robertle

you sure can! but if the reason to studying something else is your suffering knees, then I wonder whether aikido is the right thing... regards robert

hi everyone, perhaps a slightly different perspective: I have been doing aikido for quite a while and fairly recently started to go to (shotokan) karate classes, purple belt now for what it's worth. so not really qualified to say much about karate. I do find the two classes to be very complimentary, and I bet that would be the same thing the otehr way around. while some of the exercises or techniques and approaches are very different on the surface, the stuff you struggle with is the same: correct movement and awareness of it. the angle is slightly different though, for example tension and relaxation is very important in both, but in karate is seems to be a function of time (all relaxes, then all tensed on impact) where in aikido it is more a question of some parts of your body being tensed (although aikido folks would not like the word "tensed" much) while others are relaxed. when it comes to applicability to self defense, I personally don't care much. I think both karate and aikido are not really meant to do that anyway. if you want to compare the two then karate is certainly more usefull in this context after a few years, aikido may be more usefull than karate if you have done both for a very long time and you are a bit older yourself. I would not overlook the fact that aikido has lots of grabs and throws, in my extremely limited experience you would likely see some of that in a self defense sitaution. and about the dojo experience of harkon72: an aikido class is not a set of fighting techniques, but rather cooperative exercises to develop body skills. the comfort and courtesy of an aikido dojo helps with that. the wrist grab also isn't an effective attack in an aikido dojo, the attack comes afterwards and would be something like a jodan punch. but we want to utilise the initial contact, so we omit the actual attack because it's not what this exercise is about. all that said, neither is only roses of course. it is quite true that lots of aikidoka could not attack if they wanted to (this is what brought me to do karate), which then also makes the aikido exercises difficult because of the unrealistic attack. I also agree with the pseudo-spirituality, that can be quite annoying in some areas. fortunately different dojos are quite different in that respect, you have to find one that suits you. the other bit about this is that in some cases it actually isn't that much esotericism, but rather people using a language for lack of better words. for example some people would say to "extend your ki" and actually don't mean anything special, but just a way to move that is hard to describe. if you have done it a while you know what they mean. this is the same as my karate sensei saying she wants to see more hips. that doesn't make sense on a plain english level either... puh, this has turned into a longer post than wanted. in any case: i just wanted to say that from my point of view the complimentary parts far outweight the differences, and that I enjoy both a lot regards robert