Oh dear.

I failed spectacularly to blog both Monday and yesterday.

It’s a horrifying two days late and I don’t really have any good excuses. I had a busy weekend with an aikido course about teaching randori, which was tough but enjoyable, and then I was working all day Monday and at aikido on Tuesday again for more randori training. Still, on the bright side, this all did act as a good prompt for a topic:

The Twelve Stages of Learning Aikido (in only very approximate order, ymmv)

Fresh Blood

You go along to your first session and everyone’s noses start twitching: new blood! People go out of their way to help you learn, as you flounder self-consciously along with the warm up and drills like a fish out of water. You watch the Dan grades demonstrating techniques and flying through the air with the greatest of ease and you vacillate between thinking “yeah! I’ll learn to do that!” and “Gulp! I’ll NEVER learn to do that!”

Newlywed

This is the honeymoon period. You’ve bought your gi and now you feel like a REAL aikidoka. Never mind that you can barely tell your unsuko from your Sudoku and think that the Japanese for “thank you for training with me” is “Godzilla mashed potato”, you’ve made it! You are now a martial artist in one of the most difficult martial arts in the world, you may even have read Angry White Pyjamas and think you know what that means…

Crash Test Uke

The side effect of learning kata is that you must also learn to receive kata, which means learning to breakfall (Japanese name for this skill: ukemi). Some very fortunate people take to this stage like ducks to water, but most have to conquer fear, preconceptions, bad body habits, an instinctive desire to remain alive and an aversion to mid-air body rotation.

Persevere, my friend. Yes, it’s true that you’ll spend much of your early days crash-landing with about as much grace as a drunken rhino, but the more you do it, and the more dignity you are prepared to sacrifice in the search for perfect ukemi, the better you will become.

Mountaineer

Ah, learning curves…You’ll experience several of these periodically any time from your first grading until death. These are the halcyon points where learning aikido feels effortless and your progress is marked and rapid. Make the most of them, because they are soon replaced by…

Stuck in the Mud

The dreaded Learning Plateaus of Doom. These are also something you can experience any time from your first grading until your final breath and can be diagnosed by the following symptoms: No obvious progress, two left feet, forgetting everything you ever learned about breakfalling/basic exercises/movement/kata, not being able to tell your left from right (usually at a critical point while a sixth Dan instructor is looking on). These too will pass. Hang in there.

Medically-Challenged Gi-Monkey

At some point, you will get injured. I’ve broken my toe several times, once during a grading. I know of top-class aikidoka who broke things repeatedly learning to breakfall. Much of aikido can feel like a long slog through the wilderness of injury and pain management. Embrace this. It’s part of the process and you will eventually learn, if not to love pain, to at least have a workable relationship with it.

Aikido Nerd

At some point probably around 5th-4th kyu, you’ll start looking up, and understanding, aikido humour on the internet. You too will make jokes about how impossible the 31 count jo kata is, or wryly remark about “blending” with the mat.

And you will cheer, occasionally loudly, taking everyone around you by surprise, when you see aikido in movies or TV programmes. You will start recognising kote gaeshi and oshi taoshi in the unlikeliest of places. Buffy. Tumble. Beautician and the Beast (yes, really!). The more subtle the technique you’ve spotted, the greater your geek score. You are now an aikido nerd. Well done.

The Angry Aikidoka

Maybe it’s the way that you crash and burn that particular breakfall, again and again and again. Maybe it’s a frustrating communication mix-up with the instructor. Or maybe it’s just a day ending in ‘y’. At some point (for some people at many points) and for some reason or combination of reasons, you will seriously consider quitting. You may even state, categorically, that you are done. For ever.

Yes dear. See you on the mat next week.

Spirit Disciple

This stage usually follows the “crying quits” stage. It’s the point where you decide that aikido is something you need to BEAT and you delve deep within yourself to find that elusive “spirit” everyone is going on about. If you can’t be good at it, then you will at least try really hard not to let it beat you! This is good because inevitably, after the downer that caused you to consider quitting, there is usually a marked point of progress and a brief period of being a “mountaineer” to remind you that actually, aikido is awesome, and you’d really miss it if you stopped.

Aikido Masochist

At this stage, if you wake up and some part of you doesn’t hurt, you genuinely check your pulse to see if you are still alive. This stage of learning aikido is marked most notably by the way that aches and pains just become an inevitable part of your everyday life and you have forgotten what it is like to not hurt, on some part of your body.

On a good day, perhaps only twenty percent of your body is sore. On a bad day, everything hurts but your hair. Bad days most often occur following: The first day at Skenfrith, any training session with a sensei of level 6th Dan or above and any Dan grading. This list is not exhaustive.

Enthusiast

This is the awesome stage where aikido becomes actual, consistent fun. For a lot of people this comes early on, (I believe this is directly proportional to how early you master ukemi!) but for others it can take a little longer. This is a magical place to be, enjoy it!

Beginner

This stage occurs when you achieve your first black belt. After years of work, you are now a first Dan. Your aikido career has begun.

Please note that the cartoons in this post have been shamelessly yoinked from the internet. I do not own them and did not create them.

For more information about Shodokan Aikido in York, visit York Shodokan Aikido Club’s site.