Finally,  last week end I managed to hand a copy of my study

“The Aikido inspiration to safety and efficiency: an investigation on forward roll impact forces”

Soltoggio, Andrea, et al. “The Aikido inspiration to safety and efficiency: an investigation on forward roll impact forces.” Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Computer Science in Sports (ISCSS). Springer International Publishing, 2016.

to Aikido legend Katsuaki Asai Sensei in Bielefeld, Germany.

From the left: Andrea Soltoggio, Asai Sensei, and Thomas Gertz	Asai Sensei receives the volume with the scientific study	The volume with the study

The study, inspired by the Aikido techniques of Asai, demonstrates how Aikido techniques can drastically reduce impact forces when simulating a fall. During the study, participants were invited to perform a forward roll over a sensitive force platform embedded in the floor in the laboratory of Neurocognition and Action of Prof. Thomas Schack at Bielefeld University.  Under the supervision of Aikido 3rd Dan Thomas Gertz of Aikikai Deutschland, two different groups were compared. One group had never trained Aikido, while a second group had between 1 to 10+ years of Aikido experience. The measurements showed that untrained subjects, while rolling from a kneeling position very low near the ground, in some cases could experience over 4 times their body weight in vertical forces. On the contrary, trained subjects appeared to be capable of decreasing such forces to values in some cases just over 1 body weight. Surprisingly, further measurements showed that trained subjects, when ‘falling’ from a standing position, recorded lower impact forces on the ground than untrained subjects ‘falling’ from a kneeling position.

Thomas Gertz shows the picture of Asai Sensei performing a forward roll, next to his own demonstration of the movements at the laboratory of Neocognition and Action at Bielefeld University.

I would like to thank all the people that believed in this work and helped me to perform all the steps that lead to this publication: my co-authors in the first place that contributed significantly to set up the experiments, all my Aikido friends, in particular  Thomas Gertz for his supervision, Silvia Fränkel and Nico Ludike, and all the volunteers that took part in the experiments.