Why I Don’t Trust Doctors (or Most “Experts” for That Matter…)

In bioethics, politics and law, oftentimes we must rely upon the opinions of so-called “experts,” particularly those in the medical professions.  But as anyone who has ever dealt with doctors knows, they are frequently wrong — but almost NEVER admit it.

The problem is, their arrogance can get people killed or cause serious harm. That’s one of the reasons why you should never trust doctors or any other expert. Or rather, you should follow Reagan’s Dictum: Trust… But Verify.

Take this recent case from Australia. A woman, Kate Ogg, delivered twins and was told that, after 20 minutes of resuscitation efforts, that the male child wasn’t going to make it. The hospital staff lay the lifeless body of the premature infant on the mother’s chest so she could say goodbye.

The problem is, the baby began to stir. “Just reflexive movements,” the doctor sniffed dismissively.

The parents trusted the doctor knew what he was talking about — always a problematic assumption — and continued to nuzzle the baby as it squiggled around. They assumed he was dying.

They kept asking the doctor to re-examine the baby, but he refused. Repeatedly refused. He had decided. He had made up his (arrogant) mind. Too busy filling out his forms to bother taking another look. This attitude is rampant in medicine.

Here’s what happened next as reported on MSNBC.com:

Jamie [the baby] continued to come around as he lay across Kate’s chest. He began grabbing at his mother’s finger, as well as his father’s. And when Kate put a dab of breast milk on her finger, Jamie eagerly accepted it.

Kate finally began to believe her baby was actually alive. “We thought, ‘He’s getting stronger — he’s not dead,’ ” she said. But the family wasn’t getting any encouragement from their doctor. While the Oggs urged hospital personnel to summon him, they were repeatedly told what they were seeing was still just reflex from a baby already declared dead.

Kate Ogg told Curry they had to “fib” to get the doctor to return to her bedside. “We kept saying, ‘He’s doing things dead babies don’t do, you might want to come and see this,’ ” she told Curry.

But the skeptical doctor still didn’t return. “So David said, ‘Go and tell him we’ve come to terms with the baby’s death, can he just come and explain it.’ That made him come back.”

Kate Ogg told the London Daily Mail the doctor was in disbelief when he arrived back at the bedside. “He got a stethoscope, listened to Jamie’s chest and just kept shaking his head. He said, ‘I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.’ ”

The problem with experts is not that they don’t have expertise. It’s that their expertise blinds them to what is right in front of their eyes. Their expertise actually creates a bias.

I don’t mean to pick on doctors. My brother is a doctor. I have friends who are doctors. But I take almost everything they say with a gigantic grain of salt… especially when it’s really serious. The parents in this case now worry that the arrogance of this particular doctor may have resulting in their child suffering unnecessary brain damage. Had the doctor bothered to listen to what the parents were saying, the hospital staff might have been able to administer oxygen and take other measures to help the struggling baby.

Trust but verify indeed.

The Daily Discipline of Pushups

The first thing I do every morning when I get out of bed is to do 40 pushups. It’s also the last thing I do every night before I climb into bed. That may not sound like a very “yoga” thing to do, but it’s a discipline I adhere to that I believe has been very good for me.

I’m 51 years old so, if you’re younger, you can do more. I will probably gradually work up to my age or so just to show off but 40 is plenty for conditioning purposes.

To some, 40 may sound like a lot… so I want to share how I worked up to that number. I used a very simple method that I use for most difficult things: I did started with something very easy that I knew I could do: One pushup.

I used to do a lot of pushups when I was younger, but around the age of 45 or so I noticed a lot of what doctors call crepitus in my shoulders – horrible, crunching sounds from wear and tear on my joints – whenever I did pushups. It bothered me. Yet I found that if I did pushups, it actually reduced the crunching noises, as though the exercises free up the tissue adhesions and let the shoulders move more freely.

That’s when I decided to start doing regular pushups. As I said, I started one month and, on the first day of the month, I did one pushup first thing when I got out of bed and another single pushup before I got into bed. My wife chuckled at my rigorous exercise program. But like the old Greek story of the farmer who lifted the baby calf onto his shoulders everyday… until, when the calf grew into a bull, he found he could still lift the bull… I kept doing as many pushups as the days on the month went along. On Day 2, I did 2 pushups. On Day 3, I did 3 pushups. By the time I reached Day 30, I was doing 30 pushups in the morning and 30 at night.

I stopped at 40 because I didn’t want to make it too hard. I’ve found that if I push myself too hard in my yoga practice or anything else, I start to procrastinate and avoid things. For me, forty pushups is just about right: hard enough to work my chest and shoulder muscles, not so hard that I am tempted to skip a day.

For me, hatha yoga – the physical side of yoga — is all about the creation of daily exercise, cleansing and stretching habits like this.

I have many of them which I will be sharing periodically on this site. But for beginners, I believe people will benefit from starting with one, very un-yoga-like but highly beneficial exercise: daily pushups.

Men, especially, like this exercise because it gives them a hard, chiseled, defined chest and strong arms; but women, too, can benefit from daily pushups. The trick is to start slowly… just one a day, two times a day… and build up slowly. If you think 30 pushups will be too difficult, try adding another pushup every other day. Or even every third day. The key, as in yoga, is consistency and daily practice.

Jump out of bed, stretch, and then drop and give me twenty! You’ll be glad you did.

Studies Find Aerobic Fitness Equals Independence in Later Years

The folks at Cenegenics have taken a hard look at the benefits of aerobic fitness for people in their 60s, 70s and 80s. They’ve reviewed recent medical studies and concluded that, yes, aerobic fitness matters – particularly if you want to live independently in later years. Not only that, but the recent studies show that overall mortality is cut by as much as 70% among the “highly fit” elderly.

In fact, a significant study of more than 15,000 veterans whose average age was 60, published in the January 2008 Circulation (a journal of the American Heart Association), found that men who were “highly fit” had a 50% - 70% lower mortality risk than their “low-fit” counterparts.

Lead author on the study Peter Kokkinos even stated that to attain the associated health benefits, it only takes “moderate levels of physical activity like 30 minutes a day, five days a week of brisk walking.”

But it’s also well documented that maximal oxygen intake decreases between 20 to 60 years old and is projected to deteriorate at a similar rate into retirement. The faculty of Physical Education and Health and Department of Health of Public Health Sciences along with the faculty of medicine at the University of Toronto, (Ontario, Canada) examined the “likelihood that a deterioration of aerobic fitness will lead to a loss of independence in old age.”

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The Lost Secrets of Health & Fitness After Age 50

July 18, 2010 by Robert Hutchinson  
Filed under Health, Over 50

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Here’s the bad news: You lose up to 5% of your strength, flexibility and balance for every decade after age 20. But here’s the good news: With a little effort and determination, you can maintain 90% of the strength, flexibility and balance you had at age 20 well into your 60s, 70s and even 80s.

It sounds incredible… but it’s true! That means that if you could do 60 pushups when you were 20, you could actually do a mere 54 when you’re 65 (90% of 60). If you could get up at 5:00 a.m. and surf for two hours, you could, at age 70, get up at 6:00 a.m. and surf for only an hour and a half. (After all, you must make some concession to age!)

How is this possible? The answer lies in TRAINING FOR AGING.

As you age, you can maintain your strength, flexibility and balance… but you must train to do that. You must develop an exercise program that seeks to develop the very capabilities that we know you will lose as you age.

One way I do this is with the esoteric Japanese martial art of Aikido. I love Aikido because it trains all three of the physical attributes you lose with age — strength, flexibility and, most neglected of all, balance. If you want to fight, try Brazilian jujitsu. But if you want to age with grace and dignity and agility, try Aikido. There is nothing like it.

I also lift weights, do yoga, run on my treatmill while watching the news, and practice a little Tai Chi. I’m an ugly, crotchety old bastard… but I can do more pushups than many 20-year-olds I know and I’ve never felt better in my life.

Tags: Fitness over 50

Bible, Patriarchy & Wicca

June 8, 2010 by Robert Hutchinson  
Filed under Catholicism, Health

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To say that the Bible is patriarchal is like saying that Tai Chi is Chinese: It is such a bewildering statement of the obvious that only an academic or reporter would think it a profound revelation.

Yet in the 1970s and ‘80s, literally millions of feminists opened the Bible (some for the first time, some for the millionth time) and were shocked — shocked! -- at what they found.

Not only was the Divinity addressed as “He” – as He had been, both in the original scriptural languages and in vernacular translations, for 2,000 years — but the entire book was riddled with masculine prerogatives and male-oriented language.

The people of Israel are routinely referred to as bnei Israel, literally the “sons of Israel.”

God creates the male human being (the adam) first.

Under the Mosaic Law, men can divorce women at will… but women cannot divorce men.

All of the Twelve Apostles are men. Jesus is a man. St. Paul, the first Christian theologian, is a man.

And on and on it goes: male chauvinism everywhere you turn.

In an era when radical feminists were trying on such linguistic novelties as referring to “seminars” as “ovulars,” the frank “patriarchy” of the Bible drove many feminists to distraction.

That is the only way to understand the phenomenon of Mary Daly, the ex-Catholic nun turned lesbian isolationist who banned all men from her classes at the Jesuit-run Boston College and, in such classics of feminist rage as Gyn/Ecology, Pure Lust and Outercourse, proclaimed that “a woman’s asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person’s demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan.”

Of course, many feminists were content to remain within the broad confines of Christianity and Judaism and sought moderate corrections to what they saw as the sexism inherent in western religion — such as the creation of politically-correct “inclusive language” Bibles and so on.

Others, however, were driven to reject western religion altogether as irredeemably sexist — and sought, like Daly, to “discover” (actually create) a new religion known as “feminist spirituality.”

“The feminist movement in Western culture is engaged in the slow execution of Christ and Yahveh,” explained Naomi Goldenberg in her entertaining book, Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions “The psychology of the Jewish and Christian religions depends on the masculine image that these religions have of their God.  Feminists change the major psychological impact of Judaism and Christianity when they recognize women as religious leaders and as images of divinity.”

Drawing upon the writings of neo-pagan writers such as “Starhawk” (née Miriam Simos), author of the fascinating chronicle The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, these new feminist theologians asserted that prehistoric peoples all worshipped variations on the Great Mother Goddess – sometimes in conjunction with the “horned god” who died and was resurrected each year.

For tens of thousands of years, they said, primitive societies were matriarchal, ecologically in balance, egalitarian, peaceful, civilized, in touch with their own sexuality and bodies. (Priestesses presided “skyclad” or naked, “embodying the fertility of the Goddess,” explained Starhawk – a far cry from the staid, less tantalizing services found in your average Methodist congregation or Reform synagogue.)

But into this matriarchal utopia disaster struck: Indo-European invaders swept across the European continent, their veins surging with testosterone, bringing with them weapons of killing, patriarchy and (male) hunter gods.

When Christianity arrived on the scene, full of the myriad repressions and patriarchal traditions of Judaism, the Old Religion of the Great Goddess was forced to go underground – in the form of the various goddess-worship Gnostic sects that the early church persecuted and which figured so prominently in The Da Vinci Code.

But the “Old Religion” lived on, secretly practiced by old women (crones) and “witches,” until the “Burning Times” arrived in the Middle Ages – when, according to Starhawk and Mary Daly, some 9 million witches were burned at the stake.

An entire generation of “gender feminists” — now in their 60s and ‘70s — accepted this new mythology hook, line and sinker.

It is still routinely cited by prominent feminist theologians, writers and theoreticians within the Christian churches and, increasingly, within liberal branches of Judaism as well.

There is only one problem with it: It has about as much basis in history as the volcano-dwelling Thetans of Scientology.

Virtually everything taught about the Great Goddess in “feminist spirituality” and Women’s Studies classes – from Berkeley to Boston — is a hoax.

In fact, wicca in general and feminist spirituality in particular were largely the creations of one man…

Tags: feminist spirituality, goddess, wicca

Sex and John Paul II’s Theology of the Body

June 5, 2010 by Robert Hutchinson  
Filed under Catholicism, Health

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According to rabbinic tradition, the first commandment God gives Adam and Eve in the Garden is to have sex: Pru vehravu, “be fruitful and multiply.”

It’s little wonder, then, that Christian theology has pondered for centuries the place that human sexuality and bodily existence have in God’s plan for the universe.

On the one hand, anyone familiar with the Jewish testament knows that sexual attraction (and sexual sin) permeate virtually every book. What’s more, two centuries of crusading secularism has exaggerated Christian pruddery in the early centuries of Christianity and in the Middle Ages.

On the other hand, it’s also true that the monastic movement that led to so many cultural and educational achievements in the West did tend to emphasize the negative aspects of human sexuality and bodily existence — if only because vowed celibate monks and nuns inevitably saw sexual feelings as temptations to be avoided at all costs.

Into this tangled history stepped the late pope John Paul II.

Raised by his widowed father in Poland during the nightmare of World War II, Karol Wotylwa was a working man, athlete and actor before he became a Catholic priest and a philosopher.

His experience with young married couples during his early years as a pastor — combined with his in-depth study of early 20th century phenomenologists — allowed the young priest to see the sexual embrace and life in the body in an entirely new way: as quite literally a way to God.

When he was elected pope, John Paul delivered a remarkable series of 129 lectures during his Wednesday audiences on what has become known as the Theology of the Body (TOTB) — a very traditional, very radical teaching on human embodiment and sexual attraction that papal biographer George Weigel has described as “a kind of theological time bomb” that will have dramatic consequences …perhaps in the twenty-first century” (Witness to Hope, 343).

John Paul’s argument, in essence, is that both secular libertines and Christian pruddery have missed the point. Human beings are radically, essentially physical. Human beings are not “ghosts in a machine,” as Descartes described it.

In a dramatic way, the entire Christian understanding of the incarnation means that Christians are and must be “pro-sex” and must celebrate the body generally. I would even say that Christians take the body at least as seriously as the devotees of most religions, including even Hinduism. The doctrine of the bodily resurrection reflects the Christian belief that we are our bodies — that if we are to survive death then it must be a physical survival. A disembodied spirit would not be a human being.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna teaches Arjuna the exact opposite of the Christian view of our essentially bodily natures:

As a man discards his threadbare robes and puts on new, so the Spirit throws off its worn-out bodies and puts on new ones… The Spirit in man is imperishable.

While Christianity agrees with the Gita (and with yoga!) that there is an imperishable, immortal essence of the human being, which, for lack of a better word, the west has traditionally called the “soul,” it does not agree that the physical body is merely incidental to that essence — something that can be “thrown off” for a new one.

Rather, in the Christian view, we are embodied spirits or spiritual bodies – and thus it is our bodies themselves that are (or will be) immortal. Thus, the Christian hope is even more absurdly optimistic than people give us credit for: We actually believe that we will live forever… in glorified “resurrection” bodies, not as disembodied spirits. I’ve never been the least scandalized by Taoists who claim that yoga can lead to physical immortality of a sort or at least extreme longevity: it seems perfectly plausible to me given the Christian revelation.

That is why St. Paul tells the (male) Corinthians that they should take good care of their bodies and not defile themselves with prostitutes — and why Christian practitioners of yoga celebrate the body and do what they can to maintain good health. That is also why Pope John Paul II, in his teachings on the Theology of the Body, emphasized how incarnate human beings come to God in and through their bodies — and that sex, far from being inherently sinful, is actually a way to God.

In John Paul’s teaching, sex (for non-celibate “householders”) is a sacrament (a “sign”) of divine presence because it is the preeminent example of that spiritual intimacy that is the birthright of all human beings.

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Yoga is Good for the Soul

June 4, 2010 by Robert Hutchinson  
Filed under Health, Yoga

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Like many Christians who practice yoga occasionally, or would like to more often, I am hardly a purist. You could even call me a “cafeteria yogi.” I pick and choose among the various yoga practices that fit my overall lifestyle, level of fitness and religious beliefs. Fortunately, at every single yoga school where I have studied, without exception, the other students are exactly the same.

They are typical Canadian and American suburban professional types: harried moms, latte-swilling office workers, students, retired folk. The music is funky New Age chanting music, which, quite frankly, I find very relaxing and enjoy immensely (just ask my kids!). The teachers invariably say “Namaste” after class — which, despite all the hullabaloo among fundamentalists about its alleged polytheistic meanings, is just the ordinary Hindi way of saying “hello” (as my Indian relatives inform me). But beyond that, my yoga classes are about as pagan as an aerobics class down at the YMCA.

More and more people are awakening to this fact. Yoga is not the be all and end all of health. My doctor informs me that, while yoga is great for flexibility and stress-reduction, I still must hit the treadmill or swim for aerobics. If the yoga workout is particularly intense, it may qualify for the strength training that doctors now add to the list. (When are we supposed to do all this stuff, by the way?)

When I have the time, I find that one or two formal yoga classes a week are just about right for me — combined with the occasional stretches I do when I wake up or right before I go to sleep. Yoga gives me something that no other activity does. It provides a systematic stretching and what I can only describe as “liberation” of muscle groups ignored by all my other sports (Aikido, tennis, swimming) and activities (walking on the beach with my wife).

It also quiets me down, physically and mentally, and harmonizes very well with a lifelong meditation practice. For Christians who find little time for prayer and contemplation in the hectic modern world, regular yoga practice literally forces them to quiet down. It relaxes you unlike anything else — and then quiets your mind.

Yoga (or Buddhist) meditation is not the same thing as Christian or Jewish prayer, but they can be a necessary preparation for prayer — even a prerequisite. Without the quiet, stillness and relaxation that yoga provides, many people find it almost impossible to pray. But Christian yogis, blessed with such islands of silence and stillness, inevitably find themselves spontaneously giving thanks and lifting their minds and hearts to God.

So, the bottom line is this: If you’ve been thinking about trying out yoga but are concerned about the alleged “spiritual dangers,” forget about it. The people who prattle on about that have rarely stepped inside a yoga studio in their lives. What you’ll find is probably people exactly like yourself — stiff, overworked, semi-arthritic, stressed-out modern men and women — who are trying to ease the kinks out of their tired bodies and souls. And that is a good thing. Namaste!

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Practicing Non-Violence in Aikido

May 1, 2010 by Robert Hutchinson  
Filed under Aikido

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Growing up in the 1970s, and attending a Jesuit high school and university, I heard a lot of talk about “practicing” non-violence.  This was the era of the anti-war priests Dan and Phillip Berrigan… of Catholic Worker protests… of James Douglass (author of The Non-Violent Cross) and his wife Shelly.  Everyone was a pacifist, everyone talked about Gandhi and “practicing” non-violence.

But I could never really figure out what that meant, how you would actually “practice” non-violence.  Eventually, I decided I could never be a pacifist either philosophically or temperamentally. Pacifism could be a moral choice for an individual (such as a Buddhist or Christian monk or nun who chose martyrdom rather than act in self-defense) but never as a philosophical stance.  That’s because pacifism as a philosophical stance requires that you choose suffering, not for yourself alone, but for other people who might not agree with or want to embrace your high-minded philosophical principles.  It would require you to stand by while a woman was being raped and, because you’re so spiritually evolved, not kick the rapist in the teeth.

Also, I’m Irish… which makes me temperamentally rather ill-suited to pacifism.  When someone attacks me, or someone I love, my natural reaction is to, well, fight back.  Preferably with a head butt.

But here’s the thing:  Because of my Aikido addiction, I’ve ended up actually practicing non-violence on a regular basis.  Every week I go to my Aikido class and practice having someone take a swing at me… and not punch back!  In fact, I’ve learned that punching back is actually the least effective thing you can do if you want to avoid getting hurt.  (That is why police hand-to-hand combat is largely based on Aikido:  cops want to control a suspect, not trade punches with him.)

As I’ve pointed out before, I’m not very good at Aikido precisely because my natural inclination is to resist, to fight back, to muscle my way through a technique.  If someone resists when I try to do a particular move, I typically try harder! I use my strength to force my way through it.  This makes for lousy Aikido.

Aikido is not wrestling.  It’s not even jujitsu.  It’s an attempt to paradoxically control and neutralize an attacker without resisting, without using strength.  This is why it’s so difficult to learn… why people seem so fascinated by it… and why it’s not very practical as a street martial art.  Nonviolence truly is not easy.

Aikido uses a lot of mystical-sounding explanations involving “center” and “ki” and “blending,” but in essence what you’re trying to do in Aikido is to re-direct an attack, using timing and your body’s own momentum, so that neither you nor your attacker is hurt.  To do this, you have to first “take someone’s balance,” typically by “entering” into their “space” with your whole body weight or, alternatively, with a distracting smack in the kisser (known in Aikido as “atemi”)… and then, again using the movement of your entire body and your hips, to move the attacker in the direction where his or her balance is weakest.  When it works, it’s amazing:  a tiny wisp of a woman is able to toss a big guy across the room.  (I know, I’ve had it happen to me dozens of times!)

Where I get bogged down is that my first reaction, when someone resists me, is to use my (sometimes greater) arm strength to force them where I want them to go.  The problem with that is that there is always a bigger fish in the sea… and eventually, when faced with a bigger guy, the technique simply won’t work that way.  What you learn eventually is to not resist resistance... not to force anything.  (”Resist nothing” is what Eckhert Tolle heard in his moment of enlightenment.)  If some big galoot grabs your arm, hard, you simply let him have it.  You move your whole body around and away.

Actually, the Aikido techniques that I love the most, like nikkyo (shown above), are the ones where you specifically allow someone to do something to you… and then do it more! For example, say someone grabs your lapels with both hands.  Your (my) natural reaction would be to pull away, to resist.  But the Aikido thing to do would be just the opposite:  To put your own hands over the attackers hands and arms, pull him tighter toward you, and then lean forward into him with all your body weight, easing him to the ground in a way that makes him scream from the pain in his wrists.  (You gotta love that nonviolence stuff!)  The wrist locks of Aikido are famous for this.

Eventually, though, the regular physical practice of nonresistance does have a spiritual effect of sorts (at least theoretically).  You become less reactive.  That was, I think, what the founder of Aikido had in mind in his vision of Aikido as some sort of mystical technology for universal brotherhood.  Rather than meeting an attack head on, butting heads, an Aikido person tends to move out of the way instead… and sort of redirects the aggression in the way he or she wants it to go.  Pretty soon this becomes second nature because you do it 40, 50 100 times a night in Aikido practice.  I won’t get all Zen on you and claim Aikido has all sorts of practical applications in business and home life… but a little of that is undoubtedly true.

P.S.  The big bald guy in the photo isn’t me… but someone who knows what he’s doing.

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Aikido’s Strange History

October 31, 2009 by Robert Hutchinson  
Filed under Aikido, Blogging

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Part of Aikido’s weirdness comes from its strange history. Aikido is a modern martial art that evolved out of Daito-Ryu Aiki-Jujitsu, a deadly, no-holds-barred fighting form taught secretly to the Japanese samurai. The principal aim of the art was to teach samurai how to quickly kill opponents on the battlefield if they lost their weapons. Like other types of jujitsu, it involved joint locks, throws and “pain compliance” techniques.

The last master of Daito-Ryu, Sokaku Takeda, was a mean, nasty SOB who allegedly killed dozens of men in unarmed “duels.” In the early 20th century, he taught his samurai jujitsu to a strange Shinto mystic and dreamer named Morihei Ueshiba, who had founded a rural commune in northern Japan and then spent his entire inheritance on private lessons from Takeda. Ueshiba eventually learned enough from Takeda to receive a “license” to teach Daito-Ryu but, instead, used what he learned as the base to create a new martial art which we now call Aikido – which means the Way (Do) of Harmonious (Ai) Energy (Ki).

Just as the founder of Judo, Jigoro Kano, modified the throws of classical jujitsu to create the modern sport of judo, so, too, Ueshiba took the brutal, bone-snapping techniques of Daito-Ryu and created a martial art that, he believed, promoted peace rather than mayhem. Ueshiba also added a whole new approach to doing the techniques of Daito-Ryu that involved circular movements that, his followers believe, made them far more effective and powerful – but which his detractors believe actually weakened the techniques and made them less effective.

In any event, Aikido evolved as a martial art that seeks to use circular movements and precise timing in order to “neutralize” any attack and use an opponent’s strength against him. In practical terms, it involves learning a variety of throws and joint locks that take literally years to learn well but which, if done by an expert, are actually quite effective. Many of the coolest moves you see in spy movies – like in the Jason Bourne films — are actually Aikido techniques. Modified versions of the techniques are also used a lot by police, especially the joint locks.

Does it work? I am asked that all the time.

The easy answer would be, well, that depends. The more honest answer is: In a street fight against a hardened criminal, probably not.

But then again, karate or tae kwon do or any other after-school pansy martial art wouldn’t work, either. Any bouncer will tell you that real fights are brutal and quick – and no place for anything fancy, whether spinning wheel kicks or Aikido throws. Real rights are where the toughest, most ruthless, usually most experienced bastard wins.

If you want to train for that type of fight, the best training is probably a good Brazilian Ju-Jitsu (BJJ) or Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) dojo that tries to be as realistic as possible and where people regularly get their ribs and noses broken – and even that probably wouldn’t really prepare you to face the average, run-of-the-mill convict.

But the reality is, most people don’t square off in the street against Jean Claude van Damme. What the average person encounters, and which Aikido is actually quite useful for, is the drunk in the local pub… or the too-friendly groomsman (for women) at a wedding. Some oaf grabs your lapel… or tries to push you. For these types of real-life encounters, the joint locks and simple throws of Aikido can actually be quite effective.

For most people, though, Aikido training really isn’t about fighting. It’s about not-fighting, about winning through non-resistance, about redirecting aggression so it doesn’t hurt you. The esoteric side of Aikido is that the techniques are most effective when you don’t try to use muscle at all but timing, gently knocking someone off balance enough so, with hardly any effort, you can guide him or her face down on the mat. That is why Aikido people whirl their opponents around in a characteristic circular motion that takes away their balance.

Tags: Aikido

My First Decade of Aikido

October 31, 2009 by Robert Hutchinson  
Filed under Aikido, Blogging, Health

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My knees are a bloody mess. It’s been a while since I did suwari-waza, the strange practice in traditional Aikido dojos of doing techniques, samurai-style, on your knees. Last week, the sensei spent almost the entire class doing suwari-waza and, when I stood up, the skin on my knees was entirely rubbed off. Ouch!

And yet here it is, the following week, and I am showing up again.

I took up Aikido ten years ago, at the ripe old age of forty, and have been struggling to learn it ever since. The kids wanted to take a martial art and I thought judo might be nice. Something difficult, real fighting, like wrestling.  I looked around for a judo dojo but couldn’t find any near our home. But I did find some Aikido dojos that taught kids and that intrigued me. At the time, Steven Seagal wasn’t yet an incarnate lama, just a Hollywood action star, and I was intrigued by those flashy moves he did. It seemed elegant and different, not like the typical side kicks you saw at the local tae kwon do school.

So, my three sons and I started Aikido together. Week after week, year after year, we drove 30 minutes each way for Aikido classes two or three times a week. One by one, though, the kids lost interest and quit… but I was hooked.

My first teacher was Gentile Pennwaert (5th Dan), a Belgian former ambulance driver who trained at the New York Aikikai and was the apprentice (uchi deschi) of Seiichi Sugano Shihan. Pennwaert Sensei is a wonderful teacher, especially for beginners, and his dojo is full of friendly, easy-going senior students who go out of their way to help you. He teaches the traditional “Aikikai” style of Aikido that is taught at Hombu Dojo in Japan and he is affiliated with the U.S. Aikido Federation (East), run by Yoshimitsu Yamada Shihan.

I also trained for a time with Huruo Matsuoka, Steven Seagal’s oldest student and uke, whom you see getting slammed to the mat (hard!) in Seagal’s first movies and in Seagal’s Aikido documentary, The Path Beyond Thought. Matsuoka Sensei is one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, a truly gentle and wise man, a devotee of macrobiotics, and he teaches Seagal’s somewhat unusual style of Aikido that is called “tenshin” Aikido. Around the time Seagal discovered that he is an incarnate Tibetan lama or tulku, Matsuoka had some falling out with the pony-tailed Hollywood star, returned to Japan and studied with Abe Sensei, the founder of Aikido (O Sensei’s) calligraphy teacher. Matsuoka came back to America in the early 2000s and started some new dojos where some of Pennewaert’s students and my friends came to study. Matsuoka’s Aikido is very advanced and technical – too advanced for someone like me. But I learned a lot from him and heartily recommend his dojo to anyone who lives close enough to study with him.

I now study with students of the legendary Kazuo Chiba Shihan of the (old) San Diego Aikikai, spread out in locations all over the world. Chiba Sensei is a fairly scary figure in Aikido circles, someone who doesn’t tolerate fools lightly and who is more than willing to make believers out of skeptics. From what I can tell, Chiba’s approach to Aikido is practical and very direct – “we like to make sure a certain amount of pain is involved,” my current teacher says with a smile. What Chiba Sensei’s students are trying to teach me is how to take someone’s balance first before you try any technique — a basic concept in judo (called kuzushi) but which many Aikido schools neglect.  Chiba-affiliated dojos (part of the Birankai federation) in British Columbia include Still Waters Aikikai in Sidney and Mountain Coast Aikikai in Richmond.

So, I’ve been at it for ten years now… and have only scratched the surface. I have to say, I’m really lousy at Aikido. I’m stiff as a board… clumsy… my knees hurt… my ukemi (falling) sucks… and I am still struggling with moves that any beginner knows how to do. But I feel at this point I can at least describe why Aikido captivates so many of its adherents and yet, to outsiders, seems so strange. My wife considers it a bizarre “cult,” akin to people who are in telepathic contact with aliens.

First, Aikido, at least in the mainstream Aikikai style, is the best workout you could ever have. It manages to combine a lot of stretching with tumbling and falling… a serious cardiovascular workout… and the kind of muscular training you’d get with, say, wrestling…. and a little self-defense. After an hour of Aikido, my gi is soaking wet, every muscle in my body hurts and I feel like I’ve been doing yoga for a week. I’ve been tossed around like a sack of potatoes by experts and have had my wrists and shoulder joints twisted out of their sockets. It’s great!

Second, Aikido teaches you weird stuff you don’t learn in a typical rock-‘em, sock-‘em kicking and punching martial art. Whether you’ll ever use this weird, esoteric stuff is another question entirely – but you definitely feel like you’re learning strange Shaolin voodoo, not just how to kick someone in the balls.  I studied Shito-Ryu Karate as a kid with a wonderful hippie carpenter and nidan and love traditional Japanese karate… but Aikido is from an entirely different planet.

The hard part for me is learning how not to use my muscles.  The tendency of every beginner is to try to muscle through the techniques, forcing someone to the mat, for example, or really cranking on a wrist lock.  But the people who really know Aikido use very little muscular force.  They use the weight of their whole bodies… and the ability to move their opponent off balance… so the techniques seem almost effortless.  That is why Aikido is great for women because women are generally not as strong as men and so must learn how to do the techniques correctly.  It’s also why Aikido is a great martial art for people as they get older.  It’s one of the few where technique really can overcome brawn… providing, of course, you actually learn how to do it right.  And that’s the trick!

Tags: Aikido

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