poll results: what's your favorite technique?

well, i’ve given it a lit­tle time, just in case there was a sur­prise turnover, but things have panned out just as i expected — hengi is the num­ber one favorite taido technique.

41 peo­ple cast their votes in my poll about favorite taido tech­niques, and the results are not even close — 16 votes for hengi over 9 votes for tengi in sec­ond place. my favorite move­ment, nengi, scored only 5 votes, even with sengi (5) and ungi (6).

so why is hengi so pop­u­lar? i have a few ideas. actu­ally, sev­eral peo­ple told me that they expected tengi to win (despite not vot­ing for it them­selves) because i had men­tioned the move­ment that is the most fun to per­form. that seemed valid. after all, tengi is a lot of fun and a lot of flash — nobody can deny that bakuchugeri is cool, but it’s damn-near unus­able. i think the fun-factor of tengi accounts for second-place sta­tus, but most peo­ple are just not good enough at using tengi to call it their favorite.

the thing about hen­tai is that it’s the arche­typ­i­cal taido tech­nique. noth­ing looks more like taido than hengi. if taido is defined by the change of body axis in order to defend and attack simul­ta­ne­ously, then hengi is on the money. kicks like sha­jogeri, sen­jogeri, and espe­cially ebigeri are quin­tes­sen­tially taido-esque. back in the early days, when shuku­mine would enter his taido stu­dents in karate tour­na­ments, ebigeri earned the nick­name taidogeri because taido white belts were using it like a magic bul­let to defeat much more expe­ri­enced karateka.

come to think of it, any­time i’m asked to tell peo­ple what taido is all about, i talk about unsoku and tengi, but i demon­strate ebigeri. it’s as if taido the­ory has these amaz­ing infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties, but for prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion, hengi are the sim­ple, ele­gant, and bru­tal all-purpose tools we reach for first. hengi are the sledge­ham­mers of taido — super-efficient at doing what they do (inci­den­tally also work­ing on the prin­ci­ples of lever­age and dis­placed cen­ter of mass) with­out super­flu­ous orna­ment or extra “features”.

any­way, thank you to all who par­tic­i­pated in the poll — even those who think jump­ing around and spin­ning all the time is fun. by all means, please also vote in the new poll: why do you prac­tice taido?