On Aging, Aikido, and Adaptation

Sometimes in life, roads don’t fork. They intersect.

Recently I stepped back onto an Aikido mat after several years away. Within the first few training sessions — most of which ended with me on the floor, where I seemed to be spending more time than I remembered — I realized something that should probably have been obvious much earlier. Getting up after being thrown took longer than it used to. A lot longer. And the getting up was just the beginning. I also found immense joy, however, in a realization of something deeper.

Over the past few years, I had been designing NULU—a knife built around the biomechanics of people whose bodies no longer move the way they once did. I had been studying, intellectually, the changes that come with age, injury, and fatigue: diminished grip strength, reduced joint stability, the way effort compounds over time. And yet it took returning to the mat for me to recognize that I had quietly joined that group myself. What I had been designing for “other people” was now designing for me.

Part of what made that realization so clear is that strength had always been my constant. I was never the most naturally coordinated athlete. My eye-hand coordination was ordinary at best, and the things that came easily to more fluid athletes took me longer to learn. But strength was there. Years of football, rugby, martial arts, and lifting had built a body that could apply force when it needed to.

Standing on the mat again, I realized that even that constant had begun to change.

The difference wasn’t dramatic. I could still train. But movements that once felt automatic now required more care. Positions that once felt structurally effortless now demanded better alignment. The body was asking for something different than it once had. The margin for inefficiency had narrowed.

Structure, Efficiency, and the Body’s Natural Path

That experience brought me back to something fundamental in Aikido that I had learned years earlier but was now experiencing differently. In this art, power does not originate in the arms. It originates in the center of the body and travels outward through the kinetic chain. When everything is aligned—feet, hips, core, shoulders, arms—the body can transmit force efficiently with surprisingly little effort. When that chain breaks down, everything becomes harder.

The most common way the chain breaks is through the hands.

When people encounter resistance, the instinct is to grip harder. Tighten the hands. Tighten the forearms. Muscle through the problem. The irony is that a tighter grip disconnects the body from its center. Tension locks the wrists and forearms, the shoulders rise, and the core stops driving the movement. Instead of force traveling smoothly through the whole body, it gets trapped in smaller joints that were never meant to carry that load.

Aikido instructors spend enormous time trying to undo this pattern. Relax the grip. Maintain structure. Let the body move as a unit. When the movement is right, the force travels naturally and the technique works with far less strain.

The result is efficiency — and efficiency, it turns out, is the whole game. Power is a young person’s resource. Efficiency belongs to anyone willing to learn it. When the chain functions correctly, the body stops wasting energy compensating for misalignment and starts directing it. Less effort. More effect. That economy of motion is what allows a smaller practitioner to redirect a larger one — and what allows an aging body to keep doing things a declining one cannot.

The Same Problem in the Kitchen — and a Design Language to Solve It

When I stepped away from the mat during COVID, I didn’t realize those same ideas would resurface in an entirely different context. I began studying the challenges people face with upper-extremity limitations—arthritis, nerve compression, joint degeneration, and the cumulative fatigue that comes with age. What became clear quickly is that many of the tools we use every day encourage exactly the movement patterns that martial artists spend years trying to unlearn.

The traditional kitchen knife is a perfect example.

Most knives require a tight grip combined with a forward sawing motion. To stabilize the blade, the user instinctively squeezes harder. That tension travels immediately into the wrist and forearm. The shoulder compensates, the elbow compensates, and the ability to drive the movement from the core disappears. Instead of the larger muscles and skeletal structure carrying the load, the smaller joints absorb it.

For someone with healthy joints and plenty of strength, this inefficiency may not matter much. For someone with arthritis, nerve damage, fatigue, or reduced grip, it becomes a genuine barrier. The tool forces a movement pattern that amplifies strain rather than distributing force through the body’s natural structure.

Solving that problem required more than a new shape. It required a design language — a way of thinking about the relationship between the human body and the tool it holds. That language became what I now call Force Transfer Geometry: the study of the path that force travels from its origin in the body’s center to the point where it does work. When that path is direct and structurally supported, very little energy is lost. When it is interrupted — by a grip angle that torques the wrist, a handle that forces the elbow out of alignment, a motion that isolates the arm from the core — the body compensates by working harder, and the smaller joints pay the price.

NULU was designed around that principle from the beginning. The arc, the handle position, the relationship between the user’s wrist and the blade — every geometric decision was an attempt to answer a single question: what is the most efficient path from the body’s center to the cutting edge? Not to make the knife easier to hold, but to make the body’s natural force more directly available to the work. The art taught me that the body has a preferred path. Force Transfer Geometry gave me the language to build a tool that honors it.

Stacking Limitations

But returning to the mat revealed something else—something more personal.

I’m a disabled veteran. Like many people who have experienced serious injury, I had spent years learning to work around physical limitations. Strength, discipline, and training allowed me to compensate for a great deal. In many ways I had convinced myself that those earlier challenges were behind me.

The mat made clear that something new had entered the equation.

Age was beginning to compound those earlier limitations. The body that had once compensated through strength alone was now asking for something different. Movements that once relied on raw power now required better structure, better alignment, better efficiency. It wasn’t a sudden loss of capability. It was a shift—and it was unmistakable.

What I was experiencing wasn’t a single limitation. It was the stacking of several.

For most of our lives, we think about ability as if it were fixed. We assume the body we have in our twenties or thirties is the body we will always have. When changes come, we frame them as isolated problems: a bad knee, some arthritis, fatigue that arrives earlier than it used to. What I began to understand is that these rarely stay isolated. They accumulate.

The Ability Curve

That accumulation is what I now describe as the Ability Curve. A model that I created around my invention without fully considering relevance to my own path.

Every person moves along it over time. Early in life, our abilities increase as strength, coordination, and experience develop. The curve levels off. Then, gradually, it begins to bend downward. That descent doesn’t mean incapacity. It doesn’t mean the end of meaningful activity. What it means is that the body begins demanding efficiency in places where strength once covered mistakes.

Most design—most tools, most systems, most workplaces—is built for people at or near the peak of that curve. It assumes a body that hasn’t been injured, hasn’t aged significantly, and isn’t managing accumulated fatigue. That assumption excludes a lot of people. And as the curve bends for each of us, it will eventually exclude all of us.

Standing on the mat that morning, I realized something that was both ironic and clarifying: the tool I had spent years designing to help people with changing physical abilities was now helping me understand my own.

Active Adaptation

In Aikido, the response to this reality is built into the art. Practitioners are taught from the beginning that resisting force directly is rarely effective. The practice is one of continuous adjustment—maintaining structure, staying connected to the body’s center, allowing movement to evolve in response to what is actually happening, not what you wish were happening.

The same principle applies everywhere else.

As we move along the Ability Curve, the people who continue to thrive are rarely the ones who cling to doing things the way they always have. They are the ones who adjust. They refine how they move. They learn to rely on structure instead of brute force. They choose tools and techniques that work with their bodies rather than against them.

Active adaptation is not a concession to aging or limitation. It is simply the intelligent response to reality.

For many years I trained in an art built on circular motion and the efficient transfer of force through the body. During the years I spent away from the mat, those same ideas quietly reappeared in the design of a tool intended to help people maintain independence in the kitchen. Returning to Aikido closed a circle I hadn’t realized was open.

The physics was the same. The lesson was the same.

And the realization was unavoidable: the circle includes all of us.