Practical Unarmed Combat - by Feldenkrais

Highly recommended classic tome on unarmed combatives - from the POV of one technique - hadakajime. As you can see from the above pic, Feldenkrais shows hadakajime from A-to-Z,  inside-out, upside-down, and backwards!

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Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com

Autogenic discharge

Sounds messy, doesn't it? 

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Actually, if you've done aikido or judo or some sort of bodywork like yoga or massage or Feldenkrais for long, I bet you've seen it.  You may not have thought much about it at the time, but when you think about it some it becomes a curious thing.

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Have you ever seen someone take a fall from a perfect, amazing, aiki-like throw, and hit the ground laughing hysterically?  Have you ever seen someone doing yoga or receiving a massage start crying for no special reason?

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Theory is, emotions have a certain kind of posture and movement associated with them.  Over time these postures and movement patterns can become habitual.  Some folks say this is sort of like storing the memory of that emotion in your neuromuscular system.  Sort of a neuromuscular memory of past trauma.

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Well, when you start doing something to change your habitual motions and postures, something like aikido or yoga or massage, it's possible to release the emotion that was originally associated with that habitual muscle tone, creating a spontaneous, inexplicable outburst of emotion.  Often, when you see this, the person can't tell you why they are laughing or crying.  They just know that its not really funny or painful, but they can't stop laughing or crying.  When I see this, I tend to just quietly continue what we're doing and let the emotion wash  on out.

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I wonder if some of the times that we get caught up in ego during randori and become frustrated or angry at our partners...  I wonder if some of that anger and frustration might just be autogenic discharge?  I wonder if we were able to reframe that frustration or anger, could we release it and move on more productively?

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Patrick Parker is a Christian, husband, father, martial arts teacher, Program Director for a Cardiac Rehab, and a Ph.D. Contact: mokurendojo@gmail.com or phone 601.248.7282 木蓮

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Feldenkrais' Awareness Through Movement

Seeing as this is posture month at Mokuren Dojo, I thought I'd drop you another little hint. Actually a BIG hint. Ok, a REALLY BIG hint!
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I have written often about Moshe Feldenkrais' writings on judo and posture, but I also found this online copy of Feldenkrais' book, Awareness Through Movement. A definite must-read, even if it is not an easy read in places! If you want the free online copy then download it but it you're the type that prefers the mass and feel and convenience of paper, then pick up a copy at my Amazon store from the link below.
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In either case, I consider this necessary reading before you really start to think deeply about posture and movement.

UPDATE: Here is the month-end review of all the posture articles from this month of focus.

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Basically Just Judo

Some years back, Dave Chesser posted an article in which he suggested that the acronym BJJ, which a lot of people mistakenly think means Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, actually means Basically Just Judo.  I laughed my proverbial asterisk off - particularly after asserting for so long that Judo and BJJ are just competitive brand names for the same thing.

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The other day I managed to dig up a copy of a book I've been looking for a long time, Feldenkrais' Higher Judo Groundwork!  Fantastic book!  Following are a couple of pictures from this book, published in 1952, showing some judo moves that a lot of folks think of as distinctively BJJ.

 

First we have a minor takedown that is allowed and used in BJJ contests but is disallowed in Judo and is derisively known by some as 'buttflopping' (watch out for some mildly offensive language if you follow that otherwise hilarious link).  Feldenkrais presents this as a good way to take the contest to the ground if it is allowed in the rules. Note, please, that if any of you smartaleks ever do this to me or do this in my club, get ready for a ride you'll wish you hadn't signed up for. Feldenkrais' variant of pulling guard shown here is extremely dangerous and places uke at a great risk of breaking his ankle.  But it is judo per Feldenkrais' 1952 book - not just BJJ.

Secondly, we have  a guard pass into a leglock.  Again, commonly thought of as the domain of BJJ.  Wrong again.  This stuff is judo - it is just disallowed in judo shiai and usually in randori - partly for safety, but partly just to allow emphasis to be placed on other stuff so you can become better in a smaller technical range.

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Anyway, there is nothing at all wrong with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.  If you can find a good instructor for a good price near you, then by all means, roll with them - it is a great way to learn judo!

Great posture exercise - climbing stairs

Ok, when you think about posture exercises you might think about Army recruits trying to stand straight up while a drill sergeant screams in their face, "Suck that gut in. Pull those shoulders back." Well, the aikido and judo ideal of good posture begins with relaxed, mobile, and upright. While the old drill sergeant might have gotten upright, he sure missed the relaxed part.

The folks that probably know the most of anyone in the world about functional posture are the Alexander Technique folks and the Feldenkrais Method folks. I've written before on the crossover between aikido, judo, Alexander, and Feldenkrais principles, including a recent article on a neat Alexander trick for fixing neck posture. Feldenkrais has some similar exercises which involve repeatedly sitting and standing from a chair to reprogram the neck muscles. Here's something that, so far as I know, is of my own invention... Walking up and down stairs to fix neck posture.

Try this. Get a flight of steps and walk up and down sliding your hand on the rail for balance. Repeat the flight of steps several times. First this will help your leg and cardiovascular strength if you do it regularly, and having better wind means you don't have to use shoulder and neck musckes as accessory breathers. So they can relax and control your neck posture more efficiently.

Second, keep breathing as you walk the stairs. If you are not used to walking stairs you might, without thinking, hold your breath and drag yourself up by the handrail. If one flight of stairs wears you out and leaves you breathless, look to see if you're doing this.

Third, and this is the really neat part, try the Alexander trick I previously posted while walking the stairs. Concentrate on moving however you have to in order to get your nose forward and upward. As you descend the stairs, imagine your face lifting forward and up, so that your neck gets longer and straighter and more upright as your body descends. As you climb up the steps, imagine leading with your face. Imagine someone gently holding your chin and the back of your head and giving you a little lift as you ascend. Notice that getting your nose and face up and forward releases tension in your shoulders (because you can't raise your face if your levators scapulae are in contraction) and frees your breathing (because your shoulder muscles are hooked to your rib cage).

Change your mind and the rest will follow

The other day I was scouring the net for info on Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais method because they are particular interests of mine. I came across an AT discussion of head/neck posture that I thought was interesting and enlightening. Try this out...
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Notice what posture your head and neck is in then imagine someone yelling at you, "STRAIGHTEN UP!" What motion did you make? What muscles did you use? I can't see you through your computer screen but I bet it involved neck retraction (moving your chin straight back) and looking upward. Accentuate this posture so that you can feel the muscles required - pull your chin back and look up. I feel stress in my neck and shoulders when I do this.

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Here's another option. Another way of thinking about straightening up. Instead of trying to retract your neck, think about lengthening your neck upward and forward. Move however you have to in order to get the bridge of your nose forward and upward a little bit. When I tried this a couple of times, I noticed that the heavy upper part of my head was naturally rocking back over my spine in better balance and my shoulders were relaxing and dropping. This posture follows all the shizentai rules (ears above shoulders above hips...) while requiring less from some really overworked muscles (traps, erectors, levators).

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Alexander (as I understand it) specialized in fixing neck posture and using that as a starting point to fix other postural problems. Alexander used some cool mental tricks like the above in his work. The idea being that if you can change how you think about your posture and motion then your posture and motion will begin to change and fix itself. This idea is known as ideokinesis and was developed and elaborated upon by Lulu Sweigard, Mabel Todd and others.

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I really like the leverage that these systems (Alexander, Feldenkrais, Ideokinesis) give us for self-improvement of our physical potential. Not only are they very effective but their principles appear to fit well with the principles of aikido and judo.

28 (thousand) days later

According to the statisticians at the Census Bureau, God is giving most of us about 28,000 days to live. It’s becoming increasingly common to see people moving about, living healthy lives even after having already lived thirty thousand days. What got me thinking about that was one of Feldenkrais’ movement principles, “There is no limit to improvement.”
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How can that be? We see limitations and diminishing returns all the time. Well, consider where Feldenkrais was coming from. What if we were to spend five minutes per day diligently working to improve some particular thing in our lives. In an average lifetime, we’d accumulate more than 2300 hours of practice at that one thing. What if we spent 1.5 hours two or three times per week working on improving ourselves? That works out to 12-18 thousand practice hours.
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According to Feldenkrais, the vast majority of people stop developing physical skills and abilities at around puberty. At this point we settle into our habitual (unthinking, senseless) modes of action. However, some few of us are able to continue to develop ourselves physically for years after this. These people tend to be celebrated athletes or dancers or perhaps actors.
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Even if we start with a third of our life spent, we still easily have the potential equal to 8-12 thousand hours practice. Even with 2/3 of a life already spent, one would have between four and six thousand hours to get your act together! That’s a lot of potential, considering that people can achieve shichidan (7th degree black belt) in aikido or judo with just over 4000 practice hours!
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Not only are we living longer, but we are dying longer. It used to be that people generally lived an active life followed by a short period of illness and then death. Now people may be inactive and invalid for years – perhaps even a quarter of their lives. Several of the problems that are endemic in our older population are related to poor posture, including back pain, thoracic kyphosis, osteoporosis and related fractures, sciatica, and restrictive lung problems. What if we spent just a few minutes per week working on our posture? This is why activities like aikido and tai chi have proven so beneficial for adult fitness. I think, in this sense, there is no limit to the potential for improvement.

Unfettered motion

So, why might it be a good idea to separate the martial from the art, at least for some of our practice? Consider one of the Feldenkrais principles I mentioned in previous posts: Concentration on the aim may cause excessive tension.

By placing these martial constraints on our motion, like ‘stay upright’ or ‘stay centered’ or ‘keep unbendable arms,’ we may be creating unnecessary tension in our motion and variance in our posture. By letting go of all the constraints and goals (i.e. of winning) and simply moving in contact with another person we may be able to learn what un-hindered motion feels like so that we have a reference point when we get back to practicing principled randori with martial goals. For another example of the type of motion I’m talking about (unconstrained by martial principles but still applicable to martial settings) check out this video of Tai chi silk reeling exercises. Silk reeling has the additional benefit that it can be done alone - unlike most aikido exercises/kata.

Posture vs. morphism

Dojo rat sorta mentioned in his comment one of the next things I wanted to talk about - How do societal aesthetic values affect our perception of 'good' posture or motion? For instance, check out this picture of Usher-san that I labeled "Great posture." Usher has a mesomorphic (stratight, athletic) body type, which is generally more aesthetically accpetable than an endomorphic (softer, rounder) body type. Even if I were to take a photo in that same position, someone comparing the two pictures would likely say that Usher's posture is better than mine. Body shape plays into subjective evaluation of posture.

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However, a pretty-much infinite amount of research has shown that most people's perceptions are skewed when it comes to their own bodies. I remember graduating high school weighing between 169 and 175 at my current height of 6'1". I've seen pictures taken during that era in which I look rail thin - almost gaunt. Years later, finishing graduate school, I weighed about 210. And looking back at the pictures, you can still see all the angles in my skull. I still looked skeletal - even with an extra 40 pounds. Now I'm a good bit heavier than that (though still a good bit lighter than my lifetime peak weight). Here's the kicker... I have always felt fat. Even when I knew that I was at about 3% bodyfat in highschool. Even knowing that body perception is so skewed that eating disorders prevail in the population.

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So, where am I going with this? If you are going to evaluate your own posture and call it 'good' or 'bad' posture, then you need some criteria outside of how you feel about it because how you feel changes with the temperature and humidity and how your friends are treating you and every other variable in the world. I have found that brainiacs like Feldenkrais and Alexander and Hanna and Laban have given us some pretty good guidelines and criteria for evaluating motion and posture. See the list of Feldenkrais principles in the previous post.

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Over the next several posts, I plan to work through these men's ideas about posture and post a series of thoughts about how they relate to my body and to aikido and judo in particular. Stay tuned, faithful reader...

Butt amok

I am really jealous of Usher-san's great posture. If he has to break his posture to do something then he doesn't do it. I saw a video of myself doing a kata the other day and, though generally upright, I found a new place to watch out for my posture breaking. When I am backing up and hit a tension point - i.e. the bad guy stops my motion. On the tape it was pretty common for my butt to rock back out from under my shoulders for a second before I could get it back under control. I will have to watch for that.
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In aikido, we often work on improving our posture. To attain and maintain better posture. This is not based on some aesthetic ideal of 'straightness,' but rather, better posture is more neutral and gives the martial artist better mobility and options. The ideal is to be able to flow and do all of aikido in or very close to a natural upright posture (shizentai). In aikido you cannot really separate the posture from the technique or the motion. Upright posture in flowing motion is the goal.
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Below is a re-post of several of Feldenkrais' principles from his book, Awareness Through Movement, relating to the questions, "What is good posture?" and "What is good motion?" I like to keep these ideas in the front of my mind when I am explicitly re-working my posture in aikido.

• Effective action improves the ability of the body to act.
• Reversibility is the mark of [good] movement.
• Light and easy movements are good.
• There is no limit to improvement.
• Use large muscles for heavy work.
• Forces acting at an angle to the main path cause damage.
• Superfluous efforts shorten the body.
• Concentration on the aim may cause excessive tension.
• Performance is improved by the separation of the aim from the means.
• Lack of choice makes strain habitual.

Progress

My favorite poet of all time is Edna St. Vincent Millay - probably for no particular reason that I can put my finger on. I'm generally not much on poems about death and love, but her rhythm and word choice turn me on. One of my favorite pieces of her work is as follows.

We have gone too far; we do not know how to stop; impetus

Is all we have. And we share it with the pushed Inert.

We are clever, -- we are as clever as monkeys; and some of us

Have intellect, which is our danger, for we lack intelligence

And have forgotten instinct.

Progress -- progress is the dirtiest word in the language--who ever told us --

And made us believe it - - that to take a step forward was necessarily, was always

A good idea? In this unlighted cave, one step forward

That step can be the down-step into the Abyss.

But we, we have no sense of direction; impetus

Is all we have; we do not proceed, we only

Roll down the mountain,

Like disbalanced boulders, crushing before us many

Delicate springing things, whose plan it was to grow.

Clever, we are, and inventive, -- but not creative;

For, to create, one must decide -- the cells must decide -- what
form,

What colour, what sex, how many petals, five, or more than five,

Or less than five.

But we, we decide nothing: the bland Opportunity

Presents itself, and we embrace it, -- we are so grateful

When something happens which is not directly War;

For we think -- although of course, now we very seldom

Clearly think--

That the other side of War is Peace.

We have no sense; we only roll downhill. Peace

Is the temporary beautiful ignorance that War

Somewhere progresses.

It has been a long time since I have read this in its entirety. I remembered phrases of it, but not in Millay's crisp, precise, beautiful language. Something in Tegatana no kata made me think of this poem the other day and I had to look it up. This poem speaks volumes about war and peace, which is what aikido is really about anyway. This poem speaks about aikido on the spiritual/philisophical level but also on the physical, tactical level.

Whenever we take a step, there is a part of the step that is ballistic. By that, I mean we can't take it back. We are committed to stepping. "Impetus is all we have - and we share it with the pushed Inert." However, in tegatana no kata we work on minimizing this ballistic phase of stepping by taking smaller steps, walking on the balls of the feet, etc... What this does for us is makes us more neutral and gives us more options - more choices."

Consider this quote from another 20th century mastermind, C.S. Lewis, in juxtaposition to Millay's poem about progress:

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

That brings up another, related aspect of tegatana. You want your progress to be reversible. As a general rule of thumb you don't want to make ballistic (irreversible) actions because you end up (in Millay's words) "rolling down the mountain like disbalanced boulders, crushing before you many delicate springing things whose plan it was to grow." You lose the capacity to make intelligent choice, which is what makes us human. You lose opportunity. Moishe Feldenkrais mentions this in his book, Awareness through Movement - reversibility is the mark of voluntary [good] movement.

So, in tegatana we learn to make small, conservative steps, minimizing our disbalanced nature while also minimizing the ballistic nature of our motions. Working on this in your kata will bring Progress (with a captial P).

Feldenkrais movement principles

Just like me, Moshe Feldenkrais was both a therapist and a Judo black belt. Unlike me, Feldenkrais was a genius. Everything that I have ever read by or about Feldenkrais has been mind-blowingly thought provoking, including his book, Awareness Through Movement, and his Judo Groundwork book which is interpreted in this essay at Judoinfo (this is cool too). Any of Feldenkrais' stuff that I read once I have to read over and over.

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In Awareness Through Movement, several chapters are dedicated to the questions, "What is good posture?" and "What is good motion?" The following are some of the most interesting points (to me) from those chapters. These seem to be applicable to both Judo and Aikido and speak particularly well about aikido.

• Effective action improves the ability of the body to act.
• Reversibility is the mark of [good] movement.
• Light and easy movements are good.
• There is no limit to improvement.
• Use large muscles for heavy work.
• Forces acting at an angle to the main path cause damage.
• Superfluous efforts shorten the body.
• Concentration on the aim may cause excessive tension.
• Performance is improved by the separation of the aim from the means.
• Lack of choice makes strain habitual.

Whenever you think that you have mastered something in aikido, I recommend you choose any one of these ideas and consider it carefully in the context of the motions in your technique. See doesn't the whole technique fall apart for you. See isn't your aikido better when you finally get it reassembled in accord with Feldenkrais' ideas.