{"id":1,"date":"2026-08-19T16:30:35","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T16:30:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.amicidellaikido.it\/?p=1"},"modified":"2026-09-06T15:17:39","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T15:17:39","slug":"aikido-sport-studio-sfoltimento-sinaptico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.amicidellaikido.it\/en\/aikido-sport-studio-sfoltimento-sinaptico\/","title":{"rendered":"Aikido: synaptic pruning school learning"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Aikido and sport: why training helps school performance<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Many parents see Aikido training as an activity to sacrifice when exams and tests approach. It is a widespread idea, understandable, and wrong. The neuroscience of learning tells a different story: organized movement, motor discipline, and practice on the tatami do not drain resources from study\u2014they build them. Teachers of Aikido to children and adolescents observe it every season: those who train consistently arrive at school with more stable attention, firmer anxiety management, and more developed working memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aikido and synaptic pruning: the body training the mind that studies<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

During childhood, the brain produces far more synapses than it will maintain into adulthood. In adolescence, a process of selection begins, known as synaptic pruning, which unfolds over months and years: connections rarely used are eliminated, while those activated regularly consolidate and become more efficient. The principle is simple: frequently traveled pathways remain, neglected ones disappear, with direct consequences for attention, memory, and reasoning ability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alongside this long-term process runs a daily phenomenon, faster but equally important: during slow-wave sleep, the brain renormalizes synapses strengthened during waking hours, weakening them proportionally to prevent network saturation, according to the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis described by Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli. Moderate athletic training enters precisely here: an afternoon session promotes faster sleep onset and more expansive, stable slow-wave sleep phases, and in those phases synaptic rebalancing occurs more effectively. The tatami does not directly produce pruning, but prepares the conditions\u2014better rest\u2014that make it possible every night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aikido also works on the longer-term mechanism. The techniques of irimi and tenkan, shifts in center of gravity, reading your partner's intention before their gesture\u2014these demand the same circuits involved in attention control and planning: the prefrontal cortex, motor systems, the network integrating perception and action. Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia have documented how neurons engaged in acting are partly the same ones that allow understanding and anticipating others' actions: acting and comprehending share a common substrate. Each technique repeated on the tatami trains not only the body: it reinforces neural pathways that serve also in the classroom, to follow an explanation, hold a complex line of reasoning in mind, stay focused beyond the first minute of a lesson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aikido and exams: why skipping training the night before is a mistake<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

A recurring mistake is removing training in the days before a test, under the assumption that the hours saved translate into points gained. The opposite happens more often than one thinks. The night before an exam is also the night memory consolidates through the synaptic rebalancing just described, and moderate afternoon training\u2014not excessive effort, which would produce the opposite effect\u2014remains one of the most reliable ways to encourage that rapid sleep onset and sufficient slow-wave sleep, while also metabolizing cortisol accumulated during an intense school day. A student who skips the tatami to add another hour of review often arrives at the test more tired, more tense, with worse sleep, not with firmer knowledge. Time taken from training rarely becomes productive study time: it more often becomes fatigued study time, which yields less than it costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a young person who practices Aikido consistently, the weekly lesson is not a luxury to suspend during school pressure, but one of the most effective tools for navigating it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aikido and concentration: a difference that separates it from other sports<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Not all athletic disciplines offer the same type of cognitive training. A point-based sport, with an opponent to defeat and a result to defend, trains performance under competitive pressure: useful, but different from what an exam requires, where there is no score to contest with someone else, but a personal test to sustain. Aikido operates on a different register. There is no opponent to defeat, no score, no ranking: there is a partner, uke or tori depending on role, who continuously changes direction, intention, energy, and to whom you must respond in real time without fixed schemes. This constant reading of the unexpected, free from the anxiety of winning or losing, trains a form of flexible attention that transfers well to managing evaluation stress: the student accustomed to remaining centered as the situation shifts beneath their eyes brings that same capacity to face an unexpected question from the teacher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Added to this is work with controlled falling, ukemi, which trains the vestibular system and proprioception: neural components also linked to spatial orientation and working memory, often neglected by disciplines less centered on balance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aikido, parents and school: the double mistake of punishment<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

The first mistake, as noted, is suspending training to add study hours: a substitution that rarely produces the desired result. The second mistake, more serious, is using training as a punitive lever against a poor grade: no Aikido until performance improves. This choice removes from the young person precisely the resources that could help them recover: stress regulation, sleep consolidation, attention training described in previous paragraphs. Daniela Lucangeli, who has devoted years of research to the link between emotion and learning, has shown how the emotional component\u2014what she calls warm cognition\u2014is not a side effect of learning but part of its mechanism: a young person who experiences an activity as punishment or deprivation associates with that activity a negative emotion, which also reflects on school motivation. Depriving a child of the tatami as a penalty for a poor grade risks thus aggravating precisely the difficulty one intended to correct, adding frustration to already declining performance.
You can learn more about this topic by reading our article on rules, parents, and the role of the instructor in Aikido for children.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aikido as embodied metaphor: when the tatami trains thought<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

There is a more theoretical level that explains why all this works, and it is embodied cognition. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in Metaphors We Live By, showed how much abstract thought is structured through concepts derived from bodily experience: understanding an argument is said to mean \"grasping an idea,\" an explanation can be \"solid\" or \"shaky,\" a line of reasoning can \"stand on its own\" or \"collapse\". These are not random figures of speech: they reflect how abstract thought is built from bodily schemas of balance, direction, support. Aikido works precisely on those schemas: balance, center, direction, supporting your own weight and your partner's. Training them on the tatami means training, indirectly, the same cognitive structures that underlie reasoning required in school. This is why a parent who removes training to gain study time, or denies it as punishment, is not simply eliminating a pastime: they are removing one of the most solid tools their child has to think with greater order, remember better, and face with greater calm precisely what they fear they cannot handle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Essential bibliography on Aikido, sport and learning<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Lakoff<\/strong> G.,<\/strong> Johnson<\/strong> M.,<\/strong> Metaphors We Live By, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980. [Italian ed. Metafora e vita quotidiana, ed. P. Violi, Bompiani, Milano, 1998.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rizzolatti<\/strong> G.,<\/strong> Sinigaglia<\/strong> C.,<\/strong> Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008. [Italian ed. So quel che fai. Il cervello che agisce e i neuroni specchio, Raffaello Cortina Editore, Milano, 2006.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lucangeli<\/strong> D.,<\/strong> Five Light Lessons on the Emotion of Learning, [Italian ed. Cinque lezioni leggere sull'emozione di apprendere, Erickson, Trento, 2019.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lucangeli<\/strong> D., Vullo<\/strong> L.,<\/strong> The Body Is Teaching, [Italian ed. Il corpo \u00e8 docente, Erickson, Trento, 2021.]<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aikido e sport: perch\u00e9 allenarsi aiuta lo studio a scuola Molti genitori vivono l’allenamento di Aikido come un’attivit\u00e0 da sacrificare quando arrivano interrogazioni e verifiche. \u00c8 un’idea diffusa, comprensibile, e sbagliata. Le neuroscienze dell’apprendimento raccontano una storia diversa: il movimento organizzato, la disciplina motoria, la pratica su un tatami non sottraggono risorse allo studio, le […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":886,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"page-with-title","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amicidellaikido.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amicidellaikido.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amicidellaikido.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amicidellaikido.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amicidellaikido.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.amicidellaikido.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":895,"href":"https:\/\/www.amicidellaikido.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/895"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amicidellaikido.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amicidellaikido.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amicidellaikido.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amicidellaikido.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}