Kihon for Kihon

Practice started without doing any kata. We didn’t even do kihon waza (basic techniques). I’ve long joked that the only things I really teach are how to breathe and how to walk. We haven’t been doing too much with this in practice lately because right now all of my students have been with me for at least a couple of years, and they’ve been through the breathing and walking stuff a few times. Lately though, I’ve been working on some new ideas.

I had a conversation with a Shinto Muso Ryu teacher last year that is rolling through my head like a snowball down a mountainside in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. We were talking about getting your arms aligned properly. He had some exercises he’d discovered in an interesting little book about improving your health and budo by swinging your arms properly. What he described and showed me aligned nicely with some things I was beginning to understand in my iaido practice about aligning the hands and shoulders. I’ve been playing with this since then.

I started out by trying to put my arms in good alignment. This was difficult, and as soon as I stopped thinking about it, my arms would roll back to where they normally sat. The point of this is not really about the arms though. The arms are just signalers for how well aligned the body’s central structure is. I started making progress when I stopped trying to get my arms to align with my centerline and swing straight, and instead dug back along the muscle chain. The real progress occurred when I started playing with the position of my shoulder blades. As soon as I moved those back and down, my arms and hands fell into alignment.

I’ve spent a lot of time as a jodo and iaido teacher trying to fix my students hand and arm positions. It’s been frustrating because I haven’t had much success in fixing things this way. I’d show people where their hands and arms should be, and they’d mimic the position for a while, but the next practice I’d be correcting the same thing. Then I started looking at the basics of movements.

When we move our hands, the movement isn’t based in our hands. We usually think of the arms moving the hands around. What I have realized (and forgive me taking so long to figure this out) is that all movement has a base, a foundation, and if that foundation is off, all movements originating there will be off. The base from which the arms move is the upper back; the spine, the scapulas, and the muscles connecting them. When I looked at my students, I realized that even when they put their arms in the right place, they weren’t getting them in place the right way. They were moving their arms around below their shoulders without changing the base that supports their arms. Those bases were all over the place, which explained why students couldn’t keep their arms in the right places without conscious effort.

I stopped trying to correct students' hand positions, and started working on changing the way they hold their upper backs. As soon as they focused on the position of their shoulder blades relative to their spine, their hands and arms magically corrected themselves. I noticed that if their backs were correct, they couldn’t hold their arms wrong. Once they fixed the movement's base, incorrect movement became difficult, and the correct movement became easy.

Whenyou follow the muscle chains far enough, you end up in the ball of the foot. I’ve understood that proper stance is important, but I’m just beginning to understand that it is almost everything. All the muscle chains, all the body’s structures, originate with the feet. Nothing can be correct if the feet aren’t right. So now I’m working on kihon for how to stand, and I’m thinking I haven’t done nearly enough work with my students on just standing, much less walking. I’m rebuilding my own structure from the ball of my foot up, and all sorts of interesting things are happening.

The kihon for jodo and iai are seemingly simple: swinging the sword, swinging the jo, blocking, receiving attacks, redirecting the opponent’s weapon. These are taught in the kihon waza. There are even more basic elements though, such as: How do you hold the sword? How do you hold the jo? How do you raise your arms? How do you breathe? How do you stand? These are just assumed in practice.

On this day we didn’t assume them. Practicing kihon cuts and strikes assumes that you are standing correctly, breathing correctly, and walking correctly. I’ve discovered it helps to break out these most fundamental of fundamentals and work on them without all the confusing and distracting activity that’s going on when doing kihon waza. Just standing in a proper, efficient, powerful structure takes a lot of mental focus and effort at first. We have all sorts of bad habits when it comes to posture, structure, and breathing. All of these have to be fixed before we can advance to the subtle and challenging art of holding the sword and the jo properly.

Standing properly for budo is a complicated art in itself. Your weight has to be forward on the balls of the feet. Your hips have to be above your ankles, with your butt slightly tucked. For those of us who spend our work days sitting at a computer, this is challenging. My hips and quads are used to being bent 90^o in a chair, and they pull in that direction when I stand. The first thing I do now is stretch out my quads so they have the length to allow my hips to be in the proper position without tension.

Once I get my hips settled, I can work on my upper body. The whole time I’m at the computer, I’m fighting the natural tendency to slump my back, roll my shoulders forward, and tip my head over the keyboard. Doing these things isn’t healthy for anyone, but they are especially bad habits if you want to do good budo. I’m constantly fixing my lower back, pulling my shoulder blades together and down, and pulling my nose out of the keyboard. The reward for this battle with myself is that when I’m standing, my trained habits are to have my hips, shoulders, and head all aligned so that the structure of my body is supporting me and I’m not using any unnecessary muscles to do the job.

That day, for practice we just stood around, wiggling our hips and shoulders, and rolling our heads around, until we found the sweet spot where our weight is on the balls of our feet, and our hips, shoulders and head are properly aligned above our ankles. For something as simple and obvious as standing upright, something we think we’ve all been doing for decades, this turned out to be a complicated and time-consuming exercise. We all have decades of bad habits to unlearn, and as soon as someone stopped focusing on their structure, their weight would rock back on their heels, or their shoulders would slump, or they’d stick their neck out.

Just standing around turned out to be the most valuable thing we did all day. As people’s awareness of how their body felt when it was properly aligned increased, the easier it became to maintain, and that improvement showed throughout everything we did afterward.

Next time we may try walking.

Special thanks to Deborah Klens-Bigman, Ph.D., for all of her editorial support.

 

Optimal Budo

 

I saw someone on reddit saying that the footwork in Kendo feels unnatural. My immediate reaction was “Of course it feels unnatural, it’s budo.” Budo isn’t natural. Budo is about doing everything in the optimal way. Budo is about letting go of the things we’ve learned naturally and refining ourselves.

“Natural” gets used a lot in 21st century marketing. So many things are marketed as “All Natural” that you’d be forgiven for thinking that “natural = good health.” Natural just means that humans haven’t manipulated something. Natural doesn’t have any positive or negative connotations. All-natural honey tastes wonderful. All-natural rattlesnake venom will kill you quite naturally. Mother Nature isn’t a gentle lady, and you shouldn’t assume that “natural = good.” Until the 20th century, the majority of children didn’t make it past childhood, and more than 1 woman in 100 died in childbirth. Look at the animal kingdom, pick any species, and you’ll see that the vast majority of offspring die before they can mature. This is “natural.”

We learn to breathe, stand, walk, and run, naturally. If the natural way of doing these things was the best way, musicians and athletes wouldn’t spend years learning to breathe properly. If the way we naturally stand was good for us, Feldenkrais and Alexander Technique teachers wouldn’t have jobs. If the way we walk and run was naturally optimal, there wouldn’t be any track coaches.

There is nothing natural about using a sword well, about throwing opponents smoothly and effortlessly, about hitting someone’s face with your fist in a way that damages them but doesn’t break the delicate bones in your hand, about taking a little jutte and handling a guy with a sword. These are not natural acts. Budo seeks to optimize what nature has given us in both mind and body. We train in budo not to be natural, but to make the optimal seem natural.

 The first lessons in budo, I suspect in any ryuha, are techniques but are also about learning to use your body properly. I teach new students how to walk and how to breathe. They think they are learning to hold a sword or staff, learning how to throw someone, or learning the footwork to a kata. They aren’t really learning any of these things at this point. They are learning to use their bodies properly. Students usually take a year or more to overcome enough of the bad habits they picked up naturally to be able to start learning to hold a weapon properly, or even walk without throwing themselves off-balance with every step.

They’ve learned to use their bodies naturally, and what they’ve learned is all wrong for budo. They grip things with their thumb and index finger, because it feels natural. They sway side-to-side and bounce up-and-down when they walk. These are natural habits. Only once they stop reflexively gripping with their index fingers and throwing their bodies off-balance with each step they take will they truly start to learn to hold a weapon or move through a kata.

Optimal budo comes from the optimal use of the body. To get there you have to start with the fundamentals. What’s more fundamental than breathing? Optimal breathing is a learned skill. Just ask a trained vocalist or flute player. Developing great breathing skills takes time and effort. Classical budo ryuha all have pretty firm ideas about how to develop a great martial artist in their tradition. There are specific techniques and kata that are studied in specific order so that the student develops that unnaturally optimized body and mind that make their budo powerful and adaptable.

The flip side of learning to do things well, is learning to not do things that don’t need to be done. One of the key things in optimizing the budo body and mind is getting rid of everything that is unnecessary. Unnecessary movement, tension, and mental noise all have to go. Unnecessary movements create openings and opportunities that a good opponent will make use of. Unnecessary tension slows you down and makes it harder to move and respond to what is happening. Unnecessary mental noise stops you from realizing what your opponent is doing until it is much too late to do anything about it. There are many reasons the great martial artists throughout Japanese history spent time repeatedly talking about mushin 無心 or “no mind”.

Swinging a sword or throwing someone is hard work when you first start out. It would wear me out. As you train under a good teacher, two things are likely to happen. Yes, you are likely to get stronger from the training. More importantly, your movements will become more efficient and you will use less effort to swing the sword or throw your partner. You will hear your teacher make ridiculous statements like “The sword wants to cut. Let it.” How is the sword going to cut if you don’t power it? The more you learn, the less you are driving the cut, and to your surprise, the more the sword is doing the cutting for you. You are optimizing your movement. You are using just the muscles needed, and no more. Very small women throw very large men with little effort. I’m not talking about the woman applying a joint lock and the guy jumping into a breakfall to save his joint, I mean she takes him into the air herself, adds her power, and physically throws him to the ground. This isn’t because the woman is stronger, it’s because she is efficient. She isn’t using her back to lift him. She has stripped all the unnecessary effort and movement out of her action so that all of her power smoothly moves him through the air and to an abrupt meeting with the ground.

Optimal use of weapons is subtle. I used to think my hikiotoshi uchi was good because I could smash the sword out of my partner’s hands. I was strong and I was smashing their weapons. Eventually my teachers got it through my skull that this wasn’t good technique. FIrst, it wasn’t efficient. I was putting far too much effort into the swings for the effect I was getting. On top of that, by putting all my strength into the strike, I was destroying my own stability and creating openings that could easily be counterattacked.

I’m a slow learner, but once I realized that my teachers were getting more power with less effort than I was, I slowed down, emptied my tea cup, and started learning hikiotoshi uchi from the beginning. I spent a lot of time just watching my teacher and other seniors. I learned to better coordinate my movement and my breath. I discovered that the proper angles and alignment are more important than either strength or speed. Then I really practiced hikiotoshi uchi for the first time. What I had been doing before that was swinging a stick, but it wasn’t the hikiotoshi uchi of Shinto Muso Ryu that my teacher did; it was closer to “Huck smash!” than to any real technique.

I was beginning to learn optimal movement.

I worked to take out all the unnecessary muscle activation, to be soft rather than stiff. To be precise and efficient in my application of power. Over time, my technique became softer and more powerful, while I expended less effort. This was particularly embarrassing for someone who had spent as much time reading the Tao Te Ching and doing Kodokan Judo as I had, but my technique began to move in the direction of optimal.

I’ll never have perfect technique; no one does. That doesn’t stop me from working to improve my technique every time I touch a weapon. Efficiency and precision beat raw power. One of my first iaido teachers, Suda Sensei, would do kendo randori with high school students who had been training in kendo for 10-15 years. They were strong and quick as only 18 year olds can be, and yet he shut them right down. His technique wasn’t fast. It wasn’t muscular. It wasn’t stiff. His shinai flowed, filling openings almost before they were created. His technique was precise, the kissaki always exactly where it should be, and it was efficient, using only as much power as necessary. Did I mention that Suda Sensei was in his 80s at the time? He hadn’t had the strength or speed to challenge these young men physically in decades, but he didn’t need it. His kendo was so close to optimal that he could drive them off the floor and there was nothing they could do about it.

Suda Sensei practiced to improve every time he touched a shinai, even in his 80s. Look at the video link below of Mifune Kyuzo of the Kodokan doing judo in his 60s and 70s. This is as close to optimal technique as I think you can find. Light, flexible, flowing, smooth, and precise.

It’s not natural. It’s better than natural. It’s optimal.

Thank you to Deborah Klens-Bigman Ph.D., for using her editor’s knife and cutting a lot of stuff out of this that needed to be cut.