People ask me all the time what actually separates the different dan grades in Aikido. The honest answer is that technique alone doesn't explain it — and most people asking the question are already sensing that something else is going on. That explained it — but it also confirmed what I look for ...

If you've ever watched a senior student train and thought, "that doesn't look anything like what I'm doing," you're right — and the difference isn't just skill level. It's a fundamentally different relationship with the training itself. In this week's video, I share a story about a sandan student...

Have you ever watched a senior instructor move and felt like something was different, but couldn't quite say what? I've felt that for years. I spent nearly a decade living and training in Japan, and there's a quality to how the senior instructors there move that I've never seen fully replicated a...

For years, I watched senior Japanese Aikido teachers and noticed something that I couldn't quite explain. They often seemed to move less. They entered earlier. They stayed connected in a way that felt completely different. Recently, I had a realization that helped me understand one of those lesso...