurred to me, these aren’t cheats. I’m
not importing a special code to get unlimited lives in Contra (and if you laugh
at that, you’re as old as I am); I’m accomplishing the
task.O. Ratti's illustration of kote gaeshi |
Let me start off by giving an example of a “cheat.” If the attacker performs a straight punch,
the defender in aikido may perform a kote
gaeshi wrist throw. This involves
using the momentum of the punch to continue the attacker’s motion forward,
keeping them off balance as the defender grabs the wrist, and then turns to
return the wrist towards the attacker. This results in either a broken wrist,
or more likely, the attacker on the ground.
The technique only works well if the attacker is in motion. If they ever catch their balance or composure
enough, they will resist the returning wrist motion. My cheat is that as I step next to the
oncoming attack, I place the back of their elbow against my body, so that as I
spin, I put pressure against their elbow forcing them to move more. It allows me to prevail in some situations
where the defense shouldn’t necessarily work.
Menyo scrolls of transmission |
I don’t ever remember being shown this. This was something I picked up through
experience somewhere in those 10+ years of training. I’m not saying that this is some new
discovery and I’m going to rename the technique. What I’m thinking is that this was an
accidental experience of an okudan, a
hidden technique. For those of you not
familiar with Japanese systems, let me give you a little background. In a traditional martial system, the
instructor would demonstrate a technique, and then the students would try to
infer, from what they saw, how the technique worked. Okudan
were techniques in Japanese martial arts curriculums that were not written
down, nor were they taught to most of the practitioners. These were reserved for the highest level
students, usually only the head of the school and his descendents. This way the instructor always could make
sure he knew just a little more that someone he taught. Most of you have probably experienced
this. You know that time your sensei threw you and didn’t appear to
move. That was an okudan. But, like many
things in the Japanese language, there is more than one way to define what an okudan is. Okudan
also can be the technique within the technique.
Once you have gotten the gross body movements of a technique down, you
can then start to refine said technique.
In kote gaeshi, you can work
on timing or the exact way to grab the wrist.
The okudan is a further
refining where it becomes more internal and less external. This is what I am calling my “cheats” – the things
I’ve incorporated into my techniques to make them more efficient.
Now that I’m teaching aikido,
I’ve started to show my students my cheats.
I’m wondering now if this is a bad idea.
I may be robbing them of their own self-teaching experiences. Am I reading them the last chapter in the
book before they’ve gotten there? Or am
I just conferring as much information as I can to my students? Because when I say “here’s a cheat I use,”
the students react as if they are privy to some special piece of
information. Ultimately, I would hate to
think that any student of mine would be the victim of an attack; however, I
would hate to think of them as unable to defend themselves because I didn’t
teach them everything I knew. We live
in a very information free society.
We’ve completely invested in the idea that information/knowledge is a
right and not a privilege. I agree with
this as a general idea. Nevertheless information
and knowledge should be tempered by experience.
If I give all of my own experiences as instruction, my “cheats,” it will
never become part of their technique as well as if the students figure it out
for themselves. And isn’t that the goal
of an instructor, to make the martial art a part of the student? I say it is which is why we may want to
revisit the idea of okudan in martial
arts.
Thanks for your post. I’ve been thinking about writing a very comparable post over the last couple of weeks, I’ll probably keep it short and sweet and link to this instead if thats cool. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteMy Cheats
Link away...
DeleteThank you for the compliment. I appreciate it.
This is a great inspiring article.I am pretty much pleased with your good work.You put really very helpful information... aikido
ReplyDeleteI really like the article, very deep, thanks for sahring
ReplyDelete