Aikido

muttley · Blue Belt

I have decided to try a bit of Aikido to go with my Karate. The club I am looking at studies Tommiki Aikido, I have only ever done 2 or 3 sessions of Aikido previously a few years ago.

The main reason I want to try out Aikido is to learn more about taisabaki and using the opponents force against them.

Anyone mixed these 2 forms before? If so, do they mix well?

GojuRyu Bahrain · Orange Belt

Hi Muttley,

yes, I added a year of aikodo (don't even know which style it was) to my Goju Ryu Karate. I liked it a lot, it really facilitates understanding of Tai Sabaki. I also found it very beneficial for strategies against multiple opponents (I guess this could be a part of Tai Sabaki, though). And the falling and rolling is amazing..

I liked it a lot because the Aikido people I trained with were very relaxed, friendly and had no delusions that their (very beautiful) art was for fighting. We practiced for the enjoyment of harmonic movement.

I later visited another Aikido dojo, apparently a completely different style with much harder techniques, which I found much less enjoyable and at the same time still much less realistic than the Karate I know.

Guess it all boils down (again) to the people in the particular Dojo. Go for it and tell us what it was like!
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Goju Ryu (Yushinkan since 1989), Shotokan (JKA since 2005)

mal103 · Purple Belt

I've tried it but gave up, realising it would take a very long time to get any good at it and years to master. It is very much turning the force against them, over balancing and taking advantage of the attack. Karate is more about direct striking so they kind of go against each other.
Some of the moves we practised were okay and could be effective if done at speed but with the Karate hat on you may be tempted to take a more direct route. There were also a couple of occasions that the techniques were vulnerable to someone with quick reactions.

Not knocking it as I have barely scratched the surface, I think there is more than a life-times worth of study within Karate so personally I will keep on this path. Interestingly the more you learn Karate the more you are learning things that are more at home with other styles of MA. Especially when you study advanced Kata.

sensei8 · KF Sensei

I believe that the mixture of these both MA would compliment each other quite well.

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bushido_man96 · KF Sensei

There were some movement things in Aikido that I did like, and I could see places where I could mingle in kicks or punches or other strikes to augment the Aikido techniques.
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Harkon72 · Black Belt

Don't shoot me but I'm not a fan of Aikido. It takes a long time to learn as an effective self defense system. The floor is lovely and padded, they seem to roll on it like it's a safe place to be. They wait for their opponent to get up, it's full of courtesy and assisted throws and take downs; a wrist grab is not an effective attack in our Dojo. I admit, at a high level it is very effective, but the amount of frustration involved with repetitive exercise that is not explained and a style full of pseudo spirituality that is only acceptable to the converted. I threw a punch once at an intermediate Aikidoka, he complained to his Sensei; "I can't catch his punches!" my response; "Well block and counter then!" "Please learn how to throw a punch!" I'm sorry for my anti-Aikido rant, but this style is one of my pet frustrations, I just don't believe the hype.
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robertle · White Belt

hi everyone,

perhaps a slightly different perspective: I have been doing aikido for quite a while and fairly recently started to go to (shotokan) karate classes, purple belt now for what it's worth. so not really qualified to say much about karate.

I do find the two classes to be very complimentary, and I bet that would be the same thing the otehr way around. while some of the exercises or techniques and approaches are very different on the surface, the stuff you struggle with is the same: correct movement and awareness of it. the angle is slightly different though, for example tension and relaxation is very important in both, but in karate is seems to be a function of time (all relaxes, then all tensed on impact) where in aikido it is more a question of some parts of your body being tensed (although aikido folks would not like the word "tensed" much) while others are relaxed.

when it comes to applicability to self defense, I personally don't care much. I think both karate and aikido are not really meant to do that anyway. if you want to compare the two then karate is certainly more usefull in this context after a few years, aikido may be more usefull than karate if you have done both for a very long time and you are a bit older yourself. I would not overlook the fact that aikido has lots of grabs and throws, in my extremely limited experience you would likely see some of that in a self defense sitaution.

and about the dojo experience of harkon72: an aikido class is not a set of fighting techniques, but rather cooperative exercises to develop body skills. the comfort and courtesy of an aikido dojo helps with that. the wrist grab also isn't an effective attack in an aikido dojo, the attack comes afterwards and would be something like a jodan punch. but we want to utilise the initial contact, so we omit the actual attack because it's not what this exercise is about.

all that said, neither is only roses of course. it is quite true that lots of aikidoka could not attack if they wanted to (this is what brought me to do karate), which then also makes the aikido exercises difficult because of the unrealistic attack. I also agree with the pseudo-spirituality, that can be quite annoying in some areas. fortunately different dojos are quite different in that respect, you have to find one that suits you. the other bit about this is that in some cases it actually isn't that much esotericism, but rather people using a language for lack of better words. for example some people would say to "extend your ki" and actually don't mean anything special, but just a way to move that is hard to describe. if you have done it a while you know what they mean. this is the same as my karate sensei saying she wants to see more hips. that doesn't make sense on a plain english level either...

puh, this has turned into a longer post than wanted. in any case: i just wanted to say that from my point of view the complimentary parts far outweight the differences, and that I enjoy both a lot :)

regards robert

bushido_man96 · KF Sensei

Thank you for sharing your experiences in both Karate and Aikido, Robert. Its nice to hear from the perspective of someone who has done both for a period of time.
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sensei8 · KF Sensei

guird · Orange Belt

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