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!

How NOT to escape a hold-down

This is a little notice to some of my students who have, perhaps, been watching rasslin' and applying those lessons to their performance in judo. Pay attention:

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When someone is holding you down, it is not enough to bridge your butt off the mat or lift one shoulder clear of the mat - you're still stuck under the guy so you are still held down. You can't just sit there under the guy yelling at the referee, "My back's off the mat! I'm on my side!" You have to get out from under him - better yet, turn him over and get on top of him! Make it obvious for the referee that you are not being held down.

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Pay attention to the positional escapes that I'm teaching you and practice them until you can easily find the escape for any hold-down!

Position as submission

A couple of weeks ago I wrote on the idea of position before submission. That is a common philosophy of grappling but it sort of falls short of the potential of the holding technique in judo. A position can and should be a submission in and of itself. The purpose of a judo hold is not only to immobilize uke, but to make him so intensely uncomfortable that he may just submit from the hold.

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For example, the judo holding technique katagatame (the shoulder hold) is known in jiu-jitsu as the shoulder choke (See Renzo Gracie's Mastering Jujitsu, p193 for an interesting variant) because the pressure of tori mashing uke's shoulder into his neck is so intense, unless uke is pretty sharp and pretty fast, he'll likely submit from katagatame long before he gets to escape it.

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Another great example that is ultra-common is the positional asphyxia trick used in most side-position hold-downs. The idea is to compress uke's floating ribs into his diaphragm and hold tighter every time he exhales. Pretty soon, with tori's weight resting on uke's diaphragm and his chest wall in maximum exhalation, there is no way to inhale. This is a vey frightening submission.

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Per conventional wisdom, I recommend that you pursue position before submission, developing good holding skills and good transitions between holds. But if you have previously only thought of holds as platforms from which to launch a choke or armbar, then re-examine them from the point of view of making the position itself into a submission. This will improve your judo game tremendously.

How to drop 100000 calories this year

A lot of people do this resolution thing at the beginning of each new year - a lot of times with mixed results. I generally don't do well at 'cutting back'. I do better when I find a class of food that I can completely cut out. A few years ago I cut out all sweetened tea and sweetened drinks and lost 40 pounds over the course of about 6 months. If anything was ever easy weight loss, that was.

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Well, toward the end of last year I took a look at how much alcohol I drink. I am by no means alcoholic. According to the studies, two beers per night is a healthy dose for an adult male. That 2-beer level is about the point in the studies that ETOH has the greatest blood-pressure and cardiac risk lowering effect. Beyond that it tends to raise blood pressure and cardiac risk.

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So, I average about 2 drinks a night - sometimes a couple more - sometimes none - and this has been my daily dose for a long time. But here's the shocker - 2 beers per night over the course of a year is right at 100,000 calories! That's one hundred thousand calories.

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That is equivalent to 28.5 pounds of fat calories that I have been having to expend to keep from getting fatter, and as I get older I can see the point in the future where I would lose that battle completely.

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As I said earlier, I don't do well at cutting back on anything, so I just made my resolution for this year to drink nothing but water - no tea - no coffee, no alcohol - no flavored water - only clear H20. For the first week or so I had a caffeine headache (I drink far more coffee than beer) but so far I haven't missed the alcohol at all. What I have missed is the green tea. But I'm getting used to it and it looks like it won't be a very hard resolution to keep.

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Anyone out there want to do this H20 only resolution with me and see what cutting out 100000 calories over the course of the next year does for us?

Using relaxation to your advantage in aikido

I generally do lesson plans for my classes by cycling through lists of techniques, principles, and hints one after another. This makes lesson planning easy and ensures that I cover all the material regularly. I have described how I do these aikido lesson plans and judo lesson plans and I have posted a list of hints for tegatana no kata and a list of hints for hanasu no kata as examples of the lists that I cycle through.

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As Todd mentioned a few days ago, I have decided this year to add another layer of this type of repetition to my classes. We will be emphasizing a different broad principle in class each month. For instance, the principle of the month for January is Relaxation. We'll still be going through the technique lists as before, but there will be an emphasis on relaxation in every class this month. That's not to say that we didn't already talk about relaxation before or that we're going to toss it out the window in February - we're just paying particular attention to that concept this month.

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So far this month we've talked about relaxation in tegatana no kata - working with flaccid arms as a measure of how well controlled your momentum is, visualizing a string pulling the crown of your head upward in order to relax the neck, relaxing the hips and back and legs to improve mobility, relaxing/collapsing into a step, and measuring the relaxation of your steps using the embusen (performance line of the kata). We've also worked on relaxation in hanasu - particularly in techniques #1 and 2. In #2 it is particularly apparent that tori is unable to move directly behind uke if he is tense but it is easy when he is relaxed. Last night we worked on oshitaoshi from release #1 using the exercises in Ichikata - learning to relax and flow around uke's extreme resistance.

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I can go on and on with this theme. Look for more on relaxation in upcoming classes and stay tuned for next month's super theme!

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Evasion is assumed in karate kata

All arts necessarily make assumptions. To have a starting point you have to have presuppositions. Karate presupposes that the practitioner has the sense to step out of the way of a punch and put his hands up. But then that evasion is not really practiced much as a skill in class. Some beginners might have the sense to duck out of the way of an attack, but then they get so tangled up in the teaching system - the 'front stance, downblock, counterpunch' routines - that they drill that common sense evasion right out of themselves. They hope to develop some higher skill but all along they are forgetting about the assumed factor - the starting point - evasion first.

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Example - ippon kumite (one step sparring exercises) - mid-level lunge punch countered by downblock-reverse punch. A lot of modern karate systems that do one-step engagements  begin with something like this. It is basically a bunkai - a piece of a kata done with a partner.
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Have you ever considered how incredibly hard this first one-step is to do? Your feet get all tangled up with uke's. You have to be faster in order to get your downblock into position at the right time. You bang up your arm against his punch (requiring a lot of 'arm toughening' practice), and worst of all you have to know what is coming to be able to do the move properly.

To be fair, there is some evasion and angulation going on in several of the onesteps above, but Kanazawa seems to be about as good as it gets in the Shotokan world. Also, he's not doing that inane downblock-reverse punch engagement stepping forward into uke - but go with me and you'll see where I'm coming from here.)

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If uke is off on his aim, say he throws a face punch or a reverse or hook punch instead of a low lunge punch, then your downblock misses and you take a hit and look stupid (think Jim Carrey's karate skit here). This supposedly basic one-step is really quite complicated the way it is done. You have to be quite good to pull it off spontaneously. I've seen some TSD 4th degree black belts who could sometimes do it, but I don't think I've seen many others that could do this thing out of the blue.

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For another, perhaps better example, take Taikyoku shodan, said by Funakoshi to be the universal exercise.  Try to come up with some bunkai for the first sequence: left turn 90 degrees into front stance, left down block, step forward right front stance lunge punch.  The first basic application is, "there's a guy attacking from your left so you..." but now you are right back into the one-step sparring problem from above.  If you're more creative you might come up with 1-2 more pretty solid applications for that move and maybe a handful of possible applications that stretch credibility a bit. 
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Want to know how to solve this problem and virtually all others when dissecting your kata into partner bunkai or one-steps? First step out of the way, then do the response from the kata. You might even be surprised to find things like low blocks turning into cool stuff like hammerfist attacks or cool armbars, punch chambers becoming blocks, holds, pulls, etc...
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Try this, choose any kata you like. Take it apart into its logical 1-2 step pieces and practice each one adding an explicit evasion (a sidestep or turn, etc...) to the beginning of each one (even if the evasion is not part of the kata). I think the kata will all of a sudden spring to life for you, and a whole bunch of the stuff that is weird and dysfunctional about karate will sort itself out very quickly.
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Try making the assumed explicit in your practice.

Why mind beats body

The mind can be loosely defined as the function of the organic brain - the thing that the brain does. Some scientists will try to tell you that there is no mind - only brain, but that is just science guys being dense. The mind is greater than the sum of its organic parts. It is more expansive than the organic machine itself. The expansiveness of mind allows greater leverage and potential for change than do the limitations of the physical frame.

You get more mileage out of changing how you think about the use of your body than you get out of changing the physical abilities of your body.

• Physical is fleeting - mind is much longer-lived. Unless you work out fanatically, there is an average decline in physicality of 1-2 % per year after age 30. The mind, if exercised moderately, can often remain sharp and active and productive throughout a lifetime.
• There is not much physical variation between healthy bodies. This is an example where the exception proves the rule. If it were common to occasinally see extremely strong or extremely fast people then the Olympics would not be interesting to watch. It is the exceptional nature of these few freaks that suggests that most of the rest of us are non-exceptional physically. On the other hand, there are a lot of people in the world that know approximately what it would take to become an olympian. Exceptional minds are more common than exceptional bodies.
• The mind runs the body. Sometimes skilled and experienced teachers in martial arts or other physical arts can tell you what you are thinking just by watching your movement. This is not ESP, it is just a knowledge of how the mind directs the body. If the body is doing this, then the mind must be guiding it like that. Spastic, uncontrolled, undisciplined motion never accomplished anything exceptional.
• There is vast variability in how efficiently different people are able to use their minds to control their bodies. Read Jim Loehr's classic book, The New Toughness Training for Sports and you'll see that elite athletes really only differ in mental attributes. By this stage of the game there is very little physical difference between competitors because everyone has used the same best training methods to reach their physical peak. Their ability to control their mind separates champions from elite athletes.
  
  

But on the other hand, you do have to have a healthy, strong, fast, efficient body to tote your brain (and mind) around.

Honsho - true character

Another great gift for Christmas! Todd got me a new bokken - and not just any old stick. An exquisitely crafted hickory aikiken from Kingfisher with the inscription, honsho, meaning true character. Thank you again, Todd, for such a fine gift.

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Tonight I took the new bokken out and tried it on some suburi. It is very nicely weighted and feels more comfortable and natural in my hands than my white oak bokken that I've had for 15 years. Very solid feel. slightly heavier than my old bokken but not nearly as heavy as the red oak basher I bought a few months ago.

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There are several of us looking forward to the weather clearing and warming so we can get out of the dojo and do some sword and jo (we only do sword and stick outside at Mokuren) and I will be especially looking forward to getting to practice with this fine weapon.

Lesson plans, week of 1/5/2009

Kid's Judo:

• newaza randori starting seated back-to-back
• standing randori
• bridge&roll escape from munegatame
• uphill escape from kesagatame

Adult Judo:

• bumping a stuck deashibarai
• tsubamegaeshi
• reviewing the escapes from mune and kesa then playing them in lo-resistance flow
• standing randori

Aikido:

• how to relax and release
• aigamaeate, hikitaoshi, kotegaeshi, maeotoshi
• coolness from ichikata

On the blog:

• the move that is assumed in karate kata
• relaxation in aikido
• physical vs. mental
• ...and much, much more! Subscribe now for free updates.

 

 

BJ 'The Prodigy' Penn

In BJJ, 2 years per rank and 10 years from white to black belt seems to be be considered a typical course of promotion. BJ Penn earned the nickname, The Prodigy, when he progressed from white to black belt in about 5 years and won the World Championships (Mundials). Following is some cool video of Penn as a white belt beating up some judo black belts.

So now here's a question for you. Should jiu-jitsu students be required to be as good as Penn was when he got his black belt in order to get theirs? I say not every student should be expected to be able to do what 'The Prodigy' did (There's a reason they call him that). To require them to be that good just to get black belt would lead to some ridiculous rank inflation. here's what I mean...
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I've heard that many military expats in the previous generation took 6-9 months in Japan or Korea to get their black belts, then they returned to the U.S. and started teaching. What if some of these guys, not wanting to look bad to their teachers, set up requirements that it should take about 2 years to get a black belt. So, the second generation actually ends up better than the first generation when they receive their black belt. Now imagine a conversation like this...

"How long did it take you to get your black belt?"

"Oh, My teacher was rough on us. It took us 2 years!"

"Well, it took us 3 years."

"I heard that fella over there makes his students practice 4 years to get their black belts! They must be really tough!"

Everyone then thinks to himself, "I guess I'd better make my students practice 5 years so we can be the toughest."

Pretty soon it takes 20 years to get shodan! How many people have heard folks bragging on internet forums, "It took me 12 years to get my shodan!" This is like making everyone suffer for someone else's great performance just so folks won't think your martial art is too easy. This is ridiculous when you consider that black belt does not represent expertise - it is just the 'first step'.

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Standards are necessarily minimal standards. You don't see medical or engineering (or any) schools making each class have to be 50% better than the previous class just in order to graduate. If you did, soon there would be no graduates.

Renku and ichigo

One of the cool things about the Japanese language is its facility for puns, double meanings, and word games. I was discussing this with a buddy of mine the other day and brought up the example of renku…

Renku (連句 "linked verses"), the Japanese form of popular collaborative linked verse poetry formerly known as haikai no renga (俳諧の連歌), is an offshoot of the older Japanese poetic tradition of ushin renga, or orthodox collaborative linked verse. At renga gatherings participating poets would take turns providing alternating verses of 17 syllables and 14 syllables. Initially haikai no renga distinguished itself through vulgarity and coarseness of wit, before growing into a legitimate artistic tradition, and eventually giving birth to the haiku form of Japanese poetry. (wikipedia)

Renku was a kind of party game in which one participant gave the first line (essentially in the form of a haiku), then passed the poem to a second participant who supplied the second line while twisting the meaning of one of the syllables in the previous line. The twist was generally intended for shock value.

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Well, If you guys have missed it, my student, Todd, is doing a blog with his notes and ideas about our training. His blog is titled, Ichigo Dojo, and I was curious about the name but I was too lazy to look it up so I asked him what it meant and he told me a cool translation for that particular Romaji was something along the lines of “lifelong study.” Now that’s a cool name for a dojo.

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I looked up the romaji for alternate translations and found the following additional translations that are cool and fitting for the name Ichigo:

一期 【いちご】 one's life time; lifetime

一期一会 【いちごいちえ】 once-in-a-lifetime encounter (hence should be cherished as such)

一号 【いちごう】 number one

一合目 【いちごうめ】 the start of a climb up a hill

What is expertise in a martial arts context?

It used to be commonly thought that the mysterious black belt was 'the expert' at their martial art. Sometimes they are called 'Master,' which is a term that really sticks in my craw but that's probably just a personal glitch. For instance, it would seem normal to me to call a Spanish or Italian fencing instructor, Maestro.

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Also, there's the public perception that the black belt is the ultimate goal of the martial arts - an ending point - graduation - induction into the mysterious inner circle. But if the black belt does not signify expertise, then what does expertise in martial arts even mean?

• Neither expertise nor the black belt signify that you can beat up all comers. On any given day anyone might win a fight. But, after 10 years practice (per Malcolm Gladwell), the martial arts guy should rarely be so outclassed that he doesn't know what happened to him when he does lose, and he should be able to formulate a plan to get better at whatever got him beat up.
• Expertise means that you have seen the whole system and have seen it in enough variations and practical scenarios that you can make it work pretty good. This generally doesn't happen until about 4th degree black belt (or the equivalent). Some folks say it isn't until 6th degree black belt.
• To me, expertise signifies the ability to not only do the deed, but to discuss and explain and teach it.

What does martial expertise mean to you?

Happy New Year!

From the Mokuren Parkers to you!