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Old 01-14-2011, 07:09 AM   #56
Mike Sigman
Location: Durango, CO
Join Date: Feb 2005
Posts: 4,123
United_States
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Re: Ikeda Sensei Demos of Ki

Quote:
John Burn wrote: View Post
Mike, quick question hopefully not too off topic...

I find it difficult to apply some if not all of the things I'm thinking about when doing this stuff statically to anything much in motion... I've been working on trying to get my body into a shape when doing this in motion, so I don't wave my arms around or move them, if I want to move my arm, I move my body so that my arm stays in the same shape.

If you were starting to introduce this stuff into a club (not a long established club, only 3 years old) would it be part of every class, or something else until you get the absolute basics instilled?

I play with what little I've picked up but am consciously trying to not overdo it as I don't have much to backup what I'm trying to teach.
Hi John:

Generally what most people do is learn some basic static jin/kokyu tricks and then weave those into their moving techniques (to some degree) so that they can roughly "use internal strength" in limited scenarios. They will also do limited application of the dantien/tanden/hara and consider that to be "internal strength". My point is that the transition from static training into moving training is always hard and it's the point where most people (usually unknown to themselves and their friends) plateau out. Moving has to take into account more dynamics than just weaving in some sudden-application usages of static kokyu power.

[BTW, just to interject a point, I prefer to say something like "jin" rather than "kokyu", because "kokyu" implies something a little more sophisticated than "jin" which means sort of "trained force skill/vector" in this context. Most people are only doing jin usage but are calling it kokyu.]

Since the principles of ki/kokyu/hara/etc are always going to be the same, the easiest thing to do, no matter what your style, is to look at the exercises Tohei developed to address the problem of taking static kokyu/jin skills into the moving. Starting around 1:43, look at Tohei's suggested methods of beginning to train into the moving usage of internal strength:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nj_7ctIWbM

Tohei (inspired by Ueshiba) did a pretty good job of putting together a series of exercises addressing the difficult transition phase from static to moving, but it's still a difficult time for everyone. In my experience few westerners ever really learn to do the transition well and they tend to be more about normal movement with interjected moments of internal strength. So you're right to focus on it. If you're going after "internal strength" and you instead pattern yourself into "moments of applied static jin/kokyu", you're back into the same old habit of repatterning movements that will limit your progress. There are a lot of traps out there.

FWIW

Mike Sigman