Just want to say a big thank you to Sensei Seth for picking me to help him with this project.  

https://youtube.com/c/MartialArtsUnlimitedAssociation

I think you hit on the key to making Aikido work: it's already being able to fight.  If you can fight,  good Aikido might give you the option of winning with a little less damage to your opponent.  It's not a stand alone martial art, it's a module you can plug in to an already functioning skillset.

I'm impressed at how often you demonstrated that a fighter can be respectful while still having doubts about whether the technique being taught would actually work.

For the record I'm wearing wrestling shoes due to a cut on my foot

A day of training?
ABSURD!

I came here to make a witty joke about Aikido but ended up learning instead. Great video Seth! I still believe Akito is one of the more unpractical martial arts especially since most of techniques would be very hard if not impossible to successfully perform against an experienced grappler. I commend your ability to keep an open mind and giving it an honest shot though.

I am a stage combat practitioner and choreographer and Aikido is used heavily in a lot of choreography mainly due to its cooperativeness and flashiness rather than in spite of

Like anything else, pressure test the techniques against active resistance. Keep what works in your repertoire, disregard the rest, and move onto the next martial arts discipline to absorb. Stay super jacked, Sensei Seth!

A lot of Aikido is about momentum and body mechanics. Your opponent is often moving towards you and you are utilizing that momentum to naturally and purposefully step out of their way and keep them moving forward. As an old practitioner, Toyoda-sensei, used to say, "Avoid a falling rock. Water will always flow to lower places."

I’m glad he made the distinction with it being against swords. It’s what I’ve always said. The part about when dude said “Wing Chun?” Aikido “close enough” hurt my heart 😭💔

JD seems like a humble guy and it’s good to see aikido looked at with an open mind

Wrist locks really are great for ground fighting. They're not used much in bjj competition because most rule sets only allow them at high grade so they aren't practiced as early

After watching this I really think you would enjoy a HEMA class covering Fiore. His whole system covers everything from grappling and striking to dagger, longsword, and pollaxe. Plus, each part of his system leads into the next. So his unarmed = his dagger =his longsword = his pollaxe. Plus, he loves armbars and groin kicks, so he's basically the Medieval Master Ken.

As someone who did aikido for quite a while (I quit just before the black belt exam) and then moved on to other, more functional martial arts, I came up with this metaphor: aikido is like a pilot school that teaches you how to fly a plane and how to land a plane, but not how to take off and only in perfect weather. The main reason is the noble, but incredibly foolish idea that is the base of aikido: teaching self-defense without giving someone the ability to attack. There is, deep down, the remnants of a functional martial art there (you can see a lot of similar things in jujitsu, judo and many types of use-of-force training), but years of this semi-pacifistic ideology and noncompetitiveness have caused it to become this outlandish and dance-like performance.

It’s interesting, I did aikido for about 10 years—including as an uchideshi—and one of the things I almost never see discussed is what I learned as the difference between practice techniques (basically partnered forms, which is most of what you see in the videos) and applied techniques: how to use this stuff in a fight. Basically stated, you do all of the circular movements and such as a way of learning your body, building a repertoire of basic techniques, etc. in much the same way as kata are used. But you learn them with a partner to begin building the foundations of randori / sparring. Then you work on how to apply those techniques in more realistic situations; with a lot less dancing around  (tenkan) and a lot more moving forward and taking someone’s center / centerline (irimi), and with a fair amount of close quarters strikes that we’re hidden in the moments of the basic forms—just like kata. You then begin practicing randori.

This sounds like a long process, but I was practicing the basics of randori as soon as I graduated from the beginners class to the intermediate (about two months).

All the while, working on the kinds of mobility and body-structure business that one finds in arts like Systema, Wing Chun, etc.

I’m not arguing the aikido rules or anything, and I see a lot of non-combat applicable aikido out there. I just think that it’s worth mentioning that there is a logic to the aikido training system. I’ve trained in a number of martial arts over the last forty years, and carry rank in most of them, yet the few times I’ve had to deal with confrontations in the real world since my aikido training I’ve found that the basics of what I learned in aikido form the foundations of how I successfully responded to those confrontations.

A final caveat: In the aikido system I trained in (which comes down the lineage from Fumio Toyoda), many of the senior Japanese instructors had a solid background in other arts before they started aikido and tended to explain aikido as “martial arts graduate school.” I think this is a fair signal of the pedagogical issues at play in a lot of how aikido is taught. And I have to recognize that a lot of my own success with aikido may in some part be due to having a solid background in striking and grappling before first stepping into an aikido dojo. Of late, I’ve bumped into a number of aikido instructors who have solid striking and grappling training and who are including more striking and grappling fundamentals in their aikido instruction to fill in those gaps, as JD in this video seems to be doing. I feel that including these fundamentals for students as they’re learning the basic partnered forms, and improving them as they move into applied technics—and really explicating these applications well—will improve aikido’s reputation in the coming years.

I'm not as anti-aikido as some people. When I was a young 20-something guy with (at the time) a mostly Muay Thai background, I had an older colleague (late 40s, early 50s) who was very good at a military combatives adaptation of Aikido/Aikijitsu/Jiujitsu and he worked me over real good. (It felt like I was like fighting a guy with three arms.) It can definitely work when the guy knows how to use it.

I find the wrist locks in Aikido to be very valid for certain self-defense scenario (crowded bar, bus, subway, etc.) where you can anticipate the confrontation enough to use the technique as a surprise and squealch the fight before blows start flying. The mechanics and concepts are also a really good segue into things like weapon retention and disarms. I've also seen guys have success adding Aikido when they're working from a foundation of another Japanese art. (Like JD in the video has a foundation in karate, though I don't know what he studied first.)

All that said...Aikido is not really something I would spend my training time on and I would not recommend it is a foundation for anyone. For most Aikido applications, even though they're valid, there always seems to me to be five or six other more reliable options from the other arts.

So I started with Aikido when I was 8 years old, all the way up till I was 13. It might not be the best for combat, but it has ignited my love for fighting sports leading to boxing, kickboxing and lessons in some other disciplines aswell. Aikido also set me up with a good base for body balance, patience and discipline. My teacher was amazing, which really helped. It will always have a special place in my heart.

I'm really glad you did this, Seth. This makes perfect sense to me, because my Aikido experience was not at all traditional. I came from a Shotokan Karate background, and trained in Aikido with a small, informal group made up of people who were all accomplished in various traditional martial arts. We were all seasoned fighters, didn't accept anything as valid in its stylized form, and therefore tested the practical application of EVERYTHING. We worked each technique over and over for weeks at a time, in various ways, and under different conditions. We'd start off really light and cooperative, to learn the basic movements, but would progressively increase the resistance until we got to multi-attacker randori. The result was that our Aikido did not look like the seamless, swirling motions of demonstrations and traditional dojos, but it worked in the real world. I now know that's exactly what happens when you train any traditional art with live resistance - it has to change to become more functional. As a general rule, then, I don't argue when people trash Aikido. I get it. I've seen the lack of actual fighting ability that most Aikidokas display. But I also know that I've used Aikido effectively in the real world, that irimi and tenkan are legit footwork, and that the wrist locks absolutely work in a range of situations. Add to that, there's a lot of shared DNA between Aikido, Jujitsu, and Judo, and lots of opportunities for adopting and blending elements of them.

As an Aikido practitioner, this video was super fun to watch! Thanks for the effort!

I studied Aikido under Amir Ardebeli, who taught it as part of his MMA class. I have trained at a few schools, but Amir teaches a very grounded and practical martial art. Although we did not do a lot of Aikido, the techniques I learned with hm have remained at the top of my kit for the last 20 years.