One of my pet peeves in Aikido is wasted time during training.
Too often I’ve noticed higher grades develop a habit of constantly correcting every mistake they perceive a beginner to make.
This can be made worse when another higher grade gets invovled and it becomes a long debate on what is the best way to practise the technique.
Meanwhile the beginner is left to listen to a conversation that is not helping their Aikido improve.
I used to like to correct each mistake also. It’s good to feel like you are helping someone to improve.
But in reality, it is hard for a person to take in many corrections. In turns into a sort of egotism within the student who feels they have the right to tell everyone else how it should be done.
I’ve always tried to adopt the idea that there is one teacher in the class. If the person I am practising with is struggling I should help as much as I can but without turning it into a lecture on the finer details.
We are partly coming to Aikido to get out of our heads and back into more co-ordination and centre in our body. Turning it into another place to over analyse and over talk becomes boring.
Also, it creates a bad feeling in the practise. When we continually stop, judge and criticise we develop a resistant mind. This is not good for our own practise.
We should endeavour to get into a good flow of practise in which we get to practise a technique many times.
Imagine in a 5 minute period we are practising a technique together, each taking turns. It’s not unreasonable that we would repeat the full technique perhaps 20 times each, or more.
Imagine another group are practising beside us and the senior student decides to stop and explain what has went wrong. They might only do the technique 3 -5 times in that 5 minutes.
If we replicate this scenario over years, one group has had 4-7 times the amount of training.
For me it is practising the basic movements first by repeating them over and over that is the first stage in our training. Of course you will not do this perfectly the first time, but you have to get a chance to practise the movement for your body to start to get used to the pattern.
On another note, it is highly demotivating to continue to point out mistakes. We should really aim to build up and encourage our training partners and focus on some of the improvements they are making. Otherwise they will constantly feel like they are getting nowhere.
There are some of my thoughts on the best way to train. Over thinking and over analysing wont get you there. To some degree there is a wisdom in your body that will help you figure out the movements through repeated practise, but this is helped by the occasional correction to make sure you are on the right path.
Aikido For Glasgow 