View Single Post
Old 08-07-2014, 11:43 AM   #151
kewms
Join Date: Aug 2002
Posts: 1,318
Offline
Re: Demonstrating aiki, demontrating aikido.Same thing ?

I'm an engineer and a writer. Very precise, mechanistic language absolutely has a place.

As I've said before, though, I'm not sure how pedagogically useful it is. Even assuming Erick's description is accurate in all respects (of which I'm not convinced), I'm not sure that telling someone to inhibit contraction of antagonist muscles is more helpful than telling them to run energy along their own tegatana. In application, any martial art is necessarily intuitive, and so one goal of training is to develop reliable physical intuition.

Not just martial arts, either. Engineering professors miss the days when most of their students spent their teenage years working on cars. Athletic coaches prefer to coach people who spent childhood playing outside. Mechanistic descriptions are important in building a rigorous, testable model -- very useful if you're making a bridge -- but intuition is how you know which models might be worth building.

Katherine
  Reply With Quote