Aikido and/or self defence - Part 1

I have been getting questions recently about the applicability of aikido in self defence situations. How effective are the techniques of aikido as self defence techniques?

Before going into the details of the techniques and their effectiveness, however, let us examine the ways self defence can manifest itself.

Self defence has several sides and levels. Based on the experiences I have had so far there is a physical side to self defence, which usually appears as a technique, and there is a mental, spiritual side which is about inner peace, calmness, about silencing one’s own ego, and about self control.

The physical side of self defence can further be divided into several levels. There is the kind of self defence techniques that are used to preserve our physical health. Here I’m thinking about rolls and falls (ukemi) that are the simplest examples. Getting out of the way, leading the energy of others also belong to the physical side of self defence, constituting another level of it. With these techniques you don’t and can’t hurt anyone else, and I will talk about this later.

Let us consider rolls and falls. The simplest example for self defence by falling can be the following: when we lose our balance – either because we just trip or because someone, somehow throws us off balance – it is the knowledge of rolls and falls that protects us from getting hurt.

So we should not just concentrate on throws and locks as self defence techniques but the possession of high level ukemi skills is at least as important. I’m sure most of us have at least heard about someone who used their falling skills to get out of a situation unhurt, or protecting themselves from very serious injuries.

So what’s the point in self defence and self preservation by ukemi?

The human body and the internal organs all have their physical limits. If the stress, pressure or shock is higher than a certain amount the danger of serious injury is very real. Some type of the stress that gets to the body is described with the G-force, which is the rate of acceleration when an object is dropped. The stress that appears in the body of fighter pilots is usually described by some multiple of this g (9.81 m/s^2) acceleration. If this number is too high, the force on the body and organs can become so high that the organs are simply ripped from their places or pressed against each other to a point where the damage cannot just be undone. When falling down after tripping, we can fall with high energies, and bumping into the ground or into another object can pose very high risk (and force) to the body. There are two options to reduce the possible damage.

a) One, the energy of the fall can somehow be reduced by, for example, creating some force that has the opposite direction. This can be achieved by using a part of the body, most frequently the edge of the hand. We hit the ground with the hand and the energy of the body will be reduced. We do a breakfall.

b) Two, the energy of the fall, more precisely the energy that hits the body at a single point can be lowered. At a single moment of impact, all the fall’s energy hits the body at the same time, so there is no hit on the body for some time, then there is a sudden peak of high energy impact and then there is not much afterwards. This peak can be distributed over time so it becomes longer but much lower, less damaging. The energy is being led away. This can be implemented by doing various types of rolls (mae ukemi, ushiro ukemi, yoko ukemi).

There are many people – mostly those who do not practice aikido or other martial arts regularly – who question aikido and ukemi practice, who say it is not life-like, that everything is choreographed, nothing like that happens in the street. Looking at the above points, we can clearly see that these people are not aware of the rolling-falling level of physical self-defence, and the physical background of it. It is true that a layman, who has never been taught any ukemi, will not roll or fall nicely after a couple of practice rolling sessions, and they won’t be able to reduce the energy of the falls effectively. Their movements will tend to be quite uncontrolled at the beginning, all objects in the way of the falling person will be swept away by them and they might get hurt. But nice and effective rolls do not just appear overnight, they need to be perfected and practiced for long, just as any other body movements.

So when we talk about aikido, self defence is not only something that is important for the defender (aka. tori or nage). There’s another side, too. It is also the task of the attacker (uke) to defend themselves, to protect themselves from injury. Self defence is important for both partners, it just appears differently during aikido practice.

I hope that the above ideas help you to think about self defence, and to understand that self defence in aikido is not only something that you do by applying techniques.

In the next article we will discuss a principle (similarly to the above paragraphs, from a highly materialist perspective) that is very important to know in order to be able to execute any aikido technique. If you don’t want to miss it please subscribe to our blog posts by e-mail or in a reader.

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