Poll Results: Which Technique is the Most Fun?

This poll ended up run­ning a lit­tle longer than I had planned, but the cool side ben­e­fit is that it gave more peo­ple time to vote and share their opinions.

Let's Make Taido Fun

I think Taido is crazy fun to do, and I don’t seem to be the only one. At the sem­i­nar for rain­bow belts prior to the recent World Taido Championships, I helped Saito and Tanaka Sensei give a pre­sen­ta­tion on how to enjoy learn­ing Taido. The cen­tral point, of course, was that Taido is some­thing we do for both our­selves and soci­ety, and that we can get a lot more out of it by mak­ing it fun.

In that sem­i­nar, we tried sev­eral ways to put a lit­tle bit more inter­est into train­ing kamae and unsoku — things that may get tedious after a while unless we use some creativity.

There are lots of ways to make train­ing fun, but one of my favorites is to boil down the basic sen, un, hen, nen, and ten move­ments to fun­da­men­tal motor pat­terns and drill them that way. At my dojo in Osaka as well as at recent train­ings I gave for stu­dents at Kobe Gakuin and Kitasato Universities, I’ve shown stu­dents var­i­ous ways to get more cre­ative with their kihon train­ing by approach­ing the move­ment as sep­a­rate from technique.

Fun is Relative

One thing I always notice when I do these train­ing is that some peo­ple like cer­tain move­ments more than oth­ers. Some peo­ple like to spin, and oth­ers like to jump. Some peo­ple seem to enjoy unsoku, while oth­ers will do almost any­thing to avoid step­ping sideways.

This is also true of var­i­ous types of prac­tice. Young men tend to think that jis­sen is the most fun method of train­ing Taido. Most female col­lege stu­dents seem to pre­fer hokei. Then there are some that love con­struct­ing tenkai. I know plenty of peo­ple in Japan that enjoy the team events more than then indi­vid­ual ones — espe­cially dan­tai jissen.

The point being that every­one has a dif­fer­ent idea of fun.

Results

If we’re try­ing to find ways to have fun train­ing Taido, it’s a good idea to know which tech­niques peo­ple enjoy doing. Here’s the breakdown:

1. Hentai — 41% of total votes
2. Sentai — 39%
3. Tentai — 38%
4. Nentai — 27%
5. Untai — 21%

There were a total of 56 votes in this poll, and each one cast two votes for their favorite tech­niques to prac­tice. Hen, sen, and ten were pretty even with 23, 22, and 21 votes, respec­tively. My picks, nen and un, were con­sid­er­ably less pop­u­lar with with only 15 and 12 votes each.

So what does that mean?

Well, it’s hard to say. I’m not sur­prised that nengi isn’t very pop­u­lar, as it’s the tech­nique of which most stu­dents know the fewest vari­a­tions. I am some­what sur­prised that ungi isn’t con­sid­ered more fun — maybe because jump train­ing is so tir­ing? I had expected tengi and sengi t be pop­u­lar, but I would never have guessed that so many peo­ple would think hengi is fun.

Sure, hengi is cool. It’s inter­est­ing. It’s the most pop­u­lar tech­nique in jis­sen. But I don’t really see it as a fun move­ment. Maybe I’m miss­ing something…

Moving Forward

While you’re here, don’t for­get to vote in the new poll: What kind of Taido videos would you like to see more of on YouTube?

If you have a sug­ges­tion for an answer that isn’t included, let me know, and I’ll post it.

Thanks.