mercredi 1 octobre 2014

Why the lack of competition?

Forgive me if I seem rude, but I was interested in Aikido for a while and met a teacher who trains for free. At first, I thought it seemed like a great service that the man was doing, but after speaking with him I'm not so sure. Actually, from what fighting experience I've had with both trained and untrained people from multiple styles, it seems his methods might offer false confidence and be a disservice to his students.

It seems to me that the general mindset of the Aikidoka near me and that I've found on some parts of the internet is one of compliance during training, not allowing open sparring (including striking, takedowns, and groundfighting), not competing in martial arts competitions, and generally not fighting.



While the idea of not fighting is perfectly well and good, many people achieve this in their life without training in any art even a single day. So why the general dislike of full-contact fighting and fighting between styles? As someone who has been training in martial arts for only 2.5 years in various styles, it's my understanding that the way we grow as fighters is to fight people of other disciplines in order to understand the weaknesses of our discipline and fix them. Without full-contact fighting and healthy competition, you don't have the opportunity to really understand these weaknesses.



In particular, I don't understand why it is so widespread that many arts including Aikido don't participate in full-contact free sparring. For a while I studied Shaolin kung fu and then I took a Taekwondo class and suddenly realized that my lack of sparring in class caused my reflexes to be slow and my timing to be poor. It was only after 6 months of doing full-contact sparring in Taekwondo once or twice a week that what I learned while studying Shaolin started becoming useful. I think that the same thing would happen to many martial artists who participate in no sparring, or even light contact sparring. So, it seems unwise (to me) for a school which claims to teach self-defense or fighting not to participate in full-contact sparring.



So I've got to ask, am I wrong? Do Aikidoka regularly compete and participate in hard sparring, where I've only been seeing a very loud minority of practitioners? And if not, what is the reason?




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