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Old 10-10-2013, 12:17 PM   #121
Basia Halliop
Join Date: Jun 2006
Posts: 711
Canada
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Re: does nikyo hurt?

Quote:
Michael Hacker wrote: View Post
Excellent question.

Earlier, I said "Don't push back." I take this to heart. Literally. I don't want to fight your technique with physical strength (unless I have a specific lesson or experiment in mind). If you push me, I turn. If you pull me, I enter. I never want to push back or try to stop you with muscular force (i.e. "resist"). I've worked for quite a while to get that monkey-brain-level instinct to push back out of my system. It isn't completely gone by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a little more under control now than it was.
Thanks, this I'm familiar with. My question was specifically about a reaction to pain. Someone (I've lost track now if it was you or someone else) made a statement that they never used any pain when training (unless I musunderstood that comment).

That led me to ponder how we react to pain. It's sometimes very automatic, much more of a flinch response than a conscious strategy. So I was pondering if it's possible to reprogram a flinch response without directly practicing it - i.e., if training a very reliable and automatic response to non-painful pressures and tensions will translate into using that response instinctively when there's actual pain. Or if it's better to at least occasionally practice responding to actual pain (Perhaps a more slowly applied pain? Or a smaller one? ) to be sure your reflex 'don't resist' response is programmed as a response to pain as well.

I do find many joint locks painful at least some of the time, so I've had lots of opportunities to practice moving with it instead of against it when something suddenly hurts. So I don't have personal experience with a scenario where someone has trained for a while but never or rarely felt them applied in a painful way and then suddenly one day they receive a painful one, and I don't know one way or another what their reflex response is likely to be, but am curious...
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