Real Aikido
A Serbian modern derivative of aikido from 1993, built for police work. It takes away the ritual and adds strikes, ground work and restraint.
Quick Facts
SerbiaCharacter & Origin
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
Catalogs & Databases for Real Aikido
About Real Aikido
Real aikido is a modern self-defence system arranged in 1993 in Belgrade by Ljubomir Vracarevic, who lived from 1947 to 2013. Vracarevic came out of aikido and at the same time out of judo and jujutsu, and for many years he trained members of the police and of security services. The whole purpose of the system comes from there. Classical aikido is, on his reading, too bound by ritual and form for that work: it is practised from attacks nobody delivers in the street, and it ends in a throw where a professional needs to detain the opponent. Real aikido therefore keeps the basic aikido principle of leading and using the attacker's movement but removes the ceremonial part and adds what aikido lacks — strikes, ground work, defence against a knife and against several attackers, and techniques of restraint and handcuffing. It is trained in ordinary clothes as well as in a keikogi and the system has grades of its own. It spread above all in Serbia and the Balkans, then in Russia and other Slavic countries, where it has federations of its own. Two things deserve to be said openly. First, real aikido is a modern derivative from the end of the twentieth century, not a traditional lineage with a history. Second, its effectiveness is not independently verified; it rests on the founder's experience and on its use in the training of security forces, not on competitive comparison.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.