Listening to the feet

In the last post I discussed the wide range of motion possible at the foot/ankle comlex of humans. This is derived from the mobility achieved from the 28 bones, comprising 25 joints, contained within this essential yet underused boday part.

That last asertion might sound a bit daft but it’s not made without foundation. Of course, we use our feet everyday, even the laziest of us has to walk about a bit, thereby rendering feet essential but are feet underused?

Maybe not underused in terms of getting about but definitely in terms of optimising the full potential of the foot/ankle structures. That IS confusing, I’ll elaborate.

After many years of karate training I underused my feet as the training tends to ignore the concept of ‘rooting’ in anything more than a perfunctuary manner. Not universally true but genarally so. By the time a karateka is curious about the softer side of things he/she can have some difficulty in learning to ’access’ their feet. Particularly if the curiosity leads to the interal arts the terminology can be confusing let alone the concept itself.

I first came across this side of things on a small sanchin session with Mike Clarke in Southampton. One thing he demonstrated then taught us was how to  drop our weight using the structure of sanchin stance. This leaves you very solid in your stance. Involving what I call ‘fat, flat feet’ this sinking of the wieght increases the surface area of the foot in contat with the ground and so improves stability.

Trouble is solidity without mobility is errr, limited! It was a long time before I was able to manage both. The process of managing both invovles ‘listening’ as the Chinese arts call it, or, and a little more up my street, becoming tuned to the kinaesthetics of the foot. This means you need to become consciusly aware of whats happening in the foot as you move. Not consciously interferring with whats going on, but just observing.

I used to travel to courses in Kent which covered this sort of thing. On the way back I’d need to go through London and the Tube was a good place to ‘listen’. Bounding up steps to ground level or riding out the bumps between stations was great practice.

Steve Morris mentions walking as a great way to get a grip on the kinaesthetics of the feet, and other joints for that matter. It’s a very useful method for discovering various movements possible at the foot and ankle and how these effect the efficiency of walking. How changing foot position alters how you push off from the floor and at what angle. How you use the foot to stop or adjust to avoid an unseen obstacle. All this and more helps you to be aware of  and then attempt to optimise whats happening. It’s a very useful process.

human gait cycle

Quite recently, Steve Morris showed us the importance of the roll across the joints at the ball of the foot and the importance of that in normal gait. It was striking that none of us were using this natural part of the gait cycle to its optimum. This will be elaborated on in the next post……

Kinaesthesis and Proprioception 2 – developing the feeling

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blindfold sticky hands

Don’t think feeeeeeeeeel – Bruce Lee

This has always been one of my favourite MA quotes. Most people seem to over-think during motor skill acquisition, often getting so wrapped up in the detail that they block their progression. From personal experience, in addition to what I have read and know from others, developing keen body awareness, or heightened kinaesthetic and proprioceptive perception, new motor skills can be more readily absorbed. Furthermore existing skills can be developed, but how should we go about developing this awareness. In the last post I mentioned how push hands develops sensitivity, but here I want to discuss other methods of developing kinaesthetic and proprioceptive perception that may help when learning motor skills.

A lot of time in karate and other Martial Arts is devoted to learning forms with emphasis often directed toward attaining perfect performance. Despite this aim, kata practice does not necessarily afford an ideal environment for developing kinaesthetic and proprioceptive perception, if too much time is spent thinking rather than feeling. For instance, on her blog Karatebarbie describes how kata performance is often little more than a race to the end! This clearly is not an environment facilitating the development of kinaesthetic and proprioceptive perception, and ironically it also fails in achieving correct form. She goes on to describe

“what kata was really meant to be about.  My own kata was stiff and upright, a series of disparate movements, whilst hers seemed to rise and sink and flow.  Each move showed the principle she was trying to achieve and you could actually visualise what she was doing to repel the attacks of her far larger opponent.”

Now, if you are going to spend such a long time perfecting kata surely it has to be better to perfect the underlying principles contained within, and express these rather than concentrating on the form per se. The trouble is a kata performance demonstrating loading, posting and explosive movement, for example,  may very well do so at the expense of the stylised perfection. However, surely this trade off is more desirable than identikit pretty performance across a dojo population? Put another way, if a kata is teaching us something important, and if not why bother with it at all, then surely it is essential for this to be apparent in the kata performance even though the performance would be unique to an individual and perhaps a little untidy.

In addition, through practicing these principles as part of the kata performance they are being demonstrated and reinforced, forcing one to focus on reliably producing the movements and feeling them as the techniques are performed. So rather than superficially focussing on the detail of the action (i.e. hand/foot position), by focussing on the body actions required to drive the technique ones attention is naturally drawn deeper thereby allowing an awareness of how the body works. Personally, I really began to develop kinaesthetic and proprioceptive perception in this way through practising sanchin kata.

I initially came across Sanchin performance, different to the huffing and puffing version I was used to, through some of the instructors from the United Goju Forum, either at one of the Seminars or elsewhere. Steve Rowe of Shikon helped me improve kinaesthetic and proprioceptive perception through sanchin performance, combined with other methods. By working at being aware of how my body felt while rooted in sanchin stance and then when pulsing from the foot I was able to use this kata to develop this awareness. Further Steve encouraged the training of these concepts in everyday life. So, on the tube station stairways, during my journey home, I’d practise the pulsing as I bounced up the steps or being rooted on the tube trains or on the bus as the vehicle rocked about. Combining these methods helped immensely.

In a response to a letter, Steve Morris goes into great detail on how to develop kinaesthetic and proprioceptive perception through walking. He relates it to how he used to train horses; it’s a long piece but well worth the read. He describes, in detail a relatively easy method of developing full body awareness, although it does take time. Even by just exploring how the actions of the foot affect movement it is possible to begin to get a better understanding and awareness of movement. The beauty of this approach is that you can practise it everyday. This of course can then be developed and fed back into your kata performance, if you so desire.

Ultimately, all of this needs to be used in drills relavent to the desired outcome, if that is kata performance, you probably won’t win any medals. If it’s for the production of power you will get results as you develop the ability to feel or sense the power or potential power as you move. This can then transfer to skills useable in a fight, given correct training.

Bending the Bow

One analogy used in martial arts concerns bow’s within the body. I first heard of this from Steve Rowe at Shikon then later Steve Morris. I didn’t find it all helpful initially but now I love this analogy and, importantly, it’s useful in getting the body to generate power ‘naturally’.

Steve Morris blogged about bows in the article ‘loading against the curve’, referring to the construction of a reflex bow. While this helped I still didn’t quite get it at first, but now I do. If you imagine a springy branch that once pulled, wants to ‘ping’ back to it’s originally shape, that’s like a standard Western bow. The reflex bow, in contrast, has increased ‘spring’. This is due to it’s construction from a c-shaped piece of wood bent back on itself, i.e. against the c-shape. This greatly increases the tension and so power of the bow when firing arrows. Therefore, the bows in the body need to be bent against tension in order to generate great power. If a bow is bent ‘loosely’ power is diminished.

During a striking action, a bent ‘body bow’, such as the one across the shoulders, helps increase the loading of the strike. Muscle stretch at the shoulder activates the elastic component of the muscle providing potential energy. Tension at the shoulder joint augments this potential energy allowing greater force to be exerted when this energy is released. If the muscle stretch at the shoulder is soft/loose the resulting strike is comparable to the Western bow rather than the reflex bow. You have to play with this concept to get it. As an aside, the tension referred to here should not be confused with the dynamic tension that you often see used in the performance of sanchin kata. The striking action is NOT stiff!

It follows then, if we combine more than one bow we get a cumulative effect. This is something we have been working on in our club. We ‘created’ a strike we called the Superfrau which is like a close-in version of a Superman punch, which bends the bow of the back. We got a lot out of this. Then we added the bend of the shoulder bow, thus utilising two bows in one strike. It’s some hit!

Bows bending!

The analogy of bows bending to fire shots works well once you get your head round it. So long as tension is maintained in the bow, power strike after power strike can be fired. I think of the body being charged, through tension, ready to fire. The image of the wrestler jumping from the corner of the ring onto his opponent illustrates the charged image I have. Chest protruding, arms splayed ready to explode inward! Although it should be present in something as mundane as the Goju kata’s sanchin and tensho.

The bow analogy can be used as a model allowing us to harness natural body resources to produce powerful strikes. These resources can be manipulated to find further ways of implementing power in strikes. It’s all good.

Sanchin underpins Goju……?

Miyagi Sensei Shime testing a student

Sanchin kata underpins the martial art system of Goju Ryu Karate. That’s what you’re told as a Goju karate enthusiast. Sanchin kata is THE fundamental basis of the entire system. Some say everything you need is in the kata. A very sweeping statement, particularly, given the manner in which it is usually practised and taught.

The description of the kata in the Wikipedia article is typical of the manner in which I was taught Sanchin kata. That is, it typifies the ‘hard’ of the hard/soft of Goju, i.e. it ‘uses a very strong, tense closed fist “push”‘ and emphasises Isometric strength training.

The articles description is congruent with how I learned the kata. We used to have a great Saturday morning training sessions, where we’d concentrate on Sanchin and Okinawan strength training using traditional implement such as chi’ishi and nigiri game. Great sessions, emphasising the ‘hard’ of hard/soft but little else. We’d do Sanchin holding bricks to make it harder, and there was Shime testing too. We’d get hit on the legs, back, arms and had our strength tested during kata performance. I loved it at the time, but while strength development is clearly desirable and the shime testing was useful in regards of conditioning the kata never seemed to have a great deal to do with fighting. The link between the kata and the Thai boxing matches we attended was not obvious!

I enjoyed history at school, so the old style training implements always appealed to me and while the training was enjoyable the focus was firmly in the ‘hard’ camp. This was fine as the ‘soft’ would come later, so we were told. With friends interested in internal martial arts I was curious about the ‘soft’ side and became impatient. I knew that Sanchin kata performed in the manner I’d been taught was to say the least missing something. I wanted to know if the ‘soft’ performance was the missing link. To cut a long story short I got bored of waiting for the ‘soft’ side.

I became involved with the once excellent United Goju Forum and my eyes opened. There was a much larger Goju world than I had been led to believe and after meeting other groups through the forum and related seminars I began to discover more to Sanchin and Goju than I was experiencing in my own association.

I travelled around attending seminars and training with various Goju teachers with a variety of insights. I attended a number of courses in Kent with Steve Rowe who gave us an insight into the way he taught at Shikon. Steve Rowe’s use of Sanchin and Tensho katas was unlike what I was used to. This training helped me get to grips with the softer side of Sanchin, that’s for sure. Interestingly, this ‘soft’ side, for want of a better description involved more training alone than with others. I used to practice being ‘in the feet’ on the tube and tried ‘pulsing’ from the feet as I bounded up the long staircases located at some of the central London tube stations.

Complementing some of the training I was doing elsewhere this really helped. Another teacher I went to see, Mike Clark, suggested that we should do Sanchin soft sometimes and hard other times depending on what we want to achieve. This has stayed with me as it suggests using the kata for your own ends rather than being contained by the kata. Great stuff! So I could take the softer appreciation and ‘mix’ it with the harder approach I was already familiar with as I saw fit. This was very useful at the time.

At this time I was training with various Goju and non-Goju teachers, researching on the internet and training in Birmingham. I was getting better but it did seem that one common denominator was a bloke called Steve Morris, previously a Goju man he’d turned his back on karate. A course he was holding was advertised on the forum and I announced my intention of going. I was put off by a private message and advised to read his site. I can still remember that first exposure to his frankly amazing site. I spent hours working through the articles. The workings of a madman or genius?

I was intrigued and eventually had the opportunity to train with him, firstly, at Steve Rowe’s dojo in Kent and then in Birmingham and Coventry. I can categorically say that training with Steve Morris I have learned more about Sanchin kata than elsewhere, and that’s without ever having actually performed or specifically addressed the kata. I now feel I understand how a kata as ‘simplistic’ as Sanchin can underpin an entire system such as Goju. And it doesn’t involve holding bricks. It’s been a bit of a journey getting there and really there is no need for the journey to be as convoluted.

Morris’s recent blog entries on Sanchin kata, called Hands on the Wheel are very informative and required reading for everyone interested in Sanchin and how to use it, I thoroughly recommend these. It does require an ‘open mind’, however so get lateral NOT literal and give it a go!

Just to finish this entry, here’s a clip of someone I have never met ‘explaining’ Sanchin in a manner similar to that I learnt originally, i.e. ‘hard’. For illustrative purposes only.