Soft training and slow training

"Everyone knows that the yielding overcomes the stiff,

and the soft overcomes the hard.

Yet no one applies this knowledge.” 

― Tao Te Ching

Last night we continued our theme of controlling the opponent through his own resistance. Jack mentioned that, last year in Japan, Hatsumi Sensei had revealed the importance of a well integrated body combined with soft hands. I had certainly noticed that concept before when experiencing techniques from various Shihan, but I couldn't understand how or why it worked. It was also very difficult to practice because although it sometimes 'just happened' for me, it wasn't repeatable and therefore difficult to improve upon.

We practiced a technique whereby there was a temporary moment of body tension that caught the opponent by surprise and unbalanced them, it was done subtly but we focused on it in slow time. Without slowing ourselves down we could not 'feel' the effectiveness of our kamae, could not develop our timing, and our uke could not experiment with natural resistance. There was no way to improve by rushing it. As we got more comfortable and as the technique sped up, the kamae, the tension, and the technique itself started to disappear and blend in to our movement.

Some of us had a Muso Dori variation applied to our arm. It felt dangerous, scary, as if our joint was at risk of being damaged, even though it was slow and his hands were soft, there was no way to prevent the pain without throwing ourselves onto the floor or breaking our kamae even further. Jack explained that in a real moment of danger our adrenalin will excite our muscles, and our movements will become fast and hard, adding an extra 30%, or so, of intention. Because of this, it is not necessary to try and hurt the Uke with hard and fast motions when training properly, that could happen anyway, depending on the situation. So this focused slow and attentive training was the way to really teach our bodies how to do it correctly.