The Broken Record Drill

Maybe I’ve gone kobo-crazy, but I believe intel­li­gent and cre­ative use of kobo-derived drills can have incred­i­ble poten­tial for improv­ing stu­dents’ Taido skills. This isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a new devel­op­ment, but it’s some­thing that I have used suc­cess­fully with stu­dents in a num­ber dojo now, so I am con­vinced that it works.

In this arti­cle, I’ll describe a method for mak­ing kobo pro­gres­sions to teach and prac­tice one of the most difficult-to-learn aspects of Taido: rengi. Rengi are “suc­ces­sive tech­niques,” or com­bi­na­tion moves. While most mar­tial arts have com­bi­na­tions (even box­ers drill dozens of punch com­bos), Taido’s rengi are usu­ally con­structed on the fly, rather than pre­set. This impro­vi­sa­tional aspect of Taido’s com­bi­na­tions is the key to their effec­tive­ness, but it’s incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to teach.

Applying the 5 Simple Rules

The spe­cific real­iza­tion of the need for this prac­tice came about when I was writ­ing my 5SRs arti­cle. The fifth prin­ci­ple of the 5jokun states “Be adapt­able in your tech­niques and main­tain free­dom of phys­i­cal move­ment. The right tech­nique will pre­vent you from being dom­i­nated,” which I boiled down to a state­ment of value for “adapt­abil­ity, free­dom, and cre­ativ­ity.” “OK,” I thought “now how would one go about devel­op­ing these attributes?”

While this doesn’t look to have very much rel­e­vance to kobo prac­tice, a look at the orig­i­nal American trans­la­tion of the 5jokun may shed more light on why it brought kobo to mind for me. It says “the tech­niques change appro­pri­ately from offense to defense. One who acquires cor­rect adapt­abil­ity to these tech­niques will never be restrained.” Specifically look at the first part: “change… from offense to defense… adapt­abil­ity…” That’s what got me thinking.

Being adapt­able in our tran­si­tion between offense and defense is what good rengi is all about. It’s not enough to sim­ply do sev­eral move­ments in sequence; you have to take your opponent’s reac­tions to your move­ments into con­sid­er­a­tion. You have to adjust for the fact that, as you are try­ing to hit him, he is also try­ing to hit you. You must alter­nate between offense and defense rapidly, while con­tin­u­ously tran­si­tion­ing from one move­ment to the next. That con­tin­u­ous alter­na­tion of roles is rengi.

From Theory to Application

At the 2006 Asia Pacific Games, Masaki intro­duced me to a drill that I saw could be used to teach exactly the high-level rengi skills I had been think­ing about. In her ver­sion, the prac­tice looked like a grow­ing, never-ending kobo, in which the part­ners con­tin­u­ally switched attack/defense rolls. I’m going to build on that frame­work with some vari­a­tions that make this prac­tice tai­lorable to improv­ing rengi skills at any level.

To make things sim­ple, I’ll refer to the prac­tic­ing part­ners as “Parry” and “Reposte” in this out­line. Since offense and defense exist simul­ta­ne­ously in Taido (and this is espe­cially appar­ent in skill­ful rengi), any func­tional des­ig­na­tion is impos­si­ble. Thus, I will resort to using names. En garde!

Basic Version

Parry and Reposte begin fac­ing each other in kamae. Parry (begin slowly!) ini­ti­ates an attack, and Reposte defends. The two prac­tice this exchange a few times, build­ing speed and flu­id­ity grad­u­ally. So far, this looks just like stan­dard kobo prac­tice. But fear not! I wouldn’t waste your time with stan­dard kobo prac­tice, because we both know it isn’t much good. It’s about to get much more inter­est­ing. I promise. OK, just one more sen­tence to stall for dra­matic effect.

Now we take the speed back down and Parry ini­ti­ates the same attack as before. As Reposte is defend­ing, Parry now defends against that defense. The ini­tial attacker has become the defender. Now the action stops long enough for the team to build up their speed and com­fort with this new series over the course of a few rep­e­ti­tions. Can you guess what hap­pens next?

That’s right, they go out for a beer. Wait, not yet. I’m get­ting ahead of myself. They haven’t fin­ished prac­tice yet.

The next step (which begins slowly!) in the prac­tice goes as fol­lows: Parry attacks, Reposte defends, but Parry re-defends. At this point, Reposte defends against Parry’s defense of his defense. Got it?

We now have a com­plex exchange of four “attacks” with­out any stop in the action. For the sake of later expla­na­tions, I’m going to call this “two iter­a­tions” of the drill (even though it’s just one actual iter­a­tion, it’s two rounds through the offense/defense alter­na­tion). Neither part­ner should return to kamae or really break their momen­tum at all. The four steps should be flow­ing one into the other, in a con­tin­u­ous fash­ion. Now, Parry and Reposte prac­tice the new com­bi­na­tion until they can do it smoothly and quickly.

I think you can see where this prac­tice is going. You can con­tinue this process ad infini­tum until you both drop. It’ll be a lit­tle like play­ing that Simon mem­ory game from 1983, but with­out the col­ors and notes. At least, if you start to see strange col­ors, you should stop and rest.

Variations

But that’s not all! You can make some game rules and vari­a­tions to make this prac­tice a lit­tle more interesting.

First, we’ll use a straight option vari­able. Assuming that the part­ners have prac­ticed this drill with a few dif­fer­ent first (ini­ti­at­ing) attacks, we can sim­ply give Parry the option to choose one on the fly. For exam­ple, both part­ners can begin by mov­ing in unsoku. Parry attacks with option A or option B, at which Reposte must con­tinue by choos­ing the cor­rect series. Of course, this makes it much eas­ier on Parry, so we can add the con­di­tion that either Parry or Reposte can make the first move. This way, they both have to be on their toes.

Next, we’ll try the branch method of vari­a­tion. At any level of iter­a­tion (after any num­ber of offense/defense cycles), there may be a defen­sive option. For exam­ple, if Parry throws man­jigeri, Reposte can jump or duck. Depending on which option Reposte takes, Parry must adjust his next move to match. This branch option can occur any­where in the chain and can also be drilled from free unsoku as described above.

So those are just two exam­ples of using options to explore this grow­ing kobo drill. We can also play with game rules to work on dif­fer­ent kinds of rengi. One way to do this is by spec­i­fy­ing jun or gyaku (same or oppo­site direc­tion) rendo patterns.

If jun is spec­i­fied, each part­ner must con­tinue his motion in the same direc­tion with­out stop­ping. This can get tricky (and fun) really quickly (pos­si­bly because of the ensu­ing dizzi­ness). In the gyaku spec­i­fi­ca­tion, each attack must change direc­tions. This gets even trick­ier, as part­ners must try to smoothly defend and attack in some­times oppo­site directions.

Game rules can also spec­ify the use of jumps or steps as seiho. Or sotai can be spec­i­fied, for exam­ple begin­ning with sengi and mov­ing through ungi, hengi, etc. in some pre­de­ter­mined order. Or you can have a “goal” attack decided upon, such as dog­a­rami. In such a case, the first part­ner who is able to exe­cute dog­a­rami within the other spec­i­fied rules wins.

Brain Pain

Now, when you write this all out, it has the appear­ance of being rather com­pli­cated, but bare with it for the first few min­utes. Things will begin to move much more smoothly as you learn the drill. Once both part­ners have done this a few times, you’ll find it very easy to change the rules, add iter­a­tions, increase the num­ber of options, and gen­er­ally sophis­ti­cate to higher com­plex­ity. I promise. At this point, you’ll be doing some­thing very cool — you’ll be improvising.

Just remem­ber to keep the esca­la­tion grad­ual, and you’ll both be able to learn quickly. Then comes the part that can be dan­ger­ous if you aren’t smart. Since each stu­dent has favorite pat­terns, the more you do this drill with the same part­ner, the more you will be able to make assump­tions based on these pat­terns. You’ll be able to read each other far to well, and this can cre­ate the illu­sion that you are get­ting way too good. How do you pre­vent this? Change part­ners. Frequently switch­ing part­ners has the oppo­site effect, actu­ally break­ing up our set pat­terns and favorites by chal­leng­ing us to react to dif­fer­ent stimuli.

Plug and Play

This prac­tice drops directly into any of the vari­a­tions on the Basic and Advanced Kobo Drills pages. All of those changes and games can used to build this rengi kobo up from idea to appli­ca­tion. Specifically, this drill drops directly into the explo­ration slot, and can be taken from there to wher­ever you indi­vid­u­ally need to go.

Remember to use the unsoku, sotai, seiho, kimegi, gen­tai process in your prac­tice. Using rengi and mak­ing gen­tai is the surest way to get ippon in jis­sen, so prac­tice it with this drill set. Rengi is tech­ni­cally a reit­er­a­tion of the sotai/seiho stage of the process, repeat­ing as nec­es­sary before kimegi.

Because this drill repeats this por­tion of the process sev­eral times, I call it the skip­ping record drill, but you can call it Tommy, if you like — just a long as you try it.

Remember to prac­tice rengi in the same direc­tion (jun move­ment); rengi alter­nat­ing direc­tions (gyaku move­ment); rengi with seiho such as steps, hops, and tim­ing changes; rengi with cheese. Especially don’t for­get to put your cre­ative work to prac­tice in jis­sen. This is a good way to work­shop cre­ative defenses, but spend­ing all day doing coop­er­a­tive rengi won’t teach you any­thing if you don’t also put it to live prac­tice (”live” mean­ing that the other guy wants to hit you).

And so, that’s it. I had a writ­ten proper clos­ing para­graph, but upon reread­ing it, I real­ized that my jokes were get­ting dumber and dumber as this arti­cle got longer and longer. I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead. This is the last sentence.