Gazing at far-distant mountains

People occasionally look upward - at a stop light or at a road sign, or occasionally at a startling cloud or sunset, but for the most part we keep our worlds within about 4-5 feet of the ground.  Especially if you work at a desk or at a computer.  We look downward a lot and this becomes habitual.

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There is a great practice in jo and sword work to help counter this - when working solo kihon or suburi, you want to find a reference point in the distance - upward from the horizon.  Trees and the corners of buildings often work nicely for vertical strikes like menuchi and honteuchi.  Focus your eyes on these reference points in the distance and pretend that your jo/sword is a giant paintbrush and paint a stripe down the tree or down the distant corner over and over.

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The old dead guys referred to this as enzan no metsuke - gazing at the far-distant mountains, and it is an important practice in creating a good mindset as well as proper posture.

Photo courtesy of Brice Canonne

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Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com

Interactions: Posture and ma-ai

Photo courtesy of Postaletrice

I've mentioned before that posture affects ma-ai. Specifically, a wrestler's stance seems to draw the conflict in towards you, as opposed to a more upright stance, which seems to facilitate disengagement better. Here's another way of thinking about the same phenomenon.

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Get a partner and stand facing each other in natural, upright postures. Measure ma-ai (however you like to do it) - basically both people reach forward and stand so that your fingertips barely touch your partner's extended fingertips. Now, everyone keeps feet in the same place and hunkers down toward jigotai or toward a wrestler's stance. Measure again and you will see that you are well inside of ma-ai. It's likely that from this posture, uke can reach your wrists or forearms without moving his feet. Without moving your feet, you and your partner have broken ma-ai!

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This demonstration can be startling for some folks the first time you see it - it seems to mean that ma-ai is a fuzzy thing instead of an absolute thing. But when you think about it a bit, it's not so amazing. It just means that you can reach farther forward when you bend over at the knee and waist, using your butt as a counterbalance. But this does tell us a couple of important things about ma-ai.

• Ma-ai is not a spherical boundary around your center. Instead, it is sort of ellipsoidal or egg-shaped. Try this experiment - stand with your feet side-by-side and measure how far you can reach forward before you have to move your feet. Now measure how far you can reach to the side before you move your feet. Ma-ai is slightly larger to your front than it is to your sides and rear.
• Don't let uke crouch at ma-ai in preparation to attack. If you think that uke is just barely outside of ma-ai but you allow him to crouch in preparation, he's actually closer than ma-ai and he can spring across ma-ai before you can move. If you are watching for uke to move across that line before you react, you'd better react if he steps on the line and crouches! That counts as breaking ma-ai.

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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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Strange posture question

Re: Sensei Strange's question on Shizentai - How wide are the feet?

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I really get a kick out of having readers who both read critically and leave comments. I'm sure that there are more folks out there that read things that I write and think,"that just doesn't add up," but they keep their thoughts to themselves. Strange jumps right on in there and lets me know, which gives me the chance to re-examine and make myself better and maybe him too. Kudos Strange!

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Check out everyone's favorite film (above) of Tomiki doing the proto-walking kata. The walking moves happen from about 00:12 to about 01:18. Tomiki is repeatedly stepping from shizentai at the centerpoint of the kata, to various postural deviations that facilitate the arm motions. Then he steps back to shizentai at the center. In the center, at shizentai, he is always narrower than hip-width. Even in the little footwork glitch at 00:26, he steps back to center but is too wide, feels uncomfortable, and shifts his right foot closer under him.

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The photographs that you point to as examples of wide shizentai are not shizentai, even though they are good, relaxed, generally upright posture. Like in the walking video above, in each of those photos he is halfway through a step out of shizentai into whatever technique he is demonstrating. Also, I don't know this for sure, but I suspect that Tomiki liked to stop in these postures so that the photographer could get a good shot of what he was trying to teach. Thus, we get the mistaken idea that natural upright posture is wider than hip-width.

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I, too, was taught by my teachers to make shizentai hip-width or ever-so-slightly wider, and I did that for years, but as I got more sensitive, I started noticing more and more glitches in my walking and force generation and flow so I started looking at how the big-dogs do their thing (regardless of how they say they do it) and discovered that they were all saying "hip-width" and doing "feet under center." So, I changed and my flow and synch and power generation have all gotten a lot better for it.

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Incidently, check out this excellent, excellent discussion by Tim Ferris on learning. Watch the whole thing because it is a great lecture, but the part that applies most to our discussion is the segment on Implicit vs. Explicit knowledge that begins at about 11:00 on the video.

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February 2009 review - posture

February 2009 has been posture month at Mokuren dojo. We've been paying particular attention to natural, upright posture in all of our classes and I have written several articles on the subject. As a matter of review:

• An introduction to good posture
• How to build good posture from the feet upward
• A funny video of how posture teaching used to be done - wrongly as far as I'm concerned
• And a discussion of a better way to improve your posture - ideokinesis
• A comparison of postures used in Chinese and Japanese martial arts
• A discussion of kokutsu and zenkutsu - two of the postures in karate-do.
• An exercise we do in judo to improve posture and learn to attack bad postures
• Finally, the best book around about movement and posture
• Or, you might want to browse all the articles I've ever written on posture

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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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Attacking specific postural deviations in judo

Photo courtesy of Major Confusion

One thing that we practice that improves both posture and randori is doing light randori looking for specific postural events in the opponent as triggers for specific throws. For instance, we might do low-resistance randori, throwing osotogari any time the other guy points his center away from you or we might do randori looking for hizaguruma anytime the other guy leans over and stiffarms.

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What we are really working on here is learning to move around in shizentai and trigger our throws when we see the opponent make specific postural deviations from shizentai. Common deviations to look for include.

• if he turns his center away from you, do deashi or kosoto or osoto
• if he bends over and stiffarms, do hizaguruma
• if uke spreads his legs too far, do kouchigari or ouchigari
• if he lunges for a grip with his dominant arm and leg forward, do seoinage
• if he stands straightlegged on his heels, get ready to do anything named otoshi next time he moves
• if he bends his legs too much, get ready to do anything named guruma next time he moves

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How to fix your posture all at once!

Photo courtesy of Natashavora

Is leaning or being 'out of posture' a sign of too much tension or too little tension? Are you doing too much on one side of the body or too little on the other to cause this postural imbalance?

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Could be either, but when we start trying to fix posture we often go for adding tension. “Pull those shoulders back! Tuck in that chin! Suck in that gut!” etc... But what if we try this way to fix a posture that is already out of whack because of too much tension? We end up locking both sides of the body down, like a vice. Let's figure out, instead, how to relax the tense muscles that are creating the postural problem.

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Now, we can go through the whole body trying to fix part after part, but as we concentrate on one structure the previous one tends to go back to its habitual posture. As an example, take a rope and throw it on the ground. If you want to straighten it out, you can crawl along, bending each little length of the rope but you'll see that every time you unkink the rope in one place it bends or kinks in another place. You can't straighten a rope a little at a time just like you can't jump a chasm in two bounds. But what if you just walk away, holding one end. The rope will straighten out and mostly unkink on its own. How can we use this sort of phenomenon to get into shizentai (natural, relaxed, upright posture)?

• Stand with your feet and legs working as I described in my previous post on good posture.
• Now, visualize a rope hanging downward from your center of balance with a huge, heavy weight on it. Any time you tilt out of vertical, the weight pulls your center downward and rights your torso like the keel of a boat.
• Once you've got that feeling of a really heavy center, visualize a giant helium balloon pulling upward from the crown of your head, making your head so light that it puts an upward traction on your neck. It's almost as if the giant weight below you is suspended from the giant balloon above you with your body in the middle being drawn both directions vertically.
• If you are able to imagine these external forces vividly enough, you can trick your body into relaxing the muscles that would resist those imaginary external forces. As the muscles give up fighting against vertical, you relax and release into shizentai.
• When you can maintain these visualizations standing still, begin learning to maintain these visualizations while moving, as in your kata.

How does this work? That is the subject of another book or five, and in no way can be easily condensed to a blog post, but you might want to check out the following excellent book on ideokinesis for a good introductory explanation of this trick and numerous other techniques for improving posture and motion.

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Chinese posture vs. Japanese posture

It seems that Japanese arts (we'll take aikido as an example for this post) seem to have a different concept of posture than do Chinese arts (like taiji for example).  Check out the following two videos, watching the quality of the postures of each instructor.

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Both seem to be based on a generally upright ideal, but Chen Manching's torso seems relaxed and pliable while  Ueshiba's torso seems to be locked into a unit.  It seems like the taiji motion is characterized by soft, fluid mobility of body parts around a mostly vertical ground path.  On the other hand, the aikido posture is a more rigidly vertical stack of body parts piled on top of each other.  The aikido posture, when it has to change, breaks at the hips while the torso remains rigid.  The taiji posture changes are spread throughout the entire body.

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Of course, this is only one demo from each guy, but I think one can draw interesting conclusions because each teacher's followers have emulated them to the point that these two demonstrations seem characteristic of the arts that they represent.  As an example of this emulation, dig up any video of Tomiki sensei from YouTube and compare the mobility and dynamics of his posture with those of the two videos above and it's easy to tell who taught whom.
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So, they are different.  Does that make one right and one wrong or one okay and the other better?  Maybe it depends on what you want to do with your body.  What you want your art to be like.  Personally, I'm leaning (ha ha, get it?)  toward developing more more taiji-like qualities in my posture and motion.
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How about you guys?

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Posture pals

What a bizarro film!  Notice how the teacher demonstrates everything exactly wrong as compared to my previous post on standing in natural upright posture.  Part of the problem with this type of posture instruction is that their norm for perfect posture is based upon an aesthetic ideal rather than a functional one.  They want the students to look a certain way rather than to be able to do something.

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Helpful handful: The feet in shizentai

Photo courtesy of Toni R.

A lot of people start talking about posture by concentrating on what the neck and shoulders are supposed to be doing. I want to start at the other end - the feet. The largest, most pervasive force that we interact with is the Earth's gravity and, while we usually think of it as pulling downward on our center of mass, we interact directly with the Earth through our legs. If you get your feet and legs interfacing with gravity correctly then the rest of the body will tend to fall into its proper place.

• In shizentai (natural, upright posture) the feet are less than hip-width apart. The farther apart you get your feet, the greater the tendency to get both of them out from under your center. From this mid-point of shizentai, you want to take small, conservative steps - as small as practical to get the job done.
• You are weightbearing on the balls of your feet. Specifically, the balls of the first two toes on each foot - the big toe and the next largest toe. These are the longest, strongest bones in the foot and are the only bones in the forefoot that are made for weightbearing. The outer edges of the feet and the heels should be slightly brushing against the ground, helping you to balance over the first two toes of each foot.
• The feet are turned slightly outward, as is comfortable. The feet tend to turn outward just enough to allow the balls of the first two toes to line up perpendicular to the direction you are facing. It is also important to point each foot in the direction that it's knee bends.
• The knees are slightly bent so that your knees fall approximately over the balls of your feet. This places your weight forward on the balls of the feet and readies the leg muscles for action.
• You will notice that when you get your feet and knees positioned right (as above) with respect to the line of gravity then your shoulders and head tend to stack vertically, but if you lock your knees out straight you tend to rest on your heels, your butt sticks out, your shoulders slump, and your head juts forward.

As we are working on posture this month in the dojo, pay attention to what your feet are doing and you'll find that your posture improves accordingly.

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Shizentai - Natural upright posture

Our dojo theme for February will be shizentai. Shizentai is the idea that we should find a way to adopt and work from a relaxed, natural, upright posture. We've already talked some about this last month in our relaxation theme because relaxation and shizentai are so interrelated. Relaxation is pre-requisite to shizentai and it is often necessary to adopt shizentai in order to be able to do a technique in a relaxed manner. Notice I am not talking about a rigidly upright posture, but a relaxed, loose, flexible posture in which the head floats generally above the shoulders, which float generally above the hips, which float generally above the balls of the feet.
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Look for the theme of posture to be emphasized in each class this month, and you can expect several articles on the blog.

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Slow down, relax, and maintain ma-ai

 

Lisa Ullmann, student of Choreutics founder, Rudolf Laban, observed:

• fast motions tend to contract inward toward the center.
• slow motions tend to extend outward from the center

I have found that trying to move quickly in a conflict tends to shorten the encounter space and artificially reduce ma-ai. In my practice I see this most in the backwards turning steps (a.k.a. 'goblet steps') of Tegatana no kata and in the first step of shomenate. If I do these motions at a slow-to-moderate speed and relax then I am able to maintain a relaxed natural posture and a normal ma-ai. But if I do them quickly I seem to be jumping back almost into a wrestler's stance, ready to engage - and I tend to be a couple of inches closer than I wanted to be.

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Play with this some and see doesn't moving a little more slowly help you maintain a more natural, upright, relaxed posture (shizentai) while opening up the space between tori and uke.

 

Relax into a natural posture

While we're talking about relaxing, let me throw out this little point: Resting on your heels is not the same thing as relaxing. It is actually just the opposite. While standing on your heels relaxes some of your leg muscles, allowing them to rest a little bit, it screws up your posture throughout the rest of your body and causes much more tension than it releases.  Standing on your heels is the lazy man's path to a poor substitute for relaxation.
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Try this: stand in shizentai (natural, upright posture, hips over balls of feet, nice vertical, relaxed posture). Now, without changing your upper body posture, rock back onto your heels. I bet you feel like you are teetering on the brink of falling backward. Now, relax into this posture with heels on the ground. How did you compensate for the backwards tendency? Probably with the butt out behind you, trunk leaning forward some, and head hanging in front of your torso (as in the photo above). Now, imagine a string pulling upward on the crown of your head, drawing you upward into shizentai. Your hips rocked back over your toes as you were drawn upward into a relaxed, upright posture.

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Standing on your heels places too much weight behind you, causing you to have to compensate by placing some weight forward of your center. The most common way for this to happen is to hang your head forward. While this seems like a relaxed posture, it places muscles throughout your torso and neck under tension.
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The moral of the story - get off of your heels and relax into shizentai!

Fundamental judo and magical aikido

Judo with Todd

• ROM, ukemi
• footsweep to control with emphasis on bumping uke to get his front foot floating and then reaching out and touching his foot to see if he is really floating or not.
• deashibarai uchikomi early and late
• deashibarai uchikomi - 2 of any variation on one side and one on the other.  This really develops the feel of randori because of the type of synchronization
• osotogari - four variations that allow tori to throw uke right-sided no matter what foot uke is moving or what direction.

Aikido with Todd

• tegatana, slightly faster than normal with emphasis on keeping a dynamic tension between floating and weightedness.  This tends to draw you upright into a perfect shizentai (natural posture) 
• releases with emphasis on #6 and 8 as ways to get into the #2 and #4 positions by following when uke does something wrong.  That sort of makes the kata 4 repetitions of a pure release form followed by four in which you have to synch and follow along with uke until you can find the place to turn into the position from the pure release form.
• chain #3, including near and far wakigatame and near and far kotegaeshi
• ichikata section B, techniques 1-3 (oshitaoshi and tenkai kotehineri) with emphasis on using ki bumps to diffuse uke's strength so you can walk around it, breaking down his posture.  This stuff is pure magic, amazing how tori can move around uke's strength.  Great example of how inappropriate  strength destroys uke.

Training log

Judo with Jesse, Justin, and Alan - ROM, ukemi (including oozing), footsweep to control, review (deashi, kosoto, osoto, hiza), ukigoshi, bridge&roll escape from munegatame, newaza randori

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Kids' judo with Gavin, Emma, Whit, Knox, Quin, Dylan, Chance, Lanie, Luke - ROM, ukemi, shrimping, footstomp randori, rooster-tail randori, amazon randori

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Aikido with Patrick M., Alan, and Erin - tegatana with emphasis on shizentai, hanasu #1-2 with emphasis on rolling off of uke, shomenate, aigamaeate, randori

Blending and ukemi

Aiki with Patrick M. and Kel.

• Warmup with particular emphasis on ukemi. We don't do a whole lot of ukemi during the winters but its about spring and it's time to get back into ukemi. It is very hard, if not impossible to develop superb aiki without throwing all the way into the ground and taking the falls yourself too. You simply have to feel both sides of the relationship all the way through the techniques.
• Tegatana emphasizing shizentai (natural upright posture) and closing the hands to protect the fingers.
• Shichihon no kuzushi with emphasis on getting rid of the discontinuities. In this exercise it is both partners' responsibility to blend intelligently throughout the thing. The ukemi on the end is a natural extension of the blend in the beginning.
• Nijusan hon kata #1-10 with more emphasis on uke blending into falls and tori throwing into the pins at the end. Gedanate was working particularly well tonight and we explored it from aiki, kime (karate), and ju perspectives. Kel was doing exceptionally well on the wakigatame that begins like shomenate.
• Release #1 into maeotoshi from Rokukata (pushing with the free hand on the body).

Ninja invisibility in aikido

Aikido with Patrick M., Rick, and Mytchi

• Jodo with Mytchi. We worked on rolling the cane from pencil grip to honte, gyakute, and sakate grips. We also worked on #1 and #6 seiteikata as separation events against unarmed attackers.
• Tegatana emphasizing using ideokinesis to release into shizentai by visualizing forces drawing the crown of the head and the balls of the feet apart (is that enough jargon for you or what?). This was an amazing, relaxing postural fix.
• Hanasu #1-4
• Randori as a game of random releases. Everyone was doing great on this.
• Oshitaoshi (irimi omote and tenkan) emphasizing sidestepping into uke's blind spot and staying there with feelers until you can separate or execute a technique. We also got to play with good locking posture in pins.
• We talked about several really disorienting tricks that are part of tori's motion. Things that make tori seem to disappear and make it more difficult for uke to continue attacking. We nicknamed this the ninja invisibility trick. I'll probably have a good blog post on this soon.

A helpful handful – Tegatana no Kata

I have previously published a list of 100 terrific things to try when practicing our first footwork exercise, Tegatana no Kata. I have also published some video (I know it’s not very good video) of the exercise here and here. Following is some elaboration on a handful of helpful hints that we have been working on most recently.

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• You want to be weight-bearing on the balls of the feet. Specifically the balls of the two most medial toes of each foot (the big toe and the second toe). The heel and the outside of the foot is slightly brushing the ground and helping you to balance on the two long, strong levers on the medial side of the foot. If you try weightbearing on the outside of the foot you will lose power and you will notice a tendency to roll the ankle outward, which is practically the only way that it is possible to sprain the ankle.
• You are trying for a dynamic posture that is balanced around a central norm of shizentai, that is, a normal, upright posture. Your feet should be slightly closer than shoulder-width and heel-toe alignment, head over shoulders over hips over balls of feet. Notice that you cannot easily attain this natural upright posture if you stand on your heels – everything on up the chain gets out of whack. If you imagine some force drawing the crown of your head up, stretching your body out between your head and the balls of your feet then you will rock forward onto the balls of the feet and the rest of the body will tend to release into shizentai.
• Take small, conservative steps – no greater than the width of your stance (width of your hips). This minimizes rocking and bobbling and reduces the amount of recovery needed after each step, making your motion faster and more efficient.
• Your steps should be gravity-powered; falling instead of stepping. Concentrate on a feeling of your center dropping toward the center of the Earth during the first half of the step, then concentrate on pulling with the new weight-bearing leg and tightening the thighs together to recover from the step.
• And one more hint, hopefully helpful, that I don’t think made my first list. Check out the following video and watch carefully the alignment of the hips, knee, and foot during the turns. I’ve been preaching this more explicitly for the past several classes and these ideas make a difference in strength and stability during the turns.
  

New nikyu

Judo with Rob

• Footsweep to control
• Deashi, stepping around the corner, hizaguruma, kubinage/ogoshi, ashiguruma

Aikido with Patrick M., Kel, Jill, and Cynthia

• Warmup, ukemi, tegatana (emphasizing following-foot and shizentai), hanasu #1
• Aiki brushoff from hanasu #1 on the far footfall and on the near footfall
• Rokukata hikiotoshi as a brush-off and ushiroate as a follow-up to a spoiled hikiotoshi
• Patrick M. did his nikyu demonstration. His shomenate, aigamaeate, gedanate, and shihonage were particularly excellent. His kotegaeshi might need some work.

Sidestepping into oshitaoshi and udegaeshi

Yesterday I suggested a momentum exercise in which you learn to use a sidestep to kill your momentum, leaving you in shizentai ready to move in another direction. This experiment is easiest to do walking forward by yourself at a moderate speed. Here's you a modification to make it easier to run this experiment walking backward.

Tie a rope to a wall or post at shoulder-level. Hold the rope with about an arm-length amount of slack in the rope. Start standing right next to the pole and walk backward until the rope snaps taut. As the rope snaps taut, put one foot straight under your hips and use the other foot to do the sidestep trick. Repeat this experiment over and over so that you can practice sidestepping to both sides at the end of the line.

Now, where this becomes really cool is when you replace the pole and rope with an uke. The Nijusan form of oshitaoshi and udegaeshi are done with tori passing backward right beside uke and moving away until the connection at the wrist snaps taut. At that point, if you plant one foot you will sidestep behind uke and execute an oshitaoshi very similar to release #1. If you plant the other foot, you will sidestep in front of uke, turning into kotegaeshi or udegaeshi.