How to Tell If an Aikido Dojo is Martially Minded YouTube

So the first thing you do when you walk into a prospective Aikido school is, of course, turn around, walk outside, and spend your money on the Muay Thai gym next door. That was a joke and a cold open. I'm allowed to poke fun at Aikido too. Of course, it is very true that finding a martially-minded Aikido school is extremely rare, and probably becoming rarer yet as time goes on. If you've found a holy grail and people train all the way up with live sparring, I am happy for you. For everyone else, there's this video. The internet tends to take the absolute worst of a given art and hyperfixate on it. But the reality is that something like Aikido is far from a monolith. There is definitely a spectrum of good and bad at play. While it will probably be up to you to take techniques into a live sparring setting, there are demonstrable qualitative differences between people LARPing as Jedi and people who are at least thinking about training Aikido martially. Of course, there is a bunch of space in between these extremes too. In this video, I want to give people the things I look for in an Aikido place that maybe aren't super obvious. By super obvious, I mean I'm not going to bring up sparring, which is always great, but I'm going to assume they don't do it. Most places don't. Also, these tips are fairly general purpose. If you want to join an art that perhaps does not have the greatest reputation, but you're still hoping to find something under that umbrella, a lot of what I'm going to talk about here still applies. Maybe not all of it, but a lot of it. Two caveats before I jump in, though. First, if you go to a school and they say we are training to make aesthetically beautiful techniques and then you complain about a lack of martial practicality, that's on you, not the school. You don't go to an Italian restaurant to eat sushi. I feel the need to point out that I actually don't hate the flowy aesthetic stuff in Aikido. I'm not playing a zero-sum game on this channel. I just think people should train what they say they're training. I don't care much for con artists and false advertising, but there are many different ways to express a given martial art. If people are interested in putting together a phenomenal demonstration piece, I say all the more power to them. To me, it's about options and clarity more than anything else. If the mythical hypothetical Tengu dojo ever did open, there may very well be a demonstration Aikido class right before the martial one. In other words, if the dojo has certain goals written on the ten, you should pay attention to that and judge them along those lines, not by anything else. And second, I always, always highly recommend cross-training. This is not just an Aikido thing, either. Maybe you have zero interest in MMA, and that's fine. What cross-training does is show you a different perspective, because whether you're doing Aikido or Karate or Boxing or Judo or something else, people will move according to the internal logic of that art. This is expected, but it means that different martial arts, even very effective ones, might be completely blind to certain things. The boxer is enabled to move and fight the way he does because he simply isn't trained to consider kicks or takedowns, it's not something in his art. If you're boxing for sport, that's fine. If you're boxing as a martial practice more holistically, it means you need to broaden your horizons because the internal logic of boxing is not comprehensive. In other words, it isn't even necessarily about getting good at a second or third martial art. It's about having hands-on experience that there are things out there that will be outside your preferred martial arts considerations. This is especially so in Aikido, however, because a lot of Aikido expects behaviors from people that aren't all that common in 2024. It should go without saying that being able to identify these Aikido-specific expectations will help you identify weak points in your training from a purely martial perspective. Alright, let's hop into the tips. Oh, and by the way, most of these things should be pretty easy to figure out pretty quickly. Naturally, more time will help you get more of a grip on things, but most of this stuff can be teased out in like a trial class or maybe a week or so, even faster if you're particularly clever and charismatic with your questions. Anyway, tip number one. The intermediate and advanced students should be breathing heavy and sweating. This will not be every class, and it often won't be the whole class. There does have to be time for detailed instruction at some point, but what you are looking for is a physical challenge. Martial arts, at least the ones that focus on fighting, are not usually comfortable most of the time. It's just a part of the space. They ask you to be fit, to face fear, to do a ton of cardio, and often work through pain. I'm not saying that training should be dangerous. Training should not be dangerous. I'm going to say it even a third time. The training should not be dangerous. But it should push people just a little bit farther than they are comfortable. The reason I left beginners out of this formula is that beginners are going to be taught things like breakfalling and basic movements and safety things, as they should be. Beginners simply don't have enough under their belt to train at a pace that is going to be athletically taxing. The challenge for beginners is almost entirely mental and intellectual. Gradually, it should become more physical, though. In summary, if you look across the mat space and it's a lot of dudes chatting without even a little sweat having been broken, this probably isn't a martially-minded place. Again, there are times when chatting is necessary—tests and things that require communication and fixing details and all that—but there should usually be some portion of the class—and it should typically be a large part of it—that is designated to being athletically difficult. Tip number two. This relates back to one of my caveats. Just see if the instructor and the students cross-train. If the instructors do, this is a fantastic sign. Not all the students need to cross-train, but it's still nice and tells you more about the culture of the dojo. An acceptable substitute to cross-training might be if people were bouncers, security guards, and the like. Even if they aren't currently cross-training but have some martial experience elsewhere, this is still usually just fine. And the key here is exactly the same as earlier. Do the instructors recognize that Aikido asks people to move like Aikido people? Therefore, they also recognize that people typically don't move in certain ways that are commonplace in martial environments. Nothing much else to add here, it's just about having that expanded understanding that the niche of one art will always be incomplete. Too many arts—Aikido or otherwise—believe themselves to be a silver bullet to everything. This is great for marketing, but it simply is not true. Tip number three. Can the instructors explain why things are happening the way they are happening in a grounded manner? This one can be a bit tough. Sometimes teachers will not know, and then they will go research and get back to you. If that happens, it's still very much a passing grade. That's good. What can be a bit trickier, though, is the whole grounded manner of speaking. By this, I mean the teacher should answer your questions with plain English, and with an answer that has martial implications. For example, we move at this angle to briefly avoid the far hand, which could punch us. Maybe later in your career you'll find you disagree with this rhetoric. Maybe you discover that actually that person can still reach you from that angle or something. That's fine. We aren't expecting most Aikido places to be martially perfect. Most places, even really quote-unquote legit martial arts, aren't. All the time, at least. If you are holding out for that martially perfect Aikido school, just realize that you're kind of looking for a golden goose. I won't say they don't exist, but you're going to have trouble finding a place to train. What matters is that the instructor gave you a clear answer, and even if the logic doesn't really pan out for you later on, the martial intention of his reasoning is understandable and clear. On the other hand, if the instructor blows you off or starts talking in buzzwords and about aligning ki or some ----, then he doesn't know why things are happening the way they are. Even if he does know why, you should politely and quietly assume he doesn't and find somewhere else to train. An instructor can actually be pretty bad at techniques himself if he can teach others to surpass him and elevate them to a high level. Obviously, you'd like to see both in a good instructor. You'd like to see good technique and solid instruction. But my point is that if an instructor can't be bothered to understand his art's own techniques or how to communicate them clearly, then this school likely is not worth your time. Instructors should have an answer for you or be willing to find one and then communicate it in a clear way. Now, keep in mind, if you are that guy who constantly raises your hand and is like, Why? What if? Why? What if? You're going to annoy people, please keep these questions to a reasonable minimum. But I think asking one or two in your time during a trial probably is fair and you should get good answers. Alright, in tip four, I'm using a term I made up. If you go into an Aikido dojo and start talking about incremental testing, you're going to get funny looks, and understandably so. The term is, of course, incremental testing. What this refers to is checking techniques step by step. This is something that certain flavors of Yoshinkan Aikido do quite a bit, and I'm pretty much a fan of, more or less. While it isn't a replacement for live sparring in my eyes, it is undoubtedly a pretty close substitute, at least as far as Aikido is willing to go, and it does undoubtedly create students with pretty good mechanics. What I'm referring to here is basically checking the efficacy of every step of a technique as applied to a neutral partner. I say neutral here to describe a partner that isn't resisting you, but isn't really cooperating either. Some of you may want that resistance to happen, it is a big internet thing that you have to train against resistance, but frankly, if you can't apply a technique to a completely neutral partner, you shouldn't even be really concerning yourself with a resisting one. I've been to many, many Aikido schools. Almost all of them have been allergic to competition. But at the same time, almost all of them have been A-OK with giving me resistance during incremental testing if I only ask. Someone in that room will oblige you most likely. Just focus on getting crap to work on a neutral body, because if you can't get it to work against someone who is just neutrally standing there, you're not going to get it to work against someone who's resisting you. Anyway, I am getting off track. It would probably be best if I gave specific examples here. Students are asking, did I really move you during footwork, or can you get up during a pin, and so on. This is a good sign. People can actually get really granular in Aikido and break down most techniques in this way. Now, it should go without saying that not every technique should or can be done like this. It would be a class fool of robots if every single rep was this slow and granular. What I'm getting at is simply that people are checking frequently with their partner that their technique is actually getting expected results. Eventually, yes, you can up the resistance level a bit. And that should be gradual, by the way. I do not advocate for jumping straight into a sparring session right after you learn a technique. Or even having a technique under your belt for a couple weeks. I'll talk a little bit more about that later in the video, though. Actually, it's in the next tip, I believe. Finally, tip 5. And this tip is actually how I judge most Aikido itself as it exists currently. I don't look at rank or even necessarily flow, at least not when I'm judging martiality, if that's even a word. I look at the stuff I'm about to list, and you should too, I think. First is their kuzushi. In Aikido, most of what we do has balance or posture breaks. One difference here is that off-balancing might not always be used for a throw, necessarily, but I will return to that later. Spotting kuzushi can be a bit difficult if you don't know what to look for, but two general indicators are that the person being controlled is on one foot or on their tippy toes or that they're being forced to post a hand or two hands on the mat. Of course, ideally, this is all happening in the aforementioned non-cooperative, neutral environment. It is fine to cooperate for demonstration or even to help someone learn, but eventually, you should see this stuff getting applied to people who are just sort of there to be moved, if they can be moved. And again, resistance can be added later. Second, related very much to the first, people are genuinely creating movement. This is actually pretty tough to do, actually, in any grappling art, I think, especially against resistance. But much of what Aikido exploits is movement. Without movement, many techniques pretty much fall flat. There are many ways to inspire a person to move, but the key here is whether or not the artificially feeding into the doer's technique or the doer is making the movement happen. Again, start neutral, add resistance, blah blah blah. I feel like you get my point on that, so I'm not going to keep repeating it. It's always in the background. Third, strike awareness. This isn't just the first off-balancing strike that you'll typically and traditionally see in Aikido. What I mean is do practitioners demonstrate that they are aware of when their partner is open to be hit? Remember that I said Kuzushi in Aikido is not necessarily about throwing. If someone is on their tippy toes, they are usually available to be kicked, struck, or thrown. If they are posting their hands on the mat, they can be kneed or elbowed and so on and so forth. I wouldn't necessarily expect strikes to be getting physically expressed, but it is nice to see students that are aware that Aikido is not just a throwing art. It is simply expressed that way most of the time. I will say, however, that this will be probably the rarest indicator of martial-mindedness in an Aikido school. Most of the room is usually just focused on getting their limbs to do the right thing at the right time and taking their falls well. If you can see this happening at all, I'd wager it would be a higher-ranked guy or guys who probably happened to cross-train, because those are the ones who are going to understand striking more so. Yeah, looking for Kuzushi, how my movement is being generated, and if I'm open to be This is generally how I judge whether or not someone's Aikido is good in a martial sense. It isn't always absolute, but if I'm completely stable, flat-footed, and just hanging out while someone applies whatever to my arm, usually they don't know what they're doing, at least again, not in a martial sense. I might take the fall to be nice or whatever. Falling is good cardio for me, but I'm usually quietly and politely pretty unimpressed. If I can just sort of hang out, then I'm still in control of myself. Whatever you're trying to apply is not working. An asterisk on all that has to do with pain compliance. I'm actually, unlike many Aikido people, very okay with applying pain to get certain things to work a little bit better. If we are discussing Aikido in a martial sense, I'm of the mind that in many ways it kind of should hurt. However, and this is a big however, pain compliance should not be relied upon to break one's balance or posture, nor should it be relied upon to get a person to move in a particular way. My reasoning for this has nothing to do with philosophy or peace or whatever else. It's not ideological. It has everything to do with the fact that pain compliance is inconsistent. Sure, maybe you punch some dude in the face and he stumbles back today, but eventually you will meet a guy who spits out a tooth and grins at you. Maybe you hyperextended an arm or demolished a wrist, but we've seen submission athletes simply not care about cracks and pops during competition and just continue on like nothing's happening. Or maybe you just get someone with bones made of rubber and they are so flexible that they are just entirely unbothered by whatever you're trying to do to them. Inflicting pain, at least in a martial Aikido sense, is a happy bonus, but it is not a means. A good martial Aikido practitioner embraces the possibilities of inflicting damage, but also understands that it is solid body mechanics and an understanding of foundational basics that lead to consistent control over a person. We aren't really submission artists in the same sense that BJJ guys are, nor are we throwers in the same sense that Judo people are or strikers in the same sense that Karate people are. Sure, people giving up from pain is a good outcome for us, but what we are really trying to do is take away a person's ability to continue fighting. Maybe that is by submission or knockout some of the time, but people have steel chins or gumby limbs. Because we just don't know, Aikido really focuses on the pin more than anything else because that's relatively universal and the kuzushi and movement and body mechanics that get us to said pin. Again, pins are much closer to being universal in this sense. Yes, there are body differences and body sizes and things like that to consider, but you don't just tough out a pin and then get up. It's not like an injury. You're either in a pin or you're not. And that's it. A nice solid five-ish tips with some caveats. That's probably going on the thumbnail. I did not at all plan for it to be a perfect five. There are other things I look for in a dojo too, of course. Just because a place is martial, for example, does not mean the people there are safe or are friendly. I've been to a few MMA gyms in my time that seem to produce pretty good fighters, but they break people almost weekly. It's not a great training environment. So there are social and safety things to consider. But this video wasn't really about finding a good Aikido dojo, but a martial-y minded one. We just obviously hope those end up being the same place. Beyond all this, you will probably need to take that extra step into live sparring on your own, of course. I will have other videos about that in the future, but this one was more about giving people a way to find a starting point. This is perhaps a bit of a hot take, but one of my criticisms of the many I-tested-my-Aikido-live type people and even some content creators that have done so, and I genuinely do mean this in a nice and constructive manner, I'm not calling anybody out, people can do as they want, but these folks don't often train the techniques outside of their live scenarios anymore. I'm not making excuses for Aikido's shortcomings here, because I absolutely acknowledge that it has no shortage of weaknesses, but pretty much every high-level martial artist trains outside of sparring. It is strange to me that Aikido pressure testing, as it is sometimes called, is sort of in this arena where people will be like, yeah, I quit Aikido cold turkey, but I'm going to keep testing it live. Now, on the creator side of things, maybe we don't see their training in between videos, but I've known people in real life who get completely disenfranchised with Aikido, which is understandable, they quit the art, also fine, but then they are baffled two years later when they still can't get the stuff to work, even a little bit, in sparring. It turns out sparring and technical practice are sort of two sides of the same coin. In reality, you need to be testing stuff live and then bringing that information back to the technical side of training and formulating drills around the behaviors that you saw in your sparring sessions. I'd also say that if you are a complete beginner, you shouldn't even be thinking about sparring anyway. Even in more quote-unquote legit arts, that's like a new English learner asking when they'll get to publish a book, and the answer is when you know your ABCs have at least like 2500 words of vocab and know a little bit of grammar. If you don't know Aikido techniques, you ultimately are going to have to go to an Aikido place or person to learn them. And yes, sure, the internet exists, but Aikido reminds me a lot of BJJ in the sense that it's kind of complicated. And to reiterate, I'm not saying it's complicated to hand a wave away its many, many problems. I'm absolutely not. But because it is so body mechanic reliant, you typically are either doing it right or doing it wrong, full stop. In Judo, maybe you can make some errors and still kind of leverage your fitness, like your strength or your agility, and take someone down. In Aikido, while solid fitness will always be useful, even a strong person is going to have a tough time getting techniques to function if he doesn't understand them. Yes, he can really crank on the wrists and make it hurt, but again, pain compliance is not all that consistent. Eventually, he will run into someone that just kind of shrugs it off. All of that is just to say, even if you want to take Aikido stuff to live sparring, which I think it does need if you want to be martial, you still need to actually learn and practice it. Maybe you're learning from just a friend who's trained before. Maybe you do find a dojo, but you're going to have to have somewhere that you're learning from. Otherwise, you're going to have a tough go of it if you're just haphazardly trying to get stuff to work in sparring that you don't have the mechanics down pat on. I see a lot of that in martial arts, honestly, and it's not just Aikido. Plenty of people try to do some cool new thing and then get disheartened when it doesn't work almost immediately. Remember, most of the people who seem like they can just apply their favorite stuff to you anytime they want, at will, probably have dumped literally thousands of hours into that one combination or technique. Not into the art or style, but the singular technique. Countless hours of drilling, theorycrafting, sparring, fitness, and making new iterations of the same thing based on experiences gained in aforementioned sparring. The notion that any of us are going to be able to just pick up a technique and be able to use it as a smoking gun in just a few months is just kind of absolutely bizarre crazy talk to me. You're not. Even if it's something as time-tested as Uchimata, you're not going to have a good Uchimata in a couple months after learning it. You're just not. You're not going to get it all that much. You have to drop hundreds, if not thousands, of hours into Uchimata. Then, when you take that same kind of mindset and look at Aikido, which is in a much worse place than Judo from a sport-slash-martial kind of perspective, it's probably going to be even more time. Aikido is niche, and I think we just need to accept that. But at the end of the day, you're always going to need a drawing board to come back to. And in this case, that's a dojo, hence this video and finding a place to train. Hopefully, you guys found all this useful. But for now, this is really all I have. I want to thank everyone for watching, and I will catch you all in the next one. Peace.