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Old 01-26-2011, 07:37 AM   #44
David Orange
Dojo: Aozora Dojo
Location: Birmingham, AL
Join Date: Feb 2006
Posts: 1,511
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Re: Why do you perceive "internal" superior to athleticism?

Quote:
Benjamin Edelen wrote: View Post
This is grievously incorrect. Athleticism is the characteristic of being prepared to undertake a broad range of physical tasks. Muscular development and exertion are incidental to the necessity to prepare oneself for a variety of circumstances. Developing athleticism simply requires addressing the areas in which you are weak, either physically or technically, and applying some of your training time to addressing these areas. Internal skills will be a tremendous asset when the task in front of you is physical conflict. All the internal power in the world will not help you, however, if the task in front of you is to quickly run a mile or lift a heavy object off your loved one.
These are true statements and I have supported these facts for decades. I remember all the aikidoka who used to hate to see me coming because if I led the class there would be squats, push-ups, sit-ups, leg-lifts, etc., by the truckload.

Further, as I've said repeatedly, simply "developing" ki leads nowhere but delusion. For actual use, the body, muscles, bones, connective tissue and breath must all be strong and well conditioned and the ki and mentality must be conditioned and coordinated. But for athleticism, only the physical aspects count, along with psychological factors of motivation, which usually consists of a relatively short-term goal of winning a given competition. Where long-term health is the goal, Jack Lalanne is a great example, but someone asked who would have come out on top in a match between Lalanne and Morihei Ueshiba when both were in their 80s. And like every other strong, athletic person who ever ran across Morihei, Lalanne would have been confounded. Why would we think Lalanne could do what a sumo giant could not?

Quote:
Benjamin Edelen wrote: View Post
That athleticism is not taken more seriously as one of the roots of martial capability indicates that folks are seriously deluded.
Well, that is also one of my main criticisms of modern (especially American) aikido. Internal strength is not the only strength modern practitioners eschew. Without either external, athletic strength or internal power strength, they rely on collusive form and a philosophy found nowhere in serious martial artists.

But to think that athletic strength is any key to internal strength, especially when much of the athleticism improperly develops the body for internal strength is the same mistake that led so many to be embarrassed by people like Sokaku Takeda, Yukiyoshi Sagawa, Kodo Horikawa, Gozo Shioda and Minoru Mochizuki. Athleticism does not train what they trained and it does not prepare the practitioner to meet someone like the above.

Quote:
Benjamin Edelen wrote: View Post
Training exclusively in internal power will result in you becoming a specialist, and when facing the unknown, the survival rate for specialists drops precipitously. Hopefully we all known what Heinlein has to say on the subject of specialization.
Well, when you find someone who has advocated "exclusively" training in internal strength with no physical conditioning, I want you to start a new thread with quotes from them. So far, I have seen no IP advocates suggest such a thing. But the tanren training they advocate is very significantly different from athleticism. Even excellent tanren training should be supplemented with cardio conditioning, but most of the serious IP advocates do that through fighting and sparring. Still, excellent physical condition does not necessarily mean "athletic" conditioning. And no amount of purely athletic conditioning will result in the kind of power we see in O Sensei and Shioda among the many, many other old-time masters of aikido.

Regards.

David

"That which has no substance can enter where there is no room."
Lao Tzu

"Eternity forever!"

www.esotericorange.com
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