This Takes 60 YEARS To Learn... ｜Yusuke in Okinawa Season 2 Ep.11 【Shogen Ryu Karate】 

On my opinion base on my experience the unconscious conditional reaction is like a feeling.You have a pattern base just on your feeling with just a little glimpse of what you see without having full intention to it. Because if you put intention you become conscious on your body then you get rigid in your movements then your will not be that much relax.if your not relax there is a tension on your body that's why the sensie says it's slow.

dk yoo (i know he is not popular right now) and systema (a system that also receives a lot of criticism) both focus on relaxation for speed and power the concept is like a whip. when your body is tense, you do not generate the same amount of momentum or acceleration. its like kicking a roundhouse or mawashi geri without driving your hip and pivoting your foot. there is a reason why baseball players and golf players both match their body with the swing. and, in that sense, neither are using rigid muscle tension but a smooth motion to generate the maximum force a smooth motion is not only beautiful but generates tremendous power. Force (N) = mass (kg) * acceleration (m/s²) ... but i could be wrong

Seems very similar to what boxers do. Keeping loose and using full kinetic chain (like a whip) to increase power and avoiding telegraphing your moves to increase likelihood of landing.

It looks like what they are referring to is called Fajin(en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fa_jin ) in the context of the Chinese martial arts.

now i understand what bruce says to be formless, 3d the available space btw, just move it, forget the movement trajectory just be there

+1 I use the whip analogy when I teach. The handle of the whip is the hips, and the tip of the whip is the fist. I will sometimes bring towels to class and have students snapping the towels. The feel of punching should be similar to the feel of snapping a towel. The towel is relaxed. And then just tension at the end to snap it.

Whip concept is what I was taught in Choy Lee Fut(gung fu). I have seen fluid concept used in karate before.

i believe he meant something a bit more obscure. its hard to explain as he said, cuz they have their way of explaining it over the years and did not know how to say it in japanese. I believe he means the "flow" that boxers demonstrate at a high level. Its harder with other tools like wrists, forarms, elbows, etc, because the amount of combinations and perms are too many to memorize or even practice. So boxers having a limited set of tools, its easier to find the flow in less time. This gets more complex to reach depending on style and rythim of the sport. Another good example is high-level jiujitsu or high old-school level judo (Ex: anything before Masahiro Kimura and before). I reacged flow by shadow fighting as a play excercise, so i can think, OK, hiw does my body react in this position? i have a few obvious options while stationary, but decision making is different under pressure. This turned into some sort of meditation excercise and while pressure testing, u understand the tandem, core 3d movement because youre body will ultimately react to how it reacts when muscles are injured and other muscles compensate for that injured muscle; by forcing it to react and ull body will adjust to the fast movements, forcing u to relax to not spend energy, while compensating with hips and the "Kinetic Chain" to drive the power with your lower part of the body while beubg mobile. Great example? Muay Thai. Keep reacting in different ways till u keep finding a way from A to B. If you retrace back and follow proper Kihon, youll have a proper flow (only based on a specific set of attacks, but it forces u to moce fast, and correctly, consequently forcing you to relax to save energy and compensating with proper lower body use). It did take me few years to snap and lots of practice and pressure testing. This is my understanding.

... he is young, isn't he? we all have our attachments though. biases and habits are hard to shed

Late to the party, but I think he got the concept alright, but not the whole picture. Other Shotokan masters have had similar epiphanies. Egami of Shotokai had his at the Makiwara, you take out the heavy kime out of the techniques and they (strikes) potentially become very dangerous. Egami mentioned that Funakoshi didn't move like the way Shotokan was being taught, but moved very relaxed seemingly without any power, but you couldn't stop his blows and his blocks were like hammers. If you can find it, there's book by Arakaki The secrets of Okinawan Karate that goes into great depth of what theses two gentlemen were describing. but it's more than just becoming a whip, it's how you use the tanden to project power into your blows, like dropping the front knee a few inches, just before you hit , forces the tanden forward and thus projecting the whole body weight into say a punch, into a opponent.

Great analogy. But with throwing a tennis ball (or baseball) you don't even need to tense... You just let go somewhere along the path. Very few techniques require any tension...the fist, maybe shuto or koken... elbows, kicks, receiving techniques, throws...none of those need a point of tension.

@@InGrindWeCrust2010 there is a split second of tension before letting go of the ball. It’s not a complete let go.

@@garymaguireuk All right. YMMV

so comprehensive... wow

@@uglystupidloser I've practiced for more than 30 years for now ;)

i just subscribed to him. he's great. thanks for suggesting him

Rick Hotton is an absolute legend. His hip analysis and teaching blow me away still years after first hearing it.

@@bassoskat where can I see it? Can you put some links here? Thanks in advance

Another sensei who do this is Peter Consterdine, they both made it looks so easy

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-XKpPxmpnClw.html

I think most if not all eastern martial arts are really hard to describe. they need to be felt and understood. words are often insufficient and can be misleading.

i think this is a fundamental difference between the theatrical performance of Kata and the efficiency for Kumite competition the movement is optimized for different goals

@@uglystupidloser agreed. I went from karate to silat and one thing my teacher pointed out was my tendency to "strike a pose" when I did our practices. The forms may look nice but I was stiff and couldn't properly flow from one move to another or Generate sufficient power, which made my practice of the forms pointless from a combative perspective

@@LiShuBen Even in Karate, you're not suppose to fight like in katas... Katas are only a syllabus of techniques and let you train hidden principales of body parts and muscles enhancement, balance gain... Maybe it just did not correspond to your will of practicing. Pencha Silat is "bunkai"-oriented, so they think we fight with kata...

@@uglystupidloser Kumite competition don't show anything efficient... Light contact, only few basic movements, always the same. This is actual kumite competition, and you can see almost only beginners, just like in kata competition.

@@Yeino you're right, of course, but i just think it is very easy to misinterpret. a student that practices with kata, and knows only kata, may not even be aware of how or why his or her form is not optimized for sparring.

Lol kung fu

just do it! 💪😁 have fun now, not later!

No reason to wait. Go to the dojo, try your best, that will help get you in shape. Train because it makes you feel good

Did you shift a chair there to hide it later?

@@blueshun No, at that time I was helping to run group via Parks & Rec in Pismo Beach, CA. and we trained in the Vets’ Hall. I tried to be a good boy and called the city P&R Dept. and offered to pay for the repair, but they refused and fixed it on their own dime.

Yes, absolutely. This points out a major issue here - there is no objective criterion used here to assess the punch (maybe a speed measurement of the hand, or total force at impact for instance). And in its absence, the assessment is based on how a certain technique matches an “ideal technique” based on their style. Which is very dissatisfying.

I think it's relative to age, where one cannot simply power through by muscle power, they find other ways to make the move as efficient and as strong.

These guys have an ego to uphold

its all just a part of the same truth, in the end. we express ourselves through the movement of our bodies. and combat between people is a dialogue that transcends spoken language, but just as sophisticated, technical, and unique

Naha-te and Goju-ryu based styles only tense muscles during Katas, with the purpose of muscular enhancement. Practicing Sanchin (opening kata) lets you gain muscle, and also warms up your muscles, ready to be tensed at any time. Their method is a good one, but if practiced by a muscles lacky guy, he could injure himself willing to speed up while his muscles can't resist the full tension + speed. He could end his mouvement with an élongation, or even more. Goju-ryu practitioners obviously don't fight like in katas. Going to the gym for gaining muscles quickly is counter-productive, because of the opposite muscles. If you gain muscles quickly, you'll lose speed as quickly. That's why they tend to say it takes decades to build this kind of skill, and that's why Goju-ryu practitioners train like this : harmonize the muscles development, even if it's a little bit slower than going to the gym. That's why Goju-ryu system recommends to first train Sanchin for several years before acceeding to other Katas. As an example, look to Bruce Lee. His punch is still the world record for the quickest fist punch. Everyone is granting Jeet Kune Do to be efficient due to his skills. But have you seen his musculature, especially his forearm muscles ? That's why his punch impact was efficient, not only due to his speed, but also due to all the muscles contraction of his forearm. You could speed up as much as you can, if you don't have muscles, you're only launching weight with no contraction, and the resulting power will be proportionally be divided. During Sanchin, you also reverse your pelvis bone, putting your Saika/Seika Tanden in your front axis to gain balance. Your knees also do the job, so the purpose remain the same as Naihanchi. The avantages of Sanchin are the muscles training and the breath training, whereas the avantages of Naihanchi are the lower back muscles and the short range Ura Tsuki work. There are also hidden parts into these trainings, but i let you discover all of this...

@@Yeino i know katas are supposed to be like a book, and the movements also help develop the necessary muscle groups, but i just think that karate loses its way as the years go on. everyone has their own interpretation of what it should be. and it changes from teacher to student, generation to generation. [edit: and society to society] ... have you checked out Kudo? its a new style of karate that is a fusion of judo and jiujitsu. it doesn't offer the... safe space for all people to train, but i think it offers many of the things that modern karate now lacks.

@@uglystupidloser maybe you're thinking about competition karate, or maybe recent karate styles, like Shotokan-ryu. Talking about Kudo, it's a fork of Kyokushin-ryu, which implémenté Judo, BJJ, wrestling, English boxing, Muay Thai... Its purpose is clearly competition, so it's more a fighting sport than a martial art, even if it integrates martial arts techniques. You think Karate lacks many things, but traditional Okinawan styles already integrates joint locks, projections, ground fight. Even the recent Wado-ryu is called "Jujutsu Kempo" by the Otsuka family. You've probably only scratched the surface.

I don't find my experiences training Shito-ryu Genbukai aka Demura-ha, anymore relaxed that my experiences with Goju-ryu, Shobayashi-ryu, ChungDoKwan and JiDoKwan which at the time, were strongly Shotokan based. I am confident that, if I brought these Shogen-ryu concepts into the Shito-ryu class, I'd be corrected out of them. What they are conveying here I encounter in my Taji Chen experiences which is a totally different concept of movement. Unfortunately, finding pure Shogen-ryu stateside is like the search for the holy grail. I know of one in San Diego. I've pretty much taken myself out of formal karate training and am focusing on kobudo now. Not enough world enough and time to master what I've come to see and understand. Lots of light, but not enough time to read.

@@zzdoc2 Don't worry for your choices. You're the only one deciding what suits the best for you. But basically, Karate and Kobudo have many things in common, at least for Ryukyu Kobudo...