Breathing Patterns

An example of One Breathing Pattern

 

 With breath life begins, without breath life ends, with efficient breathing life thrives.

 

I had (and still have) a student 35 years ago who would not breathe performing kata. He would get redder, and redder as he performed his kata. He was so focused on rembering the movements that he would forget to breath. Constantly he was reminded to just breathe as he practiced his kata. It took years, but eventually he got it.

 

Any system of martial art (and any other human endeavor) has breathing at its core, but it is so fundamental that many times people don’t recognize it is there.

 

This is not as simple a topic as Sanchin breathing is the answer. I know great practitioners who do not use Sanchin in their practice.  There is not one answer.

And in effect you cannot increase your performance by switching back and forth between methods. That does not mean there is no value discussing them, but the discussion must be tempered with reason, as you consider what can be gained.

 

I can think of about 10 or so different breathing practices I have encountered over the years. In each of those practices there are great technicians using them to effect.

 

At the core, in connection with form practice you might consider technique sequences define inter and intra breathing practices. Using the opening of Seisan kata (Isshinryu version) as a starting point, Inter technique sequence breath can be used to control the speed of a kata. Where intar technique sequence breath can be used to control the speed of a technique series (one movement, or a sequence of movements done as one movement.

 

So here is a sample analysis:

1.     (Inhale), Left foot forward Left side block (exhale), (inhale), right reverse punch (exhale)

2.     Left foot forward left side block (inhale), right reverse punch (exhale)

3.     (Inhale),Left foot forward left side block, right reverse punch (exhale)

4.     (Exhale), Left foot forward left side block, right reverse punch (one continuous inhalation)

      5.     ---- (Exhale) Left foot forward left side block, right reverse punch; Right foot forward, left reverse punch; left fot forward, right reverse punch (all on one continuous inhale sequence)

 

This gives the basic idea. Whatever the pattern chosen, under black belt performance there is no reason to consider another choice. Instead continual improvement using the first choice is the goal.

 

Where there are strategic reasons to consider other breathing patterns, their use becomes a permanent shift in one’s training at that choice. Which is why those who are making those choices in their personal training , are not good choices for training beginners at this stage of their training.

 

Example: One system I know does not alter the breathing pattern until 3^rd Dan, and then it is a change for lifetime practice. Switching from normal breathing to reverse breathing in the practice, the purpose to confuse the opponent, who are timed subconsciously to react one way on hearing an inhalation, and not expecting quite the opposite performance.

 

Another example of reverse breathing is found in tai chi practice, but the systems that choose to use this do not change back and forth no matter which practice they use.

 

Consistent practice, it can be altered, imo, but once chosen it has to become standard practice to become effective. For when you are in conditions extremis, you can’t choose, it has to be natural or you are dead.

 

A different aspect of breathing is that some techniques perform best with inhalation and some with exhalation. It does not have to be steady state.

 

A movement like the heaven and earth throw of Aikido, works better in inhalation allowing you to adhere to the opponent, when you are taking control of their center and making the technique work. That does not mean exhalation won’t work, but it works differently. This is where you have to explore the potential use of different breath patterns.

 

When you consider technique sequences you control what they mean for you. When done with one continuous inhalation or exhalation the series can be performed faster and faster. One of the systems I know uses this in one kata taking a long sequence of movements and performing them very fast with one contioious breathing pattern. Taking a breath in the middle of the series, would slow your technique.

 

The possibilities of breath are greater than what I have experienced. It is a serious topic, For with breath there is life.

The Sai's of It

 

 

‘ He musn’t be a man cause he doesn’t have the same set of sai as me’

            *my butchered version of Satisfaction, by the Stones* but good marketing, perhaps.

I was a brown belt when one day Charles Murray told me that I should get some pair of sai and a bo for myself. While I had seen seniors practice kobudo down at the Salisbury dojo, it had never crossed my mind that one day I would be studying this. That next week I had to travel to Philadelphia for a business trip to Philladelphia. I made the time to travel to the original location of Asian Martial Arts, in an old storefront business on North Broad Street. Having no idea of what I was purchasing in fact, I bought a set of steel sai according to the measurements Charles told me to purchase. For he bo, I got one of the proper length, a piece of wood slightly bent and with a density as if it was filled with lead.

 

I still have both of them, now from 1978. The bo is a primary practice bo because of its weight. The sai are a bit niched but work and feel perfect in my hands.

 

From Salisbury they were different from the Sai on Mr. Lewis’ desk, which were shorter and more dagger like. Which it turns out Charles had gotten for Mr. Lewis when he was in Okinawa. Most of the black belts practiced at different times than the rest of the class, so I had not seen much kobudo.

 

Charles started me on Chantan Yara No Sai. When he was stationed on Okinawa, he was a new shodan, and didn’t have  Chantan Yara. He learned it there. When the Okinawans stopped by after their work, to train, he remarked how all of them would assist him learning it, making corrections. He started me on Chantan Yara perhaps to have someone to practice with.

 

The sai felt awkward to me. They were nothing like being perfectly balanced. Then my wife was teaching at the YMCA and one time when practicing there, I was sweaty when the sai flew out of my hand and dropped straight down to hit my big toe with the handle, Ouch!

 

Every weapon I have studied eventually bit me.

 

Later as a new black belt I began competing with sai. Eventually switching to Bo Shi Shi for my normal competition kata. But one time when at a tournament in Delaware, I was very ill, so for some reason I switched to sai. I competed with Chantan Yara. Afterwards when changing one of the judges, a Senior instructor who I didn’t know I existed came up to me and congratulated me for showing such power.

 

I just kept practicing over the years. When my students got to the point they were learning kobudo, for sai, it was also their favorite weapon.

 

IMO, the key to sai, is not that the weapon must be perfectly balanced and made. From a theoretical level the last thing I would want is for someone to pick up my sai and have them feel perfect in their hands. Instead, I would want the sai I use to feel wrong when they pick it up, off balanced. But to me, with lots of work they would have become perfect to me, as I would have made the adjustments over the years of work so the sai were perfect to my touch.

 

Of course there is little reason in today’s world to use sai for defensive reasons. But the hard sweat equity from the constant study makes them invaluatle.

 

Back around 1990 I attended a clinic with Sherman Harrill in Chicopee, Ma. It was held by Chester Houlbecki. Among the studies Sherman had us work on, at one point he turned to me asd starded talking about Kusanku Sai. It was not what the clinic had been about.

 

Sherman started discussing the Kusanku Sai kata. “You know where you throw the Sai to the ground and then use your 3^rd sai to continue? I told him yes. “Originally that was a throw into the body of an attacker, and not into the floor. But the dojo became to busy and it was changed for safety. It wasn’t a good idea to throw the sai into other’s bodies. “ LOL

 

Years later after the deaths of John Dinger (my student) and then Sherman himself, many of my adult students stopped training. Citing their ages as the reason for leaving training, I had over 15 years training with most of them. It was their right, but I felt their departure. But that meant more time for Mike and I to work on our own advanced training.

 

One day working Sai with him, it came to me how the way the sai was used in a closed down strike, was also a method to apply to a descending pull for an application, not as a constant pressure pull but one where the pressure was applied as if you were striking down as with a sai.

 

That was when I began looking at all kobudo as a force enhancer for application utilization. We age and grow slower and weaker, But decades of work on Kobudo allow us to use the skills the training develops with our applications. It works in practice, but is difficult to express with those who have shorter time in the arts.

 

The variety of weapons, help develop skills.  My friend Ernest Rothrock in his Chinese studies has a tremendous number of different weapons in his studies. I have felt the manner in which they assisted his claw development in Eagle Claw. As the Chinese invented gunpowder, the retention of weapons was not an accident. They build skills.

 

Most Okinawan kubudo doesn’t have the same depth, but it still is a significant force enhancer if one takes advantage and practices for decades.

 

And some seek the perfect Sai, Good for them, each must follow your dream, But my less than perfect Sai are perfect to me.



The Karate Kid

 

 It was 1984, I had been teaching youth for 5 years at the Scranton Boys Club.

 

Down the street from my home lived Fred Meurty a local judo competitor and  Judo instructor. He stopped by my home and told me about this new movie “The Karate Kid” that was coming out. Knowing I taught youth  (as well as holding youth karate tournaments) he told me about an idea he had. He found sponsorship and was inviting all of the youth martial arts programs in Lackawanna County to a free showing of the movie in Downtown Sceranton. Not knowing what the movie was about I said sure and then invited my class to attend the showing with me.

  

Watching the movie that first time with the kids from my class, well  I was knocked out.  That movie “ The Karate Kid” and it’s first sequel “The Karate Kid II” IMO are probably the two best movies that have ever been made about karate. No, not from the technical aspect, the execution was cheesy to say the least, but from the explanation about what karate was designed to be on Okinawa.

 

 I have seen to many martial arts films. At times entertaining but none of what I have seen really gets to what karate is to me. I don’t watch movies for technical excellence, rather for content. This movie shows a why one studies karate, and gives an Okinawan perspective about what karate could be.

 

 At that showing you could have heard a pin drop. All of the kids there were astonished, including the young men and women who trained with me. The applause at the end of the show was thunderous. I still recall leaving the theater that Saturday afternoon, entering the bright sunlight, and feeling incredulous after seeing that show.

 

In a small way, life would never be the same.

Okinawan Youth Karate

A look at an Okinawan Youth Karate Class

Funakoshi and the Bubishi

I may make assumptions about why and what was written in the past. This time I'm looking at Funakoshi Ginchin and his inclusion of Bubishi sections in his books.

Interesting thought on the last quote in the Bubishi section of Funakoshi’s ‘Karate-Do Kyohan’.  Funakoshi incorporated those sections in all three texts he wrote, the 1922 ‘Ryukyu Kempo Karate’ and 1925 ‘Karate Jutsu’ and well as the 1935 Kyohan.  But he incorporated it in the Chinese original, not translated into Japanese.

One wonders, after leaving Chinese names for kata behind, why he was still willing to show that Okinawan Karate had Chinese connections.  In fact (outside of Bubishi translations in English, which I suspect are one’s he’s made himself, it was only in last years publication of ‘Karate Jutsu’, the 1925 book, that a translator presented them in that book in English.  In the notes he also suggests that Funakoshi may have altered his presented text from the original Bubishi.

 “When one's hands and feet move together, one's form is flawless." John Teramoto’s translation reads, “Your hands and feet [stance] must never fail to be aligned in the proper direction.”

To my way of thinking both are describing the same conceptual thought.

 “ The obvious meaning is that maintaining the unities gives proper function to the form, as it were. I'm not coming up with anything more, though...“

By way of example in my early fighting days (pre safety gear) I can recall sparring with individuals outside of my dojo.  On occasion (and almost certainly by happenstance) I can recall delivering strikes that just seemed to flow into my opponent with no force and dropping them with a strike into the solar plexus, or the jaw.

On reflection it was part the area being struck, but in part the correct alignment of my body, the angle of the strike and the correct target. Not due to my brilliance, but to happenstance that I was in the right place at the right time. Of course I then worked on trying to repeat those performances, but rarely with the same results.

When every aspect of your body is correctly aligned in a strike, all your force is moving into your target and not partially vectoring elsewhere. This makes one’s form flawless. 

In this sense, the practice of kata is a tool to work on achieving that unity, to work on the alignment and timing of the extremities with the central corpus of the body. The Kumite is the next step on taking that practiced form and adapting it to sell it when the circumstances arise, not from happenstance but from control and intent.

Personally, I believe the original use of ‘Sanchin’ testing was to do just that, test the total alignment of the student, not to strike into their arm to see if they could take a strike, but to apply appropriate pressure to see that their total alignment was correct and capable of neutralizing the opposing force.  But I also believe such testing was often misunderstood as it wasn’t given verbally, and the obvious nature of striking the body replaced the intent of challenging the alignment of the whole.

I remain wondering what did Funakoshi intend by leaving these passages in Chinese. Was he testing his students to see if they would undergo the challenge of understanding their value. Was his lack of ‘bunkai’ or application study with his students intentional or perhaps was it that they weren’t training deeply enough to address the application potential in the manner in which he was originally trained and he wasn’t willing to give them a lessor version. Instead leaving the signposts from the Bubishi.

Of course this is speculation, and my words aren’t better than another’s thoughts. But as simple as the words from the Bubishi may be, there seem to be lessons for us to ponder.

Examples of Atemi in Aikido - Saito