For those of you who know me, I practice Aikido and take it very, very seriously. That said, nothing steams me more than when people rave about it being ineffective or useless. Rather than argue over YouTube or attempt to reason with people on Bullshido, I’ll just post my thoughts here. First of all, there is no question Aikido would be almost useless as a primary fighting style in MMA. Banning small joint locks removes large chunks of the repertoire, and the martial art was designed purely with defense in mind. This makes it sub-optimal when you have to take the initiative in a confrontation. But herein lies Aikido’s strength. You are always reacting, so you redefine the parameters of winning. As an Aikidoka, if faced with a physical confrontation, simply not getting hit is sufficient for me to claim victory, whereas my assailant has to not only get a strike off, but land it and fell me. This is made difficult for him by Aikido’s emphasis on distance and avoiding initial attacks. Excluding all of the techniques, one can “do Aikido” by simply intelligently avoiding attacks while considering the distances involved, where other possible attackers are, how committed is this guy to hitting me, et cetera. But the techniques are also extremely potent given enough practice. Here’s my caveat: for Aikido to be effective you have to commit a lot more time to practicing it than many other martial arts. Most of O’Sensei’s brightest students were extremely proficient in Judo or Jiu-Jitsu, and so Aikido was an emphasis on a few key concepts from those, practiced and refined as far as they can be refined. Aikido techniques depend on balance rather than strength, and understanding how not only to stay centered yourself, but to take control of the attacker’s balance and couple it to your own. In this way, you turn and redirect the attack, sending it out away from you. This is hard to do, but the payoff is that you don’t have to be as strong or stronger than your attacker to take him down. It just has a steeper learning curve, and by the time you start to get up it, the self-defense reason for training becomes secondary to other motives. I’m a big fan of Aikido, and I think more people should at least try it out. It’s unfortunate that it’s so much lower profile than other martial arts, and receives a bad reputation because of the number of instructors that don’t seem to grasp that all the talk of harmonizing with an attack has nothing to do with sparing the attacker pain. There is nothing in the rule book that says I can’t hurt you; I would just prefer to not injure you. So please, before you mock Aikido, go to a dojo and resist one of the more advanced students and see what happens. If you can squirm out of it every time, maybe that dojo isn’t that good, but I assure you, there are dojos where this is not the case.