unshin

i recently spent five days talk­ing and train­ing with two of mem­bers of the han­shikai, and let me tell you this much — they are crazy excited about unshin. every­thing we prac­ticed came back to a very select num­ber of themes, and the pos­si­bil­i­ties of mov­ing in full 3-space was one of them. i’ve had this arti­cle on the back burner for a few weeks now, but after talk­ing to shima sen­sei, i feel i am ready to com­plete it. i plan to present some unique inter­pre­ta­tions which may be com­pletely wrong, but they will be inter­est­ing, and that’s more impor­tant than being right all the time.

note: you may notice that this arti­cle fol­lows a sim­i­lar for­mat to my arti­cle on unsoku. this is because they were both orig­i­nally part of one very long doc­u­ment. how­ever, unshin and unsoku are very dif­fer­ent ani­mals so don’t think you can skip over parts just because the word­ing is similar.

a bedtime story

it was 1969. most of the civ­i­lized world was watch­ing neil arm­strong become the first human to walk on the moon. with the lower grav­ity, neil and buzz (was it buzz that went to the moon with neil? i can never remem­ber…) were able to do all kinds of cool stuff. they were prac­ti­cally float­ing — mov­ing, not in straight lines, but in giant, curv­ing arcs, eas­ily turn­ing som­er­saults and hav­ing what appeared to be one hell of a good time. years later, this event would inspire sting to write one of the great­est hits the police ever recorded. in seiken shuku­mine, it inspired some­thing alto­gether different.

shuku­mine had some seri­ous jump­ing abil­ity, set­ting a mil­i­tary high jump record in japan that is reput­edly unmatched to this day (though i have no idea how one would go about cor­rob­o­rat­ing such a claim). tosa kuni­hiro (now the leader of one of sev­eral groups claim­ing to be the sole legit­i­mate lin­eage of gen­seiryu karate) became one of shukumine’s first stu­dents after the two met in mil­i­tary train­ing. tosa claims that, when he first approached shuku­mine to ask for instruc­tion in karate, shuku­mine jumped clear over his head and landed, pre­pared to strike before tosa could even turn around. this could prove two things: shuku­mine indeed jumped incred­i­bly high, and tosa turned incred­i­bly slowly (unless shuku­mine also man­aged to descend from head-height at a speed faster than grav­ity would have accel­er­ated him). with regards to the first point, shuku­mine was famous for per­form­ing such feats as tobi 8dangeri, and i per­son­ally saw him per­form some pretty incred­i­ble moves in his late 60s.

and so any­way, as leg­end has it, shuku­mine saw in the moon­walk (in the pre-micheal jack­son mean­ing of the word) a new way of maneu­ver­ing one’s body dur­ing a fight. he com­bined his incred­i­ble aer­ial skills with taido’s unsoku and devised a method of com­bat­ive move­ment which would free the prac­ti­tioner from the con­fines of a seemingly-flat earth. i can’t say to what degree this story is accu­rate, but it would explain the glar­ing dif­fer­ences between the taido and gen­seiryu imple­men­ta­tion of ten-movements.

"body locomotion"

ok, so unshin is just flips and stuff, right? well, yeah, that’s pretty much cor­rect, but let’s not just write it off so eas­ily. unshin is a big part of what makes taido “three-dimensional”.

tech­ni­cally, unshin is loco­mo­tion in three dimen­sions (though, even more tech­ni­cally, it would have to be at least four, but i’ll worry about writ­ing my trea­tise on post-relativistic think­ing in taido some other day). this does include flips and tum­bles, but it also includes a lot of stuff that’s harder to define. in fact, any kind of body-transport that occurs out­side of the flat earth-plane is going to be clas­si­fied as unshin. since unsoku is “leg loco­mo­tion”, our bod­ies have to be above our feet. thus, for prac­ti­cal pur­poses, unshin is any kind of loco­mo­tive move­ment that defies cat­e­go­riza­tion as unsoku.

… which is actu­ally pretty inter­est­ing to me. you see, tengi is obvi­ously related to unshin (except that tengi has inte­gral weapon deploy­ment and unshin does not), but it’s also pretty cool to think that unshin could include move­ments that are more hen or nen (and pos­si­bly un) as well. sen is pretty much always going to be on a flat plane (oth­er­wise it becomes nen), and we often see spin­ning unsoku steps in jis­sen. slides and hops (un) would also be more unsoku than unshin. any un move­ment with a lot of dis­tance or height may be clas­si­fi­able as unshin, but we wouldn’t usu­ally just make a big jump for trans­port in jis­sen because it would be indefensible.

the only real appli­ca­tion i can come up with off the top of my head for unshin by sen and un would be jump­ing twists and turns. used as unshin, this would be sen-un, but it would usu­ally be foll­wed by a tech­nique in appli­ca­tion, becom­ing waza instead of unshin. so, while there are always excep­tions, for the pur­poses of this arti­cle, i’m going to pretty much ignore sen– and un-type move­ments as hav­ing a lot of util­ity as unshin. i will dis­cuss the obvi­ous ten-related unshin and then get a lit­tle more cre­ative and write my thoughts on unshin that draws from hen– and nen-type movements.

ten-type ushin

first, well dis­cuss the cod­i­fied indi­vid­ual movements.

zenten [hai zenten]

this is sim­ple front som­er­sault, or roll. tech­ni­cally, any for­ward tum­bling maneu­ver is going to be zen­ten (zen=front, ten=turn); vari­a­tions wherein the back con­tacts the ground are hai zen­ten. in gen­eral, when we speak of zen­ten, we are refer­ring to for­ward rolls on the spine.

my advice for prac­tic­ing zen­ten: be the ball. this sounds rudi­men­tary, but i am con­stantly sur­prised to find black belts who don’t tuck prop­erly into rolls. this makes it incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to use the roll for any util­ity. if your roll is going to have the speed nec­es­sary to reach the tar­get, you need to tuck tightly. if you want to fin­ish your roll in a defen­si­ble posi­tion or with a tech­nique, you need to tuck tightly. if your roll is going to be smooth enough to use for any other pur­pose than break­falling, you need to tuck tightly. this is majorly impor­tant, not just for the sake of your actual for­ward roll, but as a devel­op­men­tal pro­gres­sion for more advanced unshin move­ments. seri­ously take some time and check your zen­ten tech­nique and make sure you couldn’t tuck just a lit­tle tighter.

koten [hai koten]

the same lex­i­cal stip­u­la­tions apply as with zen­ten, except that “ko” denotes motion in the direc­tion of one’s back.

most peo­ple start­ing out don’t like back rolls. that’s under­stand­able because mov­ing back­wards and upside down is nat­u­rally out­side our com­fort zone. as upright, forwards-moving ani­mals, we get a lit­tle ner­vous about mov­ing in the oppo­site direc­tion. so what hap­pens when we try to back roll? we chicken out. we choose a side and flop over the shoul­der. the worst part is that we develop this fear-reactive habit and allow it go go unchecked. this rein­forces every “can’t” and “don’t know how to” that crops up in our train­ing and makes it damn hard to learn new things.

i have never met any­one who did not have the phys­i­cal abil­ity to do a back roll and was not also quad­ri­plegic. really. the phys­i­cal tech­nique is astound­ingly easy, once you get the idea. the most com­mon mis­take i see peo­ple make on back rolls is allow­ing one or both elbows to turn out­wards while tran­si­tion­ing over the head. this is caused, not by lack of strength as peo­ple tend to claim, but because of fear. if you keep your elbows in, and you have any momen­tum at all (which comes straight from shift­ing your weight over and behind your heels), you will roll eas­ily over your hands and onto your feet or knees. mechan­i­cally, this move exe­cutes itself — you just have to get out of its way.

how to get over your asi­nine fear-habit: con­vince your­self that you are per­fectly capa­ble of pro­tect­ing the back of your head (one of our reflex­ive anx­i­ety areas). i sug­gest three exer­cises before even attempt­ing back­ward rolls. here they are:

firstly, do bridges and back bends. this will build up the strength to push up and behind. it will also build con­fi­dence in that strength. start with bridges form the floor, hold­ing them for a few sec­onds as high as you can. then do some “walk-down” bridges on a wall or other sup­port. build up to the point that you can do a stand­ing back bend into a bridge posi­tion. most peo­ple who can do back rolls can­not do this. learn the skills in the proper order, and you save your­self a lot of difficulty.

the sec­ond exer­cise you need to get good at is the spinal rock, or the yoga plough posi­tion. this is some­times referred to as a half back roll, so you may be able to see its devel­op­men­tal ben­e­fit before attempt­ing a full back roll, eh? just go slowly and smoothly back­ward, mak­ing sure to con­trol your speed. this can also be a great stretch or an exer­cise for abdom­i­nal strength and breath­ing skills.

step three for learn­ing back rolls = shakoten, see below. do this over both shoul­ders after you have mas­tered the for­ward shoul­der roll. here again, learn­ing things in the proper order will make things much eas­ier on you. too bad most peo­ple don’t under­stand the con­cept of incre­men­tal pro­gres­sion from sim­ple to sophis­ti­cated skills.

shazenten

sha=angular. this move­ment is com­monly known as a shoul­der roll, and also appears in aikido and judo as ukemi — falling tech­niques. an impor­tant point to remem­ber is that you are still mov­ing for­ward. many stu­dents have a dif­fi­cult time per­form­ing shazen­ten on a straight line. another com­mon mis­take is to open out of the “ball” posi­tion way too early, or even to neglect mak­ing a tight ball in the first place. though it is pos­si­ble to exe­cute some­thing that looks like a shoul­der roll with­out even bend­ing the waist or knees, this is not going to offer much use to taido students.

per­son­ally, i feel that shoul­der rolls should be learned before stu­dents attempt for­ward or back­ward straight rolls. they are eas­ier to learn to do prop­erly and safer to per­form on a vari­ety of sur­faces. you can ease a new stu­dent into a shoul­der roll, but front and back rolls are a lit­tle trick­ier to start out with unless the stu­dent already has some tum­bling expe­ri­ence. a well-designed unshin cur­ricu­lum starts with the simplest-to-learn skill, which i may get into some other time. for now, let’s just say it’s suf­fi­cient to begin with the simplest-to-learn tumble.

when i teach shazen­ten, i usu­ally start the stu­dent out from eji­dachi, in this exam­ple, we’ll assume left-lead. from this posi­tion, you should reach the right arm, palm up, under­neath the front leg. as you reach fur­ther, slowly lift the right knee off the ground, push­ing slightly for­ward. at a cer­tain point, your bal­ance will pull you ass-over-teakettle at some angle for­ward. resist the urge to open your body and flop onto the floor. if you can retain the crouch through­out the nat­ural rota­tion, you will find your­self with almost enough momen­tum to carry you fully back to eji. i find that ask­ing stu­dents to “roll under them­selves” gets them doing this a lot faster than when i ask them to “roll over their shoul­ders”. after they get the feel for enter­ing the roll, it’s not so dif­fi­cult to work on proper shazen­ten technique.

inter­est­ingly, we only have one word for shazen­ten — appar­ently nobody has done any tum­bles that move for­ward with an angu­lar body ori­en­ta­tion while mak­ing only hand con­tact with the ground (though one of my friends is try­ing to get us all to try it) — let alone with­out touch­ing the ground. there is also no “shakoten”, though you could prob­a­bly come up with appli­ca­tions for one if you think about it (and i use one ver­sion in jis­sen all the time). in fact, a twist­ing back­flip could just as eas­ily be called “shabakuchu” as nenchu, but i’m get­ting ahead of myself…

sokuten

the kanji for “soku” means speedy. as a result, let’s just go on and for­get all about the big “wheel-spoke” cart­wheels we did on the play­ground in pri­mary school. go ahead and ditch the part where you raise both arms above your head and bend slightly back­ward. also drop the idea that your legs or arms should be straight. they should not. no, no, no.

sokuten is one of my least favorite things to teach. this is partly because almost every­one who sees it thinks it is “just a cart­wheel”, and noth­ing i can say will make them real­ize that such think­ing is going to make sokuten unus­able for them. most stu­dents do come to this real­iza­tion on their own much later, but i would pre­fer to save them the trou­ble and let them get good at taido sooner. this can be accom­plished by mak­ing a men­tal sep­a­ra­tion between cart­wheels and sokuten.

the way almost every­one tries to exe­cute sokuten is almost entirely an upper-body exer­cise. this is incor­rect. i mean, it looks ok, and it gets you from point a to point b, but it isn’t going to offer you any­thing in terms of com­bat efficacy.

sokuten is dri­ven by the legs. the legs power the move­ment, and the legs steer as well. in proper sokuten, the hands are really just a pivot. you must most-importantly push with the front leg — from hip to ankle. this sup­plies about 90% of the motive force. the rear leg actively lifts up and over, sup­ply­ing direc­tion and the down­ward snap to help lift your head. the hands may push against the ground a bit to assist with the “lift­ing” aspect, but this is not vital to sokuten tech­nique. actu­ally, the direc­tion of the feet and head is much more impor­tant than any­thing you could pos­si­bly do with your hands — pro­vided you are using your legs cor­rectly. if you are still cart­wheel­ing, your arms and shoul­ders will be doing most of the work.

think­ing of sokuten this way has the added side ben­e­fit of mak­ing the tran­si­tions to one-hand, rear-hand, and no-hand ver­sions much eas­ier. even­tu­ally, you can rely less and less on the arms and use them to twist and lift rather than sup­port­ing your weight. if your arms get tired doing sokuten, you need to spend some time refin­ing your technique.

ude zen­ten
ude means arms, so this is a front tum­ble using the arms. in ameri-speak, this is a front hand­spring. don’t ask me how to do a front hand­spring. bryan and i both nailed these on our first attempts when we were pre­teens, and i seri­ously have no idea how to teach these. i don’t know how, but i can just do them. i can do them one-handed from eji­dachi and land again in eji­dachi. i think this is prob­a­bly one of the eas­i­est gym­nas­tic skills to learn — even eas­ier than front rolls.

if you can’t do a sim­ple hand­spring, i guar­an­tee your prob­lem is men­tal. from a mechan­i­cal per­spec­tive, it is almost impos­si­ble to screw this move up. all it takes is a lit­tle bit of push with one or both legs and enough arm strength to keep your head from pound­ing the pave­ment. how­ever, any­thing that involves being upside-down tends to make peo­ple uneasy. get over it — you will live. if you can’t make it back around to your feet, chances are you will land on your body’s built-in cushion.

tired of land­ing on your ass? well, that’s an easy fix once you’ve got­ten over your fear. there are three points. most impor­tantly, after push­ing with your legs, pull them back down using as much of your pos­te­rior chain as pos­si­ble — ham­strings, hip exten­sors, lower back — every­thing that could pos­si­bly help pull your feet under your hips. num­ber two is to use you head. pull for­ward. imag­ine doing a sit-up as soon as your feet make con­tact with the ground. use your abdom­i­nal mus­cles, arms, neck, and willpower (look!) to pull your head for­ward. the third point for those who are still doing this on a crash pad is: push more with your arms. don’t lock them out. instead allow them to bend slightly so that you can use them to add for­ward momen­tum to your upper body.

still can’t do it? can’t help you.

hai/ude?

actu­ally, i have no clue as to whether there is a tech­ni­cal dis­tinc­tion on this one, but there are two very dif­fer­ent ways to exe­cute a front hand­spring. in one method, the hands make the only con­tact with the ground. this method looks very much like the oppo­site of the back hand­spring. method two is some­times referred to as a “head­spring”, though actu­ally touch­ing the head to the ground isn’t such a good idea. in this ver­sion, the ini­ti­a­tion is actu­ally closer to that of a front roll, though it ends in the same man­ner as the other method. i have seen some folks even roll for­ward to the point of mak­ing con­tact with the back, and then spring­ing up by push­ing with the arms — almost like fin­ish­ing a front roll with a kip up. i guess that would be the for­ward answer to spring­ing out of a back roll.

doing this requires a lot more arm power than the stan­dard front hand­spring does. plus, it takes a lit­tle more time to per­form. how­ever, it offers a few ben­e­fits. for one, it’s dif­fi­cult for an oppo­nent to deter­mine whether you are going to roll or spring. it also avoids the giant arm wind-up that most peo­ple use to ini­ti­ate their hand­springs. that wind-up is a big invi­ta­tion to get hit with a fast sui­heigeri or dog­a­rami in jis­sen. by the same token, there is less chance for the upper body to snap for­ward into an oncom­ing attack as can eas­ily hap­pen with the hands-only ver­sion. finally, by virtue of being lower to the ground, the head­spring also allows greater trans­fer of momen­tum into a poten­tial strike (since less energy is wasted in retrans­la­tion dur­ing the tran­si­tion from ver­ti­cal to hor­i­zon­tal motion).

to develop this skill, prac­tice doing lots of kip ups. then, work on doing hand­springs from eji­dachi. by the time you are able to do this on your weak leg, you will prob­a­bly have devel­oped the arm strength and gen­eral tim­ing nec­es­sary to to a head­spring eas­ily. back bends and bridges will also be help­ful in devel­op­ing this skill, but you should have them down by this point anyway.

bakuten [ude koten]

now we get to the fun stuff. back hand­spring is the first “flash move” most of us learn. i still can­not do a back hand­spring. actu­ally, i can, but it requires much more con­cen­tra­tion than the skill deserves. since i can back­flip all day and night, i don’t worry about my lack of hand­spring tech­nique so much. back hand­springs are much more dif­fi­cult than back flips, but using the hands helps to abate some of the fear most peo­ple asso­ciate with back­wards and upside-down move­ments. if you have dif­fi­culty with bakuten, just skip it and go straight to bakuchu. do not pass “go”. do not col­lect $200.

not con­vinced that bakuten is use­less? good for you — it can be very use­ful, but just don’t fix­ate on it. it’s not that big a deal. you can basi­cally get by with­out being able to do bakuten very well, so long as you can do the flips.

still want to do things the hard way? alright, but don’t say i didn’t warn you. the mechan­ics of this move require a lot more tech­nique than just about any other tum­ble. you must jump at a good angle, match the tim­ing of your arm swing with the jump, look back­ward for the ground, bend back­ward, place your hands solidly and absorb with your elbows, snap your legs over your head by pulling at your mid­sec­tion, push off with your arms, and lift your head. good luck.

unfor­tu­nately, there isn’t very much i can write that will help you get this move­ment. if you need help with back hand­springs, ask your instruc­tors. chances are, they can do them and teach them, as these are a uni­ver­sal skill for taido students.

sokuchu [kyuchu sokuten]

and now it gets tricky. sokuchu is the infa­mous no-hand cart­wheel, aka kyuchu (aer­ial) sokuten, aka aer­ial. this is so impressive-looking that most peo­ple seem to dis­count the pos­si­bil­ity of learn­ing it as impos­si­ble. with­out even try­ing it first, they for­get that this is a skill and assume that is is actu­ally magic instead. i had assumed for years that i would never get to the level that i could do these, but then one day, i just did.

there are sev­eral ways to go about doing sokuchu because there are sev­eral ver­sions of the skill. i’m not going to get too detailed with this because i feel that most peo­ple will get the feel­ing for one or other ver­sion before they are remotely capa­ble of doing all of them. this being the case, too much advice can be detri­men­tal until you have a cer­tain amount of expe­ri­ence screw­ing up. screw-ups will help you — don’t be afraid to make them.

with that caveat, there are two fac­tors that will greatly speed your progress toward nail­ing any of the vari­a­tions: incre­men­tal pro­gres­sion and balls (or the female equivalent).

as for incre­men­tal pro­gres­sion, build up from your reg­u­lar sokuten. empha­size the front leg drive. empha­size the lift­ing of the rear leg. empha­size the lift­ing of the head. try div­ing in. try reach­ing fur­ther for­ward. try going faster. use just the front hand, then build your speed back up. use just the rear hand and swing the front hand down and back up. don’t for­get to turn your head. try all of these tweaks to your reg­u­lar sokuten and you will find that sokuchu doesn’t seem so unre­al­is­tic a goal. you will still have to do a lot of prac­tice, but this is the groundwork.

–or– prac­tice nengi, jump­ing spins, and but­ter­flies (a gym­nas­tic move­ments that i can­not think an ade­quate way to describe). use your arms and head to twist. this will help you build up to a “tilted” sokuchu. this will help you develop the kind of off-axis sokuchu that works well in jis­sen and before hengi and nengi.

the point of incre­men­tal pro­gres­sion is to look at what move­ments the tech­nique includes and develop them beyond what the tech­nique requires. grad­u­ally add them together until you are doing what you orig­i­nally set out to do.

as for balls, just don’t wear nikes. try first. you will not be able to care­fully and slowly do these unless you are in a low-gravity envi­ron­ment. even on a tram­po­line, you will have to deal with the increased speed, which makes them just as hard as they are on hard floor. get in the air (so many peo­ple seem to think they can learn to do these with­out jump­ing) and get your legs over your head. land on your side; use a pad. it’ll be ok. get up and try it again. and again. get some­one to watch you and critique.

if you keep prac­tic­ing, you will get bet­ter. remem­ber back when you first started and you couldn’t do sen­tai? well, these are no different.

zenchu [chu zenten]

front flips are one of the more dif­fi­cult skills to learn because nobody under­stands how they work. every­one i know who can do a front flip learned the same way i did in junior high school: find a flat grassy area and run really fast. jump as high as you can while grab­bing your knees and look­ing down. if you didn’t break your back, get up and try again. after a few hun­dred rep­e­ti­tions, you may find some pat­terns that will allow you to land on your feet more often, but there are still no guar­an­tees. even if you can do it your­self, you will have a hell of a time try­ing to explain what you are doing to other people.

i have a few sug­ges­tions for this move, but it’s still magic to me on some lev­els. in other words, take this with some salt because i can only do two front flip vari­a­tions with any con­sis­tency (the almost laid-out one that moves for­ward and the stays-in-one-place one that looks like a reverse dead­lift), and i usu­ally need a cou­ple of run­ning steps to keep from land­ing on my ass.

when learn­ing this move, i think a good idea would be to start with a spring board or a springy floor. stack up as many crash mats as you can to reach waist height if pos­si­ble. work on get­ting up. head tuck is pri­or­ity num­ber two. these two should be enough to even­tu­ally get you lad­ing flat on your back at waist height. if you can do this, con­grats — you can flip. the prob­lem is grad­u­ally remov­ing the crutches.

remove the mats one at a time, and begin tuck­ing your knees into your chest harder and faster. as mats go away, you will get closer and closer to land­ing with your feet fully under your body. the hard part comes when you think you’ve got it and you then attempt to front flip with­out the aid of mechan­i­cal jump enhance­ment. jump­ing power is where most peo­ple get stuck on front flips, and it is why many peo­ple can do them with run­ning steps, and almost nobody can do them from stand­ing. it’s also why i’m work­ing on an arti­cle about improv­ing jump­ing skills.

at the yoko­hama dojo, we also prac­tice this with two spot­ters, and the results have been not bad. basi­cally, the two spot­ters stand fac­ing the flip­per with their elbows bent to catch the flipper’s elbows. the flip­per runs toward them and jumps into the flip while the spot­ters sup­port him in the upside-down por­tion of the motion. this has got­ten a lot of stu­dents com­fort­able with the basic motion, but only a cou­ple have yet had the con­fi­dence to try this solo on a mat. when they do, they still have to get the feel­ing of jump­ing up into the move.

ok, so you’re hav­ing trou­ble get­ting a full rota­tion and land­ing on your feet. first step: go back and read what i wrote about zen­ten. i guar­an­tee that if you aren’t land­ing, you could use more tuck. other fac­tors will count too, but none of them will make much dif­fer­ence if you do not first tuck tightly.

bakuchu [chu koten]

if you’ve got­ten bakuten (even if you haven’t), you can do these. back flips are really so easy, it’s almost like an inside joke on every­one who thinks they can’t do them. just jump as high as you can. then, when you are at your apex, tuck you knees into your chest as quickly as pos­si­ble and look back over your head. you will flip. it’s really that simple.

there are two main prob­lems peo­ple have with back flips. one is that they think they can do them with­out jump­ing much. this is incor­rect. while speed alone is in fact enough to carry your legs over your head, it is not enough to get them all the way back under­neath you. to rotate fully, you will have to jump — high.

the sec­ond thing peo­ple screw up is tim­ing. new­bies are so con­cerned about not land­ing on their heads that they try to start their rota­tion as soon as pos­si­ble. here’s a tip: rotat­ing sooner does not buy you more time to reach the ground — it takes time away from you by divert­ing power from your jump and bring­ing you closer to the ground. the first step is just to jump up. the rota­tion should occur at the apex of the jump, or only very slightly before. i have even been able to rotate fully after i was already falling. the impor­tant key is that you have more time to turn when you are the fur­thest from the ground. if you try to rotate while you are still close to the ground, you will never get high enough to get your legs under you again.

when you have got­ten good at turn­ing over back­wards and land­ing on your hands and knees, you will be so happy. will will think you are flip­ping, and you will be wrong. a flip lands you on your feet. how­ever, the tran­si­tion from hands-and-knees to landing-on-feet is a dif­fi­cult one made more dif­fi­cult by the fact that, once we get a taste of being “able to flip” we are reluc­tant to back down and fix our form since it means more screw-ups. i will dis­cuss this in more depth later, but for now, keep in mind that learn­ing any move­ment with good form is the key to learn­ing more dif­fi­cult related move­ments. learn to do bakuchu cor­rectly and nenchu will only require one sim­ple adjustment.

variations

there are sev­eral ways that these ten-style unshin can be altered for var­i­ous pur­poses. notice is said that they can be altered for var­i­ous pur­poses —  far too often, these vari­a­tions are per­formed for sim­ple flash value. they look cooler than the sim­pler ver­sions, and their dif­fi­culty earns them extra points in hokei (though that is tech­ni­cally tengi and not unshin…). how­ever, out­side of skill-development, the the deci­sion of how to move should be based on the desired out­come, not the num­ber of cool-points one may accrue. thus, i will try to keep my dis­cus­sion of these vari­a­tions purpose-driven and explain why one may want to use one or more of them.

tobikomi, diving

at some point, when i was maybe nine, yamauchi sen­sei laid down a punch­ing back in front of the mat where we were prac­tic­ing front rolls. he told us not to change a thing, but sim­ply roll over it as we had been pre­vi­ously. being kids, we had no fear. within five min­utes, many of us were doing div­ing rolls over garbage cans and other obsta­cles with no problems.

a few years later, some­one told me to dive into a cart­wheel. what? that seemed a lit­tle more chal­leng­ing. but it wasn’t. i then real­ized that i could dive into any tum­ble (and by exten­sion, any­thing else) i could already do. i just had to stretch out the entry. it was the begin­ning of my dive-crazy period when i taught myself how to do dive rolls over chu­dan kamae as well as div­ing ver­sions of shajo and ebi and lots of other things.

how to: really, if you can’t fig­ure out how to dive into any of the skills you can already do, you have a prob­lem. for prac­tice pur­poses, it may be a good idea to use a soft, low object a an obsta­cle when you are learn­ing. a punch­ing bag lain on its side is idea in most cases. even­tu­ally, you will come to the real­iza­tion that you are actu­ally div­ing into all of these move­ments any­way, so doing the “div­ing” ver­sion is really not that dif­fi­cult a transition.

my best advice for doing div­ing tum­bles is to dive then tum­ble — don’t try to tum­ble through your dive. this ties in with the expansion/contraction i will hit on later, but the impor­tant point is that the dive is to get you some­place, then you just do the tum­ble as usual. it doesn’t mat­ter if you are div­ing high or long, into a roll, cart­wheel, or flip (yes, div­ing flips are very pos­si­ble). if you can learn to sep­a­rate the dive and the tum­ble and then tran­si­tion smoothly between them, you will never have a prob­lem with div­ing unshin.

why you would want to: there are exactly two appli­ca­tions for div­ing into unshin. one is to sur­mount an obsta­cle of some sort — per­haps an attack or the opponent’s body. the other rea­son is to gain dis­tance, either to reach or escape from the oppo­nent. beyond this, you have no busi­ness div­ing in jis­sen. it leaves your body wide-open to attack in the air and requires more time to com­plete than non-diving tum­bles. how­ever, they can be life-savers for wither of the above two applications.

these div­ing unshin are req­ui­site devel­op­men­tal steps for all of the hand­springs and flips. learn them.

katate, one-handed

any­thing you can do with two hands, you can also learn to do with one, and unshin is no excep­tion. one-handed vari­a­tions are most com­mon for sokuten, but it’s not unheard of for some­one to do a front or back hand­spring this way too.

how to: well, for katate sokuten with the front hand, it’s not that hard. the rear arm doesn’t really add that much to the move­ment — it only adds a slight sup­port. how­ever, even begin­ners will find that they can not use the rear hand and still man­age to almost land. that may help to build some con­fi­dence, but it won’t actu­ally get you very far with­out a lit­tle bit of technique.

the key to doing any unshin minus one arm is the front (dri­ving) leg — the one that does most of the push­ing. any­time you are mov­ing for­ward from kamae into unshin, this is going to be your lead­ing leg. since this leg is the last thing to leave the ground, it’s also your last chance to add speed and power to your rota­tion. since you will sup­port your weight on only one arm, you want to rotate as quickly as pos­si­ble. if you push hard and fast, there is no rea­son you can’t free up an arm.

why you would want to: so often we look at peo­ple prac­tic­ing flips and hand­springs with about fif­teen run­ning steps, their hands wound up over their heads, and a giant skip to build rota­tional speed. i guess that’s fine for prac­tice, but it’s just beg­ging to get hit. even in hokei and jis­sen, most people’s unshin leaves big gaps for a fast sen­taizuki or even dogarami.

learn­ing to do one-handed vari­a­tions of the unshin may help you cover up for pro­tec­tion. if you use only one hand to exe­cute your unshin, then the other hand is free to make a face cover or swat away an incom­ing strike. on the other side of the coin, you can use that free hand to attack as well. other rea­sons to use a sin­gle hand may include instances where, for one rea­son or another, you only have one hand avail­able, or if you are hav­ing to change direc­tions quickly while escap­ing attack.

you can even use the free hand to hold a beer. the pos­si­bil­i­ties are lim­ited only by your imagination.

in addi­tion to all of that, you are prob­a­bly never going to learn sokuchu unless you can do katate sokuten with either the front or back hand. this is another one of those devel­op­men­tal necessities.

nen, twisting

this is cur­rently where we sep­a­rate the men from the boys, unshin-wise (not to be sex­ist, but i have yet to see a woman do nenchu in taido). nenchu and shazen­ten are the most com­mon (read: “only”) ten­tai unshin you will see in taido right now, but i’m hop­ing this changes soon. cur­rently, the per­ceived dif­fi­culty of nenchu gives any­one who per­forms it in hokei gets almost a full point bonus. so any­one who hopes to take any medals bet­ter be able to do it, ’cause the big boys cer­tainly can.

how to: the first per­sonal acquain­tance i ever saw able to per­form nenchu was amir aligham­bari, who was always able to skate, dance, paint, and flip bet­ter than almost any­one else i knew. i had been pretty good at back flips for a while when i got around to ask­ing amir how he did the twist-flips. i couldn’t believe the sim­plic­ity of his answer — “oh, that’s easy, man. you just turn your head”.

i didn’t want to believe it could be that easy, so i con­tin­ued try­ing to spin by swing­ing my arms, which is what most peo­ple do. it works, but it works by trick­ing you into turn­ing your head. you can actu­ally just do the whole thing with the head if your basic flip form is good enough. i also used to try and do the turn by twist­ing at the hips. since i could flip into kamae and do bakuchugeri, it made per­fect sense in my mind, but it just didn’t work in appli­ca­tion. finally, i took amir’s advice and per­formed a sim­ple experiment.

try this: on a pad of some sort, make eji­dachi like you would in ten­tai no hokei. turn your head ninety degrees to either side. do a back flip as usual. almost made it, didn’t you? now the trick is to get that head turn to work with your usual head toss back­ward so that it is speedy enough to turn you all the way around in both direc­tions. if you still can’t get it to work, a lit­tle bit of arm swing may help you out, but don’t count on your arms bring­ing the magic if you don’t turn your head.

do this a thou­sand times to each side. see how easy that is? now you can laugh at every­one who thinks these are “too hard” for most peo­ple to get. when they ask you, just smile at them and say “oh, that’s easy, man. you just turn your head”.

why you would want to: twist­ing is incred­i­bly func­tional in taido. they allow us to change direc­tions in mul­ti­ple planes at one time. they allow us to cope with the move­ments of an oppo­nent. they allow us to set up attacks and defenses, even while mov­ing through the air. not so be flip (ha), but try­ing to explain the pos­si­ble appli­ca­tions for twist­ing unshin is like try­ing to explain the appli­ca­tions of sen-style unsoku — it’s just too obvi­ous and broad.

moving in a different direction

the eas­i­est exam­ple to describe here is the gainer, or for­ward back flip. agian, amir was the first per­son i saw who could do these, and he told me that he wasn’t quite sure how he had come to mas­ter them. i tried every­thing i could think of to get gain­ers down, but to no avail. for me, this move is all about psy­cho­log­i­cal resis­tance. i know i can do it, but i know i’m going to break my damn neck in the process.

how to: chris healy fig­ure out one clever way to build up to these. he sug­gested build­ing up from a tilted ver­sion on a mat. start out by run­ning for­ward and swing­ing the legs to one side or the other with a knee tuck. you will fall down. but. you will also be tran­si­tion­ing your momen­tum cor­rectly and you prob­a­bly won’t have as much anx­i­ety about the move­ment. as you get bet­ter, you can grad­u­ally increase the ver­ti­cal­ity of the move­ment. chris says the most impor­tant point to remem­ber when you prac­tice this way is to tuck the knees in because oth­er­wise, you will end up flopped on your belly. ouch.

two other prac­tice meth­ods that feel promis­ing right now: back flips off a wall and front roll back flip com­bos. the off-the-wall ver­sion (again, not a michael jack­son ref­er­ence) is what gene kelly does in “singing in the rain” — take a cou­ple of run­ning steps off a wall and back flip off. this is eas­ier than doing it with­out the wall, but it still take seri­ous balls. lately, i’ve been hav­ing good result doing a back­flip after a front roll, which you can eas­ily do it you can flip from a squat. tran­si­tion­ing the momen­tum is all about hip drive. though this is a very dif­fer­ent motion from a stand­ing gainer, it has really helped me get over my fear. now i can work on the chris method.

why you would want to: well… taido is all about chang­ing direc­tions. i’m pretty sure you don’t need me to spell this out for you. though gain­ers may not seem to offer a lot of util­ity for taido, they are actu­ally really defen­si­ble in jis­sen. there’s no place to try and enter with an attack. when i dis­cuss non-ten-unshin later, the pos­si­bil­i­ties of counter-rotational unshin may feel a lit­tle more open.

in the mean­time, you should also look into other ten­tai unshin move­ments that rotate in the oppo­site direc­tion as the travel. for exam­ple, imag­ine the appli­ca­tions for a retreat­ing front flip kick. the first per­son to send me a video of them doing this gets a beer.

common combinations

com­bi­na­tions are impor­tant in taido because of the seigyo prin­ci­ple of rendo rentai — using con­tin­u­ous motion to reach an out­come by indi­rect (and hence, unpre­dictable) means. in unshin and tengi, com­bi­na­tions are espe­cially viable, since the rota­tion speed and momen­tum form one move­ment can add to that of a sec­ond move­ment. here are some very com­mon com­bi­na­tions of unshin movements.

• sokuten/zenten
• zenten/sokuten
• zenten/koten
• koten/zenten
• sokuten/bakuten
• sokuten/bakuchu
• bakuten/bakuchu
• ude zenten/zenten
• nenchu/zenten

when doing these com­bi­na­tions, try not to stop the motion. keep the rota­tion from the first move­ment going into the sec­ond. the tran­si­tion is the most impor­tant thing you will get out of prac­tic­ing these com­bos. i can­not stress that enough. taido is partly about adapt­ing on the spot. learn­ing to make as smooth a tran­si­tion from one motion to another is a crit­i­cal ele­ment in devel­op­ing your abil­ity to impro­vise phys­i­cal skills in combat.

an impor­tant point to remem­ber when you prac­tice com­bi­na­tions of unshin move­ments: you will never have a chance to do more than one or pos­si­bly two of them in straight-line suc­ces­sion. there is not enough room on the court, and you have to think about maneu­ver­ing around an oppo­nent who is try­ing to hit you. to get the most out of unshin com­bos, you will need to even­tu­ally learn to add in some changes of direc­tion. i rec­om­mend prac­tic­ing every com­bi­na­tion you can think of where the sec­ond move­ments goes in the oppo­site direc­tion from the first. then prac­tice at odd angles. if you do this, you will find that you can actu­ally use these things in jis­sen rather than just flash­ing up your hokei.

maybe i will write a few drills for prac­tic­ing angu­lar unshin com­bos later on, but for right now, just go to it with your own cre­ativ­ity. try to think of every com­bi­na­tion pos­si­ble, and then look for ways to prac­tice doing them around obsta­cles and in reac­tion to stim­u­lus. remem­ber: keep you eye on the ball…

learning ten-based unshin

in 1993, a few of us started tak­ing a few hours gym­nas­tics les­son once a week to improve our tengi prior to the world cham­pi­onships. since uchida sen­sei wasn’t very good at the aer­ial maneu­vers, amer­i­can taido had a pretty sad level of tengi skill at that time (and we were absolutely stunned by the 200-pound finnish guys who could do nenchu at the tour­na­ments). we learned a lot about gym­nas­tic form, and some of us learned how we could teach flips and such bet­ter, but we didn’t really ben­e­fit from the rigid struc­ture of for­mal tum­bling (which is not to say that form in tum­bling isn’t extremely impor­tant). basi­cally, the envi­ron­ment didn’t lend itself to our pur­poses, and in case you were think­ing about it, i would not rec­om­mend gym­nas­tics lessons to a taido stu­dent hop­ing to work on this stuff.

your best bet, if you wish to prac­tice unshin and ten-type move­ments is to get a few peo­ple together who are at var­i­ous lev­els of skill. this allows each per­son to see var­i­ous mis­takes being made in addi­tion to exam­ples of really good form. find a safe loca­tion to work, warm-up well, and just do it. build up from the rudi­ments to the more dif­fi­cult move­ments — if you don’t build your con­fi­dence along with your skill, you will quickly find that you can­not progress. when you come to a stick­ing point, take things back down a cou­ple of notches. also pay atten­tion to mechan­ics, and cri­tique each oth­ers’ form mer­ci­lessly. “get­ting over” or land­ing on some­thing other than your head is not the same as doing a flip.

hen-type unshin

now before you get all excited, i want to warn you that there aren’t a lot of hen-movements that could be use­ful for unshin. the rea­son is in the clas­si­fi­ca­tion of what “hen” is: it is a change of body axis about some line that rests in the axial plane. how­ever, if the body axis changes (rotates) far enough in this direc­tion, the move­ment becomes ten. if there is any rota­tion about the sagittal/coronal axis (what taido calls the “body-axis” — though the body has an infi­nite num­ber of pos­si­ble axes), then the move­ment is nen (unless the the axis remains upright, which would be sen, but we aren’t talk­ing about sen right now).

so what kinds of unshin move­ments could be con­sid­ered hen? tricky ques­tion. i have a few appli­ca­tions, but they are pretty dif­fi­cult to describe in words. so what i’m going to do is this: i will dis­cuss one class of of hen­tai unshin that should be fairly obvi­ous, then i will leave you to your own imag­in­ings. sound fair? i think after a very lit­tle expla­na­tion, this con­cept will make a lot more sense.

my basic pro­to­type for loco­mo­tion via hen-movmement is fukuteki, pri­mar­ily the full fukuteki and step­ping back/under move done to each side in fukuteki 6rendo (amer­i­can rou­tine). of course, in its basic form, this doesn’t seem that spe­cial (and would still be con­sid­ered unsoku, since it moves along the flat plane), but there are great appli­ca­tions. look at all three forms of basic fukuteki and you will see that they involve a change of body axis while the feet stay basi­cally in the same place, but what is unshin designed for? moving.

do the same basic fukuteki, but this time lift your feet up slightly. dive into the fukuteki posi­tion and then come upright. you have just moved form one point to another by a method that can­not be called unsoku, and you did so by chang­ing the body axis — this equals hen­tai unshin.

try to apply this basic method to all three fukuteki. you will find inter­est­ing appli­ca­tions as well as sev­eral ways to move using all three. not to men­tion the other pos­si­ble “fukuteki” duck­ing move­ments that could be used in this man­ner. basi­cally this class of unshin is use­ful for mov­ing under an attack with­out rolling. the advan­tage is that you can stay inside strik­ing dis­tance and keep your eyes on the oppo­nent while mov­ing some­place safe.

i’m not going to attempt to list off all the vari­a­tions i have found to this kind of move­ment, but i will say that there are at least a dozen dif­fer­ent ways to cre­ate unshin for the escaping-under-an-attack appli­ca­tion alone. for other appli­ca­tions as well, i’m sure you will find plenty of new motions to explore. have fun — these are great in jis­sen, and just start­ing to come into wide usage. if you need some ideas, watch the matrix movies.

nen-type unshin

nen move­ment is much more open in its def­i­n­i­tion than hen (which is lim­ited by ten), partly because it tran­scends hen and ten (which are clas­si­fied by dif­fer­ent amounts of rota­tion through one axis of the axial plane). nen­tai includes some amount of rota­tion through two of the three planes of the body. the only com­mon move­ments in taido’s unshin that do this are shazen­ten and nenchu. move­ments of this com­plex­ity are nat­u­rally a lit­tle con­fus­ing (we can process infor­ma­tion in one less dimen­sion than we can per­ceive at any moment. if you can con­cep­tu­al­ize five or more dimen­sions, you can get an idea of why i like to think of taido as a four(not three)-dimensional mar­tial art).

since i am the first per­son i am aware of to clas­sify this as a spe­cific sub­set of unshin, i am invok­ing my dis­cov­ery rights to name them “andi­nos”. just kid­ding, that would be stu­pid — i actu­ally call this nentai-unshin kind of move­ment “nen­shin”. you can call it any­thing you like so long as you remem­ber me fondly when you do.

angular handspring

this is my friend, ohashi’s sig­na­ture move. it looks kind of like a cross between a one-hand front hand­spring and a shoul­der roll. there are appli­ca­tions for aeri­ally rolling over attacks at well as for deliv­er­ing attacks out of the move­ment. exper­i­ment with this move, and if you are brave, try the back­ward ver­sion as well.

twisting sokuten

how many times is it hon­estly a good idea to do a straight sokuten in jis­sen? pretty few. as a result, advanced play­ers will often enter sokuten with the inten­tion of chang­ing angle or direc­tion in the mid­dle of the move­ment. this gives them the option to kick, turn, or some­thing else. i’ve seen some guys set this up as if they were doing a big cart­wheel to lure the oppo­nent into range. when he gets close enough, they can top­ple over into an attack.

twisting zenchu

obvi­ously, if we are going to have a twist­ing back flip, we can do a twist­ing front flip. there tons of appli­ca­tions for this in jis­sen and even a few in hokei (the sec­ond half of ten­tai comes to mind). the only rea­son you don’t see peo­ple doing these is that they can’t do straight front flips. give it another cou­ple of years, and we’ll have bro­ken the zenchu bar­rier. when that hap­pens, it’ll only be a mat­ter of time before these are commonplace.

twisting hentai unshin

all of the fukuteki vari­a­tions i men­tioned above could be used with an added twist to become nen­shin. why would one do such a thing? to land in a bet­ter posi­tion for attack per­haps. since the vari­a­tions are vast and the move­ments are dif­fi­cult to describe, i’ll let you fig­ure this out for yourselves.

etc.

you prob­a­bly get the idea by now. there are all kinds of ways to twist, spin, and rotate the body, and it’s unnec­es­sary to limit that motion to one axis at a time. keep in mind too that these move­ments do not have to be high-flying aer­ial flash tech­niques. they may look very sim­ple, yet move in a sophis­ti­cated manner.

more general stuff

the fol­low­ing points apply to all unshin practice.

expansion/contraction

as i wrote about unsoku (and breath­ing, and will also write when i get to fin­ish­ing my kamae arti­cle) expansion/contraction is super-important in almost every­thing we do in taido. unshin is not an exception.

look at the most obvi­ous exam­ple — a div­ing front roll. you have to stretch way out to dive, then ball up quickly to roll. the more con­trol you have over the speed of your stretch-out and ball-up move­ments, the longer and higher you can dive with safety.

a less obvi­ous exam­ple is the back flip. as i men­tioned ear­lier, many peo­ple try to flip with­out jump­ing. by focussing on extend­ing the body upward first, you add lots of height to your flip. if you can ball up quickly, you never have to worry about not landing.

on the exten­sions, really try to feel you body become as long as pos­si­ble. stretch your spine form crown to coc­cyx, reach with your fin­gers, point your toes, and don’t for­get to look — sight is your men­tal tape mea­sure, so where you point your eyes makes a big dif­fer­ence. when you con­tract, bring your knees into your chest, exhale, tuck your chin, lift your toes toward your knees, and it’s even per­mis­si­ble to grab your knees with your hands when your are learn­ing, pro­vided you remem­ber to wane your­self from this before it becomes habit (you will be need­ing your ams for other things later, don’t ya think?).

the faster you can expand or con­tract your body in unshin, the more flex­i­bil­ity you will have in your exe­cu­tion. this means more appli­ca­tions and eas­ier usage all around. it also increases the safety with which you are able to attempt new, or more dif­fi­cult move­ments. if you know you can ball up at the last sec­ond to bail, you have more free­dom to try things you aren’t sure you can accomplish.

posture

the vast major­ity of pos­si­ble unshin move­ments will require a bend in the spine. pos­ture is the word we use to describe spinal align­ment. your pos­ture is impor­tant, and pay­ing atten­tion to when it needs to bend and when it needs to lengthen will do won­der­ful things for your con­trol of your aer­ial move­ments. pos­ture is some­thing i hope to do an in-depth treat­ment of some­day, but for now, con­sider it the link between the expansion/contraction aspect and the breath­ing aspect of unshin. think about how your body struc­ture defines your move­ment palette and you will under­stand how impor­tant pos­ture really is.

breathing

since unshin requires spinal flexion/extension and more gen­eral expansion/contraction, it only stands to rea­son that we can incor­po­rate breath­ing tech­niques into the move­ment. by prac­tic­ing the basic exer­cises i described in this arti­cle, you will learn how to incor­po­rate effi­cient breath­ing into your unshin move­ment. it only requires practice.

the appli­ca­tions of this prac­tice are far-reaching. if you are using unshin to move in jis­sen, and your unshin does your breath­ing for you, then you are going to be able to breathe with lit­tle effort through­out your matches. keep­ing your breath­ing relaxed and nat­ural low­ers stress arousal that can cause poor per­for­mance. at high lev­els, unshin could save more energy than it uses (pos­si­bly). any taidoka who devel­ops such a level of free­dom of motion, energy effi­ciency, and low arousal is going to be nearly unbeatable.

timing

as i men­tioned above in the sec­tion on bakuchu, tim­ing is a crit­i­cal ele­ment to per­form­ing all of these move­ments suc­cess­fully. chances are, you will fig­ure out the proper tim­ing through prac­tice. my basic advice on tim­ing these moves is this: later is bet­ter. so long as you jump high, you will typ­i­cally do well to delay your rota­tion as long as pos­si­ble. even if you do not fully rotate, you will prob­a­bly not land on your head. in most instances (assum­ing you jump!) it is safer to wait longer than it is to try and rotate while you are still close to the ground. it also builds your con­fi­dence and aer­ial aware­ness to prac­tice this way.

tim­ing is also crit­i­cal to apply­ing them in jis­sen, though this is mostly beyond the scope of this arti­cle. how­ever, i will say that at higher lev­els, we want to think about how to do these move­ments while pro­tect­ing our­selves from attack. thus, it becomes impor­tant to be able to con­trol the pre­cise point at which we decide to rotate or turn. con­trol requires com­fort, and get­ting com­fort­able enough to con­trol our move­ments at this level requires lots and lots of practice.

distance

i am still work­ing on the dis­tance arti­cle and have been for over a year. part of the prob­lem lay in the mal­con­cep­tion of dis­tance within 3-space that most peo­ple have been con­di­tioned with. i think that i am going to have to spend some time read­ing pop-physics before i can fig­ure out a way to explain how taido is nec­es­sar­ily 4-dimensional. why does this mat­ter? because i can’t go into a dis­cus­sion of “dis­tance” when the word itself is not accu­rately being defined. that’s as far as i’m going to go with this thread for now.

suf­fice it for now that dis­tanc­ing for unshin shares some of the same aspecs as dis­tanc­ing for unsoku. only you have to account for one added dimension.

prac­tice doing all of these move­ments around, over, onto, and off of obsta­cles and peo­ple, sta­tion­ary and mov­ing. this will give you a feel for dis­tanc­ing prop­erly when you attempt to move by unshin in jissen.

uses

this arti­cle is about the actual skills and move­ments of unshin. i will some­day devote a sep­a­rate page to using unsoku and unshin, but i want to point out here that unshin is part of your tech­nique. you must link unshin with unsoku, kamae, sotai, and waza. unshin is not sim­ply flip­ping around in a vac­uum. while it’s good enough for gym­nasts to take five run­ning steps and stick a land­ing, taidoka need to exe­cute unshin while con­scious of not leav­ing any suki for the oppo­nent to attack.

unshin also makes a killer appe­tizer at parties.

the importance of proper form

the temp­ta­tion to call our unshin form “good enough” once we can con­sis­tently land on our feet is some­times over­whelm­ing. do not fool your­self — lack of injury does not equal per­fec­tion. if i learned any­thing from for­mal gym­nas­tics lessons, it’s this: good form (but not nec­es­sar­ily “proper” clas­si­cal form) is the gate­way to higher-level skills. i’ll write that once more in bold ital­ics to make sure you don’t under­es­ti­mate its importance:

good form is the gate­way to higher-level skills.

at lower lev­els, we can fake it. we can use strength and guts to over­come the force of grav­ity. we can have an ok zen­ten, an ok sokuten, a weak koten, and a not-too-bad bakuten, and we’ll be able to cut it as c-grade taidoka. what is the c-grade taidoka miss­ing in his hokei? atten­tion to detail. what is the c-grade taidoka miss­ing in his unshin? same thing. if this hypo­thet­i­cal stu­dent were to spend about two hours seri­ously prac­tic­ing his zen­ten form, his koten, sokuten, and bakuten would instantly improve as well (unless he has a major upper-body strength deficit).

higher-level unshin is more sophis­ti­cated than basic tum­bles. we can­not force sokuchu and nenchu and the like. we can force zenchu from a run­ning start, but unless we get down into the mechan­ics of the motion, we will never be able to do it in hokei. the peo­ple who do nenchu have beau­ti­ful bakuchu, with­out excep­tion. is this a coin­ci­dence? no.

when learn­ing new skills, it’s fine to cheat until you can build some con­fi­dence. how­ever, you are only cheat­ing your­self if you don’t then back up and fix your form. i know tons of good black belts who can’t seem to take their skills to the next level, and they always blow me off when i tell them that they need to go back and fix some small mis­take in their sokuten or koten. but these same guys are quick to put me in the “good at tengi” group, as if it’s some kind of magic that i stum­bled upon. they never even notice that it’s not just my flips that are bet­ter than theirs, it’s my front rolls, back rolls, etc.

cautions

there are a few things you should keep in mind when mov­ing by unshin. firstly, in aer­ial unshin, nearly every­thing that hap­pens in tran­sit is deter­mined before we leave the ground. maybe only 10% (though this is by no means a sci­en­tif­i­cally derived fig­ure) of how we move in the air has any thing to do with what we actu­ally do while air­borne. things we can con­trol after take­off: body posi­tion, spe­cific landing-point, spe­cific landing-timing, and not much else. things we can­not con­trol while in the air: direc­tion of travel, body ori­en­ta­tion (in other words, if you want to flip or twist, you will have to ini­ti­ate that move­ment before you lose con­tact with terra), gen­eral landing-point, gen­eral landing-timing, and lots of other things.

the other big cau­tion has to do with where you look. since many unshin move­ments require you to look in a spe­cific direc­tion in order to exe­cute them, you may have blind spots when you try to do them in jis­sen. this is another place where tim­ing can make or break your abil­ity to use these skills in appli­ca­tion. in all of your unshin skills, pay atten­tion to where you are look­ing try to keep a han­dle on your loca­tion in rela­tion to your tar­get and the ground.

in conclusion

my final word on unshin is that it is very impor­tant to taido (sound famil­iar?). just as unsoku acts as a strate­gic link between kamae and tech­nique, unshin can do the same as well as link­ing any com­bi­na­tion of unsoku and sotai. this, along with the added spa­tial dimen­sion in which unshin allow us to move, gives it greater applic­a­bil­ity than unsoku in application.

how­ever, unlike neil arm­strong, we can­not escape the earth’s grav­i­ta­tional pull. this means that when we rise, we will also fall. less obvi­ously, when we move in oppo­si­tion to grav­ity, we will have to expend a great deal more energy than we do in mov­ing tan­gen­tially to grav­ity as we do when walk­ing. this means that we must chose our moments lest we tire quickly. it also means that we need to pay much more atten­tion to breath­ing well in motion.

finally, remem­ber that unshin does not have to be restricted to rolling and flip­ping around. there are any num­ber of non-acrobatic move­ments that could be just as use­ful in taido. espe­cially exper­i­ment­ing with nen­tai move­ments will open up some inter­est­ing options for stu­dents prac­tic­ing unshin appli­ca­tion. and while you chew on all the pos­si­bil­i­ties that nen­shin has to offer, i’ll be pol­ish­ing up my shazenchu.