I’m guessing that either (a) you’re not much stronger than your wife or (b) she didn’t click into the thing the visualization is meant to help people click into.
Oh, no. I’m so much stronger than my wife that there’s no way she’s keeping her arm straight if I’m serious about bending her arm. The test was 1) is she tensing her bicep when I don’t subtly suggest she should and 2) is she able to put up more resistance when visualizing instead.
Seriously, the thing I mean when I point at this technique isn’t a vague “energy” trick that fails upon encountering an MMA fighter or whatever. And it definitely doesn’t rely on subtly deceiving people into tensing the wrong muscles. Unbendable arm is immensely demonstrable
Do you have a preferred video demonstration? Or can you draw the force vector diagrams? I don’t doubt that you’re observing something real here, but from looking through YouTube I’m not seeing what you’re describing.
This one shows something closer to what you’re talking about, but it’s pretty clear that he’s cheating the starting position by giving himself a more advantageous position the second time and having the other guy start in a less advantageous position. Which I guess kinda raises the question of what exactly is it supposed to demonstrate? Is that “cheating” or is that the entire thing being conveyed?
My wife’s first reaction to “don’t let me bend your arm” was actually to swat my hand away from her wrist, which playfully points out that we’re implicitly holding back in unspecified ways for sake of the demonstration, and if we were actually trying to not let someone bend our arm we would be doing something quite different. So what are the rules, anyway? As long as the rules are kept hidden it’s really easy to move the goalposts around without anyone noticing.
Do you have a preferred video demonstration? Or can you draw the force vector diagrams? I don’t doubt that you’re observing something real here, but from looking through YouTube I’m not seeing what you’re describing.
Boy do I relate. For whatever reason, the demos on YouTube are almost universally weirdly bad. I’m guessing Ivan found the one he linked to because I linked to it; it’s the clearest short demo I’d found.
I’ll see about making one sometime. It’s a little tricky for me in particular to convey over video because I’m so visibly strong. But I’ll give it some thought. Maybe I can ask for help from some of the bodybuilders at one of the local gyms.
Sadly I can’t draw a force diagram because I honestly don’t know how it works. I can almost make sense of it. The technique works perfectly well if I put my wrist on an unyielding inanimate object like a table, so I think I’m somehow transferring the downward force near the elbow into the upward force on the wrist. But I’m not at all sure how that “somehow” works. I just… do it. By “extending ki”. :-P
This one is just awful. Just utterly dumb. It’s correct that losing focus when you’re learning the technique causes it to fail. But at no point in the video does he demonstrate the actual thing. They’re treating it like mysterious magic — which makes sense! It’s hard to do without treating it like a bit of magic at first.
I can do the unbendable arm while distracted now. It’s something my body just does when I choose for it to.
Yeah, I’m with you, this isn’t impressive. It’s kind of sort of right ish. But his understanding of how to do it is sloppy IMO. That slop shows up in how he stumbles around.
Complete relaxation is not necessary for doing this technique. But if you’re doing the technique right, tremendous relaxation is possible. So if you want to check if you’re doing it right, you can try relaxing more than you would be relaxed if you were fighting to keep your arm straight.
He’s right that the arm might bend a little. It’s an adjustment thing. Kind of like how your knees might bend a little if you catch a falling heavy object: it’s just a spring action as your body adjusts to the new incoming force. But if you’re doing unbendable arm right, you can actually let the arm completely fold up and then straighten it out again while they’re applying force. It’s quite easy.
But my guess is that he’s not referring to adjustment. I think he’s making excuses for poor technique.
This one shows something closer to what you’re talking about, but it’s pretty clear that he’s cheating the starting position by giving himself a more advantageous position the second time and having the other guy start in a less advantageous position. Which I guess kinda raises the question of what exactly is it supposed to demonstrate? Is that “cheating” or is that the entire thing being conveyed?
At a glance, it looks to me like this guy really is doing the thing I’m talking about. There might be extra stuff going on, but my impression is that if you vary that extra stuff it won’t affect the power of the unbendable arm. I really don’t think it’s a matter of “advantageous position”.
I’m not going to die on the hill of “This guy is authentic.” It’s just a passing impression from watching the video. That said, I might start linking to this demo instead honestly! :-D Although I do like the original guy’s looseness better.
I’d be happy to do this demo with you with the “advantageous positioning” mostly however you want it to be. I say “mostly” because there are some things that’ll break the technique’s ability to work, and I can nearly always tell you ahead of time what those will be. (E.g., if you rigidly pin my upper arm to a stationary object like a countertop, the technique won’t work.) But it’s really not about the level of advantage I think you’re talking about. I can do the unbendable arm on my knees with my arm pointing straight over my head. I can do it with two people, one pushing up on my wrist and the other pushing down on my elbow. I hold totally inanimate objects using this technique, like sacks of groceries, by placing a wrist on a surface like a wall or a railing. I’m pretty darn sure it’s a physics trick having to do with redirecting forces somehow. It’s just a little tricky to learn how to do it.
My wife’s first reaction to “don’t let me bend your arm” was actually to swat my hand away from her wrist, which playfully points out that we’re implicitly holding back in unspecified ways for sake of the demonstration, and if we were actually trying to not let someone bend our arm we would be doing something quite different. So what are the rules, anyway? As long as the rules are kept hidden it’s really easy to move the goalposts around without anyone noticing.
I’m very, very confident it doesn’t work via moving goalposts.
I don’t know how to delineate all the “rules”. If you change the context such that you’re not testing the arm’s unbendability, then you won’t get to experience the thing I’m talking about. There are some ways of testing unbendability that will, in fact, get even my arm to bend in defiance of my trying to use this technique. There’s an amount of force that should, in theory, cause tendons/ligaments/bones to start snapping, at which point of course the arm will fold.
Maybe there are other things for me to name there. I don’t know.
But if you’re concerned about any hidden rules here, feel free to ask me about them. If you give me a scenario, I can tell you whether (a) it’s testing the thing I’m talking about and (b) how it’d do.
E.g., if you vice grip my upper arm and use a car jack against my wrist to force my arm to bend, it absolutely will. I have no power against that setup.
E.g., if you stare really hard at my arm to try to get it to bend but you don’t touch it, you won’t be testing the thing I’m talking about.
E.g., if you are trying to bend my arm like in many of these demos but you surprise me by smashing my foot really hard, I might stop doing the technique and you might successfully bend my arm — not because it failed but because I stopped doing it. (Although even here, if it were somehow really dire that I demo it, I might flinch and it might falter for a moment, but I’d be able to recover it and re-extend my arm against your force.)
And as I said up above, within some sensible limits I’m very happy to demo this technique in person. I’d ask that you not smash my foot or otherwise be mean about it! And there are some tests you might want to do that I can just flat-out tell you would cause the technique to stop working, so I don’t think there’s much point in running those. But if you want me to, say, do it blindfolded while lying on the ground and singing the national anthem, I’d be totally happy to do that. It’ll work just fine.
I’m very, very confident it doesn’t work via moving goalposts.
I think we may be talking past each other a bit here.
I think we’re in agreement that it works through force vector diagrams, not through magic that defies the physics of force vector diagrams. Similarly, I think we’re in agreement that we get to force vector diagrams by patterns of muscular activation and limb positioning. It’s not that the visualization is a required component for doing or explaining, it’s that it allows you to do something that you don’t know how to explain (or do?) otherwise.
My skepticism about The Unbendable Arm is like my skepticism about The Unbendable Tibia. I don’t doubt that there are very good structural reasons the arm/tibia doesn’t bend, but I am skeptical of the implicit idea that in order to do it you need to learn how to visualize from an Aikido practitioner. Not “Will it work even when an MMA guy tries to bend you arm/tibia?”, but “Is the MMA guy actually getting his arm/tibia bent in fights in ways that they wouldn’t if he mixed in some Aikido?”.
If an Aikido practitioner tries to do the demo on me, there’s a few ways it can go.
One is for him to fail to bend my arm, and notice right away “Ah! You already know The Unbendable Arm!”. Points for honesty there, but not for teaching me anything.
A second is for him to implicitly or explicitly tell me to do things that make my arm bendable, and then show me that my arm is stronger when I don’t do them. Points for honesty if he admits “Yeah, all I’m showing is that you’re stronger if you don’t literally help me bend your arm”, but again, no points for teaching anything useful if you have to tell or imply that I should do things wrong in order to demonstrate your technique.
The third is that he gives clear objective rules, I do a bad job on positioning/activation on my own accord, and then he shows me how to not do that. This is the only case where The Unbendable Arm is worth anything, and it’s not because the technique itself is so great but because I was so dumb to start with.
You can say that you’re pointing at something that is physically real in the same that my “Unbendable Tibia” technique (of having an intact tibia) is physically real, and I don’t doubt that. But the relevance is up to the demonstration subject being dumb enough to need it. So when you say “it doesn’t work via moving goalposts” I kinda feel like “Yeah… but it might not seem so relevant once the goal posts are specified properly. And that’s an empirical question about the failures that people walk into rather than a statement about the things you can test on your own with weights and a table”.
I’m not saying this from a perspective of “Woo has no value, you’re crazy woo guy, only things that I personally understand are real”. I’m saying this from a perspective of “The implicit beliefs about what we’re allowed to do shape everything”.
I could tell you about when I performed The Unbendable Wrist in jiu jitsu, for example. I was able to let my friend set up her best submission, and through the power of The Unbendable Wrist I didn’t have to tap to her wristlock. In contrast, a similarly big and strong guy was forced to tap before she could even get her second hand on to assist in the pull. She was annoyed with him for pretending she was able to submit him instead of actually resisting, and he sincerely reassured her that he really was resisting and really wasn’t strong enough to stop it. So she taught him the power of my Unbendable Wrist and he was able to resist as well as I did after that. Can you guess what it took?
It didn’t take visualizations of firehoses, or any technical tips. All it took was “Jimmy was able to resist when I had both arms pulling, so unless he’s a lot stronger than you, then no, you absolutely can resist”. The problem was that he was unknowingly bound by a belief that resistance was futile, didn’t really give it his all as a result, and failed to notice the reason for his failure.
So is “The Unbendable Wrist” real? Or is it just that the illusion of The Bendable Wrist just more compelling and common than one might expect? I find the latter way of thinking much more useful.
Sadly I can’t draw a force diagram because I honestly don’t know how it works. [...] within some sensible limits I’m very happy to demo this technique in person.
I assume you’re still up in the bay area? I’m not likely to be up there anytime soon, but if you’re ever back down in socal and want to play with this stuff let me know. It sounds fun.
I bet we’d come out of it with a force vector diagram and a good way to clearly demonstrate what’s going on.
I obviously wouldn’t try anything that wouldn’t fly at a jiu jitsu gym between friends, but anything on top of that I might make you say explicitly :p
But if you’re concerned about any hidden rules here, feel free to ask me about them
So in jiu jitsu a large part of what we do is try to bend arms and not have our arms bent -- the other way. You mentioned that getting your upper arm pinned defeats the effect, and unsurprisingly this is known as one of the requirements for doing an armbar against anyone who isn’t completely clueless. In general, if you don’t control the joints on either side of the one you’re trying to attack, the person can just move their body to relieve bending pressure.
In these “Unbendable Arm” demonstrations it gets a bit weird because their shoulder is free and the only way to control it is to put them on the ground. “This is supposed to stay standing” seems to be implied, and in any normal demonstration context I’d feel uncomfortable pulling some Aikido sensei off his feet. I’d expect that to get a response like “Dude, chill, this isn’t wrestling. Just try to bend my arm”—while missing the point that “try to bend the arm, without applying enough pressure to force him to bend the arm if he wants to stay standing” isn’t is kinda like saying “Try to bend my tibia—but don’t break it you brute!”. I’d expect that most people can sense this implicit rule and that the effective methods would violate it, without being aware that they’re holding themselves back.
So who is responsible for keeping the defender on his feet, assuming he’s supposed to stay standing? If he falls over with a straight arm, how is that judged?
Similarly, what are the rules on footwork? I think one of the key points is “You don’t have to treat it as an isolated joint, so you can work to lift your elbow up as well as working to push your wrist down” (which contributes to the similarity with “reaching”, btw), but if you’re allowed to step in closer as well then you can get better leverage so there might be even more going on.
“Is the MMA guy actually getting his arm/tibia bent in fights in ways that they wouldn’t if he mixed in some Aikido?”
I don’t have enough MMA experience to know with much confidence. But from what little bit of BJJ rolling I’ve done, my impression is yes, folk who don’t know the unbendable arm trick end up struggling sometimes in ways they don’t have to.
It’s reflected on both sides, really. If BJJ folk really understood this unbendable joint thing, they wouldn’t keep trying to bend my arm to get through the grip I have (e.g. holding their lapel on either side with each hand). They pointlessly exhaust themselves. Usually more experienced folk will switch strategies at that point. But the fact that so many of them even try suggests to me that they’re used to most people they roll with not being able to do this thing.
But I don’t know. Maybe I’m just unfamiliar with those arts and this tool isn’t useful in those situations.
The third is that he gives clear objective rules, I do a bad job on positioning/activation on my own accord, and then he shows me how to not do that. This is the only case where The Unbendable Arm is worth anything, and it’s not because the technique itself is so great but because I was so dumb to start with.
I don’t know about “dumb”. Maybe “ignorant”, the way an infant is ignorant of how to stand, or someone unpracticed will fall over if standing on one leg with their eyes closed. It takes a while of using the body in a way it hasn’t been used before in order for the new skill to click into place.
Otherwise yeah, what you’re saying makes sense to me.
And it’s true, I don’t know whether the unbendable arm is at all novel or useful to you. It’s clearly novel for most people IME. Including very practiced martial artists who haven’t otherwise worked with it. But I don’t know, maybe you already do something equivalent. Or maybe it’s irrelevant to the things you care about.
I assume you’re still up in the bay area? I’m not likely to be up there anytime soon, but if you’re ever back down in socal and want to play with this stuff let me know. It sounds fun.
I bet we’d come out of it with a force vector diagram and a good way to clearly demonstrate what’s going on.
Yep, still in the Bay Area. Sounds good. And yep, I agree RE force diagram etc.
“This is supposed to stay standing” seems to be implied…
Maybe by others, but I don’t need it. I can do it on my back. Or mid leap (though that’s harder to demo :P ). Or upside down. I think I can do it with my arm stretched behind my back, but I’m less confident of that one; I’d have to try it.
But if my upper arm is pinned in a way that keeps me from moving my elbow, then yeah, I think that breaks the technique. Although in practice most people can’t pin my upper arm in the way that matters. Even if they’re trying to pin my arm to the ground. They’d have to try really really hard to fix my upper arm to the ground to get the unbendable thing to falter. At least in the ways I’ve encountered so far.
Similarly, what are the rules on footwork?
I’m not sure what you’re asking. I can do it seated. Or while doing a shoulder stand. Or while lifted off the ground in a bearhug. I don’t think there are implicit rules about footwork.
But from what little bit of BJJ rolling I’ve done, my impression is yes, folk who don’t know the unbendable arm trick end up struggling sometimes in ways they don’t have to.
I should clarify what would actually surprise me.
Most people at a jiu jitsu gym don’t really get jiu jitsu, and struggle in ways that they don’t have to if they were to just learn jiu jitsu. This is unavoidable, as learning to jiu jitsu takes time, but it also means that even if BJJ has an equivalent concept of this Unbending Arm thing you should expect these results. I don’t doubt that there’s something there.
What I’m skeptical of is the idea that it’s a blind spot in jiu jitsu, to the point where cross training in Aikido for concepts like this has demonstrable merit. I’m skeptical that the field of jiu jitsu lacks an equivalent concept and therefore systematically misleads its practitioners in a way that is relevant to BJJ/MMA/street altercations/etc.
These blind spots do exist, but they’re impressive and cognitive dissonance inducing when demonstrated. My favorite example is Derrick Lewis “just standing up”. The announcers recognize that Derrick Lewis isn’t demonstrating skill at “jiu jitsu”, and don’t recognize the unforced errors that his opponents are making which allow him to just stand up, so they’re shocked. “This isn’t supposed to work, and it is!”.
I don’t know about “dumb”. Maybe “ignorant”, the way an infant is ignorant of how to stand, or someone unpracticed will fall over if standing on one leg with their eyes closed.
If someone tries to stand on one foot with their eyes closed and falls over due to the fact that they haven’t practiced it, then that’s kinda unavoidable. It takes practice.
If someone tries to stand on one foot with their eyes closed and falls over due to the fact that they tried to stand on one foot with their eyes closed… instead of just opening their eyes and putting their foot down when there’s no reason to not open their eyes and put their foot down… then that’s entirely avoidable. All you have to do is think through what you’re actually trying to achieve.
By using the word “dumb” I’m saying that if it turns out I’m missing something here it’s not because I haven’t spent ten years practicing Aikido visualizations in the mountains of Japan. It’s because I was doing something drastically wrong that can apparently be fixed in a 30 second demonstration, which I’ve had ample time to notice, and have apparently been blind to for whatever reason.
The distinction is important because if it happens, it calls for some more self reflection on how I ended up not knowing how to use my arms despite using them for decades. In the same way that if you think you’re about to submit someone and they “just stand up”, its in your best interest to humble yourself a bit and go back to the drawing board.
I’m not sure what you’re asking
I trust your honesty about where the goal posts are, but I still have to locate them in order to know what you’re saying, exactly. I’m trying to find out where you’re drawing the line between “the thing” and “not the thing” so that I can understand what you’re saying and make sense of why the Aikido demonstrations look so much like they’re trying to hide what’s actually going on.
I tried it this morning at the jiu jitsu gym, with a fairly skilled training partner that likes to play with challenges like this. Specifically, what I did is say “I want to play an Aikido game with you. See if you can bend my arm”, and then placed the back of my wrist on his shoulder, and let him do as much as I thought I could without letting my arm bend.
He started off gently pushing and pulling to feel me out, and I had to move my feet to stay standing because it doesn’t take much if you’re in a regular upright stance. Eventually he pulled pretty hard and I had to half collapse in order to keep my arm straight. A bit after that I had to collapse fully, and he spent a couple minutes trying to figure out how to pin my arm in a way that allows him good biomechanics for bending my arm. The game ended when I had to tap to an arm bar… which I guess is fair since I didn’t specify that he had to bend it forward and he certainly would have been able to bend it backwards from there.
When we switched roles, I immediately did the thing that he eventually did to bring me down, and bent his arm. I reminded him that he was not obligated to stay standing, and that the lose condition is just the arm being bent. The next time I couldn’t bend his arm with him standing, but I could force him off his feet so long as I took a step back and used good biomechanics to pull his elbow down and into me.
The thing is, none of this looks anything like an Aikido demonstration. It looks like a grappling match.
Why don’t Aikido demonstrations look like grappling matches, if not for implicit rules about what you’re not supposed to do? Why does the guy demonstrating the technique never get to the point of having to say “Okay, but no pinning my upper arm”? Why is he never forced to collapse to the ground in order to keep his arm straight? Why doesn’t the offensive player ever take a step back and pull them down in the way that generates significant bending moment—the way my training partner did to me?
Oh, no. I’m so much stronger than my wife that there’s no way she’s keeping her arm straight if I’m serious about bending her arm. The test was 1) is she tensing her bicep when I don’t subtly suggest she should and 2) is she able to put up more resistance when visualizing instead.
Do you have a preferred video demonstration? Or can you draw the force vector diagrams? I don’t doubt that you’re observing something real here, but from looking through YouTube I’m not seeing what you’re describing.
“I want you to hold your right arm out straight, really tight”
″I want him to tense up as physically hard as possible”—and then he has to admonish his volunteer for “losing focus” when his unbendable arm bends
“the only purpose of this is for me to experience relaxation completely on this muscle”—with emphasis that the arm is gonna bend at least a little bit and maybe more.
This guy is flat out falling over unnecessarily.
This one shows something closer to what you’re talking about, but it’s pretty clear that he’s cheating the starting position by giving himself a more advantageous position the second time and having the other guy start in a less advantageous position. Which I guess kinda raises the question of what exactly is it supposed to demonstrate? Is that “cheating” or is that the entire thing being conveyed?
My wife’s first reaction to “don’t let me bend your arm” was actually to swat my hand away from her wrist, which playfully points out that we’re implicitly holding back in unspecified ways for sake of the demonstration, and if we were actually trying to not let someone bend our arm we would be doing something quite different. So what are the rules, anyway? As long as the rules are kept hidden it’s really easy to move the goalposts around without anyone noticing.
Boy do I relate. For whatever reason, the demos on YouTube are almost universally weirdly bad. I’m guessing Ivan found the one he linked to because I linked to it; it’s the clearest short demo I’d found.
I’ll see about making one sometime. It’s a little tricky for me in particular to convey over video because I’m so visibly strong. But I’ll give it some thought. Maybe I can ask for help from some of the bodybuilders at one of the local gyms.
Sadly I can’t draw a force diagram because I honestly don’t know how it works. I can almost make sense of it. The technique works perfectly well if I put my wrist on an unyielding inanimate object like a table, so I think I’m somehow transferring the downward force near the elbow into the upward force on the wrist. But I’m not at all sure how that “somehow” works. I just… do it. By “extending ki”. :-P
This one is just awful. Just utterly dumb. It’s correct that losing focus when you’re learning the technique causes it to fail. But at no point in the video does he demonstrate the actual thing. They’re treating it like mysterious magic — which makes sense! It’s hard to do without treating it like a bit of magic at first.
I can do the unbendable arm while distracted now. It’s something my body just does when I choose for it to.
Yeah, I’m with you, this isn’t impressive. It’s kind of sort of right ish. But his understanding of how to do it is sloppy IMO. That slop shows up in how he stumbles around.
Complete relaxation is not necessary for doing this technique. But if you’re doing the technique right, tremendous relaxation is possible. So if you want to check if you’re doing it right, you can try relaxing more than you would be relaxed if you were fighting to keep your arm straight.
He’s right that the arm might bend a little. It’s an adjustment thing. Kind of like how your knees might bend a little if you catch a falling heavy object: it’s just a spring action as your body adjusts to the new incoming force. But if you’re doing unbendable arm right, you can actually let the arm completely fold up and then straighten it out again while they’re applying force. It’s quite easy.
But my guess is that he’s not referring to adjustment. I think he’s making excuses for poor technique.
At a glance, it looks to me like this guy really is doing the thing I’m talking about. There might be extra stuff going on, but my impression is that if you vary that extra stuff it won’t affect the power of the unbendable arm. I really don’t think it’s a matter of “advantageous position”.
I’m not going to die on the hill of “This guy is authentic.” It’s just a passing impression from watching the video. That said, I might start linking to this demo instead honestly! :-D Although I do like the original guy’s looseness better.
I’d be happy to do this demo with you with the “advantageous positioning” mostly however you want it to be. I say “mostly” because there are some things that’ll break the technique’s ability to work, and I can nearly always tell you ahead of time what those will be. (E.g., if you rigidly pin my upper arm to a stationary object like a countertop, the technique won’t work.) But it’s really not about the level of advantage I think you’re talking about. I can do the unbendable arm on my knees with my arm pointing straight over my head. I can do it with two people, one pushing up on my wrist and the other pushing down on my elbow. I hold totally inanimate objects using this technique, like sacks of groceries, by placing a wrist on a surface like a wall or a railing. I’m pretty darn sure it’s a physics trick having to do with redirecting forces somehow. It’s just a little tricky to learn how to do it.
I’m very, very confident it doesn’t work via moving goalposts.
I don’t know how to delineate all the “rules”. If you change the context such that you’re not testing the arm’s unbendability, then you won’t get to experience the thing I’m talking about. There are some ways of testing unbendability that will, in fact, get even my arm to bend in defiance of my trying to use this technique. There’s an amount of force that should, in theory, cause tendons/ligaments/bones to start snapping, at which point of course the arm will fold.
Maybe there are other things for me to name there. I don’t know.
But if you’re concerned about any hidden rules here, feel free to ask me about them. If you give me a scenario, I can tell you whether (a) it’s testing the thing I’m talking about and (b) how it’d do.
E.g., if you vice grip my upper arm and use a car jack against my wrist to force my arm to bend, it absolutely will. I have no power against that setup.
E.g., if you stare really hard at my arm to try to get it to bend but you don’t touch it, you won’t be testing the thing I’m talking about.
E.g., if you are trying to bend my arm like in many of these demos but you surprise me by smashing my foot really hard, I might stop doing the technique and you might successfully bend my arm — not because it failed but because I stopped doing it. (Although even here, if it were somehow really dire that I demo it, I might flinch and it might falter for a moment, but I’d be able to recover it and re-extend my arm against your force.)
And as I said up above, within some sensible limits I’m very happy to demo this technique in person. I’d ask that you not smash my foot or otherwise be mean about it! And there are some tests you might want to do that I can just flat-out tell you would cause the technique to stop working, so I don’t think there’s much point in running those. But if you want me to, say, do it blindfolded while lying on the ground and singing the national anthem, I’d be totally happy to do that. It’ll work just fine.
I think we may be talking past each other a bit here.
I think we’re in agreement that it works through force vector diagrams, not through magic that defies the physics of force vector diagrams. Similarly, I think we’re in agreement that we get to force vector diagrams by patterns of muscular activation and limb positioning. It’s not that the visualization is a required component for doing or explaining, it’s that it allows you to do something that you don’t know how to explain (or do?) otherwise.
My skepticism about The Unbendable Arm is like my skepticism about The Unbendable Tibia. I don’t doubt that there are very good structural reasons the arm/tibia doesn’t bend, but I am skeptical of the implicit idea that in order to do it you need to learn how to visualize from an Aikido practitioner. Not “Will it work even when an MMA guy tries to bend you arm/tibia?”, but “Is the MMA guy actually getting his arm/tibia bent in fights in ways that they wouldn’t if he mixed in some Aikido?”.
If an Aikido practitioner tries to do the demo on me, there’s a few ways it can go.
One is for him to fail to bend my arm, and notice right away “Ah! You already know The Unbendable Arm!”. Points for honesty there, but not for teaching me anything.
A second is for him to implicitly or explicitly tell me to do things that make my arm bendable, and then show me that my arm is stronger when I don’t do them. Points for honesty if he admits “Yeah, all I’m showing is that you’re stronger if you don’t literally help me bend your arm”, but again, no points for teaching anything useful if you have to tell or imply that I should do things wrong in order to demonstrate your technique.
The third is that he gives clear objective rules, I do a bad job on positioning/activation on my own accord, and then he shows me how to not do that. This is the only case where The Unbendable Arm is worth anything, and it’s not because the technique itself is so great but because I was so dumb to start with.
You can say that you’re pointing at something that is physically real in the same that my “Unbendable Tibia” technique (of having an intact tibia) is physically real, and I don’t doubt that. But the relevance is up to the demonstration subject being dumb enough to need it. So when you say “it doesn’t work via moving goalposts” I kinda feel like “Yeah… but it might not seem so relevant once the goal posts are specified properly. And that’s an empirical question about the failures that people walk into rather than a statement about the things you can test on your own with weights and a table”.
I’m not saying this from a perspective of “Woo has no value, you’re crazy woo guy, only things that I personally understand are real”. I’m saying this from a perspective of “The implicit beliefs about what we’re allowed to do shape everything”.
I could tell you about when I performed The Unbendable Wrist in jiu jitsu, for example. I was able to let my friend set up her best submission, and through the power of The Unbendable Wrist I didn’t have to tap to her wristlock. In contrast, a similarly big and strong guy was forced to tap before she could even get her second hand on to assist in the pull. She was annoyed with him for pretending she was able to submit him instead of actually resisting, and he sincerely reassured her that he really was resisting and really wasn’t strong enough to stop it. So she taught him the power of my Unbendable Wrist and he was able to resist as well as I did after that. Can you guess what it took?
It didn’t take visualizations of firehoses, or any technical tips. All it took was “Jimmy was able to resist when I had both arms pulling, so unless he’s a lot stronger than you, then no, you absolutely can resist”. The problem was that he was unknowingly bound by a belief that resistance was futile, didn’t really give it his all as a result, and failed to notice the reason for his failure.
So is “The Unbendable Wrist” real? Or is it just that the illusion of The Bendable Wrist just more compelling and common than one might expect? I find the latter way of thinking much more useful.
I assume you’re still up in the bay area? I’m not likely to be up there anytime soon, but if you’re ever back down in socal and want to play with this stuff let me know. It sounds fun.
I bet we’d come out of it with a force vector diagram and a good way to clearly demonstrate what’s going on.
I obviously wouldn’t try anything that wouldn’t fly at a jiu jitsu gym between friends, but anything on top of that I might make you say explicitly :p
So in jiu jitsu a large part of what we do is try to bend arms and not have our arms bent -- the other way. You mentioned that getting your upper arm pinned defeats the effect, and unsurprisingly this is known as one of the requirements for doing an armbar against anyone who isn’t completely clueless. In general, if you don’t control the joints on either side of the one you’re trying to attack, the person can just move their body to relieve bending pressure.
In these “Unbendable Arm” demonstrations it gets a bit weird because their shoulder is free and the only way to control it is to put them on the ground. “This is supposed to stay standing” seems to be implied, and in any normal demonstration context I’d feel uncomfortable pulling some Aikido sensei off his feet. I’d expect that to get a response like “Dude, chill, this isn’t wrestling. Just try to bend my arm”—while missing the point that “try to bend the arm, without applying enough pressure to force him to bend the arm if he wants to stay standing” isn’t is kinda like saying “Try to bend my tibia—but don’t break it you brute!”. I’d expect that most people can sense this implicit rule and that the effective methods would violate it, without being aware that they’re holding themselves back.
So who is responsible for keeping the defender on his feet, assuming he’s supposed to stay standing? If he falls over with a straight arm, how is that judged?
Similarly, what are the rules on footwork? I think one of the key points is “You don’t have to treat it as an isolated joint, so you can work to lift your elbow up as well as working to push your wrist down” (which contributes to the similarity with “reaching”, btw), but if you’re allowed to step in closer as well then you can get better leverage so there might be even more going on.
I don’t have enough MMA experience to know with much confidence. But from what little bit of BJJ rolling I’ve done, my impression is yes, folk who don’t know the unbendable arm trick end up struggling sometimes in ways they don’t have to.
It’s reflected on both sides, really. If BJJ folk really understood this unbendable joint thing, they wouldn’t keep trying to bend my arm to get through the grip I have (e.g. holding their lapel on either side with each hand). They pointlessly exhaust themselves. Usually more experienced folk will switch strategies at that point. But the fact that so many of them even try suggests to me that they’re used to most people they roll with not being able to do this thing.
But I don’t know. Maybe I’m just unfamiliar with those arts and this tool isn’t useful in those situations.
I don’t know about “dumb”. Maybe “ignorant”, the way an infant is ignorant of how to stand, or someone unpracticed will fall over if standing on one leg with their eyes closed. It takes a while of using the body in a way it hasn’t been used before in order for the new skill to click into place.
Otherwise yeah, what you’re saying makes sense to me.
And it’s true, I don’t know whether the unbendable arm is at all novel or useful to you. It’s clearly novel for most people IME. Including very practiced martial artists who haven’t otherwise worked with it. But I don’t know, maybe you already do something equivalent. Or maybe it’s irrelevant to the things you care about.
Yep, still in the Bay Area. Sounds good. And yep, I agree RE force diagram etc.
Maybe by others, but I don’t need it. I can do it on my back. Or mid leap (though that’s harder to demo :P ). Or upside down. I think I can do it with my arm stretched behind my back, but I’m less confident of that one; I’d have to try it.
But if my upper arm is pinned in a way that keeps me from moving my elbow, then yeah, I think that breaks the technique. Although in practice most people can’t pin my upper arm in the way that matters. Even if they’re trying to pin my arm to the ground. They’d have to try really really hard to fix my upper arm to the ground to get the unbendable thing to falter. At least in the ways I’ve encountered so far.
I’m not sure what you’re asking. I can do it seated. Or while doing a shoulder stand. Or while lifted off the ground in a bearhug. I don’t think there are implicit rules about footwork.
I should clarify what would actually surprise me.
Most people at a jiu jitsu gym don’t really get jiu jitsu, and struggle in ways that they don’t have to if they were to just learn jiu jitsu. This is unavoidable, as learning to jiu jitsu takes time, but it also means that even if BJJ has an equivalent concept of this Unbending Arm thing you should expect these results. I don’t doubt that there’s something there.
What I’m skeptical of is the idea that it’s a blind spot in jiu jitsu, to the point where cross training in Aikido for concepts like this has demonstrable merit. I’m skeptical that the field of jiu jitsu lacks an equivalent concept and therefore systematically misleads its practitioners in a way that is relevant to BJJ/MMA/street altercations/etc.
These blind spots do exist, but they’re impressive and cognitive dissonance inducing when demonstrated. My favorite example is Derrick Lewis “just standing up”. The announcers recognize that Derrick Lewis isn’t demonstrating skill at “jiu jitsu”, and don’t recognize the unforced errors that his opponents are making which allow him to just stand up, so they’re shocked. “This isn’t supposed to work, and it is!”.
If someone tries to stand on one foot with their eyes closed and falls over due to the fact that they haven’t practiced it, then that’s kinda unavoidable. It takes practice.
If someone tries to stand on one foot with their eyes closed and falls over due to the fact that they tried to stand on one foot with their eyes closed… instead of just opening their eyes and putting their foot down when there’s no reason to not open their eyes and put their foot down… then that’s entirely avoidable. All you have to do is think through what you’re actually trying to achieve.
By using the word “dumb” I’m saying that if it turns out I’m missing something here it’s not because I haven’t spent ten years practicing Aikido visualizations in the mountains of Japan. It’s because I was doing something drastically wrong that can apparently be fixed in a 30 second demonstration, which I’ve had ample time to notice, and have apparently been blind to for whatever reason.
The distinction is important because if it happens, it calls for some more self reflection on how I ended up not knowing how to use my arms despite using them for decades. In the same way that if you think you’re about to submit someone and they “just stand up”, its in your best interest to humble yourself a bit and go back to the drawing board.
I trust your honesty about where the goal posts are, but I still have to locate them in order to know what you’re saying, exactly. I’m trying to find out where you’re drawing the line between “the thing” and “not the thing” so that I can understand what you’re saying and make sense of why the Aikido demonstrations look so much like they’re trying to hide what’s actually going on.
I tried it this morning at the jiu jitsu gym, with a fairly skilled training partner that likes to play with challenges like this. Specifically, what I did is say “I want to play an Aikido game with you. See if you can bend my arm”, and then placed the back of my wrist on his shoulder, and let him do as much as I thought I could without letting my arm bend.
He started off gently pushing and pulling to feel me out, and I had to move my feet to stay standing because it doesn’t take much if you’re in a regular upright stance. Eventually he pulled pretty hard and I had to half collapse in order to keep my arm straight. A bit after that I had to collapse fully, and he spent a couple minutes trying to figure out how to pin my arm in a way that allows him good biomechanics for bending my arm. The game ended when I had to tap to an arm bar… which I guess is fair since I didn’t specify that he had to bend it forward and he certainly would have been able to bend it backwards from there.
When we switched roles, I immediately did the thing that he eventually did to bring me down, and bent his arm. I reminded him that he was not obligated to stay standing, and that the lose condition is just the arm being bent. The next time I couldn’t bend his arm with him standing, but I could force him off his feet so long as I took a step back and used good biomechanics to pull his elbow down and into me.
The thing is, none of this looks anything like an Aikido demonstration. It looks like a grappling match.
Why don’t Aikido demonstrations look like grappling matches, if not for implicit rules about what you’re not supposed to do? Why does the guy demonstrating the technique never get to the point of having to say “Okay, but no pinning my upper arm”? Why is he never forced to collapse to the ground in order to keep his arm straight? Why doesn’t the offensive player ever take a step back and pull them down in the way that generates significant bending moment—the way my training partner did to me?