Awareness, Zanshin, or just plain Paying Attention

Awareness makes budo work. Without it, it doesn’t matter how good  your maegeri or your uchimata is.  You’re going to get clocked before you can use is. Being aware tells us what’s going on and what to be prepared for so we can deal with it when it arrives.  It’s so important I considered including it as one of the fundamental principles of Budo.  I didn’t because it is a skill built on and with the principles I discussed in earlier posts (Structure, Spacing and Timing).  Without an understanding of those, awareness can’t happen. WIthout awareness though, you’ll never get to use the skills you’ve spent so much time developing.

Awareness is a combination of the knowledge of structure, spacing and timing combined with being cognizant of the world you are moving in. If you don’t understand structure, spacing and timing, it really won’t matter how much you pay attention to the people and things around you, because you won’t be able to interpret what you see. If you understand these things, but don’t pay any attention to what you are seeing and don’t apply your understanding to the world, it won’t matter what you’ve learned because you aren’t using it.

A lot of people talk about being aware of the world around us, but what are we looking at and why are we looking at it?  Just being aware of what’s going on around you is useless if you don’t have a framework with which to evaluate what you are seeing.  Understanding your own structure lets you see what’s going on in others' structures. Understanding spacing tells you not just what is good spacing for you, but what is good for someone else. Knowing when the timing is right and wrong for you to act enables you to understand those moments when you are vulnerable to someone else.

When I was first learning the kata Seigan from the Kendo Federation Seitei Jodo set, my teacher explained that shitachi (the sword side) and shijo (the jo side) should begin moving towards each other simultaneously.  I thought he was a little bit crazy.  How was I going to be able to see exactly when shitachi would move?  I watched senior people do the kata, sure enough, they did move together. I was sure they were signalling each other somehow.  How else could you know exactly when to move together?

As I practiced with Kohashi Sensei week after week though, I began to recognize subtle changes in her body that would happen just before she stepped off.  They weren’t big changes by any means, but I could see that her balance changed just slightly as she prepared to move and so I could match her starting movement with my own. It seems pretty obvious now what I’m looking at, but it took time to develop an understanding of structure and movement.  At first I just “knew” that shitachi was going to move, but I couldn’t have told how I knew.  Now I can talk about things like a slight change in the relationship between shoulders, hips and feet.  I can see that shitachi has shifted her balance forward just enough that her leg muscles have to work to hold her from moving forward.  Her center of gravity has shifted just a slight bit in front of her feet.  

Now I don’t just “know” when shitachi will move, I know why I know and know what is happening with shitachi, and I can apply that knowledge to other kata and situations. As I develop my understanding of what is useful and effective structure, I understand more about what my partners are doing, what they can do, and what they can’t do from moment to moment. All those lessons about how to stand upright and balanced, and how to carry your weight so you can move immediately inform everything I see now.  I can see when a partner isn’t loading her weight correctly.  I understand that if my partner is slouching, she can’t breath properly, so she’ll get tired quickly.  I can see when she is ready to attack or if her balance has shifted back.  

Spacing, ma’ai 間合, is another aspect of awareness. We’re all aware of it when someone stands too close to us in public. We feel uncomfortable. We might even be aware that we feel uncomfortable because someone is too close. As we develop an understanding of ma’ai and get comfortable with our budo though, this changes. I’m an old judoka. It didn’t take too much Judo practice to change my sense of what was too close for comfort. After doing Judo for a while, you could be leaning on me and it still wouldn’t bother me.  

In Judo, we spend a lot of time training standing techniques while holding on to our partner. This is awfully close. Then when we hit the mat, we’re glued to each other, rolling around with our bodies stuck together as we fight to pin, choke or armlock our friends and partners. As we get more and more at home with this much body-to-body contact we stop feeling like people stand too close in other situations as well. After all, I can’t throw or choke you until you get close.  

This is not necessarily a good thing (though it does tend to unnerve jerks who like to intimidate people by standing too close because judoka just relax at that range, since you’ve moved into our attacking comfort zone). Being aware of spacing means adjusting what are safe, dangerous and active distances based on a host of different factors. In kata and sparring, good ma’ai is one you can attack effectively from while your partner cannot.  A lot depends then on the partner. How tall are they? How long is their reach? What kind of weapon are they using? Long sword? Short sword? Staff? Jutte? Something else?

Being a judoka who is comfortable even when people are touching you doesn’t make you aware. Being aware means understanding how quickly someone can cover the distance between you and her. This is more complex than being aware of structure, because how someone is standing influences it. Are they facing you square on? Have they turned to the side (hanmi)? Where is their balance placed on their feet?  Is their balance divided between their feet, or over just one foot? These all change how quickly a person can cover the distance to you. If her weight is divided between her feet, you partner has to first shift her weight to one driving leg before she can go smoothly. If her weight is settled on just one foot though, and that leg is not straight, she can start moving by simply pushing with that leg.  

Being aware of the spacing and the quality of the space takes time to develop and it’s an awareness that is difficult to deploy. As I was learning what is a safe spacing, I got caught more than a couple of times by teachers when I thought I had plenty of space, and they kindly laid a bokuto or jo on my head before I could react. They understood the spacing beautifully, and they were kind enough not to raise a bruise as reminder of how much I had to learn. With practice this understanding can become highly refined. I’ve seen weapons pass within a centimeter or less of experienced swordsmen who didn’t even blink. They understood the spacing so finely that they could see that the weapon wouldn’t touch them.

Once you can read spacing well, then you can really be aware of it. Until you understand it and can read it though, you can’t really be aware of it.  Once you become aware of it, then you can start manipulating the spacing, but that will have to be another post.

Each of these elements in awareness is progressively more difficult to describe.  Structure is relatively easy to describe. Spacing can be awkward because good spacing, safe spacing, vulnerable spacing and every other kind of spacing are not fixed quantities.  You can’t say “if someone is 5 feet or 10 feet or 15 feet away, you’re safe.  It depends on how fast they are, how prepared you are to move and what kind of weapon they might have.  When you start working with weapons, you spend a period of time getting hit when you think you are safe because you don’t yet understand the ma’ai of weapons and how fast someone can enter.  Just having someone describe it for you is not sufficient to understand or learn ma’ai.

Timing is even more difficult to put into words, though I keep trying.  Knowing when structure and spacing come together to make someone, including yourself, vulnerable is when you begin to understand timing. You can see when someone’s shifting their balance, or better still, when they are preparing to shift their balance, and act in that moment when they are committed to action in one direction. At that moment your partner cannot respond to you. They have to finish their first action before they can respond.

Good timing is about sensing those moments. You can’t really develop it until you understand structure and spacing. Once you have those mastered, you can develop an understanding of timing because you can see how they come together.  Timing is about being there when spacing and structure intersect in a way that is good for you and bad for your partner. Sometimes you have to set it up, as when judoka will give their partner a little push to solicit a reaction.  Better is when you can sense your partner’s movement and work with it.

Sense her attack and cut through her sword. Draw her out and cut into the opening left after her sword has passed through. Fill the space as your partner retreats so there is no opening for her to return to. Each of these things is about seeing when and how your partner can attack and then using that knowledge.

When you get to this level, then you have a framework with which you can evaluate and make use of the information your senses provide. In the dojo, understanding structure and spacing and how they go together to create optimal moments for attack is what we train for. Outside the dojo, knowing how to read someone’s structure to know how they intend to move, if they are tense or angry or relaxed or concealing something is an application of the same knowledge. Knowing when you are vulnerable or when someone has changed their spacing to make it possible for them to attack is something that can be used inside and outside the dojo.

It’s not enough to say, “Awareness is important.” or “Maintain zanshin.”  You have to know what you’re being aware of.  You need to know what to look for when you maintain zanshin and keep your mind on the job at hand and don’t relax. That only comes from mastering the essential lessons of structure, spacing and timing.

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Beginning And Ending, Let The Middle Take Care Of Itself

A guest post, shared by Kim Taylor


Can't remember where, but somewhere in the old iai teachings is the instruction to teach the beginning and the end and not worry so much about the middle of the kata. Make sure the students work on the approach and on the disengage rather than concentrate on the actual technique in the middle. In other words, what we call zanshin is the most important part of the practice. I've got to agree with this. As an aikido student and teacher I can be awfully sloppy about the approach and the finish of a technique, it's something I've spent 34 years trying to fight.

With the kata based arts it's easy to make the approach and disengage part of the performance, even though it, technically, doesn't matter if we approach from three steps or maintain concentration as we back off for five. It's the part in between that has the differences from kata to kata, the bookends tend to be the same for all. This attaching of beginning and ending to the technique tends to make it easier to pay attention to them.

But why is that a good thing? Simply put, it makes you better, it makes your practice more realistic, more vigorous and less dangerous. When you are sloppy on your approach and attack it's much more dangerous to do the techniques at full speed and force. A sloppy attack means surprises, it means an off balance attacker, it means more chance of getting clocked from an unexpected direction. In short, it means you have to practice with a lot of your attention and energy reserved.

Having a set approach of a certain number of steps during which you are expected to pay close attention to your partner means that you aren't going to miss the attack. You will be concentrating on the small movements that mean the attack is beginning. You are paying attention as your partner enters the attack distance which is a very good thing, knowing where the "safe line" is may someday save your nose from being spread across your face.

Being ready to move means that your partner can attack with full speed without the risk of mistakes due to miscommunication. It means you are safer because you're ready.

The disengagement is also a useful phase, who knows when a partner is going to "teach you a lesson"? With full attention given to the movement out of combat range you will cut down the worries about being hit after you figured the technique was done.

At its most basic, zanshin gives permission to your partner to try and take your head off.
So teach the beginning and the end and let the middle take care of itself. Your students will be ready, they will be safe and they will push themselves to learn the middle by cranking up the intensity within the envelope of attention you have created for them. If half of your teaching time is spent trying to get them to crank it up or crank it down, the learning curve will be shallow. Set the stage and let the learning happen at its own speed.

Copyright Kim Taylor
All rights reserved
August 27, 2014
http://sdksupplies.com/

How To Adapt An Art To Yourself

I often hear people talk about making an art their own and adapting the art to suit them. I hear it most often in arts like Aikido, Karate and Judo. The discussion will turn to adapting the art to suit an individual. This is a quite reasonable question. After all, every student’s body is different, with unique strengths and weaknesses. Adapting an art to suit an individual just makes sense, particularly in the modern, eclectic world we live in.

In competitive Judo, with dozens of legal throws, there is no way one person can be equally good at all of them. So people specialize in a couple of throws that they polish to perfection while giving the rest of the throwing techniques little more the cursory practice so they are familiar with what they look like and how they feel.  For a competitor, there is little use in doing a lot of techniques at a mediocre level. What they need are a few techniques they can hit from anywhere during a match. This compilation reel of people doing a number of different versions of tai otoshi gives a good feel for the ways and places one throw can be adapted for use.

I hear explicit discussion about adapting an art to individual practitioners quite often in Aikido as well. People want to make Aikido theirs. Even before the advent of Youtube, Aikido students could see many different senior Aikido teachers up close at seminars. There they could see that each of these teachers seemed to move a bit differently and have somewhat different approaches to practicing and doing Aikido. From there it’s natural for a student to want to make the Aikido they do as personal an expression of Aikido as that done by the shihan they see at seminars.

Adapting the techniques of an art to suit your particular body and personality is a reasonable idea. We all have different bodies with a variety of strengths and weaknesses, so why shouldn’t we try to optimize the techniques we study for our bodies. We can tweak and adjust the way techniques are done so they work better for us and are easier to do.  It seems reasonable that a person who is 2 meters (6’4”) tall will do their tai otoshi or kotegaeshi or iriminage differently than someone who is 152 cm (5’).

Across the spectrum of body types and shapes and sizes, students can see that they should be adapting their art to their particular body characteristics. Often they ask when they can or should start doing this. I’ve seen many comments that give a time after a student is well into dan (black belt) ranks. After someone reaches 4^th dan in most gendai arts they should have a really solid foundation in the art and be able to experiment without getting into trouble by teaching themselves mistakes. They can start making the art their own, and by the time they reach 6^th or 7^th dan, they could have a personal style that is clearly all their own.

This is great, right? You study the art, learn it and then mold it to your body.  I used to think it was great. Lately though, I’ve begun to wonder. I do both gendai budo (Kodokan Judo) and koryu budo (Shinto Hatakage Ryu, Shinto Muso Ryu). At one time I thought that koryu budo could learn many things from the way gendai budo are taught and practiced.  Gendai budo, particularly arts like Judo with a huge global competitive aspect, constantly mine modern science for the latest training methods and techniques for improving competitor’s skills and the efficiency of their training. I don’t think anyone would argue that Ronda Rousey hasn’t done an incredible job of adapting her competitive judo training to the world of mixed martial arts and demonstrated the effectiveness of it.

Competition is an exceptionally narrow set of conditions though. Conditions that can make techniques and stances that are foolish to try in other situations into perfectly reasonable responses. A classic example is the strongly defensive posture you can see in many competitive Judo matches. It’s very bent over and committed forward to block out your grappling partner.  Outside the competitive match though, the position is rife with openings for punches, kicks or small weapons attacks. This competitive defensive posture is quite effective for blocking out sporting attacks.

It would be a huge mistake to try to apply this or any of the defensive tactics from competitive Judo to a broader practice intended for budo. If you tried to use that stance while doing any of the combative Judo kata you would discover all sorts of unpleasant general weaknesses in it.  Competitive Judo has adapted itself to the rules of competition. The International Judo Federation is constantly trying to tweak the rules to push competitors back towards a classical style of Judo that is more broadly effective than just within the limited space of the competition area. The effectiveness of their efforts may be questionable, but their continued effort is praiseworthy.

Competitors only have to be concerned with the narrow range of possibilities present within the competition arena. Those of us doing martial arts as budo have a much broader world of possibilities and consequences to be concerned with. We’ve ruled out taking ideas from the rarified world of competition, but we still want to make our budo our own and adapt it to our unique body and personality. Now we can start looking at what there is that we can change without destroying the art.

Fundamental stances are essential in any art. This might be the first place that someone could modify the art to suit them. I like to look at leading practitioners of arts like Judo and Aikido and Kendo, arts where there is more opportunity to adapt an art to oneself without major criticism.  Aikido and Judo provide perhaps the best examples, because there are plenty of high level practitioners around to look at. Kendo leaves a bit less room for personalization, but it’s still there. 

Looking at Aikido, I see people who prefer to work from hanmi stance and others who prefer a shizen (squared up, front facing, natural) stance. When they have the opportunity to reset their stance, they go back to their preferred stance. I don’t see high level teachers modifying their stances or coming up with new ones. They just have a stance they prefer to work from. 

The same is true in Judo (after we ignore all the bad defensive postures seen in judo competitions at all levels). People don’t modify the basic stances and grips. Some people prefer a right side grip, some a left side grip, some higher and others lower. What you don’t see are people inventing new grips. With millions of people doing Judo, and thousands of those practicing at elite national and international levels, if there were a new posture or grip that could be effective, I’m certain we’d have seen it. What we see are people fighting from the right or the left, or even squared up.  Some big guys like higher grips, and occasionally you’ll see someone who likes to fight with a sleeve and sleeve grip instead of a sleeve and collar grip.  That’s about the extent of stance and grip personalization you see in Judo.

The problem with modifying fundamental stances is that they are just that, fundamental. If you start modifying them, then everything in the art that follows from those stances has to be modified to fit the new version of the stance. More problematic is that the stances have been chosen and refined within the art for their strength and flexibility. In any of the fully established arts I know, whether koryu or gendai, the stances have been refined to their essentials and changing them just creates a weakness. 

What could you change in any fundamental stance that wouldn’t weaken it? Body angle, hip alignment or foot position? If you change your body angle then you’re not aligned to deal with your attacker  If you shift your hip alignment you lose the connection between your upper body, your hips, and your feet.  Change your foot position and you can’t react properly when an attack comes in.

So when you’re personalizing your budo and putting your particular stamp on the budo you do, it looks like changes to stances aren’t the way for people to go about it. Watching high level practitioners shows that me while they have stances they prefer, they don’t make significant changes to them.  I should also note that if you watch any of them long enough, they are generally quite competent in all the stances of their art, they just prefer some stances over others.

If people aren’t putting their stamp on the art by modifying the stances of the art, how about the techniques? This is a tough one too.  I can’t imagine being able to monkey around with the essence of a technique like harai goshi or shihonage and being able to make some modification that would let it work as well as the fundamental technique, at least not any modification that someone else hasn’t already thought of.

I don’t even know who the guys in the above video are. The Judo world is quite large and I know a tiny, tiny fraction of it. But clearly they have worked out a lot of different ways to attack harai goshi. I remember my first Judo teacher telling us about how proud he was of a variation on a throw he had come up with. He used it quite successfully in a tournament. After the tournament one of the old guys came over to his teacher and complimented them on the beautiful technique.  This old guy said he hadn’t seen that version of the technique in ages, not since some Japanese guy had used it back in the 1930s. So much for doing something new.

The same holds true for something like shihonage. I tried to find a nice compilation video, but no one seems to have made one yet. A search for shihonage on youtube though brought up dozens of individual variations on the technique. If someone can think of a highly effective variation of shihonage that is not already represented by a video on youtube, I would be amazed and impressed.

All the various entries for harai goshi in the video, and all the versions of shihonage on youtube, work because throughout the variations the fundamental essence of the technique has not been changed.  People can change how they enter, what movement they use for the setup, what attack they are responding to, what position they start in, and a dozen other things, but the core of what they are doing, the basic technique being applied, doesn’t change.

When we see someone doing their version of an art like Judo or Aikido, we’re not seeing a fundamentally different art. We’re not even seeing an art that has been adapted to suit a particular person. What we’re seeing is a person who has mastered the art and found particular pieces of it that they like and are most comfortable with which they use more often than other parts of the art. Their personal “style” of aikido isn’t a personal style at all. You’re seeing the parts they like and are most comfortable doing.

An Aikido teacher who usually starts from hanmi stance and does a lot of shihonage in her demonstrations has not made any modifications to Aikido to make it suit her.She’s mastered it and chooses the stances and techniques that she likes best. A judoka who specializes in tai otoshi and can do it from 15 different positions and entries is still a judoka. She’s just become particularly proficient at one technique and is most comfortable with it. She’s still a judoka and can still do the rest of the syllabus.

I started out with the question “How do you adapt your budo to yourself?” The answer is, you don’t. You study your art. You master your art. Within it, you may find particular stances and techniques that you are exceptionally comfortable with and feel best when you do them. As you use these more and more, they will be viewed by others as your particular “style” of Aikido (or Judo or whatever). You’ll still be doing the standard version or your art. You may have specialized in particular versions, but it’s still Aikido or Judo. Other people see your particular emphasis in stances and techniques mistake technical preferences as personal style and modifications to the art.

You haven’t modified the art. You do the full art, but you are especially comfortable in particular stances and you find some techniques more accessible and easier to express than others.  There’s nothing new there. That sort of thing is older than humanity. Even before Sun Tsu people studied their opponents to learn techniques, tactics and strategy they preferred. 

In fact, if you are too wedded to particular stances and versions of techniques, it makes you weaker, not stronger. People will know exactly what you’re going to do and how you will do it.  It’s very easy to catch a tiger that walks down the same stretch of trail every day.  ou just keep laying traps for him. Eventually one will work, especially if capitalizes on the tiger using those same movements and habits.

So don’t try to adapt your art to yourself. Recognize a truth that is evident in koryu bugei.  You don’t adapt an art to yourself. You adapt yourself to the art. Master the fundamental postures and techniques of the art you are studying. Make them a part of who you are so you can’t possibly do them wrong. These fundamentals are the core of the art, and they are what make everything else in the art possible. They are designed to eliminate as many openings and weaknesses as possible. If you mess with them, you will be far more likely to do something that weakens you than something that strengthens you.

So how do you adapt an art to yourself?  You don’t.  You mold yourself to the art.

The Most Essential Principles In Budo: Timing

Previously I wrote about structure and spacing. Closely related and entwined with spacing is timing. Timing is the subtle ingredient that makes spacing and structure appear to work like magic. If you have great structure and good control of the spacing, you’re doing well and you can be quite effective. To be great though, you need to master timing..

Timing is what makes that incredible technique from Shinkage Ryu and other styles where the tachi cuts through the cutting sword of her opponent and into the opponent’s head while driving the opponent’s sword off the target into ineffective space.  Too early and the opponent simply evades and counterattacks.  Too late and the opponent’s sword will slice right through you.  There is a fraction of a second window in which to make this work.  The same is true of the stop strike in Shinto Muso Ryu.  Too early and the opponent easily evades.  Too late and the cut will take off your arm before your attack can have any effect.  

The stop strike is at 0:16

An entire class of techniques that requires perfect timing is Judo foot sweeps like de ashi harai.  When done correctly, uke doesn’t even notice the technique. They just notice the floor disappears from under their feet and then reappears between their shoulder blades.

This technique, like the sword techniques, is deceptively simple.  You merely sweep uke’s foot to the side while they are walking. The trick lies in the fact that the foot has to be swept after uke has transferred weight onto the foot but before the foot touches the ground.  Timing here is everything.  Too soon and there is no weight on the foot so sweeping has little effect. Too late and the foot is on the ground and solid, making the sweep impossible.

Timing is so important we don’t often talk about it.  We just practice things that require it without really focusing on how to see it.  Good timing is something I’m still developing in my practice, so this is definitely a work in progress.  For me, the first step in learning to understand and apply timing is recognizing that there are common elements that make certain moments optimal for action, and these common elements hold true whether it is an armed or unarmed art, whether you are at grappling distance, empty hand striking distance, lond weapons distance or even tangled with your opponent rolling on the floor.

A moment is optimal when an opponent is committed but not fully supported.  In swordwork, this would be the moment when your partner has begun to execute a cut and is so far into it that they can’t pull it back.  They have committed the sword and their body to the attack.  If you merely evade, they will finish and their body will return to a stable condition as both feet settle back on the ground and the sword stops moving.  In grappling an example happens every time someone takes a step.  Every step involves transferring your weight forward onto a foot that then touches the ground.  You have to transfer the weight before the foot is on the ground though. This creates an instant when your weight is committed but not supported.  If something happens in that instant, you can’t pull it back or move it further forward easily or smoothly.

It is this instant when you’re vulnerable. Understanding and recognizing this moment in your partner makes good timing possible. If you don’t understand this, good timing is just good luck.  Learning to recognize and exploit moments when you partner or opponent is vulnerable takes practice. There are least two ways to recognize when that moment exists.

The first way is to learn to see it.  Watch people move.  Start by watching their feet, and then see if you can understand what their feet are doing from watching their hips, and then try to understand where their feet are while only watching their chests, then their shoulders, then their heads.   Eventually you’ll be able to see the subtle shift in the body that occurs as the feet are moving and the weight is transferred to the unstable, moving foot.  That’s the moment to do something.

The other way to learn to recognize that movement is through touch.  To quote the great Judo coach Obi Wan Kenobi, “your eyes can deceive you.” Just as bad, your eyes are also slow.  If you are at touching distance, you need to sense what is happening faster than your eyes can tell you. You need to be able to feel it. I have spent, and continue to spend, a great deal of time walking around the dojo with my eyes closed and lightly touching my partner’s arm or shoulder or lapel. We walk around and I practice maintaining the connection and moving with my partner while tracking exactly where their feet are. Occasionally I reach out with my foot and lightly push my partner’s foot while it’s in the air. That’s if I sense things correctly.  If I don’t I’m pushing on foot that’s on the ground and stable, or I’m pushing on a foot that isn’t committed yet and floats away from me (often into a smooth counterattack). We walk around with me refining my ability to sense my partners movement and occasionally pushing on her feet while she makes sure I don’t walk into anything. Then we trade roles and I walk around with my eyes open while she practices catching my feet at just the right moment.

It amazes new students that I can walk around with my eyes close and slide their feet out from under them. No peeking and no secret powers. From my hand on their sleeve or collar I can feel where their feet are. It’s not a secret power though. It’s nothing more than learning to use your sense of touch more fully. Students learn the basics of this skill remarkably quickly.  Within 10 minutes most students start to sense the foot movements, and to their surprise they can feel their partner’s moving foot even with their eyes closed. Feeling the right moment to catch the moving foot though, that takes a lot more practice.  I’ll let you know how much when I can do it every time.

Lately, I’ve started trying to understand my partner’s movement when my ability to touch is extended through a weapon. I’m sure it is possible, and I can feel some of it, but I’m right back at the beginning of the learning curve with this. Our weapons are crossed and I can feel the strength and energy my partner puts into the sword or the staff. Just like when I was a beginning Judo student though, I still can’t interpret what I’m feeling. I want to fall back on my eyes. So here I am, once again a beginner slowly trying to figure things out, and probably overthinking things to a remarkable degree.

Timing is simple. Attack when your opponent isn’t stable or can’t move to defend themselves.  At striking and weapons ranges, this might include stealing a few inches of ma’ai so that you can attack faster than they can respond. When grappling it can be feeling that moment when their movement is committed but not yet supported. Rolling on the ground requires at least as acute a sense of balance and commitment as standing.  

Simple doesn’t mean easy though. Simple means “not complicated.” Easy is something I’ve never encountered in the dojo. I keep working at the timing. I’m collecting bruises right now as I work on training myself to not move too soon when someone attacks with a weapon. I stand there watching the sword come up and down and at me and wait and wait and move at the last possible moment when they can’t change the direction of the attack and can’t even stop it.  That’s the goal anyway. Often what happens is my lizard brain shrieks and I move too soon.  Or the lizard brain forgets to say anything and I get clocked in the head while watching the sword come in.

If I manage the timing properly, my movements can look almost lazy because my partner can’t do anything about it. I can move slow and smooth like I should.  Good timing means never having to rush because there is nothing your partner can do about it at that moment.  Timing lets you make the very most of your structural strength and flexibility and to use that spacing you control to the greatest advantage.

It’s simple, but not easy. The right time is when your partner is committed to one direction and unable to stop. Add some energy at that moment. Move their foot a few inches. Add a little energy in the direction they are already going. Done at the right time, this is devastating even as it looks like you haven’t done anything.  Great timing is not the art of doing something at the right moment. Great timing is the art of already being there.

When It Comes To Training, Fast Is Slow And Slow Is Fast

In my last blog I was talking mistakes people make in practicing, and it appears I gave the impression that I think that hard training is always wrong. After rereading what I wrote, I can see how that happened. I spent most of the article talking about the problems with hard training, and only the bit that I repeat below about how to train hard properly.

Train slow and work up to it.  It’s easy to practice things wrong.  The temptation is always there to start practicing harder, faster and more intensely than your technique is ready for.  Don’t give in.  Practice right so you truly learn how to do the techniques and master you art.

There is an old saying in martial arts circles that “Fast is slow, and slow is fast.” The most vivid example I’ve seen of this was watching my iaido teacher, Suda Sensei, do kendo with high school students. At the time Suda Sensei was 80 years old. He didn’t have the raw speed or strength or stamina that these 16-18 year old kids did. If all it took was physical speed and strength, they would have blown him right out of the dojo.Instead, he totally dominated them while seeming to move in slow motion when compared to his young opponents. These are not just strong kids either.  A lot of these kids had been doing kendo for 10 years or longer, so they were pretty good technically too.  

Still, they would march out on the floor, and these strong, young guys wouldn’t be able to do anything against him. It wasn’t that Sensei was faster and stronger and crushed them. He was simply always where he should be.  You never saw him take advantage of an opening. That would have required speed.  Instead, his shinai was there filling the spot as the opening came into existence. He was slow, and he moved slowly (at least compared to 18 year high school athletes who train every day). He never rushed and he never hurried. He understood how his partner was moving, and he put his sword  just in the right place at the right time to make a beautiful cut. He didn’t have to hurry. He could move slowly because more importantly than being fast or strong, he knew how to move and where to be and always did it correctly.

You don’t achieve that kind of understanding, control and soft, effortless movement by spending all your time training hard. You get there by training right. Training right means not training any harder than you can while still supporting correct posture, breathing and movement. This is the tricky part. You do need to train as hard as you can while doing everything correctly.  If you are training so hard, and going so fast that you can’t maintain correct posture, correct movement, correct breathing, and correct technique, then you are training too hard.  The biggest problem with this is that you then teach yourself bad posture, poor movement, lousy, shallow breathing, and weak technique.

The trick is to push yourself right up to that edge where everything starts to fall apart, but not fall over it.  It’s easy to go to far, and I still find myself doing it from time to time.  Try as I might to eliminate it, I still have some ego about this stuff, and sometimes it gets the best of me.  I rely on my friends and seniors to help me avoid this, and to stop me when I start crossing the line into bad training.

One of the first keys to training as hard as you can properly, is to start slow. That whole “slow is fast, and fast is slow” thing starts here. If you try to rush your training, you will improve slowly, if at all, because you will be training in bad technique, poor posture, incorrect movement and shallow, inefficient breathing. Start slow, well below your best speed and your highest effective intensity level.  Whatever it is you are practicing, focus and do it perfectly. Then increase the intensity.  Not the strength or the speed. Just the intensity. Increase your focus, blast everything else out of your mind except what you are doing and doing 100%. Gradually increase the speed, but never so much that you lose control.

If you’ve got a partner, controlling this sort of thing is much easier.  It’s one of the reasons that koryu budo ryuha require lower level students to always work with a senior student who will act as the uke for the technique or the kata.  The senior student initiates the interaction and sets the speed and intensity level.  The goal is to always set it just above where the student is comfortable, but below the point where their technique and control fall apart.  That is a pretty narrow range for most us.  I know that my technique starts to break down fairly soon after we move out of my comfort zone.

The goal is to expand that comfort zone. Make you able to handle more and more stress without getting tense, breathing shallow, pulling your shoulders up by your ears and rocking back on your heels. Good teachers and seniors will feel where a training partner is at and adjust the training appropriately.  You want to spend plenty of time training out in that shadowy region where you aren’t comfortable, but you still have enough to control to move properly, maintain good posture, breathe well, and execute good technique.  This is where you will make the most progress.

Each time you train there, you will stretch your comfort zone a little further out, and the point where technique, posture, breathing and movement all fall apart will move a little further out as well.  This isn’t necessarily hard training as we are used to thinking about it.  It is hard though, and it will leave you dripping in sweat from the focus, concentration and control required for training out there in the shadow land between comfort and losing control.  It takes a long time to learn how push yourself far enough but not too far.

I think this is why koryu students seem, in my experience, to make more rapid progress than students of modern arts. It’s not that koryu curriculums are inherently better. The koryu training system is much better though. Beginners and lower level students always train with senior who’s job is to keep them training out past their comfort zone without going too far.  The student doesn’t have to worry about how hard or intensely to train. The senior sets the pace and makes sure the training is fast and hard, but not too fast or too hard. This way the students get the maximum benefit from their time in the dojo.

A problem I see with many modern budo is that people spend a lot of time do repetitions on their own, without enough supervision to make sure what they are doing are high quality repetitions that are training good technique into their muscles. Then the students are encouraged to spar and do randori with people of all levels, without any control as to how hard they are fighting.  Students push themselves too hard, worry about winning (or not losing), and teach themselves bad habits that they will be trying to undo for decades (trust me, I have this little bend at the waist in harai goshi I have been fighting for close to 25 years. And I won’t even mention how quickly I can fall into a bad defensive posture  Arghhh!!).

Don’t rush into training harder than you are ready for.  Also don’t rush into trying to learn techniques and kata before you are ready for them. Doing that does two things. It waters down the amount of time you have to develop each technique because you are chasing too many skills at the same time. On top of that, it makes it more difficult for you body to absorb any of the skills effectively because you are trying to absorb more than you are capable of absorbing. The result is you are studying more stuff, but learning it more slowly.  Fast is slow and slow is fast.  

Learn the most basic things really solidly before you add more stuff to it. I know well the desire to learn the advanced techniques. The secret is that there are no advanced techniques. There are only the basics applied so well that they seem advanced. Sensei Hiroshi Ikeda once said that “We teach all the secrets of Aikido in the first class.” It’s true. On the first day you learn about relaxing, moving properly and breathing. Learn the basics well and all your techniques will look like magic. I was at a seminar where Howard Popkin kept doing impossible things to me. He did no advanced techniques, nothing complicated. He did very basic techniques and applications so smoothly and effectively they felt like magic. And you know what? Even those of us doing them for the very first time could do the techniques effectively when we slowed down so we could do the movements properly. The moment we tried to speed things up though, everything fell apart. There is no way to learn the good stuff by rushing. You have to slow down and do it right. Fast is slow and slow is fast.

Learn good, powerful budo.  Learn techniques that are so smooth and effective people accuse of you doing magic and tell you they can’t imagine being able to do what you do.  Master your body and your technique so fully that you fill every opening you partner gives you before it has opened. Be so relaxed and move so slowly while completely dominating your opponents that people watching can’t understand how you do it.  The fastest way to get there is to slow down and go no faster than you can do the technique correctly.  Fast is slow and slow is fast.