Perfect evasion and blending (aiki) is an impossible ideal that only exists to give you something to strive toward. This has led some instructors and practitioners to label blending as 'the most advanced skill in martial arts.'
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I disagree. While perfect evasion and blending is a blue-sky ideal, adequate evasion and blending is not an advanced skill. Within just a few training hours (often less than 10 hours), I can teach most novices evasion and blending skills that are adequate to make it very hard to attack them successfully. Don't believe it? Give me 10-15 hours of decent effort and see can't I make you much, much harder to hit.
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That is one of the great secrets – you don’t have to teach perfect blending. Adequate blending is sufficient to make it much harder to successfully attack tori and it also amplifies the effect of the other principles (kuzushi, atemi, etc…) when they come into play in aikido.
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That is one of the great secrets – you don’t have to teach perfect blending. Adequate blending is sufficient to make it much harder to successfully attack tori and it also amplifies the effect of the other principles (kuzushi, atemi, etc…) when they come into play in aikido.
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Evasion and blending is far from the most advanced skill. In fact it is the most basic, fundamental skill upon which all the rest of aikido is built
Absolutely! One of the cold hard realities that I didn't like facing up to when I was in taekwon-do was that it was actually awfully cotton-pickin' hard to hit someone who refused to engage and just consistently tried not to get hit.
ReplyDeleteIt is much easier to hit someone bent on committing aggression.