Impressed?

Great Mr. Morris!
You really have a big and open and fresh vision my friend!
Maybe I discover your "youth secret"...

I train Parkour in Brazil last year with some friends in my neighbourhood too. Some Parkour´s movements like the rolls and jumps improve my skills and include can save my skin if I will need to run 100 meters and jump a wall in city

"Fight or fly" reflex reaction...

Jokes apart, see David Belle (today with 34 years old) performance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rekmYbFRbK0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNvdSemZYCI&mode=related&search=

And about the "Street Dancers", I imagine this guys putting punches, kicks and takedows into that freak (and unexpected) movements in fight

Steve,

regarding this sentence

And that’s one of the things Sanchin should teach you

Which are the other things Sanchin should teach?

(Sorry, if I get something wrong here)

In Sanchin there's the shaking oscillating moves, the shoulder-knee alignment, the upward energy (extensor thrust), probing step, the wegdge with the arms to deflect yourself, the withdrawal reflex etc.

Also some point which interest me ist the Pu-Tim-Tun-Tau principle seems like the startle reflex and the shaking of the body.

But finally Steve, you are able to explain the principles behind it. So your students can adapt the principle.

Ha, just the other day I found an old kata book of mine and I thought about the old time warriors comming back from war. These guys which were suscessfull and enjoyed the killing but now it was over they maybe done some shadowboxing to let the aggression out in some way. Then some other guy with no experience in fighting comes along and ask him: "Hey, what are you doing. Can you show me?" and the warrior shows him some of his techniques and the non-fighter takes the free shadowboxing and coreographed it in some way so he don't forget it. Than add a little of the peak-shift effect, you explained on your website Steve and voila... you get ... bullshit. Of course if you have a fighting mindset you can make it work again in some sense, because if you are a natural fighter you using already some of the principles and concepts which determines the winner. Yeah, just a thought.

Best wishes
Julian

YOu're exactly right. YOu can't capture the experience of a fight in a kata. THat has to be put in through some form of live exchange, either actual encounters or the realistic replication of encounters.

If you're going to practice kata, you've got to be aware that there's a big element missing: in fact, the most important element of all, which is combative experience. Because on the basis of that, you will either adapt the kata to those combative experiences or recognize a move or sequence as being something that you've also experienced in a fight.

One thing that you mustn't do is to arrange the conditional fighting to fulfill a kata. That's completely ass-backwards.

The pu tim tun tao is float-sink-swallow-spit, and what's more important rather than the tactic is finding the dynamics to support it. Particularly with the sudden and violent displacement of weight (up, down, forward, back, left, right) and the way this energy is translated in different directions varies from one animal system to another. As well as the hands which express it.

Now, if you want to talk about Sanchin that's going to be a huge one--that's a book--I can't do that today. Sanchin is fundamental to fighting, psychologically, physiologically, technically/tactically, all of those things. But in order to use it in a contemporary environment, you'd have to adapt it, and it for me what was more important about the Sanchin was the 'why'. Exploring what were the reasons for doing Sanchin. ANd then, once I understood those reasons, I didn't need the Sanchin.

Because of its ambiguity, it allowed me to be involved in a process of finding out everybody's interpretation of Sanchin, matching it against my sense of reality, and distilling from that what I believed was essential to the fight. So my Sanchin, the one that everybody talks about, is not the one I was taught in Japan or Okinawa. I arrived at it by a creative process.

With kata, much of it is ambiguous. In the West we have shadow fighting, and it would make more sense, based on the realistic experiences of others or yourself, to create your fighting imagery from that. And what you describe about peacetime training, or when duelling might not have been as prominent, that's a real possibility. movement could become idealized notonly on the part of the master but also on the part of the student.

There's a saying that Sanchin isn't Sanchin unless it's tested. But often the test is done on the assumption that what is being tested actually works in the fight. But we don't know that. The only way you really test it is in a fight. So whatever the stance, footwork, the alignment, the bridging hands, the shock power development, etc., psychological state of mind, all those things, ability to take shots, all have to be tested in a real environment. Not an artificially contrived one.

Thank you for the reply.

I've read elsewhere a nice quote about Sanchin:

San chin is a vehicle, after you get to your destination; there is not need to lug it around on your back. San chin has many gears, no need to get stuck in first gear, not when you've got a ten-speed.

I think it's says much about it.

Cheers
Julian

steve morris wrote: So whatever the stance, footwork, the alignment, the bridging hands, the shock power development, etc., psychological state of mind, all those things, ability to take shots, all have to be tested in a real environment. Not an artificially contrived one.

This reminds me of a guy I used to know who trained his students to take solar plexus shots. They would partner up and start out punching lightly with the recipient controlling the impact by either saying harder or lighter. Over time they would build to taking a pretty good shot. I never could understand this...it was kind of weird to me.

Anyway, they could all take a pretty good shot, especially the instructor.
But that only worked while standing there prepared; it didn't work while sparring. You can beat a good set up!!

San chin is a vehicle, after you get to your destination; there is not need to lug it around on your back. San chin has many gears, no need to get stuck in first gear, not when you've got a ten-speed.

THe analogy of a vehicle is interesting, because the vehicle I climbed into when I practiced Goju-ryu, both in Japan and Okinawa, was a complete wreck! No engine, no wheels, no gears, no seats, even the rear view mirror had been stripped! And that’s why, through my fight experience, knowledge of boxing, Muay Thai, wrestling, kinesiology and research into the Fujian/Southeast Asian systems, I tried to rebuild it into a functional machine.

So as a vehicle, Sanchin didn’t actually take me anywhere! But after I’d rebuilt it, although a lot was said about my Sanchin, nobody was interested in taking a ride with me.

Everything I put into that Sanchin had been tested in some way or another, and what’s interesting is how, from the perspective of the Fujian systems, apart from that which was beneficial to the enhancement of the neuromusculoskeletal structure and some of the ways of developing power, many of the applications of the skills simply wouldn’t have worked against an assailant, armed or unarmed. Whereas, everything that I put into that Sanchin had been tested in some form or another, with a view to not only combat but also the enhancement of the structure.

That’s what I meant by, the Sanchin has to be tested. There are a lot of people practicing Sanchin who simply can’t fight. And their Sanchin isn’t going to help them fight, because they’re not testing it. The ways in which Sanchin is tested are very limited, and they bring out what people want the form to be, without thought to the reality of combat. Now, there are obviously those who can fight who practice Sanchin and will claim that Sanchin has helped them. But the truth is, if you actually examine a lot of the psychological, physiological, and physical attributes of those who make this claim, the fact is they could make anything work. Guys like this could make even an inferior tool work. It doesn’t say anything about the tool or the training method, only about the guy. The only way you can really test whether it works (not even absolutely, but in a general sense) is through some form of conditional test.

For example, let’s say that you’ve been trying to raise your anaerobic threshold for fighting, and you’ve been doing specific and non-specific work so you can complete say ten minutes of high intensity interval work. Let’s see if it works. Let’s put you in a conditional fight against first one guy, say for thirty seconds, then another guy, another thirty seconds, then another guy, and another, and another, until you’ve completed your ten minutes. Chances are, you won’t do it. You probably won’t even get through two minutes without becoming exhausted.

So, you then have to go back and adjust your training and then test it again.

And the same can be said also about skills.

Somebody’s going to claim that, say, in the kata Sanchin you could deflect your opponent’s attacks, capture his arm, come in at an oblique angle, and perform some Chi na skill on him. OK. Let’s try it. And we’ll do it under the same conditions as before. First one guy will come in, and he’s got ten seconds to try to knock you out with a skill you claim the kata is going to be able to deal with. You know it’s coming, it’s not even like in a fight. Now try it. First with one, then another, then another. They’re all aggressors, they’re all different in the way they’re throwing the shot, and they’re not going to comply with you. They’re out to test you. Let’s see what your percentage is on that.

And you can do the same with a knife attack. You could keep it simple with one attack, or you could make it more complicated but still in a conditional form. Let’s see if it works. Do it with a marker so nobody gets hurt. Count the slashes afterward. I bet you ten to one you’re going to be counting a lot of slashes on your t-shirt, and your arms, and your wrists, and your fingers, and your legs, and your face. You know how I know that? I’ve already done the test.

So for me, my personal experience of testing and applying Sanchin for real is that it’s very much a personal thing. You shouldn’t climb in it and assume it’s going to take you anywhere. It’s what you do with it that matters. There is no such thing as an absolute ‘this is Sanchin’—you have to make it work for you or you might as well not bother. And in my opinion, there are far too many assumptions made about Sanchin. Forget the Sanchin. If you see something, as I did, interesting in the Sanchin, then go ahead and explore it. But equally, I’ve seen something interesting in the way a guy serves a 140mph ball in tennis, and I explored that, too. I didn’t take up tennis to do it!

If I had my chance to make this journey again, that’s the way I’d do it. The testing is the most important part. And don’t believe. Don’t use something like Sanchin to support your belief of what you want it to be.

Makes it a whole lot clearer! Thanks for your insight and your time, Steve.

Julian

Makes a lot of sense....very good.