Watching the deer...and movement

I was out hiking on the Lost Boulder Trail a while back, when I spotted a young deer standing stock still about fifty feet up the hill. It surprised me. I don’t know what had drawn my eyes away from the trail. Most of the time, I think, it’s the movements of deer in the woods that you pick up if you’re going to see them at all. From a distance their legs look like young saplings and their tawny coats seem to blend into the backdrop of dead leaves that blanket the hillside. 

As I stood watching, trying to see if there was a family nearby, it sidled forward a few steps and began to nibble on a small mountain laurel, all the while keeping a wary eye on me. After a while, I moved on, heading down the trail which turned and dropped into a shallow gully, but the deer stayed there until I lost sight of it. 

A young Great Horned
Owl watching me.

I think this was on my mind—the idea of movement—because I had recently been reading something Bernd Heinrich had written about owls. He had performed a sort of experiment with a friendly owl that had regularly come to roost on a branch above the clearing by his cabin in the Maine woods. At first, he threw a piece of meat on the ground beneath the tree, but the owl showed no interest in it. But when Heinrich attached a piece of thread to the meat and dragged it under the tree, the owl quickly dove for it and carried it off. Heinrich concluded that the owl responded to movement or, in other words, movement may have been a more important consideration for the owl than sight alone or smell. 

Movement is such a nebulous thing to describe or put into words. I was watching a video the other day of a teacher trying to explain the movement of the waist, or koshi, in karate, as he slowly twisted his hips to one side and then quickly snapped them back. He did this repeatedly, snapping his hips back faster and faster. What I was wondering, though, was how a student construes this advice from this sort of demonstration, divorced as it is from technique. Might it give one the wrong impression about

how the waist is actually employed? That is, by isolating this use of the waist as an exercise, are we

This technique from Shisochin kata
very obviously uses the waist.

thereby giving students the impression that the waist is something that turns independent -ly of whatever technique is performed? I’ve seen students (and quite a few teachers) actually pull their hips back prior to thrusting it forward with an attack. They seem to be doing this as if it is a movement completely disconnected from the block or parry or whatever receiving technique that precedes it. It becomes a three-part movement: first the waist is twisted, pulling the hip back; then the hip is sharply thrust forward; and then the striking hand is quickly thrust forward. One, two, three. 

There’s a disconnect here, I think. What usually happens in kata—where at least in Goju-ryu we find illustrations of application (what we call bunkai)—is that the waist turns naturally with the initial block or parrying motion of the body (the uke or receiving technique). There is a structure to this, usually, because we learn it in Sanchin kata and we incorporate that learned movement in everything, remembering the admonition that “the arms do not move independently of the body.” This, of course, is facilitated by the notion that the first (and certainly instinctual) response to an attack is to get out of the way. Even if we can’t easily step off line, the body turns to deflect the attack or present a smaller target. The simplest way to picture this is to imagine an opponent stepping in with a right punch. The

The start of the fourth sequence in
Seipai kata.

defender turns to block the attack with the left forearm to the outside of the opponent’s right arm. The defender’s waist has naturally turned away, leaving the left hip forward and the right hip pulled back or “loaded.” In the next instant, the defender thrusts forward with a right counterattack. In each case, for both the “block” and the attack, the waist and arm move together. I’ve found that, more often than not, when you try to teach students to use the waist, they will disconnect the waist from the arms and use the arms independently, as if  the lower half of the body doesn’t know what the upper half is doing, and that seems like a lot of needless expenditure of energy. On the other hand, if all of this movement of the waist and the arms is done naturally and correctly, “blocking” and counterattacking takes very little effort. And, of course, this is greatly facilitated by the off-line stepping we see in kata, when, for example, the defender turns to block and counter, placing him or her self at a ninety degree angle to the attacker.

That seems like a rather long digression. I’m not sure what it has to do with deer standing quietly in the woods, not moving, unless it’s the notion that you probably won’t see much in the way of wasted movement when it comes to animals; they generally conserve their energy. We should too.  Oh, that, and learning to move naturally.

More thoughts on the Chinese classics

"Never forget for a moment that as soon as one part of the body moves the whole body moves. Do not move just one part independently." T'ai-chi Touchstones: Yang Family Secret Transmissions. Compiled and trans. by Douglas Wile, p. 113.

Everything is connected. This is the only way to move effortlessly in a relaxed fashion. It is also the only way to move with real power and speed. So often you see people demonstrate kata without the waist or the legs when they are attacking or blocking with the arms or the hands. It's most notable when people turn in kata to face another direction. They appear to ground themselves firmly in some rigid stance before they attack or block with the hands or arms. This sometimes happens in the first turn-around in Seisan kata. The students demonstrating kata turn and sink firmly into basic stance before the arms move. Or students stepping forward in the second move of Seipai move in such a way that you can see the hands moving independently of the lower part of the body, instead of being connected and really "powered" by the movement of the waist and lower half of the body. Or students stepping up from zenkutsu-dachi to a feet parallel stance with an overhead hammer fist attack in the middle of Saifa will stand up and then attack with the hammer fist. But even this swinging or arcing hammer fist should be connected to the waist and powered by the rest of the body. Or when blocking in the last sequence in Saifa (turning before the final mawashi and cat-stance), the forearm block should be executed by engaging the waist--in other words, when the arm moves to block, the whole body moves. This is rather hard to convey in words, but it is easy to see.

"The circle of retreat is easy; the circle of advance is difficult." T'ai-chi Touchstones: Yang Family Secret Transmissions. Compiled and trans. by Douglas Wile, p. 89.

When I read this, I think of the angles of counter-attack shown in the Goju-ryu classical katas. We see retreat directly back in Seiunchin. We see "blocking" or receiving movement stepping back along a diagonal in Kururunfa. We see stepping off-line to the sides--at a 90 degree angle to the opponent's attack--in Seisan and Sanseiru. We even see defense from a position with no movement in Seipai, as if one is caught with one's back to the wall, unable to move off-line in any direction. But with a very real attack it has always seemed to me that the most difficult movement is to move along the forward diagonal, along the tangent of the circle of advance. We see this in the diagonal steps before the kick in Saifa or before the first kick in Seipai or the corner techniques in Seipai. This movement is more difficult, but it is certainly made easier if one keeps in mind the admonition of the first quote above: "...as soon as one part of the body moves the whole body moves."

Pictures: Seipai, Saifa, Saifa, Seipai.