TL;DR: A friend tells me he wants to learn aikido to defend himself. I offer up BJJ instead, and he denies both my suggestion and an offer for me to show him some BJJ.
As the title states, I was at a little get together with some friends while I'm visiting back home. Most of them know that I train except for a girlfriend of one of them and one of the other guys. I was talking to the girlfriend at some point and she made some comment about using her long, fake nails as protection if she needed. At first I thought she was kidding, but based on the look on her face she wasn't. Now, the girl is ~5'3" and ~115lbs; she's not going to have much of a chance with just her nails. So I made a somewhat joking remark that if she really wanted protection, that she should buy a gun and/or learn jiu jitsu.
Anyway, she asked if I trained and I said yes, and after talking about it for a bit one of my friends told her to let me show her some stuff. She was hesitant but agreed -- after I assured her I wouldn't hurt her in any way -- because she was sincerely curious. The boyfriend was one of the guys who knew I trained so he was cool with everything. For reference, I'm sitting at a whopping 5'7" and ~132lbs, so I'm not a huge dude just throwing the chick around. I have her start in mount to show her how easily I can get out. We then switch and I show her how easily I can hold mount without doing too much -- explaining how bad the position is for her and how good it is for me. To finish it off, just because people love submissions, I showed her a triangle choke and she was blown away. We talked a bit more and then she asked her boyfriend if he'd pay for her to train. Cool. Not how I expected that to go, but I was pretty happy with that interaction overall.
The night goes on and the guy who doesn't know I train (I'll call him Steve from now on), whom I haven't know too long, starts talking to me about how he used to do ninjitsu as a kid and wants to pick something up again to bolster his ability to fight if he needs to. What does he pick? Aikido. Now, by this point the other guys and the girlfriend had been talking about me training because of what I showed the girlfriend, so Steve has heard as much but didn't see what I was showing the girl. I politely told Steve about one of the guys at my academy being a 2nd or 3rd Dan, and how he's gone off many times about how fake aikido is; about how he regrets spending so much time in aikido instead of BJJ. Steve isn't buying it.
Steve admits to not really knowing anything about jiu jitsu, so I start to try to cogently describe it and its use in the UFC. He goes on to talk about how he wants to learn a type of stand-up and a defensive art, where he doesn't hurt anyone, assuming he'll be able to just calmly flip someone and show them that he shouldn't be messed with. I'll save you guys the headache of reading what all was said, but basically Steve was totally sold on learning stand-up and that aikido was what he wanted to learn. I ended up spending way too much time going back and forth with the guy, and I was going to offer to show him the same stuff I showed the girl, but was getting the feeling he wouldn't be interested. What happens? Everyone else, who had been chiming in here and there and listening, got fed up with his arguments and told him to let me show him some stuff -- the girlfriend being the loudest of the bunch. He brushes it off by saying it's too awkward and didn't want to do it. I told him that my biggest concern, which is still definitely a possibility with jiu jitsu, is him getting a false sense of security or ability by picking something like aikido.
Any of you guys have any similar experiences? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you have.
Submitted May 24, 2018 at 10:25AM by MercurialNebula https://ift.tt/2KOrO6g
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