Effective techniques without strength by Stanley Pranin

“He went down easily. I had only used one hand from beginning to end!”

From the start of my involvement in aikido I would find myself using physical force in an attempt to salvage techniques that were not working. I was not alone in this regard. Virtually all of my peers were doing the same thing. I don’t think any of us understood why our techniques weren’t working.

Clueless about relaxation

Our teachers endlessly repeated that we needed to learn to relax. So in our attempt to achieve this state of relaxation we would try to visualize the flow of ki in our arms and bodies. On other occasions, I can recall even trying to make my arms go completely limp. My idea was that perhaps I would get lucky and discover this elusive state of relaxation through experimentation. None of the things I tried worked.

In the end, when I found myself under pressure to complete a technique against a resisting attacker, I would revert to using physical strength. Doing this always felt wrong. I knew it was antithetical to the principles of aikido. But the fact is, I simply ran out of alternatives and didn’t know what to do.

Faking it as a teacher!

After a few years of training, I found myself in a teaching role. Here’s how I got around the problem of not being able to handle a strong opponent. Since I knew the techniques I was best at, I would look around the class to see who was there. If someone was strong and tended to resist techniques, I would simply avoid calling that person to serve as uke. I did not want to risk being embarrassed in front of everyone!

Only many years later when I began teaching privately isolated from most of my peers did I began to find a solution to this perennial problem. There were few students in our group and several of them were physically quite strong, much more so than me. I could not get around calling up everyone to take ukemi because so few people were present. Also, I was training myself along with the members during the entire class. Everyone knew if your techniques worked. There was no place to hide!

The importance of positioning

For the first time, I began to pay close attention to how I positioned myself before attempting a throw. I found that by getting well to the side of my attacker and out of his immediate reach that I had more success. I could see that uke‘s force was effectively neutralized if I could get to his blind spot. This was a major breakthrough and I began systematically setting up techniques this way.

But there was another hurdle I had to overcome. I still could not cope with the physical strength of certain members due to their powerful grips. Since I was having good success by altering my positioning strategy, I was eager to find a way to prevail against strong grabs too. Here’s how I solved this problem.

Body unification

We did a lot of katatedori techniques and I began to notice certain things. First of all, I gave up on the idea of using any physical strength at all. But I also knew from my past experimentation that I couldn’t succeed by attempting to remove all strength from my body either. What other possibility was there?

I began to visualize myself as a unified body. When someone started to grab me, I no longer felt that he was merely grabbing my hand. I began to realize that it was my entire body and mind receiving the attack. My partner would target my hand, but I was no longer reacting to his grip in isolation. Even though he was of superior strength, his only point of contact with me was my wrist.

I began to understand that if I was not resisting his grab specifically but responding with my entire body, I could assert control while executing the technique. If he was grabbing my hand, I was still able to move other parts of my body like my legs and hips. Also, I still had a free hand. I found that if I didn’t tense my arm I could use my grabbed hand more as a steering mechanism backed by my unified body. I could alter the line of attack by subtly adjusting my hand position and twisting my hips.

When I moved to my uke‘s side and he noticed that the dynamics of the technique were changing, the strength in his grab began to wane. He realized he was loosing his balance and lost his focus on grabbing. From there it was easy to destabilize him thereby nullifying his strength advantage. The key realization I had was that it was first necessary to unbalance my uke in order to use my arms effectively without tensing. Under those circumstances it was indeed possible to “relax”.

Confronting Goliath!

In concluding, let me tell you what happened last month. I was teaching at a seminar in Italy. There was a powerful man who was a leading instructor in his country, and he still liked to train. He is about 6 feet 2 inches and weighs around 250 pounds. In the old days, I would have been overwhelmed by someone that large.

I was demonstrating a technique from kosadori, a cross hand grab. He grabbed me, but I could tell he was not using full power. So I asked him to grab me as strongly as he could so that he would be convinced that the technique worked without requiring the use of power.

Without confronting the strength of his grip, I kept my forearm totally relaxed and stepped to his side while turning my hips. From there I was able to reverse his hand easily and his balance began to falter. I was then able to advance against his outstretched arm and lead him while lowering my hips. He went down easily. Then I realized that I had only used one hand from beginning to end!

It dawned on me that for many years I considered such things to be impossible. It was sheer ignorance on my part. It turned out that my way of viewing things was deficient. The solution lay on a conceptual level.

I’ve done my best to describe the process I went through to make these discoveries. I do wish to state clearly the following: it is possible to consistently execute effective techniques on a larger and more powerful opponent without the use of physical strength. The whole rationale of aikido rests on these principles. This applies to you in your own training whether or not you believe it now.