The last thing I’d encourage anybody to do is to practice Sanchin, particularly in its Goju-ryu and Uechi-ryu variants. Sanchin kata is the central kata in those
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=L0kEaQQhTk
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=m9eCggRHpE
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=7Sei1haw9O
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=-L0OsPTJpA
It's easy to show if I've got you in a room.
And by the way, I don't practice Sanchin (or Tensho)--don't practice kata at all for many years--and I don't encourage people to do so. All I'm trying to do is point out the way your system suggests you should be fighting. And that's definitely NOT 'fighting in Sanchin'.
That's about as clear as I can make it. Have a look at the footage.
But when I began training in Goju-kai in
There's another little irony about Kyokushin Kai. If you look at the link I've put up for Kurosaki, you'll see a reference to the Japanese being beaten by the Thais in the early 1960s. Between the 60s and 70s, the only Japanese who were able to defeat the Thais were themselves training in Muay Thai, or who were karate-ka primarily from Kyokushin Kai who had cross-trained in Muay Thai. The idea that karate was able to defeat Muay Thai is a misrepresentation. But the irony is that the practices that would have made karate ka into formidable fighters were already there in the kata Sanchin/Tensho, but misunderstood and not practiced appropriate to the fight.
As my research into the
The more I watched Muay Thai and the way the Thais trained, the more I was able to see the true fighting context of the movement patterns characteristic of the
It is true that in the
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=V3vrziWRjw
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=kg4TQRlqQ3
If you study a
One of the key issues here is that you want to fight on your feet. The fighting we see in Muay Thai is a combination of striking and grappling, and because both are allowed, you have to be able to switch instantly from striking to grappling and vice versa; that’s what ‘hands on the wheel’ is all about, as well as the squarish stance which prevents your opponent from turning your corner and also enhances your stability so that you can retain balance in the close fighting mix.
Many people interpret grappling as ‘going to the ground’. Grappling can and does include standup, as seen in Greco-Roman and freestyle. A decisive phase of the fight can involve grappling not to go the ground, or grappling to off-balance your opponent to throw him down—the latter uses of grappling are seen clearly in judo and sambo. They are also seen in chi sao, which is about pushing, controlling, trapping, off-balancing your opponent with hand-fighting. We’re back to the same hands on the wheel. When I studied Wing Chun in the 1970s, I started to see how Wing Chun employed the two-hands-on-the-wheel approach that Goju-ryu ought to be practicing, because it was within this fighting position that the hand movements of Goju-ryu and Uechi-ryu found their explanation. But the Goju-ryu practitioners weren’t aware of this; they were all caught up in the kakie, single-hand pushing.
So we see standup grappling in many martial arts, and it is practiced competitively in Greco-Roman, freestyle, and to a degree, in judo and sambo. The only difference is that in these standup grappling systems, the grappling has been extracted from the fight and practiced for its own sake. In Muay Thai, the grappling aspects of close fighting are occurring in the context of a full-out fight, strikes and all. You will definitely get punished if you make a mistake in Muay Thai. So the Muay Thai representation of standup grappling is the state of the art, and the one that I draw on for my analysis of close-quarter fighting.
What’s happened since the advent of MMA and the recognition of a need for ground fighting, is that karate guys started going around teaching new ways of interpreting their kata so as to retroactively put ground fighting into it. But the point is that these original
These Fujian, etc. systems would also have included bladed weapons. The principles of close-fighting are the same with or without weapons. Naturally, depending on the weapon and the situation, the way you fight may be modified, but the underlying close-quarter principles don’t change. You have to deal with the worst possible scenario in your training, and the worst possible scenario—although potentially the most rewarding to you if you come out on top—is being eyeball to eyeball with your armed opponent. I don’t think it’s an accident that the Hakka and
Dear karate guys: in case you haven’t worked it out yet, I’m doing you a big favour here. I’m telling you clearly what your tradition is really about. You don’t have to invent new applications. Everything you need is already there. It’s just that it needs to be going off in a real fight, like what you see in the Muay Thai clips I’ve put up. It’s staring you right in the face. Put away all the other crap that you’ve been coming up with to try to explain or justify your practices. Watch the fight. Watch Muay Thai, and watch a lot of it.
Then bring thatinto your dojo and you'll be going somewhere.
One of the most frequently-heard expressions in Primal is ‘get your hands on the wheel.’ It means, get your hands positioned so that you can touch your opponent’s hands. This close position is the phase of the fight where the majority of knockouts occur. It’s where you run the highest risk, but play for the biggest payoff.
2)I’ve got to have great skill at anticipating, very good timing, and reaction speed in case things don’t go to plan.
If we were to put this into the context of the street, against one man or multiples, it’s inevitable there’s going to be a ‘crash’. Some people have assumed that because I am an advocate of MMA training, that I would automatically go to the ground in a fight. I don’t want to get my head kicked in by some guy’s mates, nor fight in dog shit. I want to be able to throw the guy to the ground, or use him as a human shield against anybody else who might be coming in. At times it might be necessary to crack his head against a wall or post. This is where the control in a close position comes into play.
Here are the clips, starting with a reference that shows how well Muay Thai can be adapted to MMA.
Here is Namkabuan, the Ring Genius, in action. He epitomizes what I’m trying to say here. Watch him.
and some more links of the same fighter:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=CAtjI1f1_o
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=qHpw_ST9Pq
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=vLBQOtHuQN
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=a9iLIVoTy8
Finally, here’s Saenchai, a guy who really is tiny and takes on bigger opponents, but shows how effectively you can throw a guy to the ground.
And a compilation of Buakaw and Saenchai, both of whom are masters of close fighting.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=DdC5ePY9Ae
Dennis asked the question, ‘What did Miyagi see?’ and some discussion ensued, but it was mainly in the spirit of Miyagi’s text, which was philosophical; i.e., making distinctions between calligraphy of the North vs. South of China and their respective martial arts.
Although the question, ‘What did he see?’ is one that can’t ever be answered definitively because there is no record, it reminds me of the research into the Fujian and Hakka systems of Southern China that I undertook over a period of roughly 40 years. The purpose of my research was to try to determine the relationship between these systems and the Goju-ryu and Uechi-ryu systems of Okinawa.
What I found out was that, particularly during the Ch’ing Dynasty (1644-1911) persecution resulted in mass migrations from Southern China, particularly from Fujian, and of the Hakka people who were particular victims of persecution. These migrations resulted in Fujianese and Hakka arriving in significant numbers across the coastal areas and islands of the South China Sea. This is the same area where the Silat of the Malay people had already been established over a period of centuries.
The systems of the Fujianese and Hakka that came to this South China Sea area subsequently became known as Kuntao, or, in the Philippines, Kuntaw. It’s the Hokkien term equivalent to Chuan-Fa or Kempo, meaning ‘Fist Way’.
Here’s the tricky bit. The Malay people, like the Chinese, were very protective and secretive about their systems. But cross-fertilization took place nevertheless. It may have happened through intermarriage, or amongst labourers who would have had interactions with one another and exchanged information. Also the Dutch colonists (such as the Thouares family) who operated business interests in the area would have had exposure to both types of system, but a vested interest in neither.
There was also political pressure, particularly within Indonesia, that led to some Chinese actually calling their system Silat. The Chinese would have taken and adapted what was useful from the Silat in a general sense. They would also have needed to adapt their practices according to the specific geographical conditions they were living in, and this would include not only terrain and climate, but also the weapons available and the stylistic and physical type of adversary they would encounter.
Out of this mix, you get something called Kuntao Silat. These styles were spread throughout the Indonesian archipelago, some obviously remaining more ‘pure’ than others. On the Philippines, the practitioners were more inventive and the systems became more eclectic.
Now this brings us to our boy. At the beginning of the 19th Century, Hawaii took on numbers of Chinese labourers to work in the sugar plantations. And again, we can easily imagine how they also took with them their martial arts. For political reasons, these migrations were stopped, and the Chinese were replaced by Japanese, who, again, would have taken their martial arts to Hawaii. And then, again for political reasons, these migrations were stopped and the Japanese were replaced by Filipinos.
And so, who knows? Maybe our boy had actually studied Kuntaw Silat on the Philippines, or something that had been influenced by it. If so, the style may well have had that Fujian/Hakka ‘look’ about it, which would have been familiar to Miyagi through his research in China. It could have also been that the boy picked up what he got on Hawaii itself. But wherever the boy learned his martial art, we know the style probably wasn’t karate, because Miyagi wouldn’t have had to write down the name!
What we do know is that Miyagi was familiar with the Fujian systems and possibly even the Hakka systems, and I suspect maybe that’s the flavour that he detected in the boy’s performance.
Now here’s a side issue. When I was researching both the Fujian/Hakka and the Malay Silat systems, as well as Kali and Arnis systems of the Philippines, I made a few observations. The Fujian and Hakka systems had a strong understanding of how to enhance the neuromusculoskeletal structure, and they knew how to generate explosive force over a short range. They also had an aggressive, spirited approach to combat, straight down the line. But when I looked at their application of that understanding in combat it fell somewhat short. However, when I looked at Silat, providing it hadn’t been over-idealised, I found that it had a clearly defined method of approach, entry, breakdown, and finish that I recognised as being valid for fighting. And this was probably because within the regions of the Indonesian archipelago, fighting was still a serious business. What the Silat systems lacked, however, were the very strengths that I’ve attributed to the Fujian and Hakka systems, above. In particular, Silat lacked the delivery power of the Fujian/Hakka systems, and I suspect this is mainly because Silat was concentrated on the use of the blade, which doesn't require the same kind of power delivery.
I felt that if a martial artist had the right combination of both approaches (and these systems were already influencing one another) he could put together a more complete fighting system than karate was offering at the time.
That’s why, in the late 1980s, I put these two approaches together. My original research had been about the connections between Goju-ryu and the Fujian systems. What I'd found was that the 'essentials' had been removed from Toudi after Toudi was put into the Okinawan school system as an indoctrinational tool of the Japanese Empire. The Goju that Miyagi created for the school system on behalf of the Butokukai and the Ministry of Education was obviously lacking in these essential principles of the Fujian systems and the Hakka, even though Miyagi had studied the systems. However, the forms of Goju-ryu were derived from the Fujian systems by way of Higaonna Kanryo; this made Goju-ryu a suitable vessel to re-fill with those essential ingredients of Fujian boxing.
So, when I re-invented Goju-ryu in the late 1980s, I used a combination of elements of the Fujian/Hakka systems and the entry/breakdown/takedown concepts and applications of Silat. I simply poured these ingredients into the Goju model.
That's why my Goju from the late 1980s onwards, had nothing to do with karate as such.
I still keep an eye on the Indonesian and Filipino systems as well as those of Fujian and the Hakka. If you know how to filter out the irrelevant bits, there’s a hell of a lot of fighting information to be gained. In fact, if you go to my You Tube page you can look at my Fujian playlist http://uk.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=4
When I was on home leave from Benghazi, I was already into isometrics and I remember trying to hold the machine steady as it was going through a fast spin, and noticing how the muscle definition increased. At that time, I didn't know about the stretch reflex and how the faster you stretch the muscle fibre, then the faster you stretch the spindles that are embedded within it. I didn't know how, through the neural impulses arising from this stretch and a synaptic connection within the spinal cord, motor neurons that innervate the muscle in which the stretch took place are activated. This is why, the faster the stretch, the more motor units are recruited to overcome the load.
The muscle spindle responds to the degree of change in its length, i.e. how much it stretches (termed 'tonic'). It also responds to the rate of stretch (termed 'phasic'). It's the phasic, or fast-stretch, that I'm interested in, because it's the fast stretch that activates the fast twitch and super fast twitch motor units (upon which explosive strength depends). I'm also interested in using the gamma efferent system, which enables the spindle to be pre-set so that the slightest stretch or even no stretch at all will produce a myotatic reflex. This occurs through the impression of needed response that I'm always on about.
The problem with Andy's machine is that for many people it just ends up as a vibrating machine, which will only produce tonic stretching and therefore result in increased tonus. But unless the muscle that you're seeking to exercise is under tension, then you won't get the phasic response.
Let me explain. If you pull back your arm to throw a ball, the muscles that are responsible for the forward movement are already undergoing their contraction during that pullback. So you're pulling against tension, rather like pulling back a bowstring to shoot an arrow. There's no slackness in the movement.
Another example. If you're going to do a rebound off the floor, and you start your drop without the impression that you're going to spring back up, then you'll just collapse on the floor. You've got to drop against the tension of the muscles so as to overcome the gravitational load. And the faster you do that (and the more you can reduce the time spent on the loading phase) then the more explosive the resulting rebound will be.
It's a bit like taking a hard rubber ball with high restitution and throwing it into the ground. The faster you throw it, the faster it rebounds. If you do that with a beach ball (what I call the Tai Chi ball), it will barely bounce back.
Going back to the washing machine. What I started to connect together was this. I know that isometrics were working for me, but now I could add to them another dimension. Within the dynamic tension drills that I was doing, I began to add a violent shake. So as to become my own 'washing machine.' You'll see me shaking weights on my DVDs for the very same reason.
I was later to see this same phenomenon within the Fujian systems, of the shaking, vibratory energy. Either they would use poles to exhibit this phenomenon, or use metal rings on the arms. With my research into kinesiology at around the same time, the penny dropped. I understood now that the shaking was about finding a way of recruiting more motor neurons and activating the higher firing rate.
There's a criticism about isometrics only being good for a specific joint angle with a range of 10-15 degrees either way. But I'd suggest for those critics that they look at the idea of torque. When the isometric is performed at optimal angle of the joint, then you're strengthening it at the angle you need to use it at.
Each joint has an optimal oscillatory range, where the distance between the tendon and the joint at the point of insertion is maximal. At your elbow, for example, the optimal oscillatory range is around the perpendicular. If your arm is straight, it's not as strong, and if it's bent completely, it's not as strong. That's why a starting position is usually 90 degrees. That's where the maximal force to produce torque can be applied.
If you strengthen the different joints of the body within their respective oscillatory ranges, now it's a matter of aligning the joints and learning the sequence, rate and timing to add them all together for either a simultaneous release or a sequential one.
Watch a fish go across a tank. He uses the oscillatory effect of the spine to turn a group of small movements into a big result.
And the beauty of isometrics vs. lifting weights is that they can be performed from any angle, against walls, door frames, ground, so you can train very specifically for the movement you want to produce.
But back to my original point.
Basically, what I tried to explain to Andy was that it's more important for you to be actively producing the neural impulses than to rely on a machine. As I said to the guys yesterday at Primal, when you do the isometric or oscillatory exercise, you have to have a clear purpose for doing it; for example, an explosive punch, kick, or movement against the ground . And remember, the isometric or oscillatory preparation is only temporary. You've recruited the motor units and their firing so as to produce an explosive response, but you can't carry it around all day. You have to now do something that's explosive.
So you train the CNS to recruit, but then you've got to express that in a specific way. That expression also feeds back to the CNS and strengthens the pattern. So doing the isometric/oscillatory exercise is only the first part; you have to immediately follow up with an explosive movement.
So, here's my question. Do you guys hug a tree, or do you hug your washing machine?
Only kidding.
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