Quote:
Katherine Derbyshire wrote:
I will say, though, that your relationship to gravity is very different when your goal is to put an attacker on the ground than when your goal is to put a heavy weight over your head.
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However, it's important to note that the primary goal of internal training is not "to put an attacker on the ground". It's simply to develop and unbreakable orientation of the body to the six directions of up/down (gravity), forward/backward and left/right. Akuzawa sensei was very firm in stating that his practice is to tune this orientation to a very high degree so that the body becomes self-correcting at all times and in response to any force that tries to move it within those six directions. "Whatever happens to the attacker," he said, "results not from an effort to do anything to him but because he has attached himself to you and your body's actions to correct its orientation take him out of his own orientation." (interpreted)
So the goal is not to put an attacker on the ground, but to maintain our own equilibrium despite any external efforts to break it.
And he further emphasized that our energy must not go out of our body, as we might ordinarily think of throwing or striking someone. The energy stays inside us and works to correct our orientation. We "choke-out" techniques from within and they stop at the boundaries of our own body. It's the attacker's relation to our body that causes him to absorb force from our movement.
Hoping that helps.
David