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Old 04-09-2013, 10:31 AM   #16
Mert Gambito
Join Date: Jun 2010
Posts: 202
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Re: "Conventional Muscles" and Internal Power

Hi Dan,

This is so true:
Quote:
Dan Richards wrote:
Not through visualization, but through direct experience. The challenge - in any kind of writing on movement and performance - is to arrive at better tools to communicate - not ideas - but experiences.
Frankly, I don't know if you can circumvent the majority of practitioners, when they're starting out, doing IP/IS exercises wrong to varying degrees, since the exercises are not natural or intuitive relative to how people typically use their bodies in everyday life, let alone in martial arts as a whole.

Fortunately, what works in martial arts as a whole seems to be effective for imparting IP/IS as well. Students ardently train during class and solo. When they train together, they use ukemi to provide feedback to refine each others' physical and mental understanding of an exercise or technique. The teacher observes, takes ukemi and fine-tunes as needed.

Words will always be abstractions of experiential knowledge. You're right in cautioning about going too granular: we've found that students tend to make scrunchy faces from information overload and lose the feeling (i.e. the taste in your example) of what they're trying to accomplish. I can't imagine how IP/IS training methods could be written that would result in even 10% of new practitioners getting it right the first time. But, even if that was possible, the face-to-face feedback and fine-tuning would still be needed ongoing for 100% of practitioners.

Mert
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