Why do you perceive "internal" superior to athleticism? [Archive]

Michael Varin

01-25-2011, 12:53 AM

Wow. The confusion persists!

Chris asked a fairly straight forward, two part question.

1. What is the perceived difference between internal martial arts and good athletics training?

2. What is the assumed superiority of internal martial arts over good athletics training?

Jonathan,

Look at your post. You have stated conclusions, and then asked more questions. Chris was asking for your explanation. By simply providing the "what's, why's, and how's" you would have answered it, at least to the best of your present ability.

Hi Chris. If you have found a way to train for what you want to get, that is a good thing. But anything you could be talking about (things that could be gained from "athleticism") is a different thing than what "they" are talking about.
Why are they different? What are the differences?

Your question only computes if what you say is true from your experience is generally true for others-- that is, if you can get internal training from athleticism.
This is a false statement, and plays no role in answering this question.

But I hear people saying that they are going far and wide to learn how to train internals, via exercises that are not present in athletics. So.. I guess whatever they are talking about can't be gotten from athletics.
You guess? Why do you guess this?

So can you clarify? Do you mean why do we perceive internal skill as superior to the very different thing of athletic skill?
Yes! Why? And how are they very different?

Or do you mean "given that internal skill is learned within regular sports, why are things like shiko better?"
As far as I can tell Chris never required you to make that assumption, but if you feel it needs to be addressed, Why is shiko better? What does it provide that is not found in the realms of athletic training.

People, let's be more aware of our contributions to this forum. Let's move this discussion forward, instead of running in circles.

Let me help everyone. Good answers would be structured as follows:

1. The difference(s) between internal martial arts and good athletics training is/are [ … ], because [ … ].

2. The superiority of internal martial arts over good athletics training is [ … ], because [ … ].

And, of course, you can add any additional explanation that you think is necessary.

Upyu

01-25-2011, 01:12 AM

Athletics teach you how to move smoothly and from your center. The modern study of athletic movement (as one would find in football, basket ball, track and field etc) teaches any of the things I can think of that are learned in "internal". The language is different but the lessons are the same. It's hard to go into anymore detail without further understanding your knowledge of sports training.

I think I mentioned this before, but Ark was a competitive gymnast before he started developing these skills and conditioning. And he would be the first to say that gymnastics had no overlap training wise, and in fact impeded his ability to learn his current skill set.

One problem lies in the language, you say "center" or "koshi" or whatever, we might say the same, but the physical meaning and development is completely different.

On one hand there's a specific physical development and control over the core, spinal erector muscles, obliques, diaphram etc that comes with the IS training, and then there's utilization of some kind of elastic property that develops in the body (whether its fascia or not is anyone's guess), not to mention a unique use of forces within the body etc, which, coupled together are simply "different" from what you see in modern sports.

Then you might say, "sure we use that too! Because I got my ass handed to me by someone that also uses those parts"

Well sure, we're only human with two arms and two legs, so the same parts are going to be used, but the manner in which they're used, and the way in which they are conditioned is going to be different.

I'd also caveat that "mechanically efficient" does not equal IS.
As in, I'm sure Vlad of Systema is extremely efficient at throwing someone using what someone perceives as being extremely effective or "effortless," but it still wouldn't be IS.
That doesn't make it bad or inferior, it's just simply not within the IS frame work.
Same applies to even some schools of Chinese arts, plus there's always shades of gray where some aspects might be used by some schools, but lacking in others.

I dunno, its just kinda obvious once you cross hands with someone that actually has it. Just because someone handed your ass to you easily, and got you to be able to replicate a couple of parlor tricks doesn't mean that the person had IS. If it were me, I'd go round a couple more "name" persons (not necessarily the ones mentioned here) and collect more data.

It's pretty cut and dry if you ask me, just go and check someone out already dude!

grondahl

01-25-2011, 02:03 AM

It declines, but continous training will keep it at high levels if done correct.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u0RVFpRNKU

They will also point out that internal strength continues to develop as people age, while athletic strength inevitably declines.

Demetrio Cereijo

01-25-2011, 02:21 AM

So I'd like to ask, what is the perceived difference, and assumed superiority of internal martial arts over good athletics training?

Internal martial arts = Exotic powers from orient.

Athletics = Ordinary western sport

bernardkwan

01-25-2011, 03:26 AM

Hi - this is an interesting video, unfortunately in Chinese, showing how Zhang Zhi Jun's Taiji punch differs from the punch from "normal" martial artists (probably trained in sanda). He is in his 60s and quite well known for actually having fought in public and against some Shiorinji Kempo Challengers from Japan in the 1980s.

His punch is in terms of pressure ranks at the bottom which is bad, but the two things that they found, the vibration from the punch lasted much longer (i.e. the internal organs shook for longer causing more damage) and that the his use of all his muscles was pretty even and integrated (whole body power), measured using electrical readings compared to the others.

http://bugu.cntv.cn/life/science/zoujinkexue/classpage/video/20110112/100843.shtml

bkedelen

01-25-2011, 08:18 AM

Internal martial arts = Exotic powers from orient.

Athletics = Ordinary western sport

This is exactly the reason. They are different and both indispensably useful in martial arts. Martial artists claim that internal skills don't require or are even hindered by athleticism because they do not understand what general physical preparation is and why it is not really optional for anyone undertaking any lifelong physical discipline. Similarly, athletes claim that martial arts is esoteric garbage because they have never had Mike Sigman swing a jo at them or been crushed by Ikeda Sensei.

Janet Rosen

01-25-2011, 08:24 AM

Chris, I will admit complete ignorance of modern methods for teaching collegiate or pro athletics beyond that plyometrics is used in sports that involve jumping and cutting.
What I can tell you is that for many yrs in aikido I've been taught to "move from my center" but that qualitatively this sense of and use of center is different from what little I've started to explore more recently.

01-25-2011, 08:39 AM

I personally have had the very fortunate experience of training with an expert in Chinese internal martial arts. Through my training with him, I learned that Chinese internal martial arts, were not magical, but just the most efficient ways one could use the human body. As I studied, I learned that I could do, at least on some level, all of the typical demonstrations of internal power. As my studies progressed I realized that modern athletic training covers most, if not all of what could be learned in the internal martial arts.

However, here on Aikiweb there seems to be a notion that "internal" and athletics are very different things. That some how athletes cannot do the things that internal martial artists can do. I don't believe this to be the case. I believe modern athletics training actually teaches the core lessons of internal martial arts, but in a more dynamic and functional way.

So I'd like to ask, what is the perceived difference, and assumed superiority of internal martial arts over good athletics training?

The answer:

I think I mentioned this before, but Ark was a competitive gymnast before he started developing these skills and conditioning. And he would be the first to say that gymnastics had no overlap training wise, and in fact impeded his ability to learn his current skill set.

Now, you can go into as much questioning as you want here on Aikiweb, but 2 of the 3 people have stated that it is different. No one ever said superior.

I would suggest going back to your "expert in Chinese internal martial arts" (sorry, but you didn't name him/her) and ask for more training because from your posts, it would appear (I say appear and am not stating a fact) that you have missed something in the training from this highly regarded teacher.

Perhaps some more training will provide answers to your questions because at least 2 of the 3 (most likely all three, but I don't remember the third addressing this issue. He probably did, but I just don't remember) all agree on the Internal Training being different than "modern athletic training".

Demetrio Cereijo

01-25-2011, 08:59 AM

I would suggest going back to your "expert in Chinese internal martial arts" (sorry, but you didn't name him/her)
Does not need to.
Dojo: Central valley Aikido, Shen wu.

Perhaps some more training will provide answers to your questions because at least 2 of the 3 (most likely all three, but I don't remember the third addressing this issue. He probably did, but I just don't remember) all agree on the Internal Training being different than "modern athletic training"
Depends on what you call "modern athletic training" cause there are lots of modern athletic training methods. For instance: http://www.menshealth.com/fitness/understanding-your-muscles/page/1

Alfonso

01-25-2011, 09:16 AM

There is no dichotomy. This will become part of the body of knowledge of sports medicine, it's already happening.

thisisnotreal

01-25-2011, 09:30 AM

There is no dichotomy. This will become part of the body of knowledge of sports medicine, it's already happening.

I agree with this.

Demetrio Cereijo

01-25-2011, 09:35 AM

There is no dichotomy. This will become part of the body of knowledge of sports medicine, it's already happening.
And the sooner the "usual suspects" start to work with universities, investigation centers, or practitioneers like Daniel James (http://sportsbioengineering.com/danieljames.html) (who posts here in AW) instead in engaging in the usual A: "You suck" B: "No, you suck more and your momma is ugly" ad infinitum, the better.

IMO, of course

ChrisHein

01-25-2011, 10:03 AM

The internal power folks will tell you that the lessons aren't actually the same, that IP focuses on manipulating the structure of your own body, while athletes manipulate the outside world. They will also point out that internal strength continues to develop as people age, while athletic strength inevitably declines.

Katherine,
I understand that the "IP folks" say lots of things. They may or may not believe that the lessons are actually different, but this is still not a reason. Why are they different?

Saying that internal focuses on manipulating the structure of your own body, but athletics doesn't is not logical. Athletics is about properly aligning, moving and using the body. It teaches the principles of proper use of the physical body. There is absolutely no doubt that athletics focus on manipulating the the structure of your own body.

If internal martial arts don't manipulate the outside world, how do they interact with it? If internal martial arts don't have an effect on the world outside of the body, then how are they useful for anything, let alone martial arts.

Athletics have proven time and again to help people into old age. Look at Jack Lalanne (who passed this weekend at 96) He could do things that no internal martial artist could even touch. At 80 yeas of age he swam 1.5 miles, pulling 80 boats, each with 80 people in them. At half his age, 80% of people couldn't do that. Everyone dies, Ueshiba and Lalanne, who do you think was stronger at 80?

Rob John,
I find it strange that all the "internal people" who possess so much "internal power" are also athletes. Perhaps they are simply telling you that it's not athletics, but something else. Ark has more videos than any of the other internal people, he's also an ex gymnast and kickboxer (I'm sure he's done a few other athletic things as well). Strange that the more athletic they are, the more things they show.

As far as using the elastic nature of the body, sports people discuss this all the time. The language is different but they are talking about the same thing.

Athletics take less time to learn, are more clearly explained, more widely available, and demonstrate more effective ability.

Why is "internal" different then athletics? What can an internal martial artist do that a good athlete cannot?

Janet Rosen

01-25-2011, 10:08 AM

http://www.menshealth.com/fitness/understanding-your-muscles/page/1

Great link - Thanks!

01-25-2011, 10:12 AM

Does not need to.
Dojo: Central valley Aikido, Shen wu.

I've never met or trained with Tim Cartmell. But, in all the time I've read about him, he seemed like the kind of martial artist that kept an open mind and got out there and actually trained with all manner of martial artists. Just look at the people he's trained with:

I began training in Kung Fu San Soo with Ted Sias and later continued training with Jimmy H. Woo. In Taiwan, I studied Xing Yi Quan with Xu Hong Ji and later with his son Xu Zhen Wang. I studied Old style Yang Tai Ji Quan and Xu Xi Dao (an esoteric Crane style) with Chen Zhuo Zhen. My next Tai Ji Quan teacher was Lin Ah Long, who taught me the Yang and Chen Zhao Bao styles. I studied Yi Quan and the Internal styles with Gao Liu De. I studied the Old Frame of the Chen style with Xu Fu Jin. I studied Gao style Ba Gua Zhang and Chen Pan Ling style Tai Ji Quan with Luo De Xiu. In mainland China, I studied He Bei style Xing Yi Quan with luodexiub.gif (17025 bytes)Liang Ke Quan. I studied Sun style Ba Gua Zhang and Tai Ji Quan with Sun Jian Yun, Sun Bao An and Liu Yan Long. I studied Shan Xi Xing Yi with Mao Ming Chun.

Seriously, he seems like a very open minded martial artist who looks for quality people to train with. I would be that if someone came up to him and said, hey, Tim, there's a guy who says that his Internal Training methods are different than everyone else's and that he can also use these methods in an MMA environment, that Tim would keep his mind open and when the chance came, he'd look to train with that guy.

Point of fact, here's Tim himself:

I would only add that I believe it is important to respect the practitioners of all types of martial arts, regardless of the style. Remaining humble with an open mind is the only way to continuous improvement. You can learn something from just about everyone. I often tell my students, "if it works for you, it's good."

So, I thought that maybe there was someone else that Chris had trained with that he hadn't reported. You never know.

Depends on what you call "modern athletic training" cause there are lots of modern athletic training methods. For instance: http://www.menshealth.com/fitness/understanding-your-muscles/page/1

Yep, and all those people are now Internal Martial Arts experts, right? ;)

Knowing theory about how the body possibly works will never equal actual training to create a martial body. But you know this. :)

Mark

ChrisHein

01-25-2011, 10:17 AM

Tim Cartmell is very open minded. So am I. I am just asking for someone who spends a lot of time doing the "IP" stuff as talked about here on Aikiweb to tell me how and why "IP" is better/different then athletics training.

It's kind of like someone saying, "this is so because I say it." And I ask," can you tell me why?" and they say, "you're so close minded, I just told you because I said so."

David Orange

01-25-2011, 10:20 AM

kewms

01-25-2011, 10:21 AM

I'm currently training in both olympic weightlifting and IP-influenced aikido(*). My sense so far is that the two take different approaches in search of different goals. I'm not yet knowledgeable enough in either to be much more precise than that, I'm afraid.

I will say, though, that your relationship to gravity is very different when your goal is to put an attacker on the ground than when your goal is to put a heavy weight over your head. Channeling the energy that an attacker helpfully provides is also very different than supplying all of the energy necessary to move a barbell from a dead stop. These guys
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tl9NgfDKus&feature=related
clearly know something about explosiveness and structure -- that's double bodyweight they're lifting -- but I'm not sure it's the same stuff IP martial arts study.

My feeling is that both have important lessons to teach -- which is why I'm doing both -- but that they aren't the *same* lessons.

Katherine

(*) IP-influenced aikido = aikido in the dojo of one of the folks who is trying to incorporate IP into his art. Not going to get into the whole debate about what is and isn't IP, or who does or doesn't "get it."

David Orange

01-25-2011, 10:24 AM

Wow. The confusion persists!

Man, this stuff just eats you alive, doesn't it?

The question comes back to the same line as what is the difference between internal arts and external arts. External arts are athletics. So it's the same question. And that has been answered many times.

David

Demetrio Cereijo

01-25-2011, 10:38 AM

Yep, and all those people are now Internal Martial Arts experts, right? ;)
Wrong.

My point is "modern athletic training" encompasses lots of different approaches. You can't (well you can but I think you shouldn't) say all "modern athletic training" is the same thing. Except, of course, if you are a recognized authority on that matter, but I missed that part.

Knowing theory about how the body possibly works will never equal actual training to create a martial body. But you know this. :)
Apples have been falling from trees since ever... Who needs to know what gravity is? Who needs science when the shaman can give you the answers? What about the possible uses of IS training in sports performance, medicine, rehabilitation, workplace ergonomics?

At least the "modern athletic training" people are helping to diminish the suffering of another human beings. Are you doing the same?

David Orange

01-25-2011, 10:42 AM

Tim Cartmell is very open minded. So am I. I am just asking for someone who spends a lot of time doing the "IP" stuff as talked about here on Aikiweb to tell me how and why "IP" is better/different then athletics training.

Well, an athletic person (say, a fighter) will have good movement, etc., but he won't have developed the ability to use ki at the direction of the mind.

Note that this ability without physical conditioning is in itself worthless. You don't "hit" someone with your ki: you hit them with your body. But if the body is conditioned to move and strike with mind/ki as the primary motivators (instead of primarily by muscular manipulation), the quality is different. Note again that this mainly applies to human-human interaction: not to things like pulling boats, though it will undoubtedly improve even that performance. For internal arts, a big part of the mix is how your mind/ki interacts with the opponent's mind/ki to influence his perceptions, feelings, intentions and therefore his actions. Much of the long-bouncing from an effortless old man comes about because the qualities of the movements in relation (and the feelings/perceptions in the mind/ki of the opponent) cause certain reactions in the attacker that lead him into worse and worse positions, where his efforts to correct himself actually help to propel him away.

A well conditioned fighter can probably beat a poorly conditioned internal artist. Because the ki only works effectively in coordination with the muscles, bones, fascia, mind and breath. So an internal artist will get better results with better physical conditioning. But no amount of athletic conditioning affects the mind/ki development because most of it involves things that actually weaken or constrict the ki, as Rob explained that Ark's gymnastics actually hampered his ability to develop internal power. Ark also said that most people who get involved in Aunkai just drop weight training because they find that it works against them. Dan has said similar things.

Hope that helps.

David

01-25-2011, 11:27 AM

Hi Michael, it was an honest probe for clarification of the question, because I wanted to know if we were supposed to be trying to convince him that the 2 are different, or if we were supposed to make a case for one being better.
But, I see we are supposed to do both-- since having an answer to one of those questions makes the other moot, I guess it was dumb to ask for clarification.

My answer: internal training teaches me to generate a different kind of force usage than I learned in normal life. I couldn't learn it from athletics, so that's why I see them as different. Of course it also could be because I am dumb, whereas if I was smart I could have learned this from athletics. Why is the new usage superior? Because it is teaching me aiki, which I failed to learn before.

So it's all in whether or not you are happy with your training (if you are getting what you want, then who is anyone to tell/convince you that something is superior?).

David Orange

01-25-2011, 11:36 AM

I will say, though, that your relationship to gravity is very different when your goal is to put an attacker on the ground than when your goal is to put a heavy weight over your head.

However, it's important to note that the primary goal of internal training is not "to put an attacker on the ground". It's simply to develop and unbreakable orientation of the body to the six directions of up/down (gravity), forward/backward and left/right. Akuzawa sensei was very firm in stating that his practice is to tune this orientation to a very high degree so that the body becomes self-correcting at all times and in response to any force that tries to move it within those six directions. "Whatever happens to the attacker," he said, "results not from an effort to do anything to him but because he has attached himself to you and your body's actions to correct its orientation take him out of his own orientation." (interpreted)

So the goal is not to put an attacker on the ground, but to maintain our own equilibrium despite any external efforts to break it.

And he further emphasized that our energy must not go out of our body, as we might ordinarily think of throwing or striking someone. The energy stays inside us and works to correct our orientation. We "choke-out" techniques from within and they stop at the boundaries of our own body. It's the attacker's relation to our body that causes him to absorb force from our movement.

Hoping that helps.

David

HL1978

01-25-2011, 01:18 PM

So I'd like to ask, what is the perceived difference, and assumed superiority of internal martial arts over good athletics training?

Is this with respect to aikido training or martial arts in general?

I personally would hesistate to call one superior over the other, in particular because there are a wide range of skills and skillsets that result from internal training (with different levels of "purity") while good athletics training develops a second, useful skillset.

I do wonder why if you have had some time with someone with some skill why you might be asking the question. What are the attributes you usually tend to feel when working out with someone with "internal skills" and how are you able to replicate them via good athletic training?

I am just asking for someone who spends a lot of time doing the "IP" stuff as talked about here on Aikiweb to tell me how and why "IP" is better/different then athletics training.

I think Rob gave a pretty good overview from a conditioning standpoint as to how the approaches differ, and how different schools/people might have mixes of internal/external. I certainly don't mind laying out some of the things typically associated with an internal approach that result in differences from good athletic training. I would be happy to do so in response to answering my question above.

kewms

01-25-2011, 04:13 PM

So the goal is not to put an attacker on the ground, but to maintain our own equilibrium despite any external efforts to break it.

Sure. From what I've read here, though, maintaining that equilibrium while in motion is yet another level of development, and I would imagine doing so while manipulating other objects or people is yet another step beyond that. Yet those two additional steps are the very core of athletics or, for that matter, practical martial arts.

So returning to the core of the thread, I can see how internal training is different, but agree with the OP that it is not necessarily better, depending on the individual's goals.

Katherine

Mike Sigman

01-25-2011, 05:11 PM

I find it strange that all the "internal people" who possess so much "internal power" are also athletes. Perhaps they are simply telling you that it's not athletics, but something else. Ark has more videos than any of the other internal people, he's also an ex gymnast and kickboxer (I'm sure he's done a few other athletic things as well). Strange that the more athletic they are, the more things they show.

As far as using the elastic nature of the body, sports people discuss this all the time. The language is different but they are talking about the same thing.

Athletics take less time to learn, are more clearly explained, more widely available, and demonstrate more effective ability.

Why is "internal" different then athletics? What can an internal martial artist do that a good athlete cannot?

It's a different usage of "athletics" though:

Ueshiba Sensei brought Mr. (Noriaki) Inoue with him. After they showed some techniques, Ueshiba Sensei said: “You are probably thinking that we cannot possibly do these techniques without some sort of collusion between us. Since you are all martial arts practitioners, if there is a man among you, come and test this old man.” However, no one stepped forward. At 35 I was the youngest among them. I had recently arrived in Manchuria and several government officials were observing the demonstration. I thought that I should test my own ability and said, “Yes, I will try”. Ueshiba Sensei replied: “You are Mr. Tenryu, aren’t you? You too are probably imagining that an old man like me won’t be able to throw you very well. However, budo is much more than what you think it is. He offered his left hand saying it was weaker than his right and continued: “You must be quite strong physically. I am not putting strength into my arm so you can do anything you want with it. Try!”

I thought that this old man was speaking nonsense and slapped his hand down as I grabbed it. But the moment I touched him I was startled. I felt as if I had taken hold of an iron bar. Of course, I knew very well from my experience in Sumo that it would be useless to struggle against him. I immediately knew I had been defeated. However, I couldn’t just leave things like that and attempted to twist his arm up and out. He didn’t move an inch. I tried again with both hands using all my might. But he used my strength against me and I fell down.

Upyu

01-25-2011, 05:59 PM

Rob John,
I find it strange that all the "internal people" who possess so much "internal power" are also athletes. Perhaps they are simply telling you that it's not athletics, but something else. Ark has more videos than any of the other internal people, he's also an ex gymnast and kickboxer (I'm sure he's done a few other athletic things as well). Strange that the more athletic they are, the more things they show.

As far as using the elastic nature of the body, sports people discuss this all the time. The language is different but they are talking about the same thing.

Athletics take less time to learn, are more clearly explained, more widely available, and demonstrate more effective ability.

Why is "internal" different then athletics? What can an internal martial artist do that a good athlete cannot?

Hi Chris,

Again we run into the language barrier where we aren't talking about the same usage. You say elastic, and to be sure, there's some overlap, but there's a specific way in which the elastic nature of the body is trained to obtain a specific result.

Let's take another example, the valsalva technique is used in sports, and to a certain degree there's overlap (I think) with the breath methods used in internals, in so far as you're raising the pressure inside your body. The problem is that there's a specific manner in which the breath/pressure is used in order to obtain a specific result. IE it's only a smaller part of the big picture.

But the way I just wrote the above, you'd say, sure a boxer exhales sharply when they punch, to maintain the pressure in their core, so they "must" be doing the same thing.

Yet if you and I were to get together it'd be fairly easy to show you that something different is going on.

I'd agree in a sense its "athletics" in that you have to train extremely hard, condition your body physically, but the end result is different.

I think someone else summed it up perfectly when they said, take a body builder and a power lifter, both lift weights, both are athletes,
but the methodology and results of their training are completely different. Same difference.

01-25-2011, 06:49 PM

I think someone else summed it up perfectly when they said, take a body builder and a power lifter, both lift weights, both are athletes,
but the methodology and results of their training are completely different. Same difference.
:D
What else do we know for sure?
Does being a good fighter and winning competitions mean they have internal power? No.
Does going to live and train in China or Japan with the masters mean ypu learned nternal power or Aiki? No it doesn't.
Does knowing some very good and practical principles for fighting mean you have internal power? No it doesn't.
Does being a Chinese Master level teacher of the internal Chinese martial arts mean you have internal power...nope.
Does being a Japanese shihan mean you have aiki? Not on your life.
Would some people rather die than admit they don't know it and nether does their teacher whom they love?...you betcha
Have any number of people gotten up and gone out and met folks teaching it and came away understanding it is different than what they had thought and what they had trained their whole lives...yup..
And while not a requirement...friends have been made while doing so. Not such a bad deal I think.
Dan

David Orange

01-25-2011, 07:02 PM

Sure. From what I've read here, though, maintaining that equilibrium while in motion is yet another level of development, and I would imagine doing so while manipulating other objects or people is yet another step beyond that. Yet those two additional steps are the very core of athletics or, for that matter, practical martial arts.

But athletes don't keep it all strictly inside. And athletics neither teaches nor has anything to do with using the ki with the mind. Plus, the muscular focus of athletics can seriously damage the ability to do those internal things. So...not really related.

So returning to the core of the thread, I can see how internal training is different, but agree with the OP that it is not necessarily better, depending on the individual's goals.

Still...better....for what? To develop bujutsu, it's the only true way. Martial arts that fail to include this element are just an outer appearance of what real martial artists actually do within the same form. And athleticism is just muscular development and exertion. They're better than getting no exercise, but they don't even enter the arena of real martial arts.

Best wishes.

David

bkedelen

01-25-2011, 11:39 PM

And athleticism is just muscular development and exertion.

This is grievously incorrect. Athleticism is the characteristic of being prepared to undertake a broad range of physical tasks. Muscular development and exertion are incidental to the necessity to prepare oneself for a variety of circumstances. Developing athleticism simply requires addressing the areas in which you are weak, either physically or technically, and applying some of your training time to addressing these areas. Internal skills will be a tremendous asset when the task in front of you is physical conflict. All the internal power in the world will not help you, however, if the task in front of you is to quickly run a mile or lift a heavy object off your loved one. That athleticism is not taken more seriously as one of the roots of martial capability indicates that folks are seriously deluded. Training exclusively in internal power will result in you becoming a specialist, and when facing the unknown, the survival rate for specialists drops precipitously. Hopefully we all known what Heinlein has to say on the subject of specialization.

kewms

01-26-2011, 12:04 AM

That athleticism is not taken more seriously as one of the roots of martial capability indicates that folks are seriously deluded.

Among other things, it completely dismisses the examples of both MMA fighters and professional military and law enforcement, both among the groups most likely to encounter actual martial situations.

Katherine

ChrisHein

01-26-2011, 12:38 AM

First I would like to say, the only way to move the body is by using intent to move the ki. It's not mysterious, that's the way we move. Our brain decides it wants to move (intent) sends a signal to the muscles (ki) and we start moving. This is normal, it does not take special training, well it does take the instinctual training that babies undertake.

Second, it seems to me that everyone here is talking about faith, not anything factual. If you look through the posts of the pro-IP people, you constantly see stuff like "so-and-so says, so it must be true", or "lot's of people do this stuff, so it must be something important". These are all statements of faith: I believe this person, so that must be so. It's not really an answer to the question.

I am asking a simple question, but let's make it simpler. What can an expert internal martial artist physically do that a good athlete couldn't do?

Mostly we get speculation, he said she said, elitist comments about how silly a question this is, but no real answers. Athletes are physically superior to those who don't practice athletics. I believe modern sport athletics encompass everything that internal training does, and then some.

I'm sure most of the replies to this will be along the line of, "nuh uh, your wrong", or "let me explain the theory of using (enter jargon here)". But let me save you the time. simply answer, what physical thing can an internal martial artist do better then a modern sport athlete?

Lorel Latorilla

01-26-2011, 04:11 AM

Chris, you win. We will never get to your level of athleticism in martial arts because we're doing sub-par athletics training.:eek:

Oh Lord help me see through the delusion that I'm doing something what might kill me in an actual situation! I'm a poor boy that doesn't know better.

Lorel Latorilla

01-26-2011, 04:44 AM

Oh Lord help me see through the delusion that I'm doing something worthwhile when it fact it is what might kill me in an actual situation! I'm a poor boy that doesn't know better.

Corrected.

danj

01-26-2011, 05:59 AM

So I'd like to ask, what is the perceived difference, and assumed superiority of internal martial arts over good athletics training?

"If the foot says, “Because I am not a hand, I am not a part of the body,” it is not for this reason any the less a part of the body…" 1 Cor 12

my 0.02c after enjoying the dialogue and I hope mostly on topic and from perhaps the sidelines of IS, well till I can grab some wrists of the AW almost famous (and not states side till a Boston conference next year anyways).

No disciplines, East or West have a monopoly on understanding the body - on almost any topic. For the current topic, be it ground path, rooting or ground reaction forces or something else - there is so much complexity here it is very difficult to understand and/or articulate.

A sprinter/runner understands very well the ground path and how to develop ground reaction forces at the correct angle to break the 10 second barrier and the weight lifter also how to have optimal alignment. For the complexity of a 2 person interaction probably its the IS that have the understanding. Each is different knowledge about almost the same thing applied to a different field of endeavour.

The different approaches (East and West) can inform and I think they do (aikido as elite sport (http://www.aikidorepublic.com/learn-aikido) ) on a range of topics related to martial arts.From my own experiences simple things are explainable explainable in both paradigms (unraisable body experiment (http://www.aikidorepublic.com/aikiphysics/unraisable-body) circa. 10yrs ago) - but anything more complex requires lots of time and resources. Given time and resources I suspect given these some really fruitful work could be undertaken. But to what end? Well some people learn better with an eastern paradigm and some with a western one, whatever camp your in or straddling somewhere in the middle, a fresh set of eyes or view point can really help.

So around the world there are lots of people in sports science/biomechanics labs that are looking at all kinds of things to make athletes stronger and faster so why not IS? The trouble is people time and resources need incentive to do so, be it funding, fame, publishing in peer reviewed press, personal intrest. Funding wise in Australia at least a gold medal is worth something like $50M to the local economy and i suspect in the world of professional sport this kind of amount is not unusual. Thus olympic or big money professional sport can be persued, when this kind of money and accompanying intrest is brought to the IS and martial arts communities then i suspect there'll be some intrest. Same to for fame or at least making a name in a professional field, you might find doing IS research to be a high risk career move for a graduate student hoping to work in professional sport or something more mainstream 'cause it don't look nearly as good on the CV as something like tendon stiffness or throwing arm injury in baseball pitchers.

Beyond the science aspects and assuming the science can be done for the athlete/IS, its may not be suitable to be taught to the athlete at detail and instead some paradigm or descriptor might be used instead. So to if IS can be described in scientific terms, its going to be a challenge to explain in an eastern paradigm and needs to be considered.

Finally science in a plodding behemoth, it gets results - albeit slowly, but when it does it carries a lot of cred and like the creation/evolution issue it can be a bit tender and people get excited about there being a fence and which side they are on and how everyone should joint them there :)

SeiserL

01-26-2011, 06:06 AM

HL1978

01-26-2011, 06:44 AM

I am asking a simple question, but let's make it simpler. What can an expert internal martial artist physically do that a good athlete couldn't do?

Mostly we get speculation, he said she said, elitist comments about how silly a question this is, but no real answers. Athletes are physically superior to those who don't practice athletics. I believe modern sport athletics encompass everything that internal training does, and then some.

I'm sure most of the replies to this will be along the line of, "nuh uh, your wrong", or "let me explain the theory of using (enter jargon here)". But let me save you the time. simply answer, what physical thing can an internal martial artist do better then a modern sport athlete?

Well since you didn't answer my question, I feel generious and will answer yours :rolleyes:

It does not take much imagination for each of these to see how they can be martially applicable, so I will leave that up to you, Chris. These aren't "better" per se since if you are "fighting" having elements of both helps. Rather these are things that you don't tend to feel via people with exposure only via the athletic side of things. As Rob said earlier, power lifters may utilize some elements of this, just not in a martial manner.

1) Generate more power from positions which do not require structural alignment, or from positions in which optimal alignment is compromised.

2) Can drop their center of gravity without lowering their body.

3) Can take your balance on contact without any overt movement as they are already under your center of mass. They then manipulate you wherever they want. If it is a strike you loose your balance on contact.

4) Generate signifigant power/speed with no windup of the muscles or chain/kinetic linking. Rotation and weight shifts are not required.

5) Distribute loads taken through jointlocks into other portions of the body.

6) Make it very hard to read where they are generating power from.

7) Power can be "stored" via breathing and released. This isn't the same as merely generating power via grunting.

The above list is not all encompasing.

phitruong

01-26-2011, 07:05 AM

just want to point out a few things. modern athletics are just as specialize as IS folks. runner trains differently, than weight lifter, than gymnast, than high jumper, and so on. they are as specifics at IS training.

training IS doesn't mean you don't need to train in term of athletic stuffs. folks who trained IS still run, but they do it with a slight different focus. they still lift weights but with a different approach. they still do other physical activity but with a different approach to it.

when you only trained and get your info from one person, there is an element of faith involved. when you trained and get info from more than one person, then the faith part dropped severely. if folks have not realized by now, many of the IS folks that contributed on this forum and others, have encouraged folks to go and tried and learned with as many folks with different IS training approaches as they can.

David Orange

01-26-2011, 07:37 AM

This is grievously incorrect. Athleticism is the characteristic of being prepared to undertake a broad range of physical tasks. Muscular development and exertion are incidental to the necessity to prepare oneself for a variety of circumstances. Developing athleticism simply requires addressing the areas in which you are weak, either physically or technically, and applying some of your training time to addressing these areas. Internal skills will be a tremendous asset when the task in front of you is physical conflict. All the internal power in the world will not help you, however, if the task in front of you is to quickly run a mile or lift a heavy object off your loved one.

These are true statements and I have supported these facts for decades. I remember all the aikidoka who used to hate to see me coming because if I led the class there would be squats, push-ups, sit-ups, leg-lifts, etc., by the truckload.

Further, as I've said repeatedly, simply "developing" ki leads nowhere but delusion. For actual use, the body, muscles, bones, connective tissue and breath must all be strong and well conditioned and the ki and mentality must be conditioned and coordinated. But for athleticism, only the physical aspects count, along with psychological factors of motivation, which usually consists of a relatively short-term goal of winning a given competition. Where long-term health is the goal, Jack Lalanne is a great example, but someone asked who would have come out on top in a match between Lalanne and Morihei Ueshiba when both were in their 80s. And like every other strong, athletic person who ever ran across Morihei, Lalanne would have been confounded. Why would we think Lalanne could do what a sumo giant could not?

That athleticism is not taken more seriously as one of the roots of martial capability indicates that folks are seriously deluded.

Well, that is also one of my main criticisms of modern (especially American) aikido. Internal strength is not the only strength modern practitioners eschew. Without either external, athletic strength or internal power strength, they rely on collusive form and a philosophy found nowhere in serious martial artists.

But to think that athletic strength is any key to internal strength, especially when much of the athleticism improperly develops the body for internal strength is the same mistake that led so many to be embarrassed by people like Sokaku Takeda, Yukiyoshi Sagawa, Kodo Horikawa, Gozo Shioda and Minoru Mochizuki. Athleticism does not train what they trained and it does not prepare the practitioner to meet someone like the above.

Training exclusively in internal power will result in you becoming a specialist, and when facing the unknown, the survival rate for specialists drops precipitously. Hopefully we all known what Heinlein has to say on the subject of specialization.

Well, when you find someone who has advocated "exclusively" training in internal strength with no physical conditioning, I want you to start a new thread with quotes from them. So far, I have seen no IP advocates suggest such a thing. But the tanren training they advocate is very significantly different from athleticism. Even excellent tanren training should be supplemented with cardio conditioning, but most of the serious IP advocates do that through fighting and sparring. Still, excellent physical condition does not necessarily mean "athletic" conditioning. And no amount of purely athletic conditioning will result in the kind of power we see in O Sensei and Shioda among the many, many other old-time masters of aikido.

Regards.

David

David Orange

01-26-2011, 07:38 AM

Among other things, it completely dismisses the examples of both MMA fighters and professional military and law enforcement, both among the groups most likely to encounter actual martial situations.

I will be excited to see the citations of any IP advocate suggesting abandonment of physical conditioning.

Thanks.

David

thisisnotreal

01-26-2011, 07:54 AM

JW and Rob John nailed it.
/thread

M2C
The primary reason internal is better, in a MA setting, is that the way the body moves and carries itself is alien and confounds the way normal people move. even athletic normal people. Touch one; and you will know in an instant. It is different and words will not convey this understanding. Like the story of Tenryu touching Ueshiba's arm...and knowing in a split second he was undone..

Go see.

David Orange

01-26-2011, 08:08 AM

First I would like to say, the only way to move the body is by using intent to move the ki. ... Our brain decides it wants to move (intent) sends a signal to the muscles (ki) and we start moving. This is normal, it does not take special training....

By no means correct. When the brain sends a signal to the muscles, it uses nerves. That is not ki. Ki does not travel through the nerves and nerve impulses cannot travel through the meridians of ki. So your first idea is in error because you still confuse 'mind' with 'ki,' as if you can't tell that your finger and your fingernail are different.

Ask any pro athlete how he directs his ki with his mind and he will look at you like you're insane. While it is true that a certain amount of ki will be involved in any movement, it will not be fully intentional since even as you say this you can't distinguish 'mind' and 'ki' or nerve impulses and ki. What "naturally" involves ki is incidental, but it's like confusing your arm for your leg. You're trying to "kick" with your hand or write with your ankle.

Second, it seems to me that everyone here is talking about faith, not anything factual.

Yet, you're claiming "I already do that."

So either you're doing what you decry or you just don't understand what we (and you) are talking about.

Several years ago, a friend gave me a copy of Peter Ralston's book, "The Principles of Internal Power" and I have tried to read it several times over those years but it never made a lick of sense. He seemed to be talking about shadows and clouds and nothing of any substance.

But since my ki Eureka, this book is incredibly clear and meaningful. Moreover, it follows exactly the things that Mike, Dan and Ark are saying. It's all there. And he is talking about something of no substance, but every bit of that is in the context of the body, the weight, the bones. The missing piece is ki and once I crossed the threshold and understood ki in myself, it all became clear and comprehensible. And that came about from listening to Mike, Dan and Ark and working with their tanren methods.

If you look through the posts of the pro-IP people, you constantly see stuff like "so-and-so says, so it must be true", or "lot's of people do this stuff, so it must be something important". These are all statements of faith: I believe this person, so that must be so. It's not really an answer to the question.

Chris. What a distortion. People are not saying "So and so said such and such." We say "So and so did this thing. He hit me so hard, he shoved me so far with such little movement, no wind-up, no effort." We're saying "I did what he showed me and suddenly I can do this thing I could never do before."

What we say about what someone "said" is always in the context of what they did and the inescapable results they (and we) got.

Because you've never gotten those results and you still have no clear idea what we're talking about betrays one thing. Your failure to go and meet these people and verify what we say is quite another. How can you discuss something you've never experienced?

Athletes are physically superior to those who don't practice athletics. I believe modern sport athletics encompass everything that internal training does, and then some.

You believe?....Gee...that sounds like...faith? Minus facts?

I'm sure most of the replies to this will be along the line of, "nuh uh, your wrong", or "let me explain the theory of using (enter jargon here)". But let me save you the time. simply answer, what physical thing can an internal martial artist do better then a modern sport athlete?

Do you think any modern sport athlete could have thrown Tenryu down with one hand from a sitting position?

The problem is that you still haven't distinguished your own mind from your own ki. Modern athletics is excellent at distinguishing various parts of the body and their functions and isolating specific muscles and conditioning them to support the desired functions. But they still have not distinguished the difference between mind and ki. In order to direct ki with the mind, we must first distinguish the two, like an athletic trainer distinguishes one muscle from another. We have to develop them in different ways and use them according to their nature. And until that happens, any involvement of ki in movement will be incidental and any results from such action will be irreproducible because you won't understand how you did it.

Of course, if you had spent the last few years honestly thinking about what is being said instead of shutting it off with all your strength, you might have glimpsed some of this by now.

Regards.

David

David Orange

01-26-2011, 08:12 AM

IMHO, it really isn't a question (or statement) that internal (subtle/energetic) is superior to athleticism (external/muscular).

Truly they complement and supplement each other.

Given the context, they each have their superiority in effectiveness.

Training in both perhaps is the wisest choice.

And once the MMA man or LEO is as highly conditioned as athleticism can make him, IS is the final element that can take him through the gate into really superior action and results.

Best to you.

David

Mike Sigman

01-26-2011, 08:14 AM

Well, when you find someone who has advocated "exclusively" training in internal strength with no physical conditioning, I want you to start a new thread with quotes from them. So far, I have seen no IP advocates suggest such a thing. But the tanren training they advocate is very significantly different from athleticism. Even excellent tanren training should be supplemented with cardio conditioning, but most of the serious IP advocates do that through fighting and sparring. Still, excellent physical condition does not necessarily mean "athletic" conditioning. And no amount of purely athletic conditioning will result in the kind of power we see in O Sensei and Shioda among the many, many other old-time masters of aikido.
I agree with the above comment, David. I spend a fair amount of time working on internal strength most days, but technically any physiologist is going to recognize that within my training there is inescapably embedded elements of muscle-tissue training, cardio, and so forth.

The "ki" I could define pretty accurately here, but rather than digress into a lengthy tangent, let me just say that "ki" involves a lot more than "fascia", but traditionally the ki and strength are considered to develop hand in hand. For instance, the ki of a weight-lifter increases as he strengthens. However, the weight-lifter may not have any of the 'ki-skills' that we're talking about in relation to 'internal strength'. Since ki does have a component related to the fascia tissues, you can see how this relationship regarding a weight-lifter developing ki but not having ki skills might work.

I do a workout that includes using circuit machines. To the casual eye it appears that I'm doing something close to a "circuit-machine workout", but I'm not. Even some of the local weight-lifters have come over and watched and asked me what I was doing because they spotted that I'm not doing anything normal.

The point is that I'm doing a workout that enhances my so-called "internal strength", but at the same time I of course must be getting some athletic development.

When I use ki/kokyu skills it is a combination of several factors, but it is not the same type of strength that a weight-lifter or other "athletic" person uses. The garbled Asian translation of this phenomenon usually comes out something like "use ki, not muscle", which in turn has many people thinking that you are not supposed to develop your muscles if you're using internal strength. It's not that you don't have muscles with I.S., it's how you use them in conjunction with the ki, kokyu, hara, breathing skills, and so on. The real problem is, as I've said many times, that it's very hard for someone who is athletically strong to give up that strength and learn a new way of moving and sourcing power.

FWIW

Mike Sigman

thisisnotreal

01-26-2011, 08:28 AM

The "ki" I could define pretty accurately here
Really?

Wei qi & Ying qi?

The feeling that movement of blood or 'Ying Qi' brings about.
Or seek the tingling sensations that come from moving 'Ying Qi' and 'Wei Qi' (which moves in the skin and the fascia).

bkedelen

01-26-2011, 09:53 AM

I'm getting out the popcorn!

kewms

01-26-2011, 09:56 AM

I will be excited to see the citations of any IP advocate suggesting abandonment of physical conditioning.

You, up thread, wrote:
And athleticism is just muscular development and exertion. They're better than getting no exercise, but they don't even enter the arena of real martial arts.

Maybe not "suggesting abandonment," but certainly not a resounding endorsement, either.

Katherine

ChrisHein

01-26-2011, 10:01 AM

Every time I post, I have to respond to many different people, so forgive me if I omit you specifically. This post would go on to long if I were to respond to everyone individually.

I asked the question, what can an internal martial artist physically do better than an athlete. I saw many replies that said something to the effect of: athletics are different than internal, each should be trained for their specific strengths. So what is the specific strength that internal has over athletics? What can internal people do that athletes can't?

David Orange. Let me address as many of your questions as I can in one statement. Ki or Chi means energy. Exactly as we use the word in the west. When you knock on a door, you put ki into the wood, and that ki reverberates through the air going inside of the ear and makes a sound. When you pick something up, you are using ki. Ki is not magical, it means energy. Watch a physics lecture and substitute the word ki every time the speaker says energy, we in the west use the same word to explain all kinds of things.

When I said I believe that athletes are physically superior to internal people, I should have said, believe and can prove. I can show you video of athletes doing all kinds of things that internal people can't. I have yet to see a video of an internal guy doing something that I can't duplicate, let a lone a professional athlete.

Hunter,
Athletes can do everything on your list as well or better than any internal person. That is my opinion, yours is apparently contrary to that, how do we prove our points with something other than our own speculation?

Other then saying, "they're just different" I didn't see any real answers.

01-26-2011, 10:11 AM

Athletes can do everything on your list as well or better than any internal person. That is my opinion, yours is apparently contrary to that, how do we prove our points with something other than our own speculation?
Other then saying, "they're just different" I didn't see any real answers.
Chris
All due respect offered, athletes cannot do what I do. I have any number of body workers, lifters, TMA and MMA people I have trained who would vehemenly dissagree with you.

I agree with you that nothing of proof has been offered here either way. You haven't made your point either, Chris.
Then again you discount every teacher here who is telling you it feels different as if they or their testimony doesn't matter-while you have only one source to rebutt- that is- your teacher.
Cheers
Dan

Lorel Latorilla

01-26-2011, 10:14 AM

That is my opinion, yours is apparently contrary to that, how do we prove our points with something other than our own speculation?

.

Wow, an honest question.

Maybe you can start by meeting people who claim to be doing 'different' things? Bring an 'athletic' person with you too, and see whether they can replicate the feel of the aiki/bodyskill guy. Only then can you put your speculations to rest. Other than that, your speculations aint mean shit. Pardon my French.

"I asked the question, what can an internal martial artist physically do better than an athlete. I saw many replies that said something to the effect of: athletics are different than internal, each should be trained for their specific strengths. So what is the specific strength that internal has over athletics? What can internal people do that athletes can't?"

Hunter already freaking answered your question, dude. Damn.

kewms

01-26-2011, 10:15 AM

David Orange. Let me address as many of your questions as I can in one statement. Ki or Chi means energy. Exactly as we use the word in the west. When you knock on a door, you put ki into the wood, and that ki reverberates through the air going inside of the ear and makes a sound. When you pick something up, you are using ki. Ki is not magical, it means energy. Watch a physics lecture and substitute the word ki every time the speaker says energy, we in the west use the same word to explain all kinds of things.

Actually, the character 気 is used in all kinds of contexts. Some involve energy in the sense of physics, but many do not. My Japanese character dictionary (New Nelson) lists nearly four pages of compounds, ranging in meaning from "energy, vigor, vitality" to "gloom, melancholy." It's used to discuss mechanical energy, the weather, individual health... all kinds of topics. I'm sure the Chinese usage is just as complex. (As is the English usage of the word "energy," for that matter.)

Which is not to go into great detail on the etymology of 気. Someone like Peter Goldsbury is far more qualified to address the topic than I am. Just to point out that literal interpretations of words pulled from another language are often misleading.

Katherine

ChrisHein

01-26-2011, 10:18 AM

kewms

01-26-2011, 10:28 AM

My only source of rebuttal? I haven't seen anything to rebut.

Sure you have. Hunter, up-thread, wrote:

3) Can take your balance on contact without any overt movement as they are already under your center of mass. They then manipulate you wherever they want. If it is a strike you loose your balance on contact.

4) Generate signifigant power/speed with no windup of the muscles or chain/kinetic linking. Rotation and weight shifts are not required.

I trimmed the list to these because it's pretty clear what they actually mean, where things like "lowering center of gravity without moving" are hard to measure outside of a lab.

I have personally felt both of these effects. I am not aware of any individuals who are able to duplicate these effects without internal martial arts training of some kind. If you do, please provide examples.

Katherine

ChrisHein

01-26-2011, 10:30 AM

3) Who can do that? Show me video, and I'll duplicate it

4) See "3)"

Lorel Latorilla

01-26-2011, 10:32 AM

My only source of rebuttal? I haven't seen anything to rebut. People have said, "my teacher says" I say "they are wrong, can you prove to me how I am wrong" and they reply with "no you're wrong". If it makes you feel better I'll put up some video of people playing football, and ask if your teacher can do that, or has a student that can do that. Then you can post any video you like, and I'll duplicate what you're doing. But we haven't even gotten there yet.

Dan, with all due respect, why don't you post a video showing what you can physically do that others cannot. I'll bet that barring raw strength (athletics) as I've heard you are a power lifter, that I can duplicate whatever you show.

Chris, you are being stubbornly stupid. Nobody has said anything about 'my teacher says'.

You do understand that there are people here that have trained in Aikido longer than you have and have been Uchi Deshi to guys like Mochizuki Minoru and have felt Ark and have concluded that Ark is really actually doing something different from the rest of the martial arts world? I'd listen to those guys more than I'd listen to you (hint, he's on this thread).

With all due respect, why don't you meet Dan when he comes through? Not to challenge him to a duel, but to really test whether your speculations are true. Dan will take you on his offer and from what I hear will buy you dinner and beer after. This posting up video and discussing on the net is bullshit. You've been sniping on internal guys for a couple years now...for what reason are you doing this? To help out the aikido community? To break us (doing this kind of training from the delusion) out that this training is actually valuable?

You should be honest with yourself about why you're posting these kinda things Chris.

kewms

01-26-2011, 10:38 AM

3) Who can do that? Show me video, and I'll duplicate it

4) See "3)"

I have personally experienced 3 with Ikeda Sensei and Saotome Sensei, and 4 with Ushiro Sensei. I'm sure they are not the only ones. (And some people posting in this thread claim an even higher skill level, which may be true but I haven't personally seen it.) All three teach in the US regularly, and I'd strongly suggest you go see them in person.

I'm not going to post video, as this is the sort of stuff that always "looks fake," and "has to be felt." I'll just say that if you have not personally put your hands on someone with these skills, you really don't know what you're talking about.

Katherine

ChrisHein

01-26-2011, 10:39 AM

You do understand that there are people here that have trained in Aikido longer than you have and have been Uchi Deshi to guys like Mochizuki Minoru and have felt Ark and have concluded that Ark is really actually doing something different from the rest of the martial arts world? I'd listen to those guys more than I'd listen to you (hint, he's on this thread).

This pretty much says: "my teacher says", or at least, "other peoples teachers say".

With all due respect, why don't you meet Dan when he comes through?

When Dan was through here last time, Michael tried to go see him, his check was returned.

You should be honest with yourself about why you're posting these kinda things Chris.

Look into the mirror.

David Orange

01-26-2011, 10:49 AM

You, up thread, wrote:

""And athleticism is just muscular development and exertion. They're better than getting no exercise, but they don't even enter the arena of real martial arts.""

Maybe not "suggesting abandonment," but certainly not a resounding endorsement, either.

Lame, Katherine. I don't need to resoundingly endorse athletic exercise to respect its proper place in strength and wind conditioning. Virtually every post I make stresses the necessity of conditioning all six elements of bone, muscle, fascia, breath, mind and ki to develop internal power. A certain amount of exercise is necessary for good health.

But athletic conditioning has its limits and uses.

So again, your effort is lame in this case. Do you just have so much time on your hands that you need to manufacture misreadings?

If you have to post, at least post relevant things.

David

Lorel Latorilla

01-26-2011, 10:50 AM

This pretty much says: "my teacher says", or at least, "other peoples teachers say".

When Dan was through here last time, Michael tried to go see him, his check was returned.

Look into the mirror.

1) The point is Chris, if I haven't been exposed to an internal martial arts guy, why should I listen to you and not David Orange? Why should I put my faith in your opinion? (for the record, I dont need your opinions. I went out there and touched Ark). The fact that you're too scared to actually go out there, meet people and consider the fact that you might be wrong and also keep your 'scientific' speculations within the range of the internet will only lead to unproven speculations and circular games you like to play. You mentioned in the beginning that you've trained with an expert in internal martial arts--sound familiar Chris? So you've trained with Tim Cartmell and he says that the stuff they do in Thai boxing is the same as what the internal guys do...oh shit, should I believe you now????? I should stop training the internal stuff and do crossfit now!

2) That's too bad. If you fail, try try again.

3) "I know you are but what am I"...nice one there, Pee Wee Herman.

HL1978

01-26-2011, 10:51 AM

Hunter,
Athletes can do everything on your list as well or better than any internal person. That is my opinion, yours is apparently contrary to that, how do we prove our points with something other than our own speculation?

Other then saying, "they're just different" I didn't see any real answers.

Well, we could describe how each of the things I listed could be done by someone with a good athletic background. For example, someone with a good athletic background can unbalance someone else on contact, wether it is a strike or grab, or a response to a grab.

This could be accomplished for example, due to physically lowering their center of gravity as they enter in towards their opponent (Boxer Jack Dempsey, judo, aikido, various martial arts etc all teach this). It can be accomplished by entering on an vector offline of the opponents attack. Clearly both means are taught in aikido. Likewise, it can be accomplished by having more mass than the opponent.

I am sure many of us have felt skilled/highly athletic people do the above, but it doesn't tend to feel the same, or have the same dramatic effect as when a skilled/conditioned IS person does it, or how the skilled/conditioned IS practioner may not be effected by such an incoming motion. The fact that a skilled IS person need not rely on the same means as I described above, could be construed at the very least as different or at the very least unusual, and depending on ones opinion, a "better" approach.

Now if you can go into how a skilled athletic person can utilize kokyu in a manner other than grunting for power, lower their center of gravity without bending their legs, or any of the other effects I mentioned, I think it would be an informative discussion, given some parallels to power lifters. In particular this might help people sitting on the fence understand the differences between the two approaches.

01-26-2011, 10:56 AM

When Dan was through here last time, Michael tried to go see him, his check was returned.
Hey....who is Michael?
I had about ten guys who registered late -several of them from here-and that seminar was too full already- . Let's not imply foul play where there was none, I bear you no ill will, especially since I once offered to show you in person. Why didn't you apply?
Dan

David Orange

01-26-2011, 11:10 AM

David Orange. Let me address as many of your questions as I can in one statement. Ki or Chi means energy. Exactly as we use the word in the west.

Again...not even close. Energy can be detected and measured. Ki cannot be detected or measured except by another person using ki.

When you knock on a door, you put ki into the wood, and that ki reverberates through the air going inside of the ear and makes a sound. When you pick something up, you are using ki.

Again, no, you don't put ki "into" the door when you knock on it. You put the force of your movement into the door. The ki never leaves your body. And very few people actually use ki to pick things up. They may incidentally involve the ki because it's part of their physiology, as the mind is. The difference is in the degree and fluency with which you use it. You can use it without knowing it--which is the only way you can use it if you don't know what it is. Or, if you know what it is, you can use it haphazardly. Or you can know exactly what it is, condition it, use it in coordination with the other parts of the mind/body complex and consciously direct it. Only then are you actually "using" it. Just as you can pick up a cup without really paying attention. You "use" your mind in that, too, but only very vaguely. You cannot use ki with any level of accuracy by accident. Sometimes you get results from it because you do enough things generally right and it works, but then you can't do it again because you don't understand what happened.

Ki is not magical...

Who has said it is? None of the IP posters here, certainly.

...it means energy. Watch a physics lecture and substitute the word ki every time the speaker says energy, we in the west use the same word to explain all kinds of things.

That is really an ignorant statement, Chris. Tell that to a physicist and he will laugh at you and repeat what I just said unless he's just too polite. Can you measure ki? No. Can you detect ki? No. Because "ki" is NOT "energy" as physics defines it. It is LIFE. You can say "life force" or "life energy" but those terms are actually inaccurate.

When I said I believe that athletes are physically superior to internal people, I should have said, believe and can prove. I can show you video of athletes doing all kinds of things that internal people can't. I have yet to see a video of an internal guy doing something that I can't duplicate, let a lone a professional athlete.

So you can duplicate all of Ueshiba's feats? You can do what Sagawa did? What Sokaku Takeda did?:rolleyes:

And second, you cannot "prove" that athletes are physically superior to internal people because as Phi pointed out, athletics today is more specialized than ever. Whatever you can get an athlete to do, I can show you something in a different field of athletics that he can't do. A marathon runner will lose to most competetive swimmers. The weight lifters will lose to the runners. The boxers and the wrestlers will win some, lose some. So even among athletes "physically superior" is a relative thing. So you've just been "disproven" and we're back to your "faith" and your "belief" without facts.

But you show me any athlete who can do half of what ARK does and I'll wash the mats in your dojo.

David

David Orange

01-26-2011, 11:13 AM

Actually, the character 気 is used in all kinds of contexts. Some involve energy in the sense of physics, but many do not. My Japanese character dictionary (New Nelson) lists nearly four pages of compounds, ranging in meaning from "energy, vigor, vitality" to "gloom, melancholy." It's used to discuss mechanical energy, the weather, individual health... all kinds of topics. I'm sure the Chinese usage is just as complex. (As is the English usage of the word "energy," for that matter.)

And in the specifically martial context, ki is very specific. It doesn't mean 'energy' in the western sense at all.

Best wishes.

David

Demetrio Cereijo

01-26-2011, 11:19 AM

Ki cannot be detected or measured except by another person using ki.

Serious business.

David Orange

01-26-2011, 11:30 AM

My only source of rebuttal? I haven't seen anything to rebut. People have said, "my teacher says" I say "they are wrong, can you prove to me how I am wrong" and they reply with "no you're wrong"

That's certainly not what I said. I always refer to what people do. I couldn't care less what anyone says if they can't back it up with action.

But here's something I'm pretty sure you can't do.

In Atlanta, Minoru Akuzawa shoved me back 25 feet (as witnesses have posted here on aikiweb) when I tried to hold back his push on a bo. We were both in "back stances," holding opposite ends of a 6ft bo.

He weighed 130 pound and I was over 190--at least 46% heavier than he, more like 50% heavier.

So video yourself shoving a person 25 feet backward when they weigh 46-50% more than you.

Ark didn't move either foot and he didn't incline his shoulders forward. He started in a "back stance" and may have shifted to a front stance, but he remained upright.

Further, I seriously doubt that you or any athlete of your choosing could do that or produce the explosive feeling as if a wall of wind blasted me back, as it happened with Ark.

I know you've got a camera because I've seen lots of your videos.

So set up your camera and show us ten consecutive attempts to shove someone back any distance at all with a bo. Make sure that the uke is 46-50% heavier than yourself.

I will look forward to seeing your ten attempts.

David

mathewjgano

01-26-2011, 11:41 AM

By no means correct. When the brain sends a signal to the muscles, it uses nerves. That is not ki. Ki does not travel through the nerves and nerve impulses cannot travel through the meridians of ki. So your first idea is in error because you still confuse 'mind' with 'ki,'...

This strikes me as odd...Nerve impulses cannot travel through the meridians? How does one sense or control the ki without nerves and their various endings?
It seems like the meridians would be an effect of nerves from the symmetries of the body and that those meridians can be sensed (more easily) when there aren't arbitrary (semi-random) tension-points interfering with the rather continuous flow of nerve impulses. It seems like a distinction ought be made between the kinds of nerve impulses, rather than whether or not nerves are involved.
...not all nerve-impulses are "mind," right? Hence the biofeedback practices used to integrate nerves and intent (integrating different nerve impulses)?
Take care,
Matt

David Orange

01-26-2011, 12:11 PM

This strikes me as odd...Nerve impulses cannot travel through the meridians?

No. Nerve energy can only travel in nerve fibers. There are points where nerves cross meridians and vice versa, so there are some meridian points that correspond with a nerve point, but the fact that meridians don't follow nerves has always been a big factor in scientific efforts to "debunk" ki theories. Ki travels in the fascia (and the blood and marrow).

How does one sense or control the ki without nerves and their various endings?

Ki is the essence what "one" is so we sense the ki directly, without the necessity for nerve action. The brain is a structure the ki uses, as "the soul" uses the brain. The brain uses nerves to control the muscles. Ki does not directly control the muscles. But it is present throughout the whole body at all times and can communicate instantly within itself throughout the body. It's sort of like a sub-atomic particle--not really a particle, but a field that is more intense in one spot than in the rest of the field, so that it seems to be a particle. Wehen we 'send ki' to a part of the body, it simultaneously exists (and is conscious) throughout the body, but it intensifies in the place where we direct the mind.

What I've been working on the last few weeks is observing my own ki and my own mind to distinguish one from the other and to become directly aware of how the two interact. From there, the interaction of ki with the body is another thing. So I'm studying that as well (since I recognized the ki by contemplation of the fascia). But my sense is that ki going to a part of the body prepares that body part for the nerve signal that will come immediately after. But the ki goes into the bones, the skin, the blood, the fascia and the muscles, while the nerve impulse goes only to the muscle, I think I understand. But I believe this is how the old tai chi and other Chinese sources describe it.

It seems like the meridians would be an effect of nerves from the symmetries of the body and that those meridians can be sensed (more easily) when there aren't arbitrary (semi-random) tension-points interfering with the rather continuous flow of nerve impulses. It seems like a distinction ought be made between the kinds of nerve impulses, rather than whether or not nerves are involved.

No, I'm pretty sure, anatomically, that nerve impulses can only travel through nerve fibers, while fascia runs through areas both with and without nerve endings.For instance, I think I'm correct that there are no nerve endings actually inside the muscles, but only at the ends of the muscle fibers, while fascia completely wraps every muscle fiber and allows ki to penetrate where there is no nerve ending.

...not all nerve-impulses are "mind," right? Hence the biofeedback practices used to integrate nerves and intent (integrating different nerve impulses)?

I don't think any nerve impulse is the same as mind. A nerve impulse is just an electrical pulse that travels through a nerve fiber. And I think that most nerve actions completely by-pass mind, coming as they do from the autonomous nervous system.

Thanks.

David

mathewjgano

01-26-2011, 12:19 PM

Ki travels in the fascia (and the blood and marrow).

Facinating! Thank you, David! Would you say the sensation of ki, however, is based on nerve function?
Take care,
Matt

Janet Rosen

01-26-2011, 12:19 PM

No. Nerve energy can only travel in nerve fibers. There are points where nerves cross meridians and vice versa, so there are some meridian points that correspond with a nerve point, but the fact that meridians don't follow nerves has always been a big factor in scientific efforts to "debunk" ki theories. i travels in the fascia (and the blood and marrow).

Correct. It was fascinating to me the first time I received myofascial therapy many years ago to realize the points being worked all corresponded to acupuncture points along meridians. The myofascial person had no exposure to TCM and didn't realize this until I said something.

For those curious to read more about differing conceptions of anatomy and physiology I strongly wholeheartedly recommend "The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine" by Shigehisa Kuriyama.

bkedelen

01-26-2011, 12:27 PM

I heard that Ki can also be detected with dowsing rods, although it never seems to work when James Randi is around.

David Orange

01-26-2011, 12:37 PM

Facinating! Thank you, David! Would you say the sensation of ki, however, is based on nerve function?

I wouldn't. I might be wrong, but as I understand it, ki is one's own ephemeral essence and has awareness and consciousness apart from mind, brain and nerves. So I would say that, no, the sensation of ki is felt by the ki itself and not through nerves.

What do you think?

Thanks.

David

David Orange

01-26-2011, 12:38 PM

Correct. It was fascinating to me the first time I received myofascial therapy many years ago to realize the points being worked all corresponded to acupuncture points along meridians. The myofascial person had no exposure to TCM and didn't realize this until I said something.

For those curious to read more about differing conceptions of anatomy and physiology I strongly wholeheartedly recommend "The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine" by Shigehisa Kuriyama.

Interesting. Thanks.

David

Tony Wagstaffe

01-26-2011, 12:42 PM

http://www.aikidojournal.com/article?articleID=146 :) ;) :D

Janet Rosen

01-26-2011, 12:59 PM

I wouldn't. I might be wrong, but as I understand it, ki is one's own ephemeral essence and has awareness and consciousness apart from mind, brain and nerves. So I would say that, no, the sensation of ki is felt by the ki itself and not through nerves.

For me it varies - when I focus on moving it from head to hands via breathing and extending - for migraine relief - and my hands become warmer, clearly what is happening in Western physiological terms is that I'm affecting a change in my autonomic nervous system - activating the parasympathetic component, which relaxes the peripheral vascular system and increases the blood flow.
Similarly I experience various small changes in focus, tension, weighting, etc when I play with it on the mat. Its possible that it is mostly autonomous system that is mediating the changes overall but I wouldn't swear to it.

mathewjgano

01-26-2011, 01:11 PM

I wouldn't. I might be wrong, but as I understand it, ki is one's own ephemeral essence and has awareness and consciousness apart from mind, brain and nerves. So I would say that, no, the sensation of ki is felt by the ki itself and not through nerves.

What do you think?

Thanks.

David

I think I need to study/practice more. :D
I do find it hard to swallow the idea that sensing ki doesn't happen through nerve function (of which the brain is more or less the nexus) at all, but I'm pretty open to the idea that the brain is capable of intuiting quite a lot.
...And just to be clear about my earlier post, I understand that major nerves don't run in line with the meridians, but figured that through the nerve-endings, (which do effectively allow for sensation across a whole surface, not just where the nerves themselves are located), the mind was able to form the "picture."
Interesting stuff though! Thanks again!
Matt

Demetrio Cereijo

01-26-2011, 01:17 PM

I heard that Ki can also be detected with dowsing rods, although it never seems to work when James Randi is around.
:D

Mike Sigman

01-26-2011, 01:22 PM

as I understand it, ki is one's own ephemeral essence and has awareness and consciousness apart from mind, brain and nerves. How would that work, David? What senses what? Where does the sensation register? And so on. People demonstrate ki physically, most often. When it's not physical (See: Encounters with Qi: Exploring Chinese Medicine by David Eisenberg for a good read from a sceptical point of view) there are limits to the effects. Given the physicality of it, then there must be a tangible explanation as opposed to the metaphysical.

Mike Sigman

Rob Watson

01-26-2011, 01:40 PM

2) Can drop their center of gravity without lowering their body.

I'd like to suggest that Mr. (Dr.?) James take a look at this one. I suspect a fairly simple series of measurements will show this not to be true. Of course, more specific details need to be clarified. For example, If one simply lowers ones arms the center of gravity is lowered but the body is not lowered.

Center of gravity is a technical term with a very precise definition. One may think they are lowering their center of gravity when performing 'sink the qi' but that is not actually what is happening.

As usual, very clear thinking is required in these undertakings.

kewms

01-26-2011, 01:57 PM

I do find it hard to swallow the idea that sensing ki doesn't happen through nerve function (of which the brain is more or less the nexus) at all, but I'm pretty open to the idea that the brain is capable of intuiting quite a lot.
...And just to be clear about my earlier post, I understand that major nerves don't run in line with the meridians, but figured that through the nerve-endings, (which do effectively allow for sensation across a whole surface, not just where the nerves themselves are located), the mind was able to form the "picture."

I think it's important to avoid confusing the "what" with the "how" in these discussions.

For example, Janet mentioned warming her hands through movement of ki. As she explained, it's very clear what has happened on a metabolic level: increased blood flow, leading to a sensation of warmth that is detected by the nerves in the hands. That does *not* mean, however, that ki is identical with the blood, or with the signals flowing along the nerve fibers, or that it is possible or desirable to directly manipulate blood flow with the mind.

Katherine

Demetrio Cereijo

01-26-2011, 02:10 PM

I think it's important to avoid confusing the "what" with the "how" in these discussions.

For example, Janet mentioned warming her hands through movement of ki. As she explained, it's very clear what has happened on a metabolic level: increased blood flow, leading to a sensation of warmth that is detected by the nerves in the hands.

But temperature really increased or was it a sensation generated in her brain (the nerves in the hand didn't detected anything) while her hands temperature remained constant?

If the increase of temperature happened, can this be explained by a different cause than "movement of ki"?

David Orange

01-26-2011, 02:17 PM

I do find it hard to swallow the idea that sensing ki doesn't happen through nerve function (of which the brain is more or less the nexus) at all, but I'm pretty open to the idea that the brain is capable of intuiting quite a lot.

I notice that Mike comments on this below, as well. A neurologist friend also was very noncommittal on this possibility.

But to me, the senses of the ki are sort of like vibrations through Jello. You touch it one place and the whole mass feels it. So I'm not talking about the brain's intuiting something, but about the ki's feeling something throughout itself, like Jello receiving vibrations, without having to be processed by the intellectuality of the mind or even the physicality of the brain.

So I'm really talking about something independent of brain recognition and interpretation. But as I said...I'm exploring the brand new recognition of ki and sorting through which part does what. At this point, I'm getting the impression that the ki experiences things directly, on a non-intellectually-interpreted level, independent of both mind and brain. My neurologist friend, who is also an experienced martial artist, has declined to agree or disagree with this.

Moshe Feldenkrais said that mind could not exist without body because it would have no sensory input and nothing to relate to anything. But maybe (I wonder) it would just become cognizant on another level of non-physicality.

However, now I wonder if it's not true that "mind" is a function of the brain and nerves, therefore terminating when the brain/body dies.

Let's think, though. I've met people who I was certain were literally (or nearly) "mindless"--they had become like animals but it was possible for them to continue living and doing things among normal people.

Likewise, I've known people whose bodies were effectively destroyed, but whose minds were still extremely sharp--Stephen Hawking, for instance.

But when ki departs the body, both mind and body die.

So I wonder if an individual's ki might not be something a priori the mind and body that somehow continues to exist after the separation--akin to the concept of the soul or pran.

And of course, I don't know, but more importantly, I don't claim to know.

...And just to be clear about my earlier post, I understand that major nerves don't run in line with the meridians, but figured that through the nerve-endings, (which do effectively allow for sensation across a whole surface, not just where the nerves themselves are located), the mind was able to form the "picture."

I think that's true, but I don't think it covers everything and I think that ki does go where nerves don't. But of course, I don't know that for a fact.

Just thinking based on experience and contemplation of a lot of things I've read.

Interesting stuff though! Thanks again!

Thank you.

David

David Orange

01-26-2011, 02:53 PM

How would that work, David? What senses what? Where does the sensation register? And so on. People demonstrate ki physically, most often. When it's not physical (See: Encounters with Qi: Exploring Chinese Medicine by David Eisenberg for a good read from a sceptical point of view) there are limits to the effects. Given the physicality of it, then there must be a tangible explanation as opposed to the metaphysical.

Well, certainly for martial applications, we can't omit the physicality of it and it certainly coordinates with the mind.

I'm just musing on the ultimate nature of it.

But Matt did ask about it in relation to nerves and the brain...

I'm just not limiting myself with any boundaries in consideration at the moment. I'm trying to directly perceive which is mind, which is ki, which is nerve, etc., and I'm also not trying to convince myself of any particular idea. I'm just looking at them and pondering them.

In any case, none of the martial applications that I'm interested in are done except by coordination of the ki with all the other elements of the body and mind.

But I am thinking that mind/ki both work independently of the nerves.

And on that line, I e-mailed a friend to see if he'd like to try one of the things we've been working on--agete, pushout, etc--but he was in a distant location and couldn't meet me.

I said, "Don't worry. I'll do it here and you just tell me if you just scratched your nose."

To my amazement, he replied that he had not scratched his nose.

So I learned something from that...I think...:D

Thanks for the food for thought.

David

kewms

01-26-2011, 02:54 PM

But temperature really increased or was it a sensation generated in her brain (the nerves in the hand didn't detected anything) while her hands temperature remained constant?

If the increase of temperature happened, can this be explained by a different cause than "movement of ki"?

From Janet's point of view, there is no difference. She has no way to consciously perceive warmth except through the brain. Taping a thermometer to her hands would answer the question for the rest of us.

(Sorry to pick on you, Janet, just a convenient example.)

Similarly, the *cause* of the (presumed) temperature increase was simply increased blood flow. That could in turn be driven by any number of things: increased blood pressure or heart rate, reduced pressure anywhere along the arms, or flow of (hypothetical) ki. But from Janet's point of view, thinking of it in terms of "movement of ki" clearly produces the desired effect. I don't require "proof" of the separate existence of ki to make use of ki in my training, any more than I require proof of the existence of electrons in order to wire a light switch.

Katherine

kewms

01-26-2011, 03:00 PM

But to me, the senses of the ki are sort of like vibrations through Jello. You touch it one place and the whole mass feels it. So I'm not talking about the brain's intuiting something, but about the ki's feeling something throughout itself, like Jello receiving vibrations, without having to be processed by the intellectuality of the mind or even the physicality of the brain.

Nerve endings lining the inside of the bowl could also perceive vibrations in the Jello, even if there are no nerve endings within the Jello itself.

I'm quite open to the idea of sensations occurring below the level of conscious recognition, but much more skeptical of the notion that ki functions entirely independently of the brain.

Katherine

C. David Henderson

01-26-2011, 03:05 PM

Ever hear the story about the Tibetan monks, the wet sheets, and meditation?

http://physiologyonline.physiology.org/content/13/3/149.full

Quite possibly, had she looked at a thermometer, taped to her hand, Janet would have said, "yup."

[The article above is also offered as information about some of the other things a trained mind and body can accomplish, and some of the indirect ways you have to go about some of it....]

Regards

HL1978

01-26-2011, 03:18 PM

Janet Rosen

01-26-2011, 03:42 PM

But temperature really increased or was it a sensation generated in her brain (the nerves in the hand didn't detected anything) while her hands temperature remained constant?

If the increase of temperature happened, can this be explained by a different cause than "movement of ki"?

Actually, it is not metabolic, Katherine - I believe it is autonomic nervous system activation, but not the sympathetic side we are more familiar with, but the parasympathetic which has the reverse effects, including relaxation of the support structure of the blood vessels (lowering of blood pressure but also vasodilation, which promotes blood flow to the extremities.

Demetrio the increase in temperature is demonstrated with a handheld thermometer. I understand what you are getting at by your question....all I can say is that if I were to ponder my parasympathetic nervous system from now until next November I doubt I could do a darn thing. So I am happy to describe my ability to induce changes in my physiology, which are similar to those that can be reliably done in labs and professional offices via biofeedback, as movement of ki because it works for me to effect the changes by approaching it that way.

And since there is an entire body of medicine based on this, why NOT posit that there is something non-magical within the brain-body physiology that can't actually be scanned but that is the thing that lets us take conscious control of portions of our usually automatic function be it via feedback, yogic practices, or visualisation of moving ki?

Rob Watson

01-26-2011, 03:42 PM

As an engineer I am well aware that you can't effectively change you COG in a static position. Like you said, this is effectively what it feels like to a partner whether one is passively recieving a push or activly adding to it. In such a case it becomes a question not only of where one is originating there response or how They are letting that. Incoming force pass throuh their body.

None the less, I would to be curious as to how athletic training can replicate the effect.

My point would be that this stuff is hard enough without using words and phrases, especially technical terms/concepts, incorrectly. This is not mere semantic quibble either. If you will permit me to imitate Mike Sigman -as an engineer how would you describe the effect ('sink the qi') using western technical terms? It will help the athetically inclined to attempt to replicate the skill if they know exactly what is being referred to.

To be fair I'm not able just yet to answer my own question. I can replicate the feat with minimal IS training but only to a limited extent that is likely less than martially viable. I'm certain that when I do it there are very small motions present that may not be visible to the casual observer. I'd be very interested to see someone more practiced 'wired up' to see just how much motion is actually happening.

Janet Rosen

01-26-2011, 03:44 PM

BTW having in other threads specified that I have done this WITH the thermometer (my Kaiser doctor gave me for that very purpose) I didn't think to specify it again but clearly I was wrong...sorry.

kewms

01-26-2011, 03:51 PM

Actually, it is not metabolic, Katherine - I believe it is autonomic nervous system activation, but not the sympathetic side we are more familiar with, but the parasympathetic which has the reverse effects, including relaxation of the support structure of the blood vessels (lowering of blood pressure but also vasodilation, which promotes blood flow to the extremities.

There I go with my sloppy not-a-medical-professional usage... :p

Thanks for the clarification.

Katherine

C. David Henderson

01-26-2011, 04:05 PM

Demetrio Cereijo

01-26-2011, 04:21 PM

Demetrio the increase in temperature is demonstrated with a handheld thermometer.
Thanks.

And since there is an entire body of medicine based on this, why NOT posit that there is something non-magical within the brain-body physiology that can't actually be scanned but that is the thing that lets us take conscious control of portions of our usually automatic function be it via feedback, yogic practices, or visualisation of moving ki?
Because saying "I don't know how and why this happens" would be more honest than saying "This happens because I'm moving ki"?

Moving ki sounds better. It means you are skilled, wise and awesome, "I don't know" puts you in a lower place of the social scale.

David Orange

01-26-2011, 04:47 PM

As an engineer I am well aware that you can't effectively change you COG in a static position. Like you said, this is effectively what it feels like to a partner whether one is passively recieving a push or activly adding to it. In such a case it becomes a question not only of where one is originating there response or how They are letting that. Incoming force pass throuh their body.

None the less, I would to be curious as to how athletic training can replicate the effect.

One of the most startling things I ever experienced in MA was around 30 years ago. I'd met a "kung fu" teacher--no specific style mentioned--and we were sparring a little. I went in for seoi nage and it felt like a large cannonball dropped from his chest way down deep into his abdomen and he was suddenly like a rock and I couldn't move him. It was just the weirdest sensation. I felt this huge weight inside him just drop down sharply and I couldn't budge him. We both laughed really hard. The difference was that he knew how he did it and I didn't.

Wish I could find that guy again.

Best wishes.

David

kewms

01-26-2011, 05:14 PM

Because saying "I don't know how and why this happens" would be more honest than saying "This happens because I'm moving ki"?

Moving ki sounds better. It means you are skilled, wise and awesome, "I don't know" puts you in a lower place of the social scale.

How about "I don't know, but it works better when I think about moving ki?"

Katherine

Janet Rosen

01-26-2011, 05:49 PM

From the posted article,

[W]hereas meditation is a state of parasympathetic dominance, in advanced meditators there is also enhanced control over sympathetic activity. Either sympathetic or parasympathetic activation then becomes possible. A hypometabolic state of parasympathetic arousal, however, remains the doorway as well as the fundamental context for these potential changes. In other words, sympathetic control in the presence of parasympathetic dominance is the fundamental principle underlying what has been reported in advanced practitioners as the voluntary control of internal states.

FWIW

Cool - thanks- it makes perfect sense because from a neurophysiological point of view inhibition of one system allows the agonist system to predominate. So if one learns to inhibit or override the sympathetic one can achieve parasympathetic effects.

To me this points to the essential issue in "proving" ki .... I have no idea which of the two possible systems I'm acting on, but it doesn't actually matter because my subjective experience that is having a real result (again, just as biofeedback folks - my brother in law learned this very same skill with biofeedback in a doctors office deep in the heart of Texas) is that what I am doing is what I understand as moving ki.

gregstec

01-26-2011, 06:11 PM

I have personally experienced 3 with Ikeda Sensei and Saotome Sensei, and 4 with Ushiro Sensei. I'm sure they are not the only ones. (And some people posting in this thread claim an even higher skill level, which may be true but I haven't personally seen it.) All three teach in the US regularly, and I'd strongly suggest you go see them in person.

I'm not going to post video, as this is the sort of stuff that always "looks fake," and "has to be felt." I'll just say that if you have not personally put your hands on someone with these skills, you really don't know what you're talking about.

Katherine

As Katherine, I have had on-hands with both Saotome and Ikeda on more than one occasion, and yes, they can both do as she said, BUT not like what I have felt from Dan or Howard Popkin (my Aikijujutsu teacher) - both Dan and Howard are light years ahead in the internals than those two pillars of Aikido, not that they are bad, they just don't feel the same in the sense that I am I totally controlled by them when I touch them - both Dan and Howard do.

Greg

HL1978

01-26-2011, 06:21 PM

My point would be that this stuff is hard enough without using words and phrases, especially technical terms/concepts, incorrectly. This is not mere semantic quibble either. If you will permit me to imitate Mike Sigman -as an engineer how would you describe the effect ('sink the qi') using western technical terms? It will help the athetically inclined to attempt to replicate the skill if they know exactly what is being referred to.

I would be happy to give it a go later on, as I already asked Chris how someone who has been focusing on athletic training can do it and he has yet to answer. I will note a couple of things however, what I was referencing earlier could be refered to as several related skills.

HL1978

01-26-2011, 06:30 PM

3) Who can do that? Show me video, and I'll duplicate it

4) See "3)"

Poke around youtube and put in the big time names in aikido (Ueshiba, Tohei etc), pre-war judo (find the hour long essence of judo video with Mifune), kendo (Mori Mochida) etc. If you want something more modern, put in the names of the big dogs of chen tai chi. Likewise search Akuzawa or Aunkai and you will find some videos too. I'm sure you can find 20 year old video of some of the posters on this thread as well if you look around the internet hard enough.

If you have difficulty finding any, search old threads in the non-aikido traditions section. If you still can't find any, I would be happy to suggest some and open a new discussion.

thisisnotreal

01-26-2011, 07:01 PM

If the increase of temperature happened, can this be explained by a different cause than "movement of ki"?

Great couple of posts on it. (http://www.aikiweb.com/forums/showthread.php?p=151055#post151055) hth.

thisisnotreal

01-26-2011, 07:10 PM

ChrisHein

01-26-2011, 10:21 PM

kewms

01-26-2011, 11:43 PM

As Katherine, I have had on-hands with both Saotome and Ikeda on more than one occasion, and yes, they can both do as she said, BUT not like what I have felt from Dan or Howard Popkin (my Aikijujutsu teacher) - both Dan and Howard are light years ahead in the internals than those two pillars of Aikido, not that they are bad, they just don't feel the same in the sense that I am I totally controlled by them when I touch them - both Dan and Howard do.

I don't have enough information to compare those two. I'm still waiting for Chris to produce an athlete with the ability to match any of them.

Katherine

kewms

01-26-2011, 11:51 PM

danj

01-27-2011, 02:40 AM

I'd like to suggest that Mr. (Dr.?) James take a look at this one. I suspect a fairly simple series of measurements will show this not to be true. Of course, more specific details need to be clarified. For example, If one simply lowers ones arms the center of gravity is lowered but the body is not lowered.

Center of gravity is a technical term with a very precise definition. One may think they are lowering their center of gravity when performing 'sink the qi' but that is not actually what is happening.

As usual, very clear thinking is required in these undertakings.

As an engineer I am well aware that you can't effectively change you COG in a static position. Like you said, this is effectively what it feels like to a partner whether one is passively recieving a push or activly adding to it. In such a case it becomes a question not only of where one is originating there response or how They are letting that. Incoming force pass throuh their body.

None the less, I would to be curious as to how athletic training can replicate the effect.

COG can be pretty hard to measure, what you might want instead is something to measure the interaction/kuzushi e.g. some force plates under uke's feet and nage's feet. These measure the ground reaction force in three dimensions - which can tell you a lot about what is going on upstairs. If uke is pushing you see a large horizontal force, re directed with something like aiki-age and you see just the vertical component (their weight bearing down on their feet if you like). If nage draws uke towards them to become the third pillar for their weight to rest on you see the vertical force of nage becomes larger.
The plates themselves are big enough to put both feet on though there are times you might leave one off to look closer.

Some other tools around the traps include multisensor preassure mats - from here you can look at the weight distribution across the feet. Couple the tool of you choice it with some video (many standard (i.e. cheap) handy cams will do short bursts of high speed now) and you might find something useful. Be sure to put your spandex on, rather than hiding limb segments under a hakama though.

Want to look at something faster than a glacial pace interaction and it gets a bit tougher. Even the static slow moving tests are hard to design to measure what you want, and for the test subjects its hard not to 'game' the system to see what you want to see/ or defeat what you don't want to see. (Its not quite uke collusion but a similar problem)

Lorel Latorilla

01-27-2011, 02:41 AM

Lorel Latorilla

01-27-2011, 02:44 AM

Chris.

You win, internal training sucks. We suck. Will this be your last thread on you griping about internal training? Because you have convinced most of us. I'm going to Tokyo tomorrow to train with Rob, but since your arguments have been so convincing, I'm not gonna bother to train with Rob and just go run around and mack on blond-haired Japanese gyaru.

Mike Sigman

01-27-2011, 03:28 AM

COG can be pretty hard to measure, what you might want instead is something to measure the interaction/kuzushi e.g. some force plates under uke's feet and nage's feet. These measure the ground reaction force in three dimensions - which can tell you a lot about what is going on upstairs. If uke is pushing you see a large horizontal force, re directed with something like aiki-age and you see just the vertical component (their weight bearing down on their feet if you like). If nage draws uke towards them to become the third pillar for their weight to rest on you see the vertical force of nage becomes larger.
The plates themselves are big enough to put both feet on though there are times you might leave one off to look closer.

Some other tools around the traps include multisensor preassure mats - from here you can look at the weight distribution across the feet. Couple the tool of you choice it with some video (many standard (i.e. cheap) handy cams will do short bursts of high speed now) and you might find something useful. Be sure to put your spandex on, rather than hiding limb segments under a hakama though.

Want to look at something faster than a glacial pace interaction and it gets a bit tougher. Even the static slow moving tests are hard to design to measure what you want, and for the test subjects its hard not to 'game' the system to see what you want to see/ or defeat what you don't want to see. (Its not quite uke collusion but a similar problem)Great ideas on tools/measuring-devices. I stood up and practiced some pretend interactions with an imaginary partner and paid attention to the forces in and around my feet. It's *possible* that a sophisticated extrapolation from some type of force-plates under the feet would be helpful, but I have no expertise in that area.

In terms of my center, I can do a number of tricks with it that have been trained over time, plus I can source forces at will in different directions (my body's alignment structure subtly reforming for each new force). In relation to an opponent's forces, I can vector-add forces in such a way that the resultant is uncomfortable for him. None of these things is an actual change in my COG, of course, but an opponent may feel an effect (the vector-resultant for the combined structures of our bodies) that suggests something to do with my COG. It's mostly just me deliberately manipulating forces in relation to a joined "unit-body", though.

2 cents.

Mike Sigman

Tony Wagstaffe

01-27-2011, 03:49 AM

Jon Haas

01-27-2011, 05:58 AM

Usually I just skim these threads, shake my head, and go back to training, but on this one I hope I might have a beneficial perspective to offer.

Much of my study over the past 10 years has revolved around how to utilize exercise and conditioning to create the best budo-body. I studied sports science, Russian kettlebells, Russian Systema and ROSS, was a CST instructor under Scott Sonnon (circular strength training system) from 2004 to 2006, and also wrote a book on Warrior Fitness - conditioning for martial arts. I hope this establishes my knowledge base and belief in western exercise science and physical training. Also, to round out my background, I have been training in martial arts for almost 30 years, 22 of them in Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu.

In 2008 while reading E-Budo, I discovered a thread by a guy named Dan Harden talking about conditioning a "budo-body" in a way I had never heard of before. When Dan announced his teacher seminar back in August of 2009, I jumped at the chance. I'm not going to re-review the seminar here, but suffice it to say I came away with concrete exercises, examples, and principles on which to work and put into my own personal practice. At the time, I had asked Dan about combining the solo exercises he taught with my regimen of kettlebells and other western conditioning methods. Here's his reply from the 2009 thread:
I would stop everything but cardio for a while. There is a period where your body needs to "reset." I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer so for me-I needed to avoid every device where my body would revert back to just doing what it knew. That included power lifting, Judo/jujutsu, everything. I wasn't kidding about this training changing your body physically. It is conditioning; mentally and physically, but it is very soft, meant to not be physically exhausting, by rather mentally exhausting. Remember all the cautions I gave about sitting down if you were tired and stopping? Why? Because we need your mind at its peak and your body aware and listening. It's a soft, gradual process. "Burning it in" with hard exercises will just screw it up, so will doing it fast. All that comes later.

Needless to say I followed his advice and gave up all other exercise and just concentrated on the solo work. The result after 6 months or so? People asking me - why are you so difficult to throw? :)

Now, here's the comparison part. Around April last year I had the bright idea to start lifting kettlebells, clubbells, sandbags, and doing all sorts of high intensity conditioning workouts. The results? After several months, I looked great, was very healthy and conditioned and physically strong, but here's the rub - I FELT just like everyone else. Training partners that had been having trouble throwing me and locking me were able to do so again much easier than before. So, my little mind got to thinking - what is my goal here? Do I want to be strong and conditioned as an athlete OR strong and conditioned as a budoka? I chose Budoka and quit lifting and once again began doing the solo work that Dan teaches. I now train this stuff for at least an hour every day and will not look back. To me, the difference is clear.

One last point. Internal is not superior to athleticism, it's a different methodology of training for a different result. As I said above, you need to decide your goal. It's not for everyone

Hope that ramble helps....

Jon

Budd

01-27-2011, 07:36 AM

Nice, Jon. That pretty much gels with my experience when I started working on "this stuff". You have to rewire the body to a degree, otherwise you'll just do things the way you always did them.

David Orange

01-27-2011, 07:44 AM

thisisnotreal

01-27-2011, 07:46 AM

David Orange

01-27-2011, 08:02 AM

I keep reading through these posts, trying to see how to get through, but it seems hopeless. It's like trying to talk to someone who is on a mission of faith.

That's been my feeling when talking to you.

I gave you a very clear and simple challenge:

show yourself shoving someone weighing 50% more than you (and I'll even settle for 40% more) 25 feet back with a bo.

Then you were gone from the forum the rest of the day. I guessed you were videoing your attempts and simply found that you couldn't do it. Now you're back claiming no one gave you anything solid to work with.

So in case you missed it:

1. find someone who weighs 40 to 50% more than you (preferably someone with at least 20 years of solid martial arts training) and videotape the following:

2. stand in a back stance holding a 6ft bo

3. have the uke stand facing you in back stance holding the other end of the bo, directly in front of you, and tell him to keep you from pushing the bo forward

4. shove the uke back 25 feet without moving either foot, as Ark did with me.

5. if you can't do it, find any athlete who can and tape them doing it

When you can do that, I'll be glad to hear your ideas on the value of whatever you want to discuss.

Otherwise, I'm pretty well convinced that your thoughts don't merit the same attention as those of people like Mike and Dan or even people like me who have only felt the power and are seriously trying to learn more about it.

I started by asking a question.

And so far you have continued by ignoring every answer. We're all just waiting for any meaningful response from you.

"I can't do it" is the only honest answer I expect from you.

If you "can" do it, I'll be the first to say that I was wrong.

Best to you.

And waiting.....

David

01-27-2011, 08:07 AM

Do this;

Stand against a wall. Heel, head and butt vertically aligned touching the wall.
Get the strongest person in the dojo to push on you, on the sternum,chest, shoulders,where ever. it doesn't matter. Pin them there with all you've got.
Now neutralize the push and Walk off the wall with the greatest of ease (As seen from the outside world).

No I can't do this; but I did do the pinning.. :eek:
And I was pushing. I remember the wall was groaning behind the guy.

Can you reproduce this Chris?
Did I use any 10 dollar words?

Don't forget, Josh, to also note that the person being pushed cannot use his hands. The person being pushed must just walk forward without touching the person pushing.

Demetrio Cereijo

01-27-2011, 08:10 AM

Don't forget, Josh, to also note that the person being pushed cannot use his hands. The person being pushed must just walk forward without touching the person pushing.
And should have his toenails trimmed.

Lorel Latorilla

01-27-2011, 08:33 AM

Usually I just skim these threads, shake my head, and go back to training, but on this one I hope I might have a beneficial perspective to offer.

Much of my study over the past 10 years has revolved around how to utilize exercise and conditioning to create the best budo-body. I studied sports science, Russian kettlebells, Russian Systema and ROSS, was a CST instructor under Scott Sonnon (circular strength training system) from 2004 to 2006, and also wrote a book on Warrior Fitness - conditioning for martial arts. I hope this establishes my knowledge base and belief in western exercise science and physical training. Also, to round out my background, I have been training in martial arts for almost 30 years, 22 of them in Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu.

In 2008 while reading E-Budo, I discovered a thread by a guy named Dan Harden talking about conditioning a "budo-body" in a way I had never heard of before. When Dan announced his teacher seminar back in August of 2009, I jumped at the chance. I'm not going to re-review the seminar here, but suffice it to say I came away with concrete exercises, examples, and principles on which to work and put into my own personal practice. At the time, I had asked Dan about combining the solo exercises he taught with my regimen of kettlebells and other western conditioning methods. Here's his reply from the 2009 thread:

Needless to say I followed his advice and gave up all other exercise and just concentrated on the solo work. The result after 6 months or so? People asking me - why are you so difficult to throw? :)

Now, here's the comparison part. Around April last year I had the bright idea to start lifting kettlebells, clubbells, sandbags, and doing all sorts of high intensity conditioning workouts. The results? After several months, I looked great, was very healthy and conditioned and physically strong, but here's the rub - I FELT just like everyone else. Training partners that had been having trouble throwing me and locking me were able to do so again much easier than before. So, my little mind got to thinking - what is my goal here? Do I want to be strong and conditioned as an athlete OR strong and conditioned as a budoka? I chose Budoka and quit lifting and once again began doing the solo work that Dan teaches. I now train this stuff for at least an hour every day and will not look back. To me, the difference is clear.

One last point. Internal is not superior to athleticism, it's a different methodology of training for a different result. As I said above, you need to decide your goal. It's not for everyone

Hope that ramble helps....

Jon

This is an interesting topic to me because it seems like 'athleticism' and having a 'budo body' are mutually exclusive. I am personally interested in having the 'conditioning' of an 'athlete', but for the purposes of running, walking long distances, carrying heavy loads, climbing, swimming. Things a soldier is required to do. But at the same time, I want to maintain a budo body..it's the only kind of body that can stand a chance against bigger people (I'm only 5'3). For this reason, I've dedicated the past 4-5 years to re-wiring my body to prepare it for 'aiki' skill, dragon back, etc..

Some people have suggested to me that I try crossfit--but I didn't like what it did to my body. So far, I've only experimented with jogging/bodyskill stuff. Nothing groundbreaking so far.

You got any advice for a boy that wants to maintain the conventional 'athletic' body and the budo body, John?

HL1978

01-27-2011, 08:43 AM

4. shove the uke back 25 feet without moving either foot, as Ark did with me.

Just to clarify so that this doesn't sound completely fantastic, I do not believe David intends people to think that Ark shoved him back 25 feet in the air. He probably was poped up in the air a bit, but took 25 feet to regain his balance as he moved backwards.

chillzATL

01-27-2011, 09:03 AM

I keep reading through these posts, trying to see how to get through, but it seems hopeless. It's like trying to talk to someone who is on a mission of faith.

I started by asking a question. Most people didn't bother to answer the question, but rather, asked their own questions, and use circular logic.

A few did offer some "sort- of" attempts at answering the question, but again circular logic rears it's head. No one seems to have any answers, but everyone knows about this stuff.

Trying to simplify what we are talking about doesn't seem to work here. Everyone wants to use ten dollar words and recount times when some high ranked somebody touched them.

If you guys would simply say "I don't know, but I like doing this stuff" at least that would be honest.

Chris,

I'm a nub in this area skill wise, but I'm also trying to make a go of understanding what's going on in more simple terms, so I'll take a stab at it.

First there is relaxation or keeping the body soft and flexible. By keeping the body soft and flexible it allows it to do things with energy transfer that simply aren't possible with hard, flexed muscle. This is no different than buildings or bridges that are supported by soft, flexible connections to the ground. Hard and rigid connections can always be overcome by a stronger force and are more easily degraded over time and under pressure, but soft and flexible can disperse and redirect that force/energy in a variety of ways and much more efficiently.

next, and this is kinda where "it has to be felt" is that the body can be conditioned so that you can mentally direct energy/forces through that soft/flexible material. The conditioning aspects seek to build and connect the materials of the body that are capable of transfering that energy. The stronger and better connected that material is, the more capable the body is of manipulating those forces whether they be initiated by the ground, by someone else or by gravity. An example of this would be in grappling. If you have someone by the shoulders and are trying to get under them they could take in your energy, combined with their own and via force vectors (I think that's the right term) can redirect that energy back at you, lower than where you're inputting it and under your center of gravity. The net result is that you are, on contact, never quite stable and more easily thrown all without them physically dropping their body to be under you, as is typically in most grappling scenarios.

This is a very basic description and by no means complete or all encompassing, but you asked for an example of what it can do that typical athletics/muscle can't and I think this fits that bill.

phitruong

01-27-2011, 09:42 AM

was doing slow jog the other day and was focus on breathing and expanding. ya, bouncing ball down the road. so i was thinking, if someone would push a runner sideway in the shoulder, while the runner is running, more than likely the runner would break stride and probably goes off the road and/or tripping on his/her own feet. now the folks who trained IS with one of the requirement is to be able to handle force input from multiple directions at the same time (the 6H stuffs, not the 4H which involved strange practices with farm animals) :) . so with an IS trained runner, the push from the side wouldn't break his/her/it stride. he/she/it would have dealt with the force input(s) and keep on running. just thinking out loud mind you. however, if any of you bugger tried to push me while i am out and about jogging, you are going down, no loving and harmony here. :D

ChrisHein

01-27-2011, 10:09 AM

Are you reading the same thread I am? I see several lists of IP-driven phenomenon, and several examples of teachers who can produce those phenomenon. And I see a resolute refusal on your part to engage with those posts.

Katherine

The problem with this is that all the lists presented are working under that assumption that what you think is happening is happening. It's circular reasoning. You won't question from outside of the belief that the stuff you are observing is happening the way you think it is. I am only questioning from outside of this belief, because I don't hold it.

I can't have someone push me in the wall with all their force, and simply walk away from the wall. Nor have I ever seen anyone else do that. I can however think of several situations where this could be made possible. I don't know what you are seeing, if you show it to me, I can work with it, but words are not doing it.

There is a standard point being made that I have to feel it to know it. I have in the past (although not yet in this thread) made the point that group think, mental suggestion, magic tricks and other means can be used to create these types of situations. Feeling it is not enough. You have to be able to objectively look at something physical. You must be able to step away from the emotions of the moment and see what is happening. However no one will put up anything concrete that can be looked at objectively.

David Blaine can do all manner of amazing things, but we all know he is a trickster. The fact that none of the IP IS or whatever you want to call them guys want to put out video, they hold tightly controlled seminars, and otherwise seem mysterious and vague should make you question it, unless you're working on faith.

ChrisHein

01-27-2011, 10:16 AM

kewms

01-27-2011, 10:26 AM

There is a standard point being made that I have to feel it to know it. I have in the past (although not yet in this thread) made the point that group think, mental suggestion, magic tricks and other means can be used to create these types of situations. Feeling it is not enough. You have to be able to objectively look at something physical. You must be able to step away from the emotions of the moment and see what is happening. However no one will put up anything concrete that can be looked at objectively.

David Blaine can do all manner of amazing things, but we all know he is a trickster. The fact that none of the IP IS or whatever you want to call them guys want to put out video, they hold tightly controlled seminars, and otherwise seem mysterious and vague should make you question it, unless you're working on faith.

Several of the teachers mentioned in this thread give public seminars all over the world. Many of the teachers mentioned in this thread have been captured on video. If you have never felt or seen any of the phenomena being discussed, it's because you haven't tried.

Katherine

kewms

01-27-2011, 10:32 AM

Nicholas Eschenbruch

01-27-2011, 10:37 AM

Several of the teachers mentioned in this thread give public seminars all over the world. Many of the teachers mentioned in this thread have been captured on video. If you have never felt or seen any of the phenomena being discussed, it's because you haven't tried.

Katherine

Plus there are some great videos of Chinese IMA on youtube - but guess what, they won't convince the sceptics either, what a surprise! Because you cannot see how they do it, and because it does not look like MMA...

It also keeps amusing me in these threads how "group think" is always the other party.

01-27-2011, 10:39 AM

The problem with this is that all the lists presented are working under that assumption that what you think is happening is happening. It's circular reasoning. You won't question from outside of the belief that the stuff you are observing is happening the way you think it is. I am only questioning from outside of this belief, because I don't hold it.

I can't have someone push me in the wall with all their force, and simply walk away from the wall. Nor have I ever seen anyone else do that. I can however think of several situations where this could be made possible. I don't know what you are seeing, if you show it to me, I can work with it, but words are not doing it.

There is a standard point being made that I have to feel it to know it. I have in the past (although not yet in this thread) made the point that group think, mental suggestion, magic tricks and other means can be used to create these types of situations. Feeling it is not enough. You have to be able to objectively look at something physical. You must be able to step away from the emotions of the moment and see what is happening. However no one will put up anything concrete that can be looked at objectively.

David Blaine can do all manner of amazing things, but we all know he is a trickster. The fact that none of the IP IS or whatever you want to call them guys want to put out video, they hold tightly controlled seminars, and otherwise seem mysterious and vague should make you question it, unless you're working on faith.
I hear ya Chris except that every..single...person keeps telling you it is from conditioning the body so that it moves and responds as a connected whole in a different way. You should at least acknowledge that man. No one is talking about tricks and magic. I would have walked away if I could not have made it work and improve my game. And it did. Period.
Now you have others...to debate with fairly... who are telling you the same thing. Now..mind you...they train with different people, but express similar results?
Hhmmm....maybe them ol masters really did know something after all that is not expressed in crossfit and P90X
Cheers
Dan

thisisnotreal

01-27-2011, 10:40 AM

Oh, I would quickly like to add. The pushing you into the wall thing would be a good example of something that an athlete should not be able to do. If any of you could make a video of this, It could quickly make a point. Please put up something that can be looked at.

From here, this now devolves into the same old discussion about why video fails. You will only believe it when you do the pushing yourself. It is good to be a doubting Thomas. Very good. Your conclusions will be hard earned and something foundational to build on.

Edit: Nicholas: Yes. Your point on groupthink is very relevant. Interesting observation.

ChrisHein

01-27-2011, 10:41 AM

Dan, I'm guessing you are the guy who can do the wall thing. Will you make a video?

chillzATL

01-27-2011, 10:46 AM

Oh, I would quickly like to add. The pushing you into the wall thing would be a good example of something that an athlete should not be able to do. If any of you could make a video of this, It could quickly make a point. Please put up something that can be looked at.

Chris,

You've already established that your defacto stance is that it's all mental suggestion, hero worship or collusion. So what exactly will a video "prove" to you? It's far easier to concoct a convincing looking video than it is to get someone to believe you're doing something to them ,face to face, that you really aren't doing. If you don't believe, a video isn't going to convince you.

01-27-2011, 10:50 AM

Plus there are some great videos of Chinese IMA on youtube - but guess what, they won't convince the sceptics either, what a surprise! Because you cannot see how they do it, and because it does not look like MMA...

It also keeps amusing me in these threads how "group think" is always the other party.
Well, you saw it being tested as a separate skill set. The problem is with use.
Some guys can do this and show real power but really can't fight well. So, the average MAer says..."ya....so what? Big deal."
Other guys can do this and can fight..so...the average MAer says "Wow look what he can do fighting."
But that doesn't really validate the IS does it?
Others can't do this but can fight well...so...MAers say.."Who needs that?"
That's why I don't over-sell it. I have trained guys for MMA bouts and never brought this up.
I think it is great stuff, You will ...use it...in fighting..if you know how to fight because you take your body with you, As Jon noted most people will tell you, you feel different..
You can use it Martial arts, where the the difference is more pronounced because there is less pressure than in fighting.

All the best
Dan

Demetrio Cereijo

01-27-2011, 10:51 AM

It also keeps amusing me in these threads how "group think" is always the other party.
There's groupthink in both sides.

Demetrio Cereijo

01-27-2011, 11:00 AM

You can use it Martial arts, where the the difference is more pronounced because there is less pressure than in fighting.

Interesting statement.

kewms

01-27-2011, 11:19 AM

I hear ya Chris except that every..single...person keeps telling you it is from conditioning the body so that it moves and responds as a connected whole in a different way. You should at least acknowledge that man.

It's also worth noting that you are hearing the same things from multiple people who don't know each other, or in some cases who agree about pretty much *nothing* else. Either there's really something there, or there's a mass delusion going on. Mass delusion is possible, I guess, but it's probably easier to actually develop the skills than to perpetuate a delusion among so many people for such a long time.

Katherine

David Orange

01-27-2011, 11:55 AM

Just to clarify so that this doesn't sound completely fantastic, I do not believe David intends people to think that Ark shoved him back 25 feet in the air. He probably was poped up in the air a bit, but took 25 feet to regain his balance as he moved backwards.

Hunter,

I described it in detail in a post right after it happened and a neurologist at the seminar also estimated 25 feet.

What happened was that I felt Ark start pushing and I started holding him back. The push built up and I held harder. I could tell the bo was beginning to move toward me and I tightened my hands and increased my push back and looked down as I also pressed down.

Then it was like a literal explosion and I felt as if a huge wall of wind hit me. It blasted me up and back and I went reeling backward about ten feet, back-pedalling as my feet tried to catch up with my upper body. From that point I came off my feet and did go backward through the air about another ten feet. I hit on my shoulders and slid backward about another five feet before I stopped moving. 130-pound Ark sent over 190 pounds 25 feet across the dojo before the 190+ pounds lost its momentum and stopped.

I was laughing all the way!

He should sell that as a ride!

It was great!

Thanks.

David

HL1978

01-27-2011, 11:56 AM

David Blaine can do all manner of amazing things, but we all know he is a trickster. The fact that none of the IP IS or whatever you want to call them guys want to put out video, they hold tightly controlled seminars, and otherwise seem mysterious and vague should make you question it, unless you're working on faith.

I would disagree with that statement. There is plenty of video out there, but you have not looked particularly hard given the examples i gave.

An aunkai example

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAJVQMCWeOA&feature=player_detailpage#t=12s

How does Akuzawa get that guy up in the air? You will notice that he moves forwards after the guy is already going back. Nor does he drop down and upwards. I seriously doubt there is colussion as that would take some practice on the seminar goers part to be able to jump in seiza like that.

01-27-2011, 11:57 AM

It's also worth noting that you are hearing the same things from multiple people who don't know each other, or in some cases who agree about pretty much *nothing* else. Either there's really something there, or there's a mass delusion going on. Mass delusion is possible, I guess, but it's probably easier to actually develop the skills than to perpetuate a delusion among so many people for such a long time.

Katherine
Yup!
Even more conclusive when they have trained with different people and do not know each other and have never spoken to one another, but arrived at similar views.
How do you get that to happen?
As I keep pointing out, among this group -if you want to call it a group- is an ever growing cross section of Martial artists from Koryu to MMA. It defies group think, in that it is teachers from different cultures, from widely different arts, training with people who learned these skills from different cultures in different arts. Were it any other venue or product it would be preeetttty much conclusive. .
All of whom advocates that it is NOT the same as normally trained athletisism but is specific in that it is trained differently, except for Chris's teacher who sees it as one and the same thing.
Cheers
Dan.

Dan

ChrisHein

01-27-2011, 05:59 PM

David Orange

01-27-2011, 06:26 PM

First off, this comes from me, not my teacher. Second, the group of internal martial artists that is not the Aikiweb IP IS or whatever group is MUCH larger than this small group of internal. Most IMA would say Dan, Ark, Mike who? Your group is not that large, although you're working it, I'll give you that.

Gee. Where have I heard that before? Maybe from Dan? Mike? and others? They have well acknowledged that the worldwide group is much larger than themselves. But of those in the US, you won't find many, and of those, how many will tell you and show you in open seminars exactly how they do it?

Yeah. The internal group is not only very big, but it's very, very old. And modern aikido is very young and most players have only very shallow roots even in that.

Mike and Dan both have aikido roots much deeper than most of those...including yourself.

I could probably find 50 people who think chickens can speak English. People from all over the world, different people who have never met. I could put them on a forum together and try to tell them that chickens can not in fact speak English. Those 50 people would act like I'm crazy, because they all believe it. Looking at this small group it would be easy for them to say, "Chris, everyone is telling you the same thing, why don't you listen, chickens can clearly speak English."

Uh....yeah. And some chickens can even write in English!!!

But it seems they can't back up what they write!!!

At least one of them is on this very thread!

See if you can find him!

Hunter,
I have seen lots of videos of internal, I like to look at all these things quite a bit, but I wanted you to specifically show me the videos that you think are important.

I don't see anything on the video of Ark that an athlete cannot do.

Gee. That not only sounds myseriously like faith and belief but also like "So-and-so can do that, too!"

But didn't you say you can do anything you see on video?

Put up, Bud! Let's see you lift someone off the ground as Ark does in that vid.

The only thing I can't do as well as Ark on that video is the suwari waza kokyu ho shove.

Shove? Bad form, Chris. Ark effortlessly lifts that guy up and sets him back. No "shoving" involved. Shame on you, man.

Then again Ark has been doing this longer then I have.

And he also knows what he's talking about, Chris, as you seem not to.

What do you think is on that video that an athlete cannot do?

Dig 'em up, Chris! Where are these fabled athletes? And what kind of athlete are you refering to? Wrestlers? Long-distance runners? Swimmers????? Where are they, man? Not imaginary 6 foot bunnies, but real people. Let's see 'em.

I'm still waiting for you to show us what you can do with a bo and a martial artist 40% heavier than yourself. You sure have been quiet. I was hearing crickets, but now it sounds like "Bock-bock-bock! Bock-bock-bock!":p

Geez. Put up or shut up, already.

Respectfully,

David

ChrisHein

01-27-2011, 06:36 PM

David Orange,
I'm not trying to insult you personally. I am asking questions about what you are doing. Please refrain from personally insulting me. Thank you.

David Orange

01-27-2011, 06:47 PM

David Orange,
I'm not trying to insult you personally. I am asking questions about what you are doing. Please refrain from personally insulting me. Thank you.

I and several others have told you specific things time and again and you have come back repeatedly with statements like "The problem with this is that all the lists presented are working under that assumption that what you think is happening is happening. It's circular reasoning." and "I have in the past (although not yet in this thread) made the point that group think, mental suggestion, magic tricks and other means can be used to create these types of situations." and "no one will put up anything concrete that can be looked at objectively." and "You must be able to step away from the emotions of the moment and see what is happening."

That is rude, insulting and unworthy of a "teacher" of martial arts. And I note that you rely on thirty-dollar sentences where you accuse others of using ten-dollar words. We don't want the flowery sentences. Just show what you claim you can do.

I'd suggest that you step away from the emotions of the moment and see what's happening. You have basically called all thes IP advocates idiots and liars and dupes while at the same time claiming that you can do all the things they describe. Basically, like someone else in another thread, you're saying "It's snake oil But I can do it, too!"

Yet you won't step up and replicate these feats you claim you can replicate. And you offer the imaginary athlete who you imagine can do what Ark can do as proof of....something? In other words, you're begging for ridicule. To those who can see, of course, you're ridiculing yourself.

So respond to the many, many solid examples people have given. Show that you can do all those things Ark does. To continue making such specious claims insults yourself and everyone on the forum. So you stop insulting us and we'll show you some respect.

Thanks.

David

ChrisHein

01-27-2011, 07:04 PM

I was simply trying to have a logical conversation. I'm sorry if you were offended by this.

Janet Rosen

01-27-2011, 09:49 PM

Please, both of you, stay within bounds of civility and just stop pushing at each other; it serves no useful or productive purpose. And no I don't care who started or who is right. Thank you.

ChrisHein

01-27-2011, 10:08 PM

...

Michael Varin

01-28-2011, 12:20 AM

Wow. The confusion persists! Man, this stuff just eats you alive, doesn't it?
And there you have it.

My above quoted comment at the beginning of this thread had nothing to do with "internal strength."

It had to do with something that is all too common here on Aikiweb, that is, posters' apparent lack of ability or lack of desire to read, comprehend, and address the topics of discussion or specific questions of a thread.

We all know how quickly these threads degrade once they become infected with agendas, bickering, and tangents. That is why I suggested a format for responses that would allow both posters and observers to more accurately evaluate people's positions and the weight of their contributions.

With all due respect to the "it has to be felt" nature of some of the things we discuss here, this is a forum that relies on verbal communication (with the occasional aid of videos and images).

Like it or not clarity, objectivity, logic, and patience are required to overcome the imperfections in human perception.

Otherwise, we are just exchanging "warm fuzzies" and insults, grandstanding, and making sarcastic remarks, etc…

If that is where we want to go, fine, I can do that with the best of them.

But at that point Aikiweb is for entertainment value only. And it will lower us as a community.

That would be a shame.

Full disclosure: Chris Hein is a good friend of mine, and longtime training partner.

Chris definitely is responsible for some of the negativity and absurdity of this thread, but he is not alone. David Orange's posts spiraled completely out of control, and he was the one that took this to a personal level… I guess in the interest of humor. And take a look at the thread, there wasn't much of an on point contribution until Jon Haas at page 5, post 114 (apologies to those earlier posters who did contribute), so many of the early posters are at fault as well. Let's remember, this thread started with questions, not an argument. You cannot answer questions with questions. You cannot answer questions by begging the question.

It's fine to be forceful with points, to ask and expect answers to challenging questions, to argue, to use colorful language, and even to be confused or go off on tangents, but the level of vitriol is almost unacceptable.

I have noticed that there are a few new members and a few other members who have just started posting regularly. They are excited about aikido and are thinking about it with some depth. If you can't put more effort into your posts for yourself, consider doing it for them.

No one forces anyone to participate on this forum, so I would expect a higher level of discourse.

Maybe I'm a wishful thinker…

ChrisHein

01-28-2011, 12:54 AM

I do apologize for any fuel I threw on the fire. At several points I was just being onry.

As far as "PM's" go, those are private messages, I stand by what I said, but it wasn't meant to be brought into this thread; that is why I used the PM option.

My comments about circular reasoning were in no way meant as insults. That is what I feel is happening. And as far as making a video goes, give me a week or two. I have multiple jobs and a life as well. I will get to it I promise.

I apologize and would like to get on with the discussion.

Lorel Latorilla

01-28-2011, 04:13 AM

If Chris wants David Orange to stop making fun of him, he needs to stop inviting insults. Dude is just asking for it. He asks people some questions, people clearly answer it, and yet he accuses them of circular reasoning and suggesting other insulting things it is like 'talking to people who are on a mission of faith'. How can you engage someone like that in a 'logical' discussion?

Clarity, objectivity, patience, and logic are not seen in Chris's posts.

1) Clarity--he doesn't know what he's talking about. The IP/Aiki guys are claiming they are doing something different, and have outlined in many posts what is occurring in their bodies, not in a mystical magical manner, but in a real physical manner. Some (like Tim Fong) have even described the phenomena in anatomical terms. Even when people here have demonstrated (in a physical level) that what they're doing is different from what Chris is doing, he still stubbornly insists that what he's doing encompasses the bodyskills that we talk about here.

2) Objectivity--he has no objectivity, but only speculation. He hasn't met Ark, Dan, or Mike. Therefore, he has no grounds to evaluate what they do. Martial arts is not a philosophical, dialectical thing--truth in martial arts is achieved on the mat. David calling Chris a chicken seems like an accurate statement--I mean why would you be afraid of meeting Dan? What do you have to lose besides your own cherished preconceptions/beliefs about martial arts? Even if you find out he sucks, the man will buy you dinner for crying out loud.

3) Patience--he fails to engage people's points. Hunter answered his questions, and it seemed as though Chris purposely overlooked them. If you want to engage people in a 'logical discussion', you have to engage the points they make, and not accuse them of 'circular reasoning' or suggesting the are 'fanatics'.

4) Logic--no logic either. For instance, he makes an analogue to David Blaine, suggesting that IP guys could be tricksters. Just as David Blaine takes control of logistics to bring about magical acts, he's suggesting that the IP guys do the same by not putting out videos and have tightly controlled seminars, and they do all this to facilitate an environment where mental suggestion is easily achieved. Sure that's logical, but the premises are clearly false. For one, Ark has a lot of videos out and has DVDS. Same with Mike. Secondly, I'm thinking you don't even have to go to seminars as you can do a private with Ark or you can even meet up with Dan, buy him dinner and a beer and then he will show you--I believe Dan met Mark Murray on his own, outside a seminar. There's also a open door policy in each cases--I'm sure Ark would be willing to spar with you, and Dan of course does that for fun. If you think it's all mental suggestion, I suggest you spar Dan or Ark. Or if that's too rough, I suggest you go at it on a freestyle stand-up grappling thing, since that's your range. If they can't throw you or you can throw them, then you can call bullshit on them..no mental suggestion shit here, just sheer physicality. In any case, comparing them to magicians is dishonest. Moreover, asking for video and then interpreting it based on your understanding and saying that that is what is actually happening is circular reasoning itself--you saying "this is what's happening, therefore is true" refers to its own validity. This stuff is more scientific than it is philosophical or magical. If you want to test your theory, your interpretation, you have to experiment, and cross-reference. In this case, if you think your interpretation encompasses what's going in the internal stuff, then you'll have to check with the guys who're saying something different. By meeting with these people, you will see if your interpretation/hypothesis holds true in reality, and see whether it trumps the other 'interpretations' out there. You saying "I can do what they do! But here is how I do it,and it's right, and they're wrong" is straight up intellectually dishonest.

It is for these reasons that people cannot take you seriously and discussion spirals into ridicule. If you want us to have a discussion with you, take the advice of your friend Michael Varin and start approaching discussion from the foundation of these 4 principals. People are making fun of you because your skepticism is dishonest. Skepticism can be good, but only if it is honest.

P.S.--Chris, Ark has been doing bodyskill for only 15 years I think. He started off with Tai Chi when he was 16, but it wasn't until his late 20's and early 30's that he started training this stuff seriously. It's not that far off from your 10 + years of aikido and training with Tim Cartmell.

P.P.S.--I don't think you are using the word 'faith' here correctly. 'Blind faith' which is what atheists like to pejoratively describe Christians and other religionists describes only an unchecked belief system that some Christians and religionists work to protect for fear of being wrong. In that case, 'working on faith' or 'working on blind faith' is bad. But 'true working on faith' is on some warrior shit. You essentially put your beliefs out there (whether it is beliefs in religion, in politics, in martial arts, in philosophy, etc.) and allow reality to burn down your beliefs. And it's called 'faith' because you have faith that the truth will stand up over the ashes that was once your fortresses of belief. In that case Chris, I implore you to get out there, allow reality to burn down the beliefs you cherish, and find the truth in martial arts. The worst that can happen is that you lose all beliefs...even then, you exchange that for the truth. The best thing that can happen is that you are correct, and that your interpretation is reality and from there, you will have the authority to call IP guys magicians and all that stuff. I have no problem with making fun and ridiculing charlatans and magicians, so if you were to find out that you were correct all along, I'd join you in the laughter and in the ridicule.

Demetrio Cereijo

01-28-2011, 04:35 AM

Hi Lorel,

Good points, but I think clarity, objectivity, patience and logic is also needed in IS/IP/Aiki proponents posts.

Lorel Latorilla

01-28-2011, 04:48 AM

Hi Lorel,

Good points, but I think clarity, objectivity, patience and logic is also needed in IS/IP/Aiki proponents posts.

Clarity--besides describing this phenomena in terms that are phenomenologically convenient to the IP proponent (and to other IP guys) it is hard to achieve clarity. That is, clarity is not available to people who don't do this stuff because you can't perfectly describe the body-mind dynamics and effect an intersubjective miracle. Tim Fong's Spear Post is probably the closest thing to achieve objectivity and clarity, because he touches on anatomy.

Objectivity--IP guys suggest to other people to meet these people claiming to do something different. I don't know how 'objective' you can go beyond that.

Patience--Chris is intellectually dishonest and that stuff does not warrant patience, especially mine. If he was ignorant, and honest and humble about it, then of course, patience is granted. BTW, it took a lot of patience for me to carefully write that post. I don't think Chris is aware that he is intellectually dishonest.

Logic--Please point out to me where an IP proponent has failed to be 'logical'. Maybe David and I got carried away by posting some sarcastic stuff, but beyond that...where is the ill-logic? :confused:

danj

01-28-2011, 05:12 AM

Great ideas on tools/measuring-devices. I stood up and practiced some pretend interactions with an imaginary partner and paid attention to the forces in and around my feet. It's *possible* that a sophisticated extrapolation from some type of force-plates under the feet would be helpful, but I have no expertise in that area.

In terms of my center, I can do a number of tricks with it that have been trained over time, plus I can source forces at will in different directions (my body's alignment structure subtly reforming for each new force). In relation to an opponent's forces, I can vector-add forces in such a way that the resultant is uncomfortable for him. None of these things is an actual change in my COG, of course, but an opponent may feel an effect (the vector-resultant for the combined structures of our bodies) that suggests something to do with my COG. It's mostly just me deliberately manipulating forces in relation to a joined "unit-body", though.

2 cents.

Mike Sigman

I think the key question might be "Are force plates or similar technologies likely to be useful?" I suspect to a certain audience they offer objective information and interesting aids to understanding. As a feedback tool they might help develop an externally based sensitivity to ones own internal structure through seeing what works and what doesn't. Progression by coming to recognise this and associate it with internal feedback mechanisms like you describe would be the next step.

If the path to sensitivity is quicker using something like this (and given the long lead times to expertise quoted this might just be the case) then its a useful tool for the masses.

In taking on what Mike is saying something like preasure mats which allow a visualisation of dynamic weight distribution could be useful. This is an example from google here (http://www.tekscan.com/medical/pressure-sensitive-mat.html) http://www.tekscan.com/sites/default/files/video-synchronization.gif - didn't see a price though :(

gregstec

01-28-2011, 06:32 AM

In taking on what Mike is saying something like preasure mats which allow a visualisation of dynamic weight distribution could be useful. This is an example from google here (http://www.tekscan.com/medical/pressure-sensitive-mat.html) http://www.tekscan.com/sites/default/files/video-synchronization.gif - didn't see a price though :(

Maybe not as hi tech as what you are showing here, but the Wii board has an exercise application that shows weight distribution and center of balance.

Greg

HL1978

01-28-2011, 07:05 AM

I have seen lots of videos of internal, I like to look at all these things quite a bit, but I wanted you to specifically show me the videos that you think are important.

I don't see anything on the video of Ark that an athlete cannot do. The only thing I can't do as well as Ark on that video is the suwari waza kokyu ho shove. Then again Ark has been doing this longer then I have. What do you think is on that video that an athlete cannot do?

If you can pull off the shiko (sumo stomp) with someone on your back, that would be rather interesting. That one requires very little leg muscle to pull off despite the fact that beginners use their quads way to much which also applies to mabu/tenchijin as well. While I won't go into the mechanics of how the exercise is done other than saying that it requires "being under" the weight your arms and legs and that you don't bend your waist, the version he demonstrated requires making the other person effectively part of your body.

I will lay out how most people usually attempt kokyu ho, I have seen power lifters, MMA semi-pro's etc usually try it in this manner. After that I will talk about how you should be doing it, which goes back to that list of things that IS people tend to do.

The goal of the exercise is not to push the person backwards, rather to pop them predominantly upwards. Given the path of the arms, there will of course be some lateral movement. Once the person is up, then you can manipulate them over to the side via the same mechanic you use to pop them upwards (via the same list of things I mentioned to you earlier) rather than pulling them around with the arms, or twisting the hips with a rotation. It is more or less kokyu dosa. From what I remember Akuzawa sensei saying in the past, this is more or less how they spent their class time in Sagawa's Daito Ryu dojo.

It has to be understood what it feels like when this exercise is done properly. To both people, it feels like no muscular effort was expended. There is no straining of muscles like when one bench presses a lot of weight or arm wrestles. It is completely effortless and even if one was to stop raising the arms at any point, there is no straining of the arm and back muscles, you can more or less hold that position indefinitely. The partner being lifted should not break their grip at any point, though clearly the harder they grip the easier they will be to lift. If they break their grip, the person lifting has no weight to work with.

This exercise does not rely on usage of the shoulder, biceps and triceps to carry the load, or pop a person back. If you try to lift someone from that position predominantly using those muscles, it becomes quite an effort and your partner can feel you straining. If you try using the biceps, the arms tend to move backwards a bit, making the load greater on the biceps. If you raise/lift with the shoulders, the same thing happens as the shoulders wind up being disconnected from the body and are loaded. Using the triceps is a better way which I used for a long time, but is not correct either. Even if you use all 3 together it still will not work properly in recreating the feeling I described above. You do not want to pull the person forwards either. While this may take their balance, now you have more of their weight going straight down on you which makes them even harder to lift!

It does not rely on the muscles of the back either. One of my training partners has significant back problems and can not use his back muscles without a lot of pain. Nor does he do much conditioning so he has to rely purely on skill in terms of manipulating where he routes incoming force. Now I bring this up as certainly conditioning plays a role in Akuzawa's demo, but want to note that it can be done purely through "skill" in terms of using the 7 things I listed earlier. Chaining together muscle groups doesn't work either.

It does not rely on leaning forwards into your opponent and then pushing. If you think about it for a second, if you lean in, it would certainly add something to a push backwards, however you would be in a mechanically compromised position to lift someone into the air at that point. You would likely find your torso being pushed towards the ground as your partner went upwards. If anything you want to go slightly back to counteract your arm extension. My guess is that we see Akuzawa's slight lean afterwards as a result of his partner's grip pulling him back a bit, but it is clearly after his partner has left the ground.

The version practiced by the aunkai doesn't require opening/closing the body either, namely making the torso go from a concave to convex position. Thats not to say that a breath powered version (hey the aikido version does call it kokyu, while the aunkai version is agete-literally hand raise), would not involve doing so.

It does not rely on structure/optimal alignment either, which runs true of most aunkai exercises where you are put into extreme positions where there is really only a few ways to make the exercise work (some of which are correct and some of which are not I have more recently discovered). This is readily obvious by the starting position.

From the position itself, you can't physically get any lower than your partner....

So how do you do it?

This will not be a full how to, as there is a prerequisite understanding of some of the 7 skills I listed earlier, namely "getting under" so that it feels as though you have a center of gravity lower than your opponents. As described above, you really can not get lower than your opponent physically as you can not bend one's legs even further than in seiza. Nor do you want to lean forward for the reasons discussed previously. If you are under someone, wether physically, or in the manner discussed in IS, it is always a lot easier to raise them up!

You do not want to lock the arms, but instead keep them straight. The arms merely make an arc from your lap up past shoulder height. It should have been clear from what I wrote above that the arms are not bearing the load, somewhere else is. For a long time I tried using the lower back and that is NOT right. It could sort of work, but it isn't really correct. The following is my own personal understanding. Other's are probably doing it more correctly than myself. It's more like you put the weight of your hands in your lower crotch, coupled with "reflecting" the other persons weight/energy into the ground while you push into the ground with the psoas. You effectively need to source power from somewhere lower than your partner.

The above mostly ends the how to, though I would be remiss if I did not at least attempt to explain part of what it means to "get under" or "be under" your partner. Chris, I want to help you understand so that you don't think we are trying to play word games with you.

Alex Lee recently showed me a way in which just about anyone can feel what it is like to be under your own hands VERY quickly. He had me basically squat and hold a bo/jo/bokken with my arms outstretched opponents of me. He then rested his weight on it and told me to stand up. Of course I could not lift it and him up with all my muscles straining. What would up happening was that it was as though I was doing a pullup, trying to pushback against his weight with my arms/shoulders and then trying to push with my quads off the ground.

What he suggested I do instead was pretend I was doing the limbo dance and go underneath the bo/jo/bokken (starts to look in some aspects like a power lifter). Now this doesn't mean lean back, as if you do that at this point you will fall over, rather my crotch pushed forwards and I could feel the inner part of the legs and the lower crotch area between the testicles and the anus take the load. I could then effortlessly raise the weapon and stand up. This took me maybe 2-3 times to figure out and about the same for another training partner who only has about 1 month of IS experience.

Now I can personally recreate that under the hands sensation fairly easily now without having something in my hand, it does tend to fall apart though as soon as I touch someone else as I have to figure out how to "get under" that additional weight and make it part of me. When I do have it, it becomes rather easy to move them.

HL1978

01-28-2011, 07:33 AM

I forgot to add, that I think that Akuzawa is always "under" his partners so thats why you see them unbalanced/move the way they do.

01-28-2011, 08:48 AM

First off, this comes from me, not my teacher. Second, the group of internal martial artists that is not the Aikiweb IP IS or whatever group is MUCH larger than this small group of internal. Most IMA would say Dan, Ark, Mike who? Your group is not that large, although you're working it, I'll give you that.

I could probably find 50 people who think chickens can speak English. People from all over the world, different people who have never met. I could put them on a forum together and try to tell them that chickens can not in fact speak English. Those 50 people would act like I'm crazy, because they all believe it. Looking at this small group it would be easy for them to say, "Chris, everyone is telling you the same thing, why don't you listen, chickens can clearly speak English."
All you have done is once again discredit..well more accurately dismiss, personal testimony of dozens of experienced martial artists while offering not one thing....nothing...in rebuttal except yours.
You have hundreds of these observers of English speaking chickens telling you that what they felt and feel in IP/aiki is different from what they had done their whole lives. The way they are training to move their own body is NOT the same as what they had been doing their whole lives. Okay
Please explain why they all do not know what they are talking about
HOW WERE THEY TRICKED?
.
After you address that lets see you tackle Jon Haas's post
Please respond to Jon's example where his body was being conditioned in a different manner and his own people were having trouble throwing and locking him
He went back to athletics-what he had always done- and they could.
He went back to IP training and they had trouble throwing him and locking him again
Explain this to us.

Maybe he wasn't flexing and lifting properly or we wasn't strong enough?

Of the hundreds who are now training this way and all agree that it is "different" than athletics, what are we supposed to say? That none of us know what we are talking about,?
Is that your argument and talking points?
Dan

Eric Joyce

01-28-2011, 09:22 AM

If you can pull off the shiko (sumo stomp) with someone on your back, that would be rather interesting. That one requires very little leg muscle to pull off despite the fact that beginners use their quads way to much which also applies to mabu/tenchijin as well. While I won't go into the mechanics of how the exercise is done other than saying that it requires "being under" the weight your arms and legs and that you don't bend your waist, the version he demonstrated requires making the other person effectively part of your body.

I will lay out how most people usually attempt kokyu ho, I have seen power lifters, MMA semi-pro's etc usually try it in this manner. After that I will talk about how you should be doing it, which goes back to that list of things that IS people tend to do.

The goal of the exercise is not to push the person backwards, rather to pop them predominantly upwards. Given the path of the arms, there will of course be some lateral movement. Once the person is up, then you can manipulate them over to the side via the same mechanic you use to pop them upwards (via the same list of things I mentioned to you earlier) rather than pulling them around with the arms, or twisting the hips with a rotation. It is more or less kokyu dosa. From what I remember Akuzawa sensei saying in the past, this is more or less how they spent their class time in Sagawa's Daito Ryu dojo.

It has to be understood what it feels like when this exercise is done properly. To both people, it feels like no muscular effort was expended. There is no straining of muscles like when one bench presses a lot of weight or arm wrestles. It is completely effortless and even if one was to stop raising the arms at any point, there is no straining of the arm and back muscles, you can more or less hold that position indefinitely. The partner being lifted should not break their grip at any point, though clearly the harder they grip the easier they will be to lift. If they break their grip, the person lifting has no weight to work with.

This exercise does not rely on usage of the shoulder, biceps and triceps to carry the load, or pop a person back. If you try to lift someone from that position predominantly using those muscles, it becomes quite an effort and your partner can feel you straining. If you try using the biceps, the arms tend to move backwards a bit, making the load greater on the biceps. If you raise/lift with the shoulders, the same thing happens as the shoulders wind up being disconnected from the body and are loaded. Using the triceps is a better way which I used for a long time, but is not correct either. Even if you use all 3 together it still will not work properly in recreating the feeling I described above. You do not want to pull the person forwards either. While this may take their balance, now you have more of their weight going straight down on you which makes them even harder to lift!

It does not rely on the muscles of the back either. One of my training partners has significant back problems and can not use his back muscles without a lot of pain. Nor does he do much conditioning so he has to rely purely on skill in terms of manipulating where he routes incoming force. Now I bring this up as certainly conditioning plays a role in Akuzawa's demo, but want to note that it can be done purely through "skill" in terms of using the 7 things I listed earlier. Chaining together muscle groups doesn't work either.

It does not rely on leaning forwards into your opponent and then pushing. If you think about it for a second, if you lean in, it would certainly add something to a push backwards, however you would be in a mechanically compromised position to lift someone into the air at that point. You would likely find your torso being pushed towards the ground as your partner went upwards. If anything you want to go slightly back to counteract your arm extension. My guess is that we see Akuzawa's slight lean afterwards as a result of his partner's grip pulling him back a bit, but it is clearly after his partner has left the ground.

The version practiced by the aunkai doesn't require opening/closing the body either, namely making the torso go from a concave to convex position. Thats not to say that a breath powered version (hey the aikido version does call it kokyu, while the aunkai version is agete-literally hand raise), would not involve doing so.

It does not rely on structure/optimal alignment either, which runs true of most aunkai exercises where you are put into extreme positions where there is really only a few ways to make the exercise work (some of which are correct and some of which are not I have more recently discovered). This is readily obvious by the starting position.

From the position itself, you can't physically get any lower than your partner....

So how do you do it?

This will not be a full how to, as there is a prerequisite understanding of some of the 7 skills I listed earlier, namely "getting under" so that it feels as though you have a center of gravity lower than your opponents. As described above, you really can not get lower than your opponent physically as you can not bend one's legs even further than in seiza. Nor do you want to lean forward for the reasons discussed previously. If you are under someone, wether physically, or in the manner discussed in IS, it is always a lot easier to raise them up!

You do not want to lock the arms, but instead keep them straight. The arms merely make an arc from your lap up past shoulder height. It should have been clear from what I wrote above that the arms are not bearing the load, somewhere else is. For a long time I tried using the lower back and that is NOT right. It could sort of work, but it isn't really correct. The following is my own personal understanding. Other's are probably doing it more correctly than myself. It's more like you put the weight of your hands in your lower crotch, coupled with "reflecting" the other persons weight/energy into the ground while you push into the ground with the psoas. You effectively need to source power from somewhere lower than your partner.

The above mostly ends the how to, though I would be remiss if I did not at least attempt to explain part of what it means to "get under" or "be under" your partner. Chris, I want to help you understand so that you don't think we are trying to play word games with you.

Alex Lee recently showed me a way in which just about anyone can feel what it is like to be under your own hands VERY quickly. He had me basically squat and hold a bo/jo/bokken with my arms outstretched opponents of me. He then rested his weight on it and told me to stand up. Of course I could not lift it and him up with all my muscles straining. What would up happening was that it was as though I was doing a pullup, trying to pushback against his weight with my arms/shoulders and then trying to push with my quads off the ground.

What he suggested I do instead was pretend I was doing the limbo dance and go underneath the bo/jo/bokken (starts to look in some aspects like a power lifter). Now this doesn't mean lean back, as if you do that at this point you will fall over, rather my crotch pushed forwards and I could feel the inner part of the legs and the lower crotch area between the testicles and the anus take the load. I could then effortlessly raise the weapon and stand up. This took me maybe 2-3 times to figure out and about the same for another training partner who only has about 1 month of IS experience.

Now I can personally recreate that under the hands sensation fairly easily now without having something in my hand, it does tend to fall apart though as soon as I touch someone else as I have to figure out how to "get under" that additional weight and make it part of me. When I do have it, it becomes rather easy to move them.

Hunter,

Thank you for this explanation. So, the getting under uke (using the jo/bokken example) you are connecting to uke and taking his tension (or taking his center) into you and channeling into into the lower crotch & inner thighs? The visual I get is a line that is coming directly through you and into the ground...like a tripod. Am I getting this visual correct? I'm asking this to get a visual and understanding in my head.

JangChoe

01-28-2011, 09:26 AM

I agree with Chris. It's just a parlor trick. All you need to do is generate a force vector from the ground to respond to your opponent's force vector. Just learn that skill, and you're golden.

Rob Watson

01-28-2011, 09:33 AM

Alex Lee recently showed me a way in which just about anyone can feel what it is like to be under your own hands VERY quickly. He had me basically squat and hold a bo/jo/bokken with my arms outstretched opponents of me. He then rested his weight on it and told me to stand up. Of course I could not lift it and him up with all my muscles straining. What would up happening was that it was as though I was doing a pullup, trying to pushback against his weight with my arms/shoulders and then trying to push with my quads off the ground.

What he suggested I do instead was pretend I was doing the limbo dance and go underneath the bo/jo/bokken (starts to look in some aspects like a power lifter). Now this doesn't mean lean back, as if you do that at this point you will fall over, rather my crotch pushed forwards and I could feel the inner part of the legs and the lower crotch area between the testicles and the anus take the load. I could then effortlessly raise the weapon and stand up. This took me maybe 2-3 times to figure out and about the same for another training partner who only has about 1 month of IS experience.

Now I can personally recreate that under the hands sensation fairly easily now without having something in my hand, it does tend to fall apart though as soon as I touch someone else as I have to figure out how to "get under" that additional weight and make it part of me. When I do have it, it becomes rather easy to move them.

A photo or sketch of this setup would really help. Sounds like a nice drill but the particulars are not clearly described to my reading.

Adman

01-28-2011, 09:37 AM

Ark effortlessly lifts that guy up and sets him back.

Hi David,

I'm just catching up on some of this thread, but to be fair, it's not that Akuzawa lifts that guy all on his own. Nor I think it was his goal to have the holder respond in that exact manner. The guy holding is adding a lot to the direction he ultimately takes. He is taken up and to the rear and since he doesn't want to fall awkwardly (and has no chance of keeping his shoulders down), he tries to get the rest of his body back in order and in balance, and ends up with a "seiza hop™". :D If the guy was a statue, Akuzawa's push back wouldn't have been so dramatic, or if the guy was just a bag of potatoes, he would have just slumped backwards. In any case it takes two-to-tango, your mileage may vary, etc.

So, to ask someone to replicate certain results, requires a certain amount of similar circumstances/constraints/controls, etc. All other things being equal that is, such as skill.

Thanks,
Adam

Demetrio Cereijo

01-28-2011, 10:01 AM

Clarity--besides describing this phenomena in terms that are phenomenologically convenient to the IP proponent (and to other IP guys) it is hard to achieve clarity. That is, clarity is not available to people who don't do this stuff because you can't perfectly describe the body-mind dynamics and effect an intersubjective miracle.
Which has resulted in the IS people developing their own language, let's call it "internalese", only understood by them.

Imagine for a moment I started to post in Spanish how to do a shoelace (whick is itself a complex task) then, when you say you didn't understood I put the blame on you.

Tim Fong's Spear Post is probably the closest thing to achieve objectivity and clarity, because he touches on anatomy.
At least he tried to use a common code. Why other IS proponent can't try the same? People here are not (well, not most of them) illiterate. Plus if the skeptics see an IS proponent trying to establish communication in a code they understand may be they start to pay attention.

Objectivity--IP guys suggest to other people to meet these people claiming to do something different. I don't know how 'objective' you can go beyond that.
That's not objectivity. That's asking for another subjective account to add to the many we have.

Objectivity: an objective account is one which attempts to capture the nature of the object studied in a way that does not depend on any features of the particular subject who studies it. An objective account is, in this sense, impartial, one which could ideally be accepted by any subject, because it does not draw on any assumptions, prejudices, or values of particular subjects. This feature of objective accounts means that disputes can be contained to the object studied.
http://www.iva.dk/jni/lifeboat/info.asp?subjectid=314

How could you guarantee Chris' account of what happened in the case he met a skilled IS proponent lacks subjectivity?

Patience--Chris is intellectually dishonest and that stuff does not warrant patience, especially mine. If he was ignorant, and honest and humble about it, then of course, patience is granted. BTW, it took a lot of patience for me to carefully write that post. I don't think Chris is aware that he is intellectually dishonest
There are more people reading and participating than Chris, and even if you consider him intellectually dishonest, there have been few posts really adressing the OP question: what is the perceived difference, and assumed superiority of internal martial arts over good athletics training?

Logic--Please point out to me where an IP proponent has failed to be 'logical'. Maybe David and I got carried away by posting some sarcastic stuff, but beyond that...where is the ill-logic? :confused:
The lack of logic is in a generalized use of:

Person X performs better than Person Y
Person X is an IS stilyst while Person Y is an athlete.
Therefore: IS is superior to athleticism.

Don't you see the flaws in this logic?

ChrisHein

01-28-2011, 10:13 AM

All you have done is once again discredit..well more accurately dismiss, personal testimony of dozens of experienced martial artists while offering not one thing....nothing...in rebuttal except yours.

Then we are even. I say no, they say yes, it's a draw. We'll have to go beyond mere opinion if we are going to get anywhere.

You have hundreds of these observers of English speaking chickens telling you that what they felt and feel in IP/aiki is different from what they had done their whole lives. The way they are training to move their own body is NOT the same as what they had been doing their whole lives. Okay
Please explain why they all do not know what they are talking about
HOW WERE THEY TRICKED?

This is what we are trying to get to the bottom of. I'm not saying that these people are not experiencing something. I'm saying that I don't believe it's what they think it is. They are saying that it is. We are now trying to hash out the details. It is possible that I am wrong, but I have seen nothing other than opinion, speculation and accounts of personal experiences as arguments.

I discount personal experience because it's subjective. In my head I might see dragons flying around, but that doesn't mean they are. Personal experience is a very real thing to you, but not necessarily to anyone else.

After you address that lets see you tackle Jon Haas's post
Please respond to Jon's example where his body was being conditioned in a different manner and his own people were having trouble throwing and locking him
He went back to athletics-what he had always done- and they could.
He went back to IP training and they had trouble throwing him and locking him again
Explain this to us.

Again Dan, I can't speak to his personal experiences. Maybe if we talk in an objective fashion, something where we can all get information at the same time we can talk about it.

Of the hundreds who are now training this way and all agree that it is "different" than athletics, what are we supposed to say? That none of us know what we are talking about,?
Is that your argument and talking points?
Dan

I'm not trying to make this personal, I'm not trying to call anyone anything. I simply want to figure out what is going on.

Dan, it would help so much if you could make a quick video. Why won't you do this?

HL1978

01-28-2011, 10:22 AM

Hunter,

Thank you for this explanation. So, the getting under uke (using the jo/bokken example) you are connecting to uke and taking his tension (or taking his center) into you and channeling into into the lower crotch & inner thighs? The visual I get is a line that is coming directly through you and into the ground...like a tripod. Am I getting this visual correct? I'm asking this to get a visual and understanding in my head.

Yes, Mike Sigman has presented diagrams previously which show two people with their centers connected together as though they are a 4 legged horse. You are connecting their center/the power they are giving you "to your crotch" and loading/issuing power from there. It is almost like you are bypassing your own arms/shoulders.

Hopefully, I made it clear in my explanation that this is only one component of the entire picture. "Sinking the qi", reflecting your opponeent's power, and the rest of the stuff I previously listed is beyond what I want to lay out for now as I don't have the entire picture myself. I could probably recite the theory, but that doesn't mean I actually know how to do it.

HL1978

01-28-2011, 10:24 AM

A photo or sketch of this setup would really help. Sounds like a nice drill but the particulars are not clearly described to my reading.

I work at home so I can film it, but I don't have anyone to push on me.

I'll film something and put it up in a bit.

phitruong

01-28-2011, 10:28 AM

i thought i mentioned in passing by way of the runner example, but i guessed i need to spell it out a bit clearer.

when i heard the word "athleticism", in my mind, i thought of runner, swimmer, weight lifter, high jumper, basketball player, soccer player, and so on. from my point of view, athletes trained to be one dimension dealing with force. if a push straight from the front of an athlete he/she/it would push straight back. however, if someone would apply a force lateral to the athlete at the same time, his/her/it would have a hard time dealing with it. if you watch some of the soccer plays, you would see a soccer player running full tilt and if another player body check him/her from the side, the running soccer player would often goes tumbling into the grass. IS folks basic training is to be able to deal with forces coming at many directions at the same time - up, down, front, back, left and right - to name a few. so from my point of view, IS training, at the foundation, is multi-dimensional force neutralization. now, if normal athlete learn such training, would make them much better athlete than before. the soccer player would keep on going and score! :) (yup! me likes soccer!)

01-28-2011, 10:30 AM

There are more people reading and participating than Chris, and even if you consider him intellectually dishonest, there have been few posts really adressing the OP question: what is the perceived difference, and assumed superiority of internal martial arts over good athletics training?

The lack of logic is in a generalized use of:
Person X performs better than Person Y
Person X is an IS stilyst while Person Y is an athlete.
Therefore: IS is superior to athleticism.

Don't you see the flaws in this logic?
The OP was answered
Why do you perceive internal superior to athleticism
In some ways it's not a question of superior or lesser
In other ways it is; among which are being:
Harder to throw
Harder to lock up
Easier to throw others
Easier to lock
Hard hits in small spaces
With weapons it gets even better-I would argue it superior there.

There was never a question as to how or why.

The question of performance is relative to demand. There are things that someone with IP skills can do that an equal sized athlete cannot. I don't debate it here. No athlete.has ever disagreed with me in person...and it is never contentious and ugly. It's friendly and matter of fact.

My only caveate -if we are talking Martial arts- it sure as hell doesn't teach you how to fight. That's a different topic and that's your own hard work of a different sort. You make of it what you will.

Dan

ChrisHein

01-28-2011, 10:30 AM

Adman

01-28-2011, 10:39 AM

i thought i mentioned in passing by way of the runner example, but i guessed i need to spell it out a bit clearer.

<snipped stuff>

if you watch some of the soccer plays, you would see a soccer player running full tilt and if another player body check him/her from the side, the running soccer player would often goes tumbling into the grass. IS folks basic training is to be able to deal with forces coming at many directions at the same time - up, down, front, back, left and right - to name a few. so from my point of view, IS training, at the foundation, is multi-dimensional force neutralization. now, if normal athlete learn such training, would make them much better athlete than before. the soccer player would keep on going and score! :) (yup! me likes soccer!)

Sorry Phi, I must be in some kind of mood today, but a body in motion where that body is in the air (such as a running athlete or IS master), at some point, can be toppled as easily as the next guy. If there's no ground to support or act against, then all you're dealing with is momentum that can be be redirected, especially if you're talking about a force directed from the side. Perhaps walking would be a better example. At least one foot is on the ground at all times.

Thanks,
Adam

ChrisHein

01-28-2011, 10:42 AM

The OP was answered
Why do you perceive internal superior to athleticism
In some ways it's not a question of superior or lesser
In other ways it is; among which are being:
Harder to throw
Harder to lock up
Easier to throw others
Easier to lock
Hard hits in small spaces
With weapons it gets even better-I would argue it superior there.

I could say the same thing of someone who was about to undergo athletic training. Athletic training makes you better at all of those things as well.

The question of performance is relative to demand. There are things that someone with IP skills can do that an equal sized athlete cannot.

What are these things, can you show them?

No athlete.has ever disagreed with me in person...and it is never contentious and ugly. It's friendly and matter of fact.

Here again we have subjectivity. I'm not saying this is so, but you could just be saying this. If it is true (which I don't actually doubt) I don't know the caliber of athlete. Even if they are high end athletes I don't know their understanding of what they are doing (natural ability vs trained athletics). Even if all of those things are so, it could be that they were just saying that to be nice to you.

I'm not trying to be a jerk, but what you have presented is in no way evidence.

My only caveate -if we are talking Martial arts- it sure as hell doesn't teach you how to fight. That's a different topic and that's your own hard work of a different sort. You make of it what you will.

Dan

This is the same for athletics. They many the body better, but don't teach you how to fight. A body that works better is better in a fight, but being able doesn't mean you are good in a fight.

01-28-2011, 10:46 AM

.....I'm not trying to make this personal, I'm not trying to call anyone anything. I simply want to figure out what is going on.
You could also argue that description of riding a bike are ridiculous and you really...want to figure out how to do it by reading about it on the net. Sooner or later someone is going to say "Hey Chris, go sit on a bike and make it move."

This is what we are trying to get to the bottom of. I'm not saying that these people are not experiencing something. I'm saying that I don't believe it's what they think it is. They are saying that it is. We are now trying to hash out the details. I discount personal experience because it's subjective.

This goes nowhere. .I say I move from Dantian/hara, you say so do you. Okay.
I encounter this all the time. in person, it is agreed that it is different.
Next?
Eliminating martial techniques, there are any number of power out examples that have been offered. I do a push-out drill where they are in hanmi or any other position they want to be in with their arms straight out. I stand in a highly compromised straight leg, straight arm stance, with my arms out toward them palms to palms. They try to push and walk. I stand there, they feel like it is pushing on a wall. I then wiggle and turn to jello and they still cannot move forward.
Where is the athleticism in what I am doing?
What conditioning is doing that?

Dan, it would help so much if you could make a quick video. Why won't you do this?
Er...because I'm not interested in doing so.
It would also "help so much" if you met Ark, Mike or me.
Cheers
Dan

Brian Griffith

01-28-2011, 10:53 AM

Other then getting someone to touch our muscles or attaching sensors to them, I don't know how we could figure out if IP people are using less muscle when they do this.

So...your saying....It has to be felt? :D

time for me to quit reading ...been doing to much of that lately....

as for the original question...I'm still searching for the individual/s who went and got hands on time with someone with this ability and says they are full of it...haven't seen it yet.

Brian Griffith

HL1978

01-28-2011, 10:57 AM

I can do this, but I'm not sure if I would meet your qualifications. I'm not trying to be a jerk here, but again if the same result can be achieved, I don't know what else to look for.

On something like this, would your argument be that IP people would be less fatigued than an athlete doing the same thing? Or simply that you are interested in a specific quality personally?
-----

Again, effortless seems a bit subjective. What is effortless for one might not be effortless for another even though they are using the same means. For example, If I can easily bench 400lbs, and you can only bench 200lbs, benching 175 might be effortless for me, and I could do many many reps, for you it would be very near max, and take a lot of effort. I understand what you are saying, but I feel that "effortless" is a very personal thing.

I think you might have recognized something there. :)

There is a specific quality/feeling/sensation that we are all looking for. That is to say, that to most people looking from the outside, wether someone uses internals or externals to power something it looks the same, but to both people it feels substantially different. This is why I hesitate to call one way better than the other if the same results are achieved. Now if you have a little bit of experience with internals, and you watch you might be able to tell how each movement was powered between the athletic person and IS powered person. Likewise, the effects on the partner might look different.

I understand your point regarding strength and how "effortlessness" can be subjective. If you decide to chase after this feeling/mode of movement, the feeling of it being effortless is really just that. For example, if I raise my arms with no one pushing on them, then I raise my arms with someone holding on to them utilizing IS for both raises, it really doesn't feel any different to me. My arms kind of just float upwards as though something else was raising them other than my shoulders. To the person who is holding my arms, they don't feel me lifting them up at all. What feels strange to them is that they do not feel any resistance, they can't really tell where I am sourcing my power from.

The wacky thing is that when I do conditoining exercises now, my shoulders don't really get tired like I used too, instead other parts of my body start to get tired and from my experienced this shifts lower and lower the more skilled/conditioned you get.

Now to get back to your original question in your first post, the way in which this may be "better" is that the athletic person may not have experienced this sort of thing before so you have that element of surprise/unreadability coupled with being able to generate power from unusual positions in which others might be seriously compromised.

HL1978

01-28-2011, 11:00 AM

Sorry Phi, I must be in some kind of mood today, but a body in motion where that body is in the air (such as a running athlete or IS master), at some point, can be toppled as easily as the next guy. If there's no ground to support or act against, then all you're dealing with is momentum that can be be redirected, especially if you're talking about a force directed from the side. Perhaps walking would be a better example. At least one foot is on the ground at all times.

Thanks,
Adam

Well, if you look at the Mifune "Essence of Judo" video that sort of situation actually arises. Mifune, while in the air and without a connection to the ground via his own body, connects through his opponent's body to the ground and throws the opponent.

That video really is amazing to watch. (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3346298601525244862#) I don't have time right now to watch the whole thing (its 60 minutes long) to find that particular demonstration.

ChrisHein

01-28-2011, 11:17 AM

You could also argue that description of riding a bike are ridiculous and you really...want to figure out how to do it by reading about it on the net. Sooner or later someone is going to say "Hey Chris, go sit on a bike and make it move."

But the thing is, I can see people riding bikes. I can't see any internal people doing anything that I don't understand.

Eliminating martial techniques, there are any number of power out examples that have been offered. I do a push-out drill where they are in hanmi or any other position they want to be in with their arms straight out. I stand in a highly compromised straight leg, straight arm stance, with my arms out toward them palms to palms. They try to push and walk. I stand there, they feel like it is pushing on a wall. I then wiggle and turn to jello and they still cannot move forward.
Where is the athleticism in what I am doing?
What conditioning is doing that?

Again Dan, this is simply a description. I can think of any number of ways to do this. I have been practicing stage magic since I was a small child. I know quite a bit about the art. It is rare that I see something that I do not understand. But if you were to simply say, "This guy had a quarter, then it disappeared, how do you explain that." I can't , because I didn't see it, I don't know the context that this is happening in. Can I think of ways to do it, yes, but those would be pure speculation until I saw it.

Er...because I'm not interested in doing so.
It would also "help so much" if you met Ark, Mike or me.
Cheers
Dan

This is fine, but don't compare taking 10 minutes out of your day to make a video to support your statements, to me paying several hundred dollars, and many hours of travel, to do something that I don't believe is worth my time.

C. David Henderson

01-28-2011, 11:18 AM

The lack of logic is in a generalized use of:

Person X performs better than Person Y
Person X is an IS stilyst while Person Y is an athlete.
Therefore: IS is superior to athleticism.

Don't you see the flaws in this logic?

Hi Demetrio,

Interesting point (among others).

The logical flaw I was thinking about is built into the thread's juxtaposition of a hypothetical athlete's "ability" to perform concrete acts performed by Real Person(TM) x, y, or z.

What does the conclusion that "an athlete could do that" mean? Pretty hard to say if it means anything in its current form. (Although I suspect what Chris would like is for someone to post a video so he can, as he has in the past, attempt to duplicate what he sees on his own video.)

The argument-form you lay out has come up more than once in threads like this (a thread about "ju" versus "aiki" comes to mind).

However, I think the default response of the skeptics in this threat has tended to be that this "IS/IP" stuff is either unremarkable (an "athlete" could do that plus a whole lot more) or unreal (chickens speaking english).

I don't perceive anyone being less that honest. Still, sometimes it's read like a transcript of a game of "bring me a stone." ("That's not a stone, that's just a [rock, pebble, mote in my eye.]" "Is so -- you're either blind or pretending." "Look, even if I were, that's not objective proof that this is a stone." ) :hypno:

I suspect there is no way to resolve this kind of dispute from a distance, even assuming the best of intentions.

01-28-2011, 11:39 AM

But the thing is, I can see people riding bikes. I can't see any internal people doing anything that I don't understand.

Chris,
Let's go back to the wall push exercise and your initial response:

I can't have someone push me in the wall with all their force, and simply walk away from the wall. Nor have I ever seen anyone else do that.

Quite a few of us have experienced that. Not heard about it, but experienced it - directly. But, for you, to put that into something your mind could try to fathom, you came up with this:

I can however think of several situations where this could be made possible. I don't know what you are seeing, if you show it to me, I can work with it, but words are not doing it.

That was something you don't understand. And I would bet that even if you saw it on video, you'd still think there was some "trick" to it that "normal" people could do.

This is fine, but don't compare taking 10 minutes out of your day to make a video to support your statements, to me paying several hundred dollars, and many hours of travel, to do something that I don't believe is worth my time.

Then, seriously, Chris, why are you even posting about it? More importantly, if it's not something that's worth your time, why would we ever think it worth ours to answer your questions? Let alone video anything?

ChrisHein

01-28-2011, 11:40 AM

I think you might have recognized something there. :)

There is a specific quality/feeling/sensation that we are all looking for. That is to say, that to most people looking from the outside, wether someone uses internals or externals to power something it looks the same, but to both people it feels substantially different. This is why I hesitate to call one way better than the other if the same results are achieved. Now if you have a little bit of experience with internals, and you watch you might be able to tell how each movement was powered between the athletic person and IS powered person. Likewise, the effects on the partner might look different.

It's this personal factor that I can't get around. Let's say two guys are in a fight, one is an athlete and one is an internal guy. They have the same respective skill in their systems, same weight heights etc. If they always fight to a draw then both are equal systems. In my opinion athletics is the better route to chose though. Simply because it's more readily available, cheaper, and more people doing it. So if that were the case, I would pick athletics over IP. However I could understand why studying something more exotic would be interesting to some people.

I don't believe this to be the case however. I believe that internal is a less advanced system of understanding the body then modern sport training. So I don't understand why anyone would chose this way of learning to use the body over modern athletic practices.

I understand your point regarding strength and how "effortlessness" can be subjective. If you decide to chase after this feeling/mode of movement, the feeling of it being effortless is really just that. For example, if I raise my arms with no one pushing on them, then I raise my arms with someone holding on to them utilizing IS for both raises, it really doesn't feel any different to me. My arms kind of just float upwards as though something else was raising them other than my shoulders. To the person who is holding my arms, they don't feel me lifting them up at all. What feels strange to them is that they do not feel any resistance, they can't really tell where I am sourcing my power from.

Okay, bare with me here, this might sound like a jab, but it's not meant to be. I understand the idea of what you are describing, but to me (understand I'm not trying to be rude) it sounds like mental conditioning. If the person who is trying to resist your movement does not feel like they are resisting, they they most likely are not resisting. I understand the "it has to be felt" as it applies here. But if their are only 3 people in the world who can do this, it's pretty hard to get around. I also feel like if I were to meet up with Mike, and say, we'll I didn't feel what you guys are talking about, you would say well Mike isn't as good as Dan, and if I met Dan and said the same, it would be well you should meet Ark, and if the same results came out, it would be we'll you just don't get it because (enter answer here). I feel like this kind of thing is so personal that it can't be argued with.

I'm not trying to be difficult here, but can you see where I'm coming from?

The wacky thing is that when I do conditoining exercises now, my shoulders don't really get tired like I used too, instead other parts of my body start to get tired and from my experienced this shifts lower and lower the more skilled/conditioned you get.

I have experienced this exact same thing in my regular Aikido training. When I used to do suburi, my arms would hurt, then that disappeared, then my back was tight, then my lower back, then when that went away it was my calves then my feet hurt. This happened over a long period of time. Now I have to do a great number of suburi before I get any aches at all. I believe this is do to me letting go of unnecessary tension that I was holding in these point. I don't think this is beyond the scope of athletic training.

Now to get back to your original question in your first post, the way in which this may be "better" is that the athletic person may not have experienced this sort of thing before so you have that element of surprise/unreadability coupled with being able to generate power from unusual positions in which others might be seriously compromised.

I see where you are going with this. It's just that I don't believe a modern football running back can't do all of these things at a high level already. I believe athletes to be physically better at this stuff. I would like to find ways that we can get beyond belief.

ChrisHein

01-28-2011, 11:47 AM

Chris,
Then, seriously, Chris, why are you even posting about it? More importantly, if it's not something that's worth your time, why would we ever think it worth ours to answer your questions? Let alone video anything?

There is this slow creeping idea, that Aiki, as it relates to Aikido is what you guys call IP, IS or what have you. I disagree with this strongly.

I don't believe that IP is anything special, I've not seen or heard anything that would convince me to spend much of my time or energy on it. I do spend a lot of time on Aikido though, and I don't appreciate what I feel is the the hijacking of the word "Aiki". To have many here tell it, only Dan can do "Aiki" and everyone else is missing something. I do not buy it.

Would I give Dan $300, get time off work, get a hotel, and travel many hours to do something I don't think is anything special, no. Will I take 10 minutes out of my day to make a video, yes.

kewms

01-28-2011, 11:49 AM

Again, effortless seems a bit subjective. What is effortless for one might not be effortless for another even though they are using the same means. For example, If I can easily bench 400lbs, and you can only bench 200lbs, benching 175 might be effortless for me, and I could do many many reps, for you it would be very near max, and take a lot of effort. I understand what you are saying, but I feel that "effortless" is a very personal thing.

I can move, with little or no perceived effort, individuals who weigh significantly more than I do, and significantly more than my squat or deadlift max. And I'm not even good at this stuff.

Katherine

ChrisHein

01-28-2011, 11:51 AM

I can move, with little or no perceived effort, individuals who weigh significantly more than I do, and significantly more than my squat or deadlift max. And I'm not even good at this stuff.

Katherine

So can I. So can any football running back.

01-28-2011, 11:53 AM

The argument-form you lay out has come up more than once in threads like this (a thread about "ju" versus "aiki" comes to mind).

Why would there be any arguing over "ju" versus "aiki"? Kano pretty much defined both as being the same.

Ueshiba learns Daito ryu aiki, which is the method of in-yo (yin/yang).

Kano's concept of Ju no Ri, was based upon the Taoist precept, "reversing is the movement of the Tao," also described by the statement "the most yielding things in the world overcome the most unyielding." Kano combined Ju no Ri with the interplay of forces as defined by the precept of in-yo (yin and yang, hardness and softness, negative and positive, receptiveness and resistance)
http://www.aikidojournal.com/?id=2138

1930 Kano verifies that Ueshiba's aiki via in/yo was Kano's view of an ideal budo.

The core of what Kano viewed as the ideal of his art was physically manifested by Ueshiba's demonstration of Daito ryu aiki. Pretty clear to me. :)

kewms

01-28-2011, 11:53 AM

There is this slow creeping idea, that Aiki, as it relates to Aikido is what you guys call IP, IS or what have you. I disagree with this strongly.

I don't believe that IP is anything special, I've not seen or heard anything that would convince me to spend much of my time or energy on it. I do spend a lot of time on Aikido though, and I don't appreciate what I feel is the the hijacking of the word "Aiki". To have many here tell it, only Dan can do "Aiki" and everyone else is missing something. I do not buy it.

Would I give Dan $300, get time off work, get a hotel, and travel many hours to do something I don't think is anything special, no. Will I take 10 minutes out of my day to make a video, yes.

Okay, then. Can you do everything that Ikeda Sensei or Saotome Sensei can? How about Tohei Sensei or O'Sensei himself?

If so, let's see the video.

If not, is it "worth your time" to learn?

Katherine

kewms

01-28-2011, 11:57 AM

So can I. So can any football running back.

From a static grab?

As for running backs, it's not unusual for an NFL running back to have a 400+ pound squat. Not many humans weigh more than that, so he doesn't have the opportunity to test whether he could move them.

Katherine

Adman

01-28-2011, 11:58 AM

Well, if you look at the Mifune "Essence of Judo" video that sort of situation actually arises. Mifune, while in the air and without a connection to the ground via his own body, connects through his opponent's body to the ground and throws the opponent.

That video really is amazing to watch. (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3346298601525244862#) I don't have time right now to watch the whole thing (its 60 minutes long) to find that particular demonstration.

Yeah, I remember that video. I only watched a little into it to see an example of what you're referring to. But what's happening in that video, is not what Phi was offering in his example. Mifune is already doing a lot to control the situation, while managing himself. Even if he is suddenly airborne, it's almost as if it's by his own design. In any case, once you've left the ground, you're eliminating a lot of options that are at your disposal, especially if you're trying to make a side-by-side comparison between athlete and "internal". For instance, a good internal stylist might not be worth a damn as a runner, while an athlete might be hard to bring down no matter what you throw at them (whether you like your football American or European ;) ).

Best,
Adam

ChrisHein

01-28-2011, 12:00 PM

ChrisHein

01-28-2011, 12:02 PM

From a static grab?

As for running backs, it's not unusual for an NFL running back to have a 400+ pound squat. Not many humans weigh more than that, so he doesn't have the opportunity to test whether he could move them.

Katherine

NFL running backs can throw huge athletic men to the ground without touching them. They do it all the time, it happens several times in each game.

01-28-2011, 12:08 PM

Here is some video of me doing some of the things you may be talking about:

http://www.aikidostudent.com/content/?p=742

http://www.aikidostudent.com/content/?p=739

Again without specifics it's hard to know what you are talking about.
I can certainly see what you mean by stage magic and tricks. Thank goodness I don't involve myself with that stuff.

Tell me, when you lift a barbell...is it a trick?
Is conditioning the body.....a trick?
Dan

ChrisHein

01-28-2011, 12:10 PM

Tell me, when you lift a barbell...is it a trick?
Is conditioning the body.....a trick?
Dan

Depends on what I'm telling people when I'm doing it.

01-28-2011, 12:26 PM

Depends on what I'm telling people when I'm doing it.
Are you saying that you would be interested in misleading them?
Dan

ChrisHein

01-28-2011, 12:32 PM

Are you saying that you would be interested in misleading them?
Dan

Nope, but others may be, if they were interested in tricking people for some reason. It's easy to trick people if you want to.

kewms

01-28-2011, 12:32 PM

NFL running backs can throw huge athletic men to the ground without touching them. They do it all the time, it happens several times in each game.

Again, can they do it from a static grab?

No touch throws are actually pretty easy if the attacker is sufficiently committed. More a matter of timing than anything else. That's not what people are talking about here.

Katherine

HL1978

01-28-2011, 12:33 PM

It's this personal factor that I can't get around. Let's say two guys are in a fight, one is an athlete and one is an internal guy. They have the same respective skill in their systems, same weight heights etc. If they always fight to a draw then both are equal systems. In my opinion athletics is the better route to chose though. Simply because it's more readily available, cheaper, and more people doing it. So if that were the case, I would pick athletics over IP. However I could understand why studying something more exotic would be interesting to some people.

I would agree. Its a personal decision that is best left up to each person, though in my own opinion, it is required if you want to want to make Aikido work in the manner shown by Ueshiba. If one just wants to compete/have fun the athletic route is a heck of a lot easier and more accessible. I don't think anyone who is on the seminar circuit will tell you much different.

In my own case, I felt Akuzawa do stuff to me that I had never felt before. Came back a year later and his students felt/could do some of the stuff he could do. A couple years I felt Mike and realized that there were other people out there who could do the same. For me at least, once I felt this sort of strength I saw immediate utility, it just became a question of how much do I really want to figure it out, which has waxed and waned over the years.

I don't believe this to be the case however. I believe that internal is a less advanced system of understanding the body then modern sport training. So I don't understand why anyone would chose this way of learning to use the body over modern athletic practices.

Well, it depends as reworking your body in the internal way requires a signifigant amount of time and mental energy. Ive been doing it for 6 years and figured out 6 months ago that other than learning how to use structure, I had been pretty much doing everything wrong. If you can get hands on with a guy who you can't throw, can't read, and who literally toses you with one finger it tends to grab one's attention.

Okay, bare with me here, this might sound like a jab, but it's not meant to be. I understand the idea of what you are describing, but to me (understand I'm not trying to be rude) it sounds like mental conditioning. If the person who is trying to resist your movement does not feel like they are resisting, they they most likely are not resisting. I understand the "it has to be felt" as it applies here. But if their are only 3 people in the world who can do this, it's pretty hard to get around. I also feel like if I were to meet up with Mike, and say, we'll I didn't feel what you guys are talking about, you would say well Mike isn't as good as Dan, and if I met Dan and said the same, it would be well you should meet Ark, and if the same results came out, it would be we'll you just don't get it because (enter answer here). I feel like this kind of thing is so personal that it can't be argued with.

There are a heck of a lot more than 3 people out there who can do this sort of thing. It's just that there are several names out there who reguarly offer public seminars that show up on aikiweb. Now, I have never felt Dan, but I have felt Ark, Mike, and a bunch of other people out there who can do these skills. There are differences to be sure, due to skill, mass, approach etc, however none of them felt like they were overtly utilizing muscle. We just hear from Mike and Dan the most due to their native english ability. Some of the others who have offered seminars include the Chen Tai Chi guys from chen village (CXW, Chen Bing etc), Sam Chin (and some of his students), Forrest Chang, Tetsuzan Kuroda, Kenji Ushiro, then you have people related to the Roppokai, Don Angier etc. Now I can't personally vet all of the above people, but I have met a couple of them or seen video of some of them, but their names do appear from time to time offering seminars on aikiweb.

I think the idea of mental suggestion is quite interesting. I believe a while back, you posted some videos of you and a partner working on structure. I'm sure you are quite familiar that when you set up your body in such a way that you have really good structure that a partner can more or less push themsleves away the harder they try and push into you so they won't feel an active push. To be sure, there is an element of this with someone who is using good internal strength, and Adam's previous comments are connect with respect to why the guy flies in the air with Akuzawa. Now even if you don't "resisit" or push into the guy, you won't feel that person exerting any effort either.

I gave the example earlier with agete/kokyu dosa etc where Akuzawa can raise you up and stop you at any point and you won't feel him bearing the weight with his arms/you won't feel resistance.

I'm not trying to be difficult here, but can you see where I'm coming from?

Absolutely, and hence the difficultly talking about this stuff. All of the teachers/seminar givers above should be able to clearly demonstrate the difference between muscle and IS powered movement. It is really dramatic. I don't think you are being difficult at all. People who feel this sort of thing can come accross as trying to spread the gospel.

I have experienced this exact same thing in my regular Aikido training. When I used to do suburi, my arms would hurt, then that disappeared, then my back was tight, then my lower back, then when that went away it was my calves then my feet hurt. This happened over a long period of time. Now I have to do a great number of suburi before I get any aches at all. I believe this is do to me letting go of unnecessary tension that I was holding in these point. I don't think this is beyond the scope of athletic training.

This is a bit different, its more like how you are supporting your upper body and how you can use the middle/lower body to move the arms. Sounds a bit crazy, but you can look into discussions about the later topic by looking into Mike Sigman's suit model. As for the first thing, you are correct about tension/relaxation, but this is a bit different, its more like you start supporting the weight of the limbs somewhere other than in the limb itself.

I see where you are going with this. It's just that I don't believe a modern football running back can't do all of these things at a high level already. I believe athletes to be physically better at this stuff. I would like to find ways that we can get beyond belief.

It's actually funny you mention this, the Chargers brought in an Isshinryu karate guy named AJ Advincula as a body management coach back in the 80's/90's (for 6 years) who wound up teaching the players Sanchin and some internal concepts (Advincula has in my opinion better understanding of IS concepts than you average karateka, but IS guru's would probably say its limited). From his own reporting, the guys who took his teachings to heart had longer career's on average.

01-28-2011, 12:39 PM

Nope, but others may be, if they were interested in tricking people for some reason. It's easy to trick people if you want to.
So, would you agree that conditioning, and the results of conditioning is not a trick, but a physical event?
Dan

01-28-2011, 12:41 PM

Again, can they do it from a static grab?

No touch throws are actually pretty easy if the attacker is sufficiently committed. More a matter of timing than anything else. That's not what people are talking about here.

Katherine
Hello Katherine
Chris has already stated that he thinks aiki is timing and visual tricks in many other threads...hence linebackers doing aiki.
He also stated he thinks internal power is what is done by golfers and baseball players.
Cheers
Dan

HL1978

01-28-2011, 12:58 PM

He also stated he thinks internal power is what is done by golfers and baseball players.
Cheers
Dan

Dan,

It could be of course used in golf, but that doesn't mean golfers are already using IS. I saw Ark pick up a golf club for the first time in 10 years and hit 350 yards without using a driver.

Might not be a bad gig to run some golf clinics!

kewms

01-28-2011, 01:01 PM

You may have missed my post upthread, so you may have missed that I have a foot in both worlds.

I have lots of respect for athletes. I know people who are nationally ranked in their sports, and I can't do what they can do.

But IP is different, in a way that is immediately obvious once you put the two side by side.

If you refuse to do that... *shrug* your loss.

Katherine

ChrisHein

01-28-2011, 01:07 PM

So, would you agree that conditioning, and the results of conditioning is not a trick, but a physical event?
Dan

Yes. What is the physical difference between the type of physical conditioning you are offering, and what someone could get from the average sports coach?

ChrisHein

01-28-2011, 01:19 PM

It's actually funny you mention this, the Chargers brought in an Isshinryu karate guy named AJ Advincula as a body management coach back in the 80's/90's (for 6 years) who wound up teaching the players Sanchin and some internal concepts (Advincula has in my opinion better understanding of IS concepts than you average karateka, but IS guru's would probably say its limited). From his own reporting, the guys who took his teachings to heart had longer career's on average.

This is interesting, but maybe different for me then for you. First, the NFL is a multi million dollar industry. They fund anything that works. If they had an IP guy around who gave them a noticeable advantage, other teams would have quickly done like wise. A situation like this shows that the NFL was indeed exposed to IP but it didn't catch on. Why didn't it catch on?

If you have a few players who really liked the guy personally and he made them feel like they were performing better there would be no reason to get rid of him. I can understand keeping the guy around for 6 years. However the fact that more coaches didn't get an IP guy tells me that he didn't seem to help much.

The Chargers didn't have that many great years between the 80's 90's Save 80,81, 92 and 94, four great years out of 20 tells me that this guy wasn't a huge success.

Mark Freeman

01-28-2011, 01:33 PM

Yes. What is the physical difference between the type of physical conditioning you are offering, and what someone could get from the average sports coach?

Hi Chris,

I am not for a moment presuming to answer for Dan, I'm sure he can do that. For me, athletic physical conditioning, builds muscles in a particular way, using weights and repetitive exercise to strengthen and to increase stamina etc. Now in the case of the shoulder muscles, I have found that they are the main blockers to being able to put the hara in the hands. If I can completely relax the shoulders I can connect my hands to my centre and the floor. This is just one small way to differentiate between 'normal' athletic conditioning and 'internal' conditioning. In this case the more one develop shoulder muscles, the harder it is to not use them.

Also, quite a while ago, I had a professional rower on a corporate training course I was leading. As you would expect he had a very well developed upper body. He was asking me about aikido in one of the breaks, asking me to show him something. I decided to satisfiy his curosity in the gentlest way possible. I took his right wrist and very very lightly lead his hand up to my left shoulder turning his hand over at the same time. I must stress that I was being super cautious, treating him as I would a beginner on their first night. Anyway, I was hardly halfway through the move when he was starting to grimmace, I let go immediately, and was concerned when he went away clutching his arm, which he spent the rest of the day nursing. I felt mortified that I had caused him that level of discomfort. But, what I did learn from it was, his strength was all built in one way for one sort of release of power. He had virtually no rotational flexibility in his arm (just not neccessary for rowing). Also if I had been using normal physical strength, he would have had something familiar to cope with, but my caution and being gentle actually made it worse.

Nothing wrong with athleticism, nothing wrong with internal conditioning, they are both different though.

just my couple of pennies worth to add to this little debate.

regards,

Mark

Rob Watson

01-28-2011, 01:56 PM

Dan,

It could be of course used in golf, but that doesn't mean golfers are already using IS. I saw Ark pick up a golf club for the first time in 10 years and hit 350 yards without using a driver.

Might not be a bad gig to run some golf clinics!

They would be lined up around the block if that 350 yard shot actually went anywhere near the expected target. Probably pay more than $100 for a 1 hour 'clinic'- with plenty of repeat business.

01-28-2011, 02:18 PM

Yes. What is the physical difference between the type of physical conditioning you are offering, and what someone could get from the average sports coach?
Well Chris I don't claim to know all the different ways sport coaches teach so I would not speak for them. You apparently don't know a single way IP people train. So I would offer that I teach a different way to use the body, from feet to spine to dantian to hands which produces different results from I anything I ever got from lifting and cardio, and one which I have yet to see one of your crowd copy, as their way to training usually is antithetical to this- usually evident at a touch. Which is what Jon tried to point out to you. It is a different way to organize and move your body that is demonstrable...with practical results you can feel.

Note* The tricks and magic and huckster routine you threw my way is way off the mark, Chris, though I am sure both camps found the suggestion amusing. I'm not one for tricks and magic or standing rooted in a pot either. I am interested in something that produces power that translates freely at speed.
That said, I don't want to fight about it and get you angry again.
Dan

ChrisHein

01-28-2011, 02:32 PM

I'm not sure who "my crowd is", I didn't know I have one, sounds cool though.

Dan, saying that you train something differently from foot to hand etc isn't telling us anything. Lifting and cardio is a far cry from dynamic sports training.

I wasn't throwing anything in your way. I was simply saying that this is one possibility. I'm saying that I don't see anything different in what you are doing than I see in athletics. You're saying that you see a world of difference.

How can we resolve this beyond you and I swapping stories back about forth about what we've seen or think?

thisisnotreal

01-28-2011, 02:34 PM

How can we resolve this beyond you and I swapping stories back about forth about what we've seen or think?
I have an idea...and it's just crazy enough to work...

naaaaah! nevermind.

gregstec

01-28-2011, 03:14 PM

I tired this last night. I could do it. I do however use my quads and butt muscles. Other then getting someone to touch our muscles or attaching sensors to them, I don't know how we could figure out if IP people are using less muscle when they do this. I can however achieve the same result.

A few years ago I was visiting a chiropractor for some L4,L5 issues. We started up a conversation about Aikido and Aiki and I told him we moved without tensing muscle. He said based on his doctor training that was impossible, you must tense them to some extent - he said show me. So as he was grabbing my butt muscles with both hands. I did a simple tenkan without him feeling any muscle movement at all - today he is training with me :)

Greg

Upyu

01-28-2011, 04:39 PM

ChrisHein

01-28-2011, 05:57 PM

I'd like to see Chris's shiko vid, Im definitely curious. One thing Hunter forgot to mention is that Ark does this particular demo with some one that weighs about 300lb on his back compared to his 140 lb frame or so, so the ratio should be about the same to keep things in perspective.

A) the video was not anyone who weighed in at 300lbs, more like 150.

B) I don't know anyone who weighs that much, so that won't happen.

You do admit there is a physical limit to the amount of weight though, correct?

What is the Max that Ark could do that shikko with? Would you guess 300 is upper limit, or 1000, at what point will his IP break down, and what is the reason that will happen?

01-28-2011, 11:27 PM

Chris
We are all students and researchers of the arts. Why set yourself up to be so contrary. It's all good man. If you think you don't need this training ...okay then. Why go to such lengths to insinuate we are frauds or the work has no value over normal athletics. Neither the Chinese or Japanese were that stupid and ignorant. It was a big deal to them..because it is a big deal.
Anyway most people here, who finally meet, become friends as we share this research in common. We're all just bums on the budo bus.
Chill out man. Your teacher is capable, you are probably capable too, that leaves you plenty of room to be kind. If we meet, I will welcome you and maybe we can reach an understanding.
All the best
Dan.

Upyu

01-29-2011, 04:24 AM

A) the video was not anyone who weighed in at 300lbs, more like 150.

B) I don't know anyone who weighs that much, so that won't happen.

You do admit there is a physical limit to the amount of weight though, correct?

What is the Max that Ark could do that shikko with? Would you guess 300 is upper limit, or 1000, at what point will his IP break down, and what is the reason that will happen?

Damn dude, I didn't say it was in that video lol.
And your eye for how much people's weigh is way off. I weigh 150, and I'm a stick :D The guy in the vid was some US military special forces guy that happened to be studying at the London Business School, and weighed more like 190. (I only remember because Ark asked him at one point)

Dunno what his upper limit is, but of course there is a limit. I'll simply refrain from speculating, but I'll say that the ability to move while under load is probably aided in part by specially conditioned spinal erectors (just thinking out loud here).

I'd say that the legs play a big factor in how much load can be sustained, but it's the psoas, spinal erectors and obliques that determine how well the load can be manipulated, with the force distributed across the body's fascia, ie, taking advantage of the elastic property of conditioned tissue to act as kind of a support web to bear the load

HL1978

01-29-2011, 08:30 AM

I'd like to see Chris's shiko vid, Im definitely curious. One thing Hunter forgot to mention is that Ark does this particular demo with some one that weighs about 300lb on his back compared to his 140 lb frame or so, so the ratio should be about the same to keep things in perspective.

Yeah he seems to find the biggest guys he can for some of his demos.

Its pretty impressive too when you see some of his sub 100lbs students doing the same things to people twice their weight.

ChrisHein

01-29-2011, 11:33 AM

Damn dude, I didn't say it was in that video lol.

I understand. But to get away from subjective things, I'm trying to only work with things that we can all see, together, and look at objectively.

And your eye for how much people's weigh is way off. I weigh 150, and I'm a stick :D The guy in the vid was some US military special forces guy that happened to be studying at the London Business School, and weighed more like 190. (I only remember because Ark asked him at one point)

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt there. Also remember, Ark has done this many times, and practiced it quite a bit, I've tried this one time, night before last. I have no doubt that he can do this to a higher degree. But if I have no understanding of IP , why can I do it at all? Where is the difference between IP and athleticism? What quality makes the difference?

Dunno what his upper limit is, but of course there is a limit. I'll simply refrain from speculating, but I'll say that the ability to move while under load is probably aided in part by specially conditioned spinal erectors (just thinking out loud here).

This question of maximums is very interesting to me. With the pushed into the wall test, would there be a maximum on that? Could I park my car in front of you and you could still walk away from the wall? If not why? What makes the IP break down, not allowing you to do something like that?

If you teach a powerlifter IP how much weight can he expect to add to his max? If IP can improve such things, why isn't the olympic weight lifting teams using it to improve their max?

I'd say that the legs play a big factor in how much load can be sustained, but it's the psoas, spinal erectors and obliques that determine how well the load can be manipulated, with the force distributed across the body's fascia, ie, taking advantage of the elastic property of conditioned tissue to act as kind of a support web to bear the load

This doesn't sound far away from the answer that an athletics coach might give. The way you're describing IP, it sounds like athletics here. If it is so similar to athletics methods, why is it superior to athletics or just different? Why wouldn't any of the IP guys (major or lessor) be hired by the droves by professional athletics groups?

ChrisHein

01-29-2011, 11:36 AM

Janet Rosen

01-29-2011, 12:26 PM

ChrisHein

01-29-2011, 02:21 PM

I asked a question at the start of this thread that remains unanswered. It is not posed as a challenge but as one who lacks knowledge, so I am re-asking it.
I have done/am doing some of the basic IS exercises so have a rudimentary understanding of what folks are discussing when they discuss that half of the thread topic.
Chris, I still don't know what you mean by athletic training. In a very recent post you say " not that" to reply to someone and refer to a dynamic training. But I for one have no idea what athletic training exercises you are talking about (I asked if you meant things like Pilates or plyometrics and never got an answer) nor which sports use these methods; you want folks to "compare and contrast" but your half of the topic remains undefined.
Can you please describe the exercises used in athletics? Thank you.

Janet,
Sorry I didn't answer earlier. There are lots of questions to look at. I mean all athletics training. So any sport training, or any isolated sports movements like weight lifting or what have you. If I were to pick one athletic practice, I would choose the sport of American Football.

But any areas where IP and athletics might have the same goals (moving heavy weights, dynamically using the body, explosive force etc.) why would IP be a favored method of training over common athletic training. Plyometrics, aerobics, mobility training, agility drills, are all parts of what I would call common athletics training.

01-29-2011, 02:29 PM

I honestly don't know if I'm suppose to be offended, or if I should say thank you.
I'm just interested in openly talking about this stuff. Your contributions in this thread are much appreciated! I'd love to talk you into making a video.
If you read it right...then go with the thanks, because I meant it to be sincere, open and positive. I like your pragmatic approach to the arts-thought I do not always agree with the outcome of your research. I just respect the hell out of the fact that you research and think. I also respect one of your teachers.
I don't do videos, but hopefully one day we can meet-if not as friends- than at least as fellow budo nuts and have a more meaningful dialogue with hands on. I hate the contention around this topic on the net caused by a small number of people when hundreds are meeting and training together and having VERY positive training experiences.

Cheers
Dan

01-29-2011, 02:42 PM

... why would IP be a favored method of training over common athletic training. Plyometrics, aerobics, mobility training, agility drills, are all parts of what I would call common athletics training.
Of course any number of people who are martial artists not football players have written here on aikiweb describing how it is different...by...feel and what it did for their art.
Jon just wrote in that training this way made him harder to be thrown or locked and what going back to athletic training did to him.
I have written about it a hundred times myself.
What about the hundreds of personal testimonies dismissed?
Why is Ikeda said to be changing since he started training this stuff?
Why is Gleason changing and telling just about everyone that is is the aiki he was looking for his whole career?

At some point it doesn't make sense to dismiss it because YOU don't understand it. Were it a factual study, a first step in considering a phenomenon would be examining the difference by feel, then at least considering the sheer number of unrelated people reporting the same or similar phenomena from a different range of teachers talking about similar things.

To dismiss that does sound a bit insincere for a researcher like yourself, Chris. I honestly find that part of it a bit confusing. I searched it out BECAUSE of that testimony and witness by so many people of ....a different feel, and I was damn glad I did. The comments about pusing my car into you and such is a bit ridiculous as well. You already know the answer so why ask and insincere question like that.
Just say'n
Dan

danj

01-29-2011, 02:43 PM

Maybe not as hi tech as what you are showing here, but the Wii board has an exercise application that shows weight distribution and center of balance.

Greg

Wii board - excellent idea, will try to get my hands On one and see what it can do. Now for some expert subjects to test downunder...

ChrisHein

01-29-2011, 04:10 PM

The comments about pusing my car into you and such is a bit ridiculous as well. You already know the answer so why ask and insincere question like that.
Just say'n
Dan

That question was very sincere. If you can't do such a thing, then why? Is it because the car is too heavy? If so, why does the weight break down your IP training? Is it because the car is not alive? Can IP not be used on inanimate objects? If not then Why?

Eric Joyce

01-29-2011, 04:21 PM

With all this talk about internal or external arts, and based on some things Chris Hein said got me researching and I came across Tim Cartmell's biography. Chris, I believe you said you trained or have trained with him before correct? Anyway, listed below is a piece of the article where he shares some thoughts on external vs. internal martial arts. Just additional food for thought for anyone that is interested. Here is the original link: http://www.shenwu.com/background.htm

Interviewer: What do you consider to be the distinguishing characteristics of Tai Ji, Xing Yi and Ba Gua, beyond the obvious physical differences?

Tim Cartmell: In answer to this question, let me first state that after twenty-five years of martial arts study and practice I think the labels Internal and External, although convenient, are really misnomers. In fact, if you ask a hundred different practitioners of the Chinese arts for a definition of these terms, you'll probably get a hundred different answers. In my opinion, all martial arts are based on certain sets of principles. The principles define the style. Calling Xing Yi Quan, Tai Ji Quan and Ba Gua Zhang Internal arts only began about seventy years ago. This came about because some famous practitioners of these styles in the early part of the Twentieth Century (most notably Sun Lu Tang) cross trained, and subsequently began referring to these arts as belonging to the same family, as they were based upon similar principles. Prior to this time, Xing Yi Quan, Tai Ji Quan, Ba Gua Zhang, the Shaolin arts, Long Fist, etc. were simply categorized as martial arts. What the above mentioned masters were referring to when they chose the label Internal was the underlying principles which were common to the arts they studied. Principles of the arts later named Internal were complete physical relaxation, yielding to force, the use of the power of the whole body under mental control and relying on sensitivity and skill to overcome brute strength. Now here is the problem with such labels. It is not the particular Art itself that is Internal or External, it is the way the art is practiced. There are no Internal or External martial arts, only Internal and External practitioners (if we assume Internal refers to the principles listed above, and external is anything which is outside of these principles). I have seen practitioners of the so-called External arts who were as soft as cotton and who threw their opponents seemingly by magic. I have also seen practitioners of Xing Yi Quan tensing their muscles so much that their arms were shaking with the effort. I often hear other teachers refer to some style as being Internal while another is External out of hand; if questioned, they really have no clear concept of the difference. It is popular to repeat some nebulous definition along the lines of the Internal styles cultivating Qi while the External styles are more concerned with muscle force. This is merely parroting the party line and, I think it will only lead to increasing confusion. Arts of Xing Yi Quan, Tai Ji Quan and Ba Gua Zhang, as Internal styles (based upon the principles of relaxation, yielding and skill listed above) really only differ in the manner in which these principles are applied, due to their founders' personal backgrounds, temperaments and needs. In a nutshell, Xing Yi Quan techniques tend to be more percussive in nature, with the Xing Yi Quan fighter preferring to attack, otherwise taking the smallest defensive angle possible before counter-attacking. It is important to remember Xing Yi Quan is an art originally based upon spear fighting. Tai Ji -Quan techniques tend toward yielding to force completely and then returning it to the opponent, much as the rebound of a rubber ball or the counter action to pressure on a balance scale. Tai Ji Quan techniques have their roots in the hand to hand combat techniques of the unarmed warrior dealing with an armed opponent. Ba Gua Zhang techniques differ widely between styles but emphasize mobility, flexible bodywork and evasion with direct counter attack. Striking combinations are secondary to throwing, takedown and leverage techniques.

Interviewer: Do you favor one internal system over the others, and if so, why?

Tim Cartmell: Since the Internal systems are based upon the same principles, training in one will develop the attributes necessary in the others. I think the important point is that no single martial art is adequate to prepare the practitioner for the full range of situations that may potentially occur in a real fight. Individuals will naturally gravitate toward those arts which best suit their individual physicality and personality, but it is vital to become well rounded enough to have constructive responses to any situation which may arise. Almost without exception, all of the famous masters of old (those that were famous for actually fighting) trained in several different systems. Cross training was and is the only way to truly prepare for real fighting. Remember that all styles of martial arts were founded by men who had cross-trained, and then christened their synthesis as a new style. As much as the romantic in us would like to believe the old myths, the truth is no one ever learned a style in a dream, from reading the Book of Changes or from watching snakes, birds and bugs. Personally, I believe that for the vast majority of people, although it is vital to be able to punch and kick, a foundation in the wrestling/grappling-based arts is the most important for martial proficiency.

Interviewer: What are your personal feelings about the internal and external styles?

Tim Cartmell: I think I summed up my feelings about the internal and external styles above. I would only add that I believe it is important to respect the practitioners of all types of martial arts, regardless of the style. Remaining humble with an open mind is the only way to continuous improvement. You can learn something from just about everyone. I often tell my students, "if it works for you, it's good."

I think the last comment on respecting practitioners of all types of martial arts says it best.

George S. Ledyard

01-29-2011, 04:29 PM

But any areas where IP and athletics might have the same goals (moving heavy weights, dynamically using the body, explosive force etc.) why would IP be a favored method of training over common athletic training. Plyometrics, aerobics, mobility training, agility drills, are all parts of what I would call common athletics training.

The easiest way to answer is to look at the very paradigm you are describing. Athleticism declines over time. The first thing to go is speed. That's why virtually all athletic competitors in any area requiring speed are young. Then power goes. Almost every competitive sport which has folks engaging n competition throughout their lives have age divisions. It's true of fencing, golf, etc. anything in which the skills are based on athleticism.

Then of course, there is the fact that athletically based skills require a division between the sexes. Almost no sports have men and women competing directly because men have more speed and power. This also applies, of course, to physical size even when we are talking about the same sex. Wrestling, Judo, Boxing, etc all have weight classes. Why? Because in standard athletically based skills size matters.

With so-called internal skills, what do we see? We see old Chinese men who can blow you across the room weighing in at just over 100 pounds. You have folks saying that O-Sensei was at his peak in terms of technique at age fifty. What athletic pursuit do you know of where that is true? Most sports you are old in your thirties. Sagawa stated that he made his biggest breakthrough at eighty after he had a stroke. Everyone who trained with him stated that his stuff went to a whole new level at the point at which any athlete I know of would be totally retired, forget getting better at his sport. Takeda taught right until he died in around 1945 which made him 84 years old.

I don't even see what the question is? These guys were around 5 feet tall and old and the were still awesome. Who thinks that you can do that in the gym with the finest trainers available? It is simply not the same thing going on. Even if you haven't had a chance to feel that it isn't from someone who has some of these skills, just look at the historical evidence. There is simply no way Takeda, Sagawa, and Ueshiba, just to name three, attained legendary status within a whole community of martial artists, including some Sumo folks, using any kind of standard athletic skills. Everyone in that community had standard skills and everyone trained very hard. These guys stood out. It wasn't that they were more athletic. Each of these guys maintained a high degree of skill well past the point at which most athletes have retired completely, in fact, by all accounts they got better. I think people just need to admit there's something they don't get, instead of constantly trying to fit everything into their own limited understanding

ChrisHein

01-29-2011, 04:39 PM

Yeap, I'm in agreement with that(Tim Cartmell's statements), I don't think anything I've said is contrary to that. I would like to again state though, this discussion comes from me, not any of my teachers.

I feel that I am a very open minded person. I have no problem with anyone training in any thing that they like. And again, if the opportunity arises I would go see some of these IP people that post so much here on Aikiweb. I'm not going to go way out of my way to do it, because I can't see anything in what they are doing that I don't understand.

The real problem I'm having here, is the theft of the word "Aiki" from the Aikido community. There is a strong vibe that Aiki is what some people call IP, IS, or what have you. I believe this to be very wrong. I believe you can learn "Aiki" from any reasonably skilled, regular, Aikido teacher. "Aiki" is already built into the system, you don't need to spend a lot of money, or go way out of your way to see one of a handful of teachers in order to study "Aiki".

The idea that only a few people possess this IP, and that you have to study with them personally to understand "Aiki", is a fallacy. This idea that IP is "Aiki" suggests that your Aikido is lacking if you don't study with one of these few teachers personally. I can't let that one go.

ChrisHein

01-29-2011, 04:53 PM

The easiest way to answer is to look at the very paradigm you are describing. Athleticism declines over time.

Everything declines over time. Even Ueshiba became frail. Most athletes are competitive in nature, so once they feel that they can't compete at a high level, the quit their sport, stop training, and become un-athletic. This is not a flaw in athleticism, it's the fact that few continue to train into old age.

If you look at an athlete like Jack Lalanne, we see another story all together. He kept training into extreme old age. Jack could do things at 70 that none on this board can do in their 20's and 30's.

"1984 Age 70: Handcuffed, shackled and fighting strong winds and currents, towed 70 boats with 70 people from the Queen's Way Bridge in the Long Beach Harbor to the Queen Mary, 1 ½ miles."

The problem comes when people stop training. Internal martial artists often train into old age because they train simply to train, they are not competing with anyone but themselves. If you practice athletics into old age, you will be strong as well. Special Internal martial arts training isn't a fountain of youth, movement and hard work into old age is.

Chris Li

01-29-2011, 04:55 PM

The real problem I'm having here, is the theft of the word "Aiki" from the Aikido community.

Shouldn't that be "the theft of the word "Aiki" from the Daito-ryu community" :) ?

That question was very sincere. If you can't do such a thing, then why? Is it because the car is too heavy? If so, why does the weight break down your IP training? Is it because the car is not alive? Can IP not be used on inanimate objects? If not then Why?

Well, IP isn't a magical force. In a sense, you're right, I think, in that it's all "athletics" in the end. On the other hand, IP training involves training and conditioning your body to move and function in a way that is isn't normally done in conventional athletics.

Or that's the way it seems to me...

Best,

Chris

ChrisHein

01-29-2011, 05:05 PM

Shouldn't that be "the theft of the word "Aiki" from the Daito-ryu community" :) ?

I've never got the feeling that Aikido people are saying that you have to study Aikido in order to understand Daito ryu. That is the difference for me.

IP training involves training and conditioning your body to move and function in a way that is isn't normally done in conventional athletics.

Okay, so back to the original question, in what areas is IP training superior to regular Athletics training? What can an IP person do that a regular athlete not do?

Rob Watson

01-29-2011, 05:27 PM

We're all just bums on the budo bus.

I believe the correct turn of phrase is 'bozos on the budo bus' since working this hard at things like this one has got to have a few screws loose. The bums are the ones on the side of the road watching the bus go by while yelling 'look at those bozos!'

Chris Li

01-29-2011, 05:27 PM

I've never got the feeling that Aikido people are saying that you have to study Aikido in order to understand Daito ryu. That is the difference for me.

Who's saying that you have to study Daito-ryu in order to understand Aikido? Not me, not even Dan. What most of those folks are saying is that you have to study what Morihei Ueshiba was doing - and that, in the core, is the same engine that drives Daito-ryu. If studying what Morihei Ueshiba did isn't Aikido, than what is?

As for going outside - Tohei went outside, so did Shioda, Nishio, and Yamaguchi. Oh yes, even Morihei Ueshiba went outside. Why ought we to be any different?

Okay, so back to the original question, in what areas is IP training superior to regular Athletics training? What can an IP person do that a regular athlete not do?

OK, if we suppose that a "regular athlete" is someone who's conventionally trained in Aikido (which means little or no IP training of the type that we're talking about), then where are the equals in that group of Morihei Ueshiba, Kodo Horikawa or even Gozo Shioda?

That's the difference.

Best,

Chris

Rob Watson

01-29-2011, 05:44 PM

The idea that only a few people possess this IP, and that you have to study with them personally to understand "Aiki", is a fallacy. This idea that IP is "Aiki" suggests that your Aikido is lacking if you don't study with one of these few teachers personally. I can't let that one go.

Actually I'm with Chris on this one. Only because there is a similarly lacking definition of the types and ranges of skills that comprise "pure" IS versus the types and ranges of skills that comprise "aiki".

Like all good philosophers that never really got on with an argument without first arguing (sometimes endlessly) with definitions how much progress can be made at delineating IS from aiki or internal versus external unless we are all clear on what each constitutes?

Not to raise too much of a mess there is plenty of aiki (as I would consider it) in Shidare Yangi Ryu but not so much in the way of IS (as I understand it). Of course, I'm on the outside looking in... sounds like a different thread (but not really).

ChrisHein

01-29-2011, 05:45 PM

Who's saying that you have to study Daito-ryu in order to understand Aikido?
You miss understood me, or I didn't make myself clear. I'm saying that there is this feeling that IP people are saying that Ip is "Aiki", and that your Aikido is missing something if you don't train IP. I was making an analogy between Aikido people and Daito ryu people. I don't believe that Aikido people are saying that you have to study Aikido to understand Daito ryu; but I do feel that IP people are saying you have to study IP to understand Aikido.

As for going outside - Tohei went outside, so did Shioda, Nishio, and Yamaguchi. Oh yes, even Morihei Ueshiba went outside. Why ought we to be any different?

I train outside of Aikido all the time, I think it's a great idea. I don't think you need to study something other then Aikido to understand Aikido though.

OK, if we suppose that a "regular athlete" is someone who's conventionally trained in Aikido (which means little or no IP training of the type that we're talking about), then where are the equals in that group of Morihei Ueshiba, Kodo Horikawa or even Gozo Shioda?

I'm not exactly sure I know what you're talking about here. I guess you are saying that no one is as good as Ueshiba, Kondo, or Shioda. I don't agree with that. I think there are lot's of as good, if not better Aikido teachers out there right now.

ChrisHein

01-29-2011, 05:50 PM

Okay, video as I promised.

I'll be the first to say, my shikko doesn't look nearly as good as Ark's. I have also only done this exercise twice in my life, for about a total of 60 seconds. If I had a year to practice, I'm sure it would look much better. I wanted to get the video up quickly though, because I promised I would.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMHuWiIquTM

gregstec

01-29-2011, 05:51 PM

Tim Cartmell: I think I summed up my feelings about the internal and external styles above. I would only add that I believe it is important to respect the practitioners of all types of martial arts, regardless of the style. Remaining humble with an open mind is the only way to continuous improvement. You can learn something from just about everyone. I often tell my students, "if it works for you, it's good."
[/INDENT]

I think the last comment on respecting practitioners of all types of martial arts says it best.

I agree - I think the bolded portion above should be posted on every wall in every dojo or other place of practice - it says it all...

Greg

Chris Li

01-29-2011, 06:15 PM

but I do feel that IP people are saying you have to study IP to understand Aikido.

I feel that way too :) .

If you ask me, that questions's been pretty much talked out in the public forums. There are plenty of public opportunities available now - come see Dan in March when he comes back to Hawaii.

I'm not exactly sure I know what you're talking about here. I guess you are saying that no one is as good as Ueshiba, Kondo, or Shioda. I don't agree with that. I think there are lot's of as good, if not better Aikido teachers out there right now.

Well, I disagree, but that's just me.

Best,

Chris

Demetrio Cereijo

01-29-2011, 06:17 PM

Wii board - excellent idea, will try to get my hands On one and see what it can do. Now for some expert subjects to test downunder...

Add an EEG
http://jmp.oxfordjournals.org/content/21/4/439.full.pdf
Fun starts at p. 454

kewms

01-29-2011, 06:17 PM

kewms

01-29-2011, 06:28 PM

The real problem I'm having here, is the theft of the word "Aiki" from the Aikido community. There is a strong vibe that Aiki is what some people call IP, IS, or what have you. I believe this to be very wrong. I believe you can learn "Aiki" from any reasonably skilled, regular, Aikido teacher. "Aiki" is already built into the system, you don't need to spend a lot of money, or go way out of your way to see one of a handful of teachers in order to study "Aiki".

Theft from the aikido community? Where do you think the word "aiki" came from in the first place?

I certainly agree that aikido as developed by Morihei Ueshiba Sensei contained aiki. I don't think anyone is claiming, though, that the average dojo head can do what O Sensei could.

So why not? Is it because he was a martial genius the likes of which comes once in a generation? Or was it because he knew something that the average dojo head does not? And what was that something?

Katherine

01-29-2011, 06:31 PM

I believe the correct turn of phrase is 'bozos on the budo bus' since working this hard at things like this one has got to have a few screws loose. The bums are the ones on the side of the road watching the bus go by while yelling 'look at those bozos!'
Hah!
Well, It's an expression used by Meik Skoss. Nothing like a double Menkyo Kaiden reminding people that the arts are greater than ourselves.
All the best
Dan

ChrisHein

01-29-2011, 07:09 PM

Ok, we're getting somewhere...

I think your first disagreement with most people is going to be this idea that IP and athletics have the same goals. If I wanted to move heavy weights, I'd call a powerlifter or a strongman competitor, no question. But part of the point of IP is that it *doesn't* depend on having enormous physical strength. There is no chance that I can outwrestle an average-sized male simply by getting strong: the women's world records in my weight class are merely average for a 180-200lb man.

Katherine

Things like being shoved into a wall full force, and being able to walk away effortlessly sounds like an issue of moving heavy weight to me. Now it could be an issue of mental suggestion, hypnosis, or some other condition of the mind. Is this what you believe IP to be doing, using the mind of your attacker against him? If this is the case, than I'm more than interested in debating it.

Men are naturally stronger then women, nothing new there. And I wouldn't suggest using strength to defeat a man if I were a woman. But how would IP help you? What does IP give you the ability to do, that is unique?

Rob Watson

01-29-2011, 07:12 PM

Wii board - excellent idea, will try to get my hands On one and see what it can do. Now for some expert subjects to test downunder...

This will no doubt come in handy for 'hacking' into the devices data stream.

http://www.wiibrew.org/wiki/Balance_Board_Tools

Demetrio Cereijo

01-29-2011, 07:13 PM

ChrisHein

01-29-2011, 07:17 PM

Theft from the aikido community? Where do you think the word "aiki" came from in the first place?

The theft comes in the form of saying that Aikido training can't teach "Aiki". Yes Aikido comes from Daito ryu, but Aikido people don't suggest that you can't learn "Aiki" by studying Daito ryu. However IP people do suggest that Aikido people can't teach/don't have "Aiki".

I certainly agree that aikido as developed by Morihei Ueshiba Sensei contained aiki. I don't think anyone is claiming, though, that the average dojo head can do what O Sensei could.

So why not? Is it because he was a martial genius the likes of which comes once in a generation? Or was it because he knew something that the average dojo head does not? And what was that something?

Katherine

This is a very long and complicated answer. Ueshiba was a unique individual. He did training, and work that few today have gone through. He also had an understanding of human psychology that few today possess. He had good structure and alignment, understood good technique, and was a pretty good mover. But his ability to lead someone's mind was what I believe made him stand out. The ability to lead the mind, as I understand it, is not what IP people are suggesting is happening. Is this what you believe IP is?

Janet Rosen

01-29-2011, 07:26 PM

Chris, thank you for your reply. I've been thinking about them (letting them simmer on the back burner while I"m cooking dinner, actually, and writing while actual food simmers....).
From my perspective and mine alone, FWIW:
The exercises I'm working on plus others I hope to learn are all aimed, for me, to the goal of developing a very specific skill set. I'm not aiming to throw people harder or faster but to work on a way to connect with my partner and then undermine him without the types of muscling I have felt in a lot of mainstream aikido.
You have provided in answer to me a list of skill sets under the heading of athletic training. Some I know, some I don't. But it strikes me that they are disparate and have different goals, build different types of skills. And I don't see how any of them work on what my understanding of internal power is.

Eric Joyce

01-29-2011, 07:43 PM

kewms

01-29-2011, 07:47 PM

Things like being shoved into a wall full force, and being able to walk away effortlessly sounds like an issue of moving heavy weight to me. Now it could be an issue of mental suggestion, hypnosis, or some other condition of the mind. Is this what you believe IP to be doing, using the mind of your attacker against him? If this is the case, than I'm more than interested in debating it.

Men are naturally stronger then women, nothing new there. And I wouldn't suggest using strength to defeat a man if I were a woman. But how would IP help you? What does IP give you the ability to do, that is unique?

Keep in mind that, though I am not a beginner at aikido, this particular approach to it is different and new for me. I'm not claiming any particular expertise. I also cannot personally do "the wall thing" against an arbitrarily large and forceful push.

When I'm able to successfully walk forward against strong resistance, it feels pretty much like I'm just, you know, walking.

It does *not* feel like pushing a car or any other strength-driven pushing. (To test this, have the person offering resistance jump away suddenly: if you fall forward, you're doing it wrong.) Mental "tricks" have nothing to do with it: one easy test is to do it "wrong" deliberately in order to make sure that your partner isn't "helping" in that way.

(Although, we very quickly get into a discussion of the border between mind and body. If I change my partner's perception of his connection with the ground, but do it below the level of either his or my conscious awareness, is that "hypnosis," or is it using my structure to send confusing signals through his nervous system? Consider the experience of stepping off a moving platform onto solid ground.)

Katherine

kewms

01-29-2011, 07:57 PM

The theft comes in the form of saying that Aikido training can't teach "Aiki".

Aikido training can. Many individual dojos and instructors don't. Is it so shocking to suggest that not all instructors are equally knowledgeable or equally blessed with teaching ability?

Katherine

Janet Rosen

01-29-2011, 08:44 PM

Add an EEG
http://jmp.oxfordjournals.org/content/21/4/439.full.pdf
Fun starts at p. 454

Fascinating - THANK YOU for posting. So many of the direct quotes from the swordsman could have come directly from OSensei, neh?

As one who has learned to affect demonstrable changes in my physiology via [a form of concentration, intent, focus and relaxation that I perceive as "moving ki"] that are the same as others learn to do via meditation or biofeedback [the in the moment feedback being at least partly provided in the form of EEG] I find this particularly interesting. Like those in the study, I cannot "define" ki per se, but experience it as something real in that whatever it is called, it can be manipulated.

To bring this back to the current thread, the little bit of work I"ve started doing in IS definitely resonates with - no, to be more clear, it explains how to approach - the ki exercises I've been doing for some years and taught me how to use a different intent, focus and body while doing the same outward form everybody else on the mat, and yes as a result I do experience a difference from what I used to do that is not related to integrating, say, Pilates, into my aikido.

ChrisHein

01-29-2011, 08:49 PM

Keep in mind that, though I am not a beginner at aikido, this particular approach to it is different and new for me. I'm not claiming any particular expertise. I also cannot personally do "the wall thing" against an arbitrarily large and forceful push.

When I'm able to successfully walk forward against strong resistance, it feels pretty much like I'm just, you know, walking.

It does *not* feel like pushing a car or any other strength-driven pushing. (To test this, have the person offering resistance jump away suddenly: if you fall forward, you're doing it wrong.) Mental "tricks" have nothing to do with it: one easy test is to do it "wrong" deliberately in order to make sure that your partner isn't "helping" in that way.

(Although, we very quickly get into a discussion of the border between mind and body. If I change my partner's perception of his connection with the ground, but do it below the level of either his or my conscious awareness, is that "hypnosis," or is it using my structure to send confusing signals through his nervous system? Consider the experience of stepping off a moving platform onto solid ground.)

Katherine

Katherine,
To me it sounds like you are suggesting that IP is actually in the mind. And that you can't use IP on inanimate objects, is this correct?

Are you suggesting,that a person doing IP is somehow sending signals into their partners body, confusing their nervous system, and making them fall down, lose strength etc?

This would mean that Ip can only be used on other people, or perhaps animals, but only living things, correct?

Michael Varin

01-29-2011, 09:00 PM

Actually I'm with Chris on this one. Only because there is a similarly lacking definition of the types and ranges of skills that comprise "pure" IS versus the types and ranges of skills that comprise "aiki".

Like all good philosophers that never really got on with an argument without first arguing (sometimes endlessly) with definitions how much progress can be made at delineating IS from aiki or internal versus external unless we are all clear on what each constitutes?

Not to raise too much of a mess there is plenty of aiki (as I would consider it) in Shidare Yangi Ryu but not so much in the way of IS (as I understand it). Of course, I'm on the outside looking in... sounds like a different thread (but not really).

I have thought for some time that these were the issues that we need to begin addressing.

Of course, the last attempt didn't get very far, but maybe now the time is ripe.

Michael Varin

01-29-2011, 09:37 PM

The easiest way to answer is to look at the very paradigm you are describing. Athleticism declines over time. The first thing to go is speed. That's why virtually all athletic competitors in any area requiring speed are young. Then power goes. Almost every competitive sport which has folks engaging n competition throughout their lives have age divisions. It's true of fencing, golf, etc. anything in which the skills are based on athleticism.

Then of course, there is the fact that athletically based skills require a division between the sexes. Almost no sports have men and women competing directly because men have more speed and power. This also applies, of course, to physical size even when we are talking about the same sex. Wrestling, Judo, Boxing, etc all have weight classes. Why? Because in standard athletically based skills size matters.
I'm very curious about this. I often get the impression that people view "IP/IT/IS" as an equalizer, maybe THE equalizer.

Not all humans respond to training in the same way. Some will reach levels on day one that others will never attain. Some will respond quickly and progress steadily. Some will make significant gains, but will require much effort. Some will have almost no response at all. You will find people everywhere along the bell curve in any endeavor you choose.

None of this is meant to discourage anyone from any type of training. Everyone will make some level of improvement. And if you enjoy the activity, by all means, do it.

Assuming "IP/IT/IS" is a form of conditioning/acquired through conditioning, would it be reasonable to assume that not all people will respond equally to it? That people have different natural aptitudes? If so, what are the implications?

Or is this a skill that all humans can acquire and use equally? And what would explain this unusual outcome?