Quote:
Philip Burgess wrote:
I don't want to get into an and I appreciate what you said, am not going to argue. What I mean by "out dated" is that the term of internal power isn't used by or in major professional sports, it is the language ancients that has been translated into our language as internal power. Rather then the scientific terms used in major modern professional sports for the same principle. Sure it isn't outdate in martial arts, I mean it is a buzz word.
It is noted that you said internal mechanics. I am sure sports physiologists etc. have a modern language and research to explain so much of what is obscure langauge like internal power. The point of that is that obscure language used in martial arts related to principles are not easily understood by the average educated person, because it isn't in the modern scientific language. Because of that, internal power can be anything anyone wants it to be, and it is, and it can be anything to anyone. And some like it that way. If you are going to teach me internal power, put it in a more precise language of science, in established sports science. I don't want slight references to the human body mechanics or abstract mystical language. That is great for some. But it doesn't tell me much. I want to hear it from a professional sports physiologist, trainers or other professionals that study how the human body moves and its physics, who deal with professional major Athletes. But too sophisticated, I don't have a Ph.D.  . The problem with that is, is how many Pros in these fields are Aikidoka? |
As far as I ever read, the term "internal" was a fairly modern thing (relative to the age of the Chinese arts in question) coined by Sun Lu Tang or at least someone of around his time, so it is probably a stretch to call it ancient. I think it's just terribly non-descriptive, beyond being a loaded term.
Someone handed me a model of what the human body might be capable of which more or less went: "Imagine the majority of all voluntary muscles in your body simultaneously contracting to the fullest of their abilities in a single direction and then instantaneously relaxing." That sure as hell sounded a lot more compelling to me than "ki" or "chi". Sounds like a theoretically crazy amount of power and speed just on the surface, no? And when it is put that way, it becomes more a question of, "what modern sport doesn't have some piece of that?", rather than "why aren't they using our terminology?" It's tangible, and it's out there.
It's just applied all rather specifically in a sport, and question is how to generalize it into much less controlled situations of martial arts, and how to maximize it. It opens up a ton of subject areas about coordination, leverage, and muscle contraction, and the overarching theme of how to identity it, how to quantify it, and how to progress it.
But all that stuff is damned confusing if you have to make stuff up to get you there, rather than using it to predict what won't work at all. Most exercise research seems to be along the lines of, "Well, gee, if we put sedentary ungraduate students or senior citizens on a weight lifting or endurance regimen, they get more fit!", let alone how to maximize the body for use in a particular activity like Aikido. It's totally an art to how to coach all that stuff, and why even after you have an idea what your end-goal is, you are still going to be hunting down people looking for methods of how to get there, and pretty much explains why I still spend a lot of time searching.
A few simple "duh!" exercises for working all this stuff are worth more than entire volumes of research, and probably harder to produce!