Sunday, March 6, 2016

The Slow Lane.

Sometimes it is best to slow down and really look at the nuances of every single centimeter of movement in order to truly have an understanding.
Most people say stronger, harder, and faster, but that only works best when things are done correctly, after all, if you do a technique five hundred times incorrectly you are only practicing five hundred incorrect techniques.

Each and every person is convinced of the correctness of their own path, and they should be, because it is their own.
Each person has a unique way of doing things, whether they realize it or not, and these are the unique things that one must come to understand when they are slowing things down in order to really look at what is there... Maybe a better term would be to listen to what their body is trying to tell them.

Some people are naturally bigger than others, some people are naturally smaller, some people are good in short bursts of speed, some people can go for the long haul (depending, also, on how they train... At least in respect to this).
All of this also must take Physics into account... There is no one uniform approach, only uniform restrictions and regulations under which individual principles can be applied.
Apply harmoniously with the laws of Physics and things work out great, but try to do something outside those laws and things go terribly wrong on so many different levels.

My Sensei introduced us to doing Shisochin as Tai Chi on a beach during a Regional Sho Rei Shobu Kan camp out many years ago.
I thought this was cool at the time, it really showed how to move in a way that did not break alignment, to move free, but within the bounds of the movements' mechanics.
Kris Wilder further drove this home with his 'Go slow to learn fast' teaching as we went through Sanchin in the old basement Dojo I had at my old house in Suncrest.
The idea was to really slow down, to take your time moving so that the ENTIRE movement could be felt through ALL of its' moving parts and, in this way, one could feel how each aspect linked and supported the next in almost instantaneous succession (once sped up and done at full force after grasping and ingraining what was gained through the slow aspect).

Anyone can learn a thousand different things in a thousand different ways, but a person really only needs to know two or three things extremely well in order to succeed.
This is true in life as well as Karate, attention to detail and, as Shihan Roseberry is fond of saying, 'Do a little, but do it often.'


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