Quote:
Kevin Leavitt wrote:
The hard part here is to describe the actual transition from teaching technique to providing appropriate feedback. the best I can describe this is, you teach a little, then you fight a little. It is really the same concept as learning to swim. You start in the shallow end, practice some strokes and then you have to go swim and fail. Same with riding a bike. The endstate is very clear. You want to ride a bike. You balance training wheels and someone supporting you with actually riding. Your gonna fail when you let go. and fail alot. In both these examples you actually DO the thing you are learning to DO at some point.
I don't remember giving my kid lessons on how to turn the crank through a wax on wax off mentality.
I think another simplistic analogy would be teaching someone to ride a bike using the IS paradigm that is adopted by so many in Martial Arts. that is, to factor out failure. Imagine having him stand there for hours learning how to shift his weight and imagine being on the bike to simulate pedaling etc. The hope would be in a couple of years of this training to put him on the bike and he would ride the first time and never have to fall once he finally went live.
Sounds ridiculous but that is how many tend to approach training in Martial Arts.
Back to bike riding...I found the Germans do this the right way without training wheels. They buy their kids a little wooden push bike about the time they start walking and then the kid simply gets on the bike and begins to understand and inculcate the skills. This is an example of a model based on systematic and gradual escalation of skills acquired through failure and mistakes. It is an implicit training method versus and explicit or cognitive training method. In the US we culturally wait a little longer, then we must put on training wheels, and make them learn faster, the mistakes are more costly since the safety net is less and we have more tears...etc.etc...but in the end they learn to ride.
So, you have to first change your mind set.
I think the IS training is great. It works to some degree, but I don't seem to take the same approach which limits me to simply using IS. It has not proven to me to be a good approach/paradiigm to learning how to be more martially effective.
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This analogy falls completely flat for IS. IS is a different animal. Why? For the simple reason that it is replacing something we, by default, as a consequence of modern life if nothing else, and as a consequence of being taught wrong from the beginning... we all move horribly, utterly, depressingly, humiliatingly wrong. So half the problem of IS work is to get rid of all of these unconscious things, and then the other half to replace them with a better, conscious way of moving first. If we could all magically learn to move in the IS way from the beginning, then this model would apply. Sadly, we don't.
In many cases, with young athletes targeted for competitive levels, we don't hesitate to get them extremely young, in the single digit age category, and start training their movement to not be dysfunctional from the get-go for that chosen sport discipline, but somehow for MA we just put on blinders and expect people to magically have underlying movement foundations with no significant time spent training in it. That is bunk.
And to compound it further, even when we train IS, we spend most of the rest of the day un-conditioning the good and re-conditioning the bad habits with all the stuff we normally do, making it even harder. One response to that is to throw up your hands in defeat, let the bad way of moving stay, and just teach someone to know how to be violent and deal with violence with what they've already got, however dysfunctional. Fine, but it doesn't float my boat. I think many of us are looking for something different than that, though, because we have the luxury of exploring the alternative.
We don't take babies straight out of the cradle and expect them to jog half-marathons. We let them at least learn to crawl and walk first. Likewise, we shouldn't necessarily expect people to learn how to fight before they've learned how to move in a generalist way first. Some exposure to it at the start sure helps to keep focused, but after an introduction, I don't see much point. Been there, done that.
If you can go through the majority of your life moving in an IS way, completely unscripted/automated, then it's not much of a leap to start applying this in MA. But the reverse, to learn MA based on a foundation of bad movement, and then rewrite it to be with IS movement, not just every single bad movement habit you had before MA, well, that's really really difficult.
Then you put aiki skills above that IS foundation. IMO, the aiki skills have almost zero real-life application outside of a martial context that I can discern after wrapping my head around them for some years. They are so specific to moving people that it may well be completely worthless to understand or use them unless you're just a complete martial nerd who is really interested in being able to do it (as I am). But, if you have no IS foundation, the aiki skills are likewise completely worthless fluff. So, for me, the IS is already just a means to an end, to learn aiki. I've already learned how to box, how to wrestle, basic weapon sparring with/without armor/gear, etc. and realistically, it doesn't warrant spending much time on those anymore until my foundations are in order because all I can do is condition in more garbage that I need to simultaneously unlearn to do it right.