Movement Notes for Unsoku

Though each unsoku step has a dif­fer­ent pur­pose, they all work on the same basic prin­ci­ples of move­ment. Mastering these prin­ci­ples will make your unsoku more effec­tive. You can apply the con­cepts below to any unsoku prac­tice and should keep them in mind when prac­tic­ing jis­sen as well.

Expansion/Contraction on Sidesteps

When we begin learn­ing unsoku, we tend to start off with the mis­con­cep­tion that it is some­how related to walk­ing. A casual analy­sis shows that this is not the case.

When we walk, we pick up one leg and begin to lean for­ward. As grav­ity takes over, the unweighted leg swings for­ward. The rear leg pushes at the ankle to increase the for­ward move­ment. The for­ward leg then catches the ground, and momen­tum car­ries the hips for­ward. Et cetera. This is not unsoku. Walking is mostly pas­sive. It is a sim­ple sequence of lever­ag­ing the upright body from one leg to the next, using grav­ity to do most of the work.

Unsoku is dif­fer­ent. One thing that my instruc­tors always stressed was the neces­sity of prac­tic­ing unsoku with as wide a step as pos­si­ble — espe­cially on the side­steps. This means stretch­ing your legs out from the cen­ter and then pulling them back together. This expand­ing and con­tract­ing move­ment is a key com­po­nent of unsoku.

We don’t want to inter­act with grav­ity very much in our unsoku. Ideally, we will keep our hips at approx­i­mately the same height. Moreover, we are not only mov­ing for­ward in Taido; we often want to move to the side. Since the hips are not struc­tured to wad­dle side­ways, we must expend some phys­i­cal effort to get where we want to be. We do this by stretch­ing out lat­er­ally and then gath­er­ing our bod­ies back to the new center.

To accom­plish this, begin by push­ing with the trail­ing leg, in the direc­tion of the lead leg (if you are mov­ing left, you push left with the right leg). As this hap­pens, extend the lead leg in the direc­tion of travel. Stretch it out and feel for the ground. Try to grab a piece of the ground that is beyond your nor­mal reach. At this point, the trail­ing leg will have to begin mov­ing as the hips pull it away from its start point. Now this much would be easy if we were to visu­al­ize it as a side­ways hop, but that would force us to move up and down and make it dif­fi­cult to con­trol our motion.

In unsoku, we push straight to the side. If we sim­ply pushed off and let our­selves fall, we would end up in a near split. Instead, we now squeeze our legs together, using the mus­cles of the inner thighs. With the lead foot grip­ping the ground, this results in the legs snap­ping shut above that foot. This means that the hips will also be directly over the lead foot.

This method works espe­cially well when you need to cover a lot of dis­tance rather quickly. Push off and stretch the lead­ing leg. Then, after you have found the point at which you wish to land, squeeze your legs together tightly in order to pull your­self to that position.

As my instruc­tors always drilled into our heads, if you can move long dis­tances quickly, you will have lit­tle dif­fi­culty in mov­ing short ones. Of course, decid­ing the appro­pri­ate dis­tance is an entirely dif­fer­ent can of worms. Still, the logic holds that by prac­tic­ing step­ping as far as pos­si­ble, you will be bet­ter able to move your body to wher­ever you need it to be.

Posture

As with any phys­i­cal motion, the align­ment of the body makes a great deal of dif­fer­ence between mechan­i­cally effec­tive and inef­fec­tive unsoku. Obviously, your pos­ture affects your bal­ance, and I will deal with this aspect below (see cau­tions), but here I want to describe some­thing different.

Think of your body as a lever with two weighted ends — your spine con­nect­ing your head and hips. To gen­er­ate the most power from this sys­tem, you want the lever to be as long as pos­si­ble. By straight­en­ing the spine and stretch­ing your kamae upwards, you will notice that small changes in your head and hip posi­tions will have notice­able con­se­quences in your motion. I find this is par­tic­u­larly desir­able when attempt­ing to exe­cute hengi and nengi, because the added lever­age trans­lates to speed and power in my attacks. I also find that by lift­ing my head, I can achieve more of a float­ing feel to my unsoku — that is, I move eas­ily and smoothly.

Conversely, for more con­trol over your motion, you may wish to shorten the lever. For ungi, sengi, and tengi, con­tract­ing the mus­cles of the back and abdomen brings the head and hips closer together in a tighter rela­tion­ship. This lends itself to mov­ing with the body’s axis per­pen­dic­u­lar to the direc­tion of motion. Especially when mov­ing ground­ward, I find myself push­ing my head down into my spine and my hips into the ground. This helps increase the pre­ci­sion with which I can exe­cute cer­tain techniques.

Although I am using a sim­pli­fied phys­i­cal model, you can exper­i­ment and find var­i­ous uses for manip­u­la­tion of your pos­ture while moving.

Use

Someday, I will have to devote an arti­cle to using unsoku in jis­sen, but this is not that day.

However, I will point out here that unsoku is part of your tech­nique. You should never find your­self doing an unsoku move­ment and then exe­cut­ing a tech­nique. The tech­nique should flow nat­u­rally out from the unsoku motion.

I see this all the time in jis­sen. Both oppo­nents will mov­ing around in unsoku, look­ing for an open­ing, and test­ing each oth­ers’ reac­tions. Suddenly, one will change his angle, cut quickly in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion, and plant his kamae while he decides whether or not to con­tinue his attack. This is not how it works. That brief pause destroys the momen­tum of the tech­nique and gives the oppo­nent a chance to defend.

We must seek to elim­i­nate this pause by launch­ing tech­niques directly from unsoku.

Taido’s kamae and unsoku were designed to work together with the tech­niques. We are aim­ing for a syn­ergy of sev­eral com­po­nents. Keep this in mind when prac­tic­ing unsoku and always remem­ber that you should be able to exe­cute any tech­nique at any time dur­ing your step — not just on the final kamae.

Cautions

There are a few cau­tions you should keep in mind when mov­ing by unsoku. Three of these are men­tioned in Taido Gairon. First, do not pick up your feet while step­ping. You should move close to the ground so your oppo­nent can­not eas­ily trip you. Second, do not drag your feet. This can also throw your bal­ance. Third, do not step hard or stomp. Your foot­work should be smooth and quiet — the oppo­nent shouldn’t know whether your feet are touch­ing the ground or not.

In addi­tion to the above, I would add that unsoku as a motion hap­pens from the hips down. That is, you should avoid mov­ing your upper body very much at all. Leaning the body and tilt­ing the head will affect your bal­ance and tele­graph your move­ments to the oppo­nent. Besides that, your moves should work with your kamae to set up tech­niques. Maintaining straight pos­ture facil­i­tates this. No por­tion of you body above your hips has any con­tri­bu­tion to make towards mov­ing effec­tively in unsoku. Therefore, upper-body neu­tral­ity is ideal.

The most com­mon unsoku mis­take I see stu­dents mak­ing has to do with the direc­tion of the hips. The hips need to be aligned cor­rectly in order to deploy effec­tive tech­niques. Very often, stu­dents per­form­ing ka-soku and gen-soku will turn their hips towards the out­side as they make the final kamae in antic­i­pa­tion of a tech­nique such as ebigeri or sen­tai with turns in that direc­tion. In fact, many Taido tech­niques spin in the same direc­tion, but this does not make it OK to be in the habit of set­ting your unsoku for them auto­mat­i­cally. For one thing, it reduces the power poten­tial of the tech­nique by cut­ting the range of travel. More impor­tantly, it makes it very dif­fi­cult to move in the oppo­site direc­tion. Taido needs to be adapt­able. If your unsoku favors one side or type of tech­nique, it is a hin­drance. Be care­ful with regard to the direc­tion and ori­en­ta­tion of your feet and hips while mov­ing in unsoku.

The best way to test the accu­racy of your final step in unsoku is to pay atten­tion to any ten­dency of the front foot to turn (espe­cially to the inside) as you set it down. Focus on squar­ing the hips in the direc­tion of the intended kamae before turn­ing them off axis (to 45 degrees — hanmi) as the foot steps. Ideally, the rear foot should also point toward the tar­get before piv­ot­ing 90 degrees into kamae.

And that’s all

Those are the most impor­tant con­cep­tual points regard­ing the actual phys­i­cal per­for­mance of the unsoku steps. Of course, there is much to to devel­op­ing effec­tive unsoku than what is cov­ered above. Maai, tim­ing, the use of pat­tern, etc. are crit­i­cal in apply­ing unsoku and tech­nique in jis­sen. Practicing the con­cepts in this arti­cle will ensure that your unsoku tech­nique doesn’t get in the way.