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Old 12-23-2006, 07:25 PM   #250
Thomas Campbell
Join Date: Sep 2006
Posts: 407
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Re: How to teach and train relaxation

Quote:
Dan Harden wrote:
I do Justin. So does Rob John So does Ark or used to. So does Tim Cartmell on a national level. So does two CMA guys I know. I also know of a just a few guys who are talking and training with some of the highest ranked guys in the UFC about this very topic.

You doubt it because you don't now of it or have felt anyone with skill. Anyone I know of who can "actually" do these things or has trully felt those who can- very naturally see it as a way to move and think in -any venue-. [snip]

Should be an interesting decade. I'm looking forward to it.

Dan
I don't know what Justin has experienced, but I can offer a perspective as a student of Chinese martial arts . . . and that is that what Dan Harden is talking about will change your perspective once you get hands-on experience with the sort of internal connection and internal strength skill that Dan, and Mike Sigman, have labored in great detail to present here and on other forums.

Of the folks listed by Dan, I can personally vouch for Tim Cartmell being able to demonstrate and help you experience for yourself what internal connection feels like in a relatively static setting . . . and then go on to demonstrate its use in one-on-one or two-on-one free-form application situations. Tim uses his own skills several times a year in fighting tournaments, very successfully.

The skills can be shown, exercises and drills to help train them in the student's own body can be taught . . . but to truly make them a part of you will take long, diligent, intelligent practice and continuing testing and refinement. That's not meant as a cliche . . . I'm just coming to appreciate how easy it is to go awry with "internal" training. Merely doing what the teacher says or demonstrates isn't nearly enough. You really have to move and feel what is going on inside your own body. And the testing is essential, because it is easy to delude yourself that you're getting it right.

I work with two teachers in the Chinese internal martial arts right now who both find that the ideas expressed by Akuzawa Minoru, Dan and Mike, all from different backgrounds, resonate with how they understand their own training from the Chinese martial arts. They demonstrate similar skills (though to what level I can't say, since I haven't trained with, for example, Dan). In other words, there is an understanding that crosses cultural boundaries of martial arts practice. I've just begun working with a student of a Japanese koryu whose training methods also aim to develop similar skills. He believes that such skills carry over readily into traditional weapons practice.

Dan has worked with two leading teachers of different lineages in Chenshi taijiquan, one of whom taught in Japan, including to Japanese exponents of Daito-ryu, several years ago. Dan just worked for the second time with a Yang style taiji student in the line of the late Lee Shiu Pak, who vouched for Dan's very real internal skills.

Mike has been studying and training and showing his own evolving understanding of these skills around the world for many years. He gets out and meets people from a lot of different martial arts backgrounds. These aren't dummies and dilettantes coming to Mike's seminars. They are able-bodied, serious MA practitioners who want to get an insight into what "internal skill" means and how to train it.

My point isn't to laud Dan, or Mike, or Akuzawa, or Cartmell. Their skill and their work stands on its own. My point is that these guys are not the only ones who see the value of internal skills and work hard to cultivate them. The three teachers I have the privilege of working with now have independently found merit in the ideas expressed in these discussions.

You can't learn these skills from Internet forums. But you can learn of them, learn about them, and learn some of the people who might point you in the right direction, if you enter into the discussions with an open mind.
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