Continual Training

What if I told you that you could prac­tice Taido for over 100 hours every week? Would you be afraid? How do you think your per­for­mance would improve? Assuming that all this extra prac­tice didn’t inter­fere with your job or fam­ily life, how would you imag­ine you over­all qual­ity of life to change? What do you think you could get out of turn­ing every minute of your life into an oppor­tu­nity for prac­tice and improve­ment? I’d be will­ing to bet that you’d get quite a lot.

A while back, I ran a poll ask­ing Taido/Blog read­ers how much time they spent each week prac­tic­ing Taido. Some folks prac­tice only one or two hours a week, while oth­ers have the lux­ury and ded­i­ca­tion to devote over ten hours a week to Taido prac­tice. We all have dif­fer­ent lives and com­mit­ments which affect the time we can spend prac­tic­ing Taido.

Lately, I get to prac­tice Taido for about eight hours on a good week, plus some Judo and other train­ing. I haven’t always been so lucky, and I know many Taido stu­dents are only able to train once a week or so.

For a cou­ple of years, I had a job that required me to work most evenings instead of head­ing to the dojo. I spent a lot of time think­ing about how much I envied those stu­dents who got to prac­tice Taido sev­eral times a week. I always enjoyed the peri­ods that I was able to do that. I loved my job, but miss­ing Taido made me a lot more con­scious of how I spent my time dur­ing the day. I try to spend as much of it as pos­si­ble prac­tic­ing. This arti­cle will give you some ideas of how you can too.

I’m obvi­ously not going to sug­gest that you wear your dogi around the office and use your steer­ing wheel as a maki­wara. Your sig­nif­i­cant other would cer­tainly leave you if you insisted on spar­ring to set­tle dis­putes. Aside from the prac­ti­cal impos­si­bil­ity, your body would break down rapidly with­out ample recov­ery time. Your caloric expen­di­ture would go through the roof, but your diges­tive sys­tem wouldn’t be able to process enough food to fuel con­stant phys­i­cal effort. Clearly, this is a model built for failure.

So what we need is a new model of what prac­tice entails. Of course, the tra­di­tional meth­ods are still going to be impor­tant — hokei and jis­sen will always be the essen­tial prac­tice modal­i­ties for Taido — but we could stand to sup­ple­ment our class­room ses­sions with activ­i­ties that improve rather than impede our per­for­mance poten­tial. I’ll neglect the obvi­ous — addi­tional work­outs — because I feel that most stu­dents would rather go to the dojo than to the gym, but I will say that some strength or endurance train­ing can do won­der­ful things for your Taido, and they’re often eas­ier to schedule.

The Freaks Come Out at Night

Being a Taido freak, I’ve devel­oped a lot of habits and prac­tices through the years that I feel help me stay close to Taido, even when I can’t get near a dojo. My Taido prac­tice has had immea­sur­able pos­i­tive impact on my life. Here are a few of my favorite ways to let my life pos­i­tively impact my Taido practice:

Non-Exercise Physical Activities

NEPAs include any­thing you can think of to inject more phys­i­cal activ­ity into your day. Take the damn stairs from time to time — if you climb a flight of stairs and find that you’re breath­ing like an asth­matic on a tram­po­line, you should take it as a hint that you need to do this more often. For some peo­ple, a lit­tle extra phys­i­cal activ­ity may not seem like a big deal, but it can really make more of a dif­fer­ence than you think.

Our bod­ies are made to move, but many of us spend the major­ity of our wak­ing hours sit­ting down; we sit in the car, then sit at our desks at work, then sit down at lunch, then sit down at home and watch TV for a few hours before going to bed. On week­ends, we might go and sit down at a movie for recre­ation. As a result, our hips, shoul­ders, and spines spend a dis­pro­por­tion­ate amount of time flexed for­ward. Extend! Lengthen your spine and occa­sion­ally bend it in the other direc­tion. Move your arms and legs. If you don’t make use of your joints, they will lose mobil­ity, result­ing in pain and stiff­ness and a gen­eral crap feel­ing. The best way to pre­vent the feel­ing that you’re get­ting old and stiff? Move! Often.

Besides keep­ing your joints work­ing well, doing a lot of phys­i­cal activ­i­ties through­out your day will pro­vide sub­tle ben­e­fits in all aspects of your health. Food has been shown to digest more fully when we take a short walk after a meal. The body was made to be moved, and this is not lim­ited to our arms and legs. The body is not just a sack of organs that evolved for the pur­pose of keep­ing our brains alive. Research is sug­gest­ing that our emo­tions and much of our thought is not cen­tered in the brain at all, but results from var­i­ous chem­i­cals and hor­mones in our organs and other tis­sues (read Molecules Of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine
). Movement can keep us healthy by stim­u­lat­ing our organs and allow­ing these chem­i­cals to cir­cu­late rather than stag­nat­ing (which is one the­o­rized cause of many types of illness).

Respect your body by refus­ing to treat it as a sac, and it will reward you will health and hap­pi­ness. Really. All you have to do is move. Play with your pet, child, or lover. Stop using email or IM to talk with peo­ple who work on the same floor as you. Go to actual stores rather than order­ing every­thing online. You can think of lots of ways to move more. The most impor­tant thing is to remem­ber the age-old advice: get off your ass.

Posture

Students who have worked with me in per­son are prob­a­bly tired of me talk­ing about proper pos­ture while mov­ing, but there’s no way I can pos­si­bly over­state the impor­tance of of this point. From a mechan­i­cal stand­point, the spine is the major lever of the body, medi­at­ing the rela­tion­ship between head and ass. It also allows the twin move­ment cen­ters of the hips and shoul­ders to pivot about each other. It sta­bi­lizes the skull, zeros out forces from impacts and grav­ity, sup­ports many of our inter­nal organs, and is the major ner­vous path­way of the body. In case you haven’t noticed, the spine is super-important and super-complex — so com­plex that it takes a solid under­stand­ing of biotenseg­rity to begin to under­stand it. But I’m not going to get into that right now.

I used to slouch all the time and never paid much atten­tion to my pos­ture in Taido until a few years ago. Then I met a girl who intro­duced me to the Alexander Technique and the notion of “use” which is how Alexander prac­ti­tion­ers describe body car­riage and mechan­ics. The down­side of this is that I am now a freak about using my body in the most effi­cient man­ner pos­si­ble. The upshot is that I finally fig­ured out how to improve my pos­ture, which has improved my health, mobil­ity, and tech­ni­cal form in Taido.

So here’s the gist: pay atten­tion to your pos­ture. Ideally, your spine should be near-fully elon­gated when­ever pos­si­ble. One anal­ogy I’ve heard is to imag­ine that your head is actu­ally float­ing like a helium bal­loon from which your spine and the rest of your body hangs down. Trying to hold onto that image can help you keep the feel­ing of stretch­ing your cer­vi­cal and tho­racic spine upward. In order to straighten the giant ques­tion mark out of your lum­bar and sacral spine, it some­times helps to tilt the hips up and for­ward a bit. A lit­tle bit of curve (lor­do­sis) is desir­able, but most peo­ple I know have way too much.

Describing how this affects your Taido is a lit­tle beyond the scope of my pow­ers as a writer, but a lit­tle exper­i­men­ta­tion with this can speed up your unsoku and tech­niques while increas­ing your power and com­fort. Since we use our bod­ies for much more than just Taido prac­tice, don’t wait for your next train­ing ses­sion to think about improv­ing your pos­ture. Start now. Sit up in your chair. Raise your head up and lean slightly for­ward, off of your tail­bone. Relax the mus­cles of your back and shoul­ders, allow­ing your body’s struc­ture to sup­port itself from within. Right now — really — notice how it feels to use your pos­ture properly.

Make a men­tal note to stop and check your pos­ture a few times a day at least. Next time you get in the car, adjust your seat to a posi­tion that makes you sit up straight. Do the same at work. After you get used to a few baby steps like these, we can address the way you walk…

Breathing Efficiency

Breathing is not entirely instinc­tual. The act of breath­ing comes to us nat­u­rally, but the man­ner in which we breath is socially con­di­tioned. One indi­ca­tion of this is the dif­fer­ence between our wak­ing and sleep­ing breath­ing pat­terns. We tend to take shal­low breaths into our upper chests dur­ing much of the day, but our slum­ber sees us return­ing to the slow, nat­ural pat­tern of breath­ing deeply down into our bel­lies. Though phys­i­cal exer­tion requires a dif­fer­ent style of breath­ing than sleep does, the fact remains that most of us have learned to breathe inef­fi­ciently. The proof is the ten­dency of most stu­dents to begin pant­ing when their endurance is challenged.

It’s dif­fi­cult to change life­long habits, but it can be done. The best way to begin is to pay atten­tion. Notice your breath­ing. Then notice how it changes in var­i­ous sit­u­a­tions. Once or twice a day, spend just a minute or two being aware of your breath. Try to expand your belly and using the diaphragm to draw the air deep down into your lungs. Relax and notice how you feel when you breathe this way — it’s how your lungs were designed to work. Gradually begin to keep this breath­ing focus for up to five min­utes or so. Eventually, you may find this exer­cise so plea­sur­able that you nat­u­rally begin to sched­ule longer peri­ods of sim­ply sit­ting and breath­ing into your day. This is an excel­lent way to begin med­i­ta­tion (which, for the record, will not make you go blind) and will leave you feel­ing relaxed and refreshed.

Being aware of your breath while sit­ting can help you to become aware of your breath while mov­ing. It will also help you learn how to con­trol your breath­ing dur­ing demand­ing activ­ity. You will find your pres­ence of mind and phys­i­cal power increase when you are in con­trol of your breath dur­ing practices.

Balance

Balance is another key to your per­for­mance in Taido. Since Taido is one of the most dynamic and gym­nas­tic mar­tial arts, it’s extremely impor­tant that stu­dents develop a strong sense of bal­ance for agility and con­trol of their move­ments. Having good bal­ance will also help you not look like an idiot when you are walk­ing around doing reg­u­lar stuff.

So how can we develop bal­ance? Lots of ways. Bruce lee used to sug­gest that all mar­tial artists sim­ply stand on one foot or the other at var­i­ous points dur­ing the day. For exam­ple, while stand­ing in line at the gro­cery store or rid­ing the esca­la­tor at the mall. For a lit­tle more chal­lenge, prac­tice putting on your socks and shoes while stand­ing. Check out the 4CBD and learn to do pis­tols (a single-leg squat vari­a­tion). All of these things will improve your bal­ance, and the last two will be of immea­sur­able ben­e­fit to your Taido performance.

Just remem­ber: humans are very sel­dom “bal­anced.” Instead, we are in a con­stant state of bal­anc­ing, nego­ti­at­ing vary­ing degrees of unbal­ance. Improve your body’s abil­ity to con­trol remain upright and you will be affect­ing every aspect of your phys­i­cal life.

Flexibility

We can always stand to be more flex­i­ble and have greater mobil­ity. Stretching only takes a few min­utes and can be done any­where. However, a mod­icum of cau­tion should be exer­cised when stretch­ing out­side of work­outs. Since we warm our bod­ies up prior to stretch­ing in classes, it’s easy to for­get that our mus­cles are nowhere near as flex­i­ble cold as they are warm. Please be sure to pre­pare ade­quately before engag­ing in any kind of stretch­ing on your off days.

All rules have excep­tions, and the “only stretch warm” rule is no excep­tion. This excep­tion only applies to peo­ple who are in good shape, already fairly flex­i­ble, and free of any injuries. In Stretching Scientifically, Thomas Kurz sug­gests that we can teach our cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem to allow greater cold flex­i­bil­ity (stretch­ing is really a mis­nomer — since the mus­cles are always hold­ing some resid­ual ten­sion it’s actu­ally a method of con­di­tion­ing the ner­vous sys­tem to release) by doing some very con­trolled dynamic stretch­ing with­out a warm-up. This should be done daily, in every direc­tion, and with very grad­ual increases. I won’t be giv­ing any fur­ther details here, as this can be dan­ger­ous to those who don’t know what they are doing. Those who are capa­ble of apply­ing this prac­tice will know how to research and learn it for themselves.

Just remem­ber not to overdo it; stretch­ing has a cumu­la­tive effect, so you can­not see great improve­ments in a short period of time with­out risks. If you are seri­ous about improv­ing your flex­i­bil­ity, I sug­gest look­ing into Paul Zaichik’s Elastic Steel course, which has done great things for me.

Mindful Movement

Whenever you move, be con­scious of what you are doing. When you write your name, pay atten­tion to the feel of the pen in your hand and the pres­sure of the point against the table. Feel the fric­tion of the point on the paper. Some writ­ers are known to pre­fer the feel of typ­ing on an old-school type­writer over that of a mod­ern com­puter key­board because the tac­tile feed­back helps them focus on the task at hand.

We have a ten­dency to use sight as our pri­mary input inter­face from our envi­ron­ments. It’s a good way to receive a lot of infor­ma­tion about things at a dis­tance, but it’s not the best way to keep track of our bod­ies. By mak­ing the effort to “feel” our motions from the inside, we can sharpen our pro­pri­o­cep­tion — the “sixth” sense which includes our bal­ance and posi­tion senses in addi­tion to sens­ing heat, pain, and moisture.

Why is this a good thing? Well, I men­tioned bal­ance above, but improv­ing our posi­tion sense (mechanore­cep­tion) is just as impor­tant with regards to learn­ing to con­trol our move­ments. Have you ever been prac­tic­ing a tech­nique and had some­one point out an error in form that you were almost sure you didn’t make? Nine times out of ten, the out­side observer has a bet­ter frame of ref­er­ence. Since we aren’t used to notic­ing crit­i­cal dif­fer­ences in the posi­tions of our limbs, it’s easy to assume that we are more accu­rate than we really are.

Practice of mind­ful­ness in the var­i­ous motions we per­form dur­ing the day can go a very long way towards improv­ing our sense of posi­tion and the accu­racy of our move­ments. It’s also the cor­ner­stone of Zen and all med­i­ta­tive techniques.

Learn Some Yoga

You don’t need to sign up at a Hindu com­mu­nity cen­ter or become a veg­e­tar­ian to get the ben­e­fits of some Yoga prac­tice. Learn a cou­ple of asanas (Yoga poses) and prac­tice them for a few min­utes when you have the chance. Yoga is the oppo­site of most work­outs: instead of attempt­ing to apply mus­cu­lar ten­sion to a task, Yoga teaches us to release unnec­es­sary ten­sion to sink into a posi­tion. Since much phys­i­cal ath­leti­cism is tied to our abil­ity to medi­ate ten­sion and relax­ation, the occa­sional prac­tice of a few key asanas can be of seri­ous ben­e­fit. I rec­om­mend the cobra, pigeon, child, plough, bridge, and down­ward dog poses as a good foun­da­tion to com­ple­ment your Taido practice.

Change Your Ways

Taido’s fifth prin­ci­ple is that of adapt­abil­ity. All of our move­ments are designed to flow into each other in order to react appro­pri­ately to our envi­ron­ments. But many of us are crea­tures of habit. We tend to go to the same places, see the same peo­ple, and do the same things day in and day out for years at a time. We may not notice it, but we tend to pass up oppor­tu­ni­ties to try new and inter­est­ing things because we con­fuse these habit­ual pat­terns with impor­tant aspects of our lives.

For exam­ple, I used wake up in the morn­ings and head to the cof­fee shop to read or write. I would spend an hour or two get­ting a cup of cof­fee and doing about a half-hour worth of work. It was a waste of time, but it felt like an impor­tant part of my morn­ing rit­ual. It wasn’t. Now, I try to do some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent every­day. I take dif­fer­ent roads to get to the same places, and I usu­ally notice a new restau­rant or shop along the way. I don’t lis­ten to the same album more than two days in a row. I go to the library and check out new books to read, even if I may not have the time to fin­ish them.

There are always other ways to do the things you need to do every day. Try them out. Adding a small change to your rou­tine and a lit­tle bit of cre­ativ­ity can really change your out­look on the rou­tines in your life. They also get you into a new habit — chang­ing your habits. It can be addict­ing and lib­er­at­ing, and it can improve your Taido prac­tice too.

On the Other Hand

One way to change the way you do some habit­ual actions is to use your other hand. In Taido, we have to be able to move to any direc­tion as the sit­u­a­tion dic­tates. However, most peo­ple have a favorite side of almost every tech­nique. There are even a lot of black belts who can’t do some tech­niques on one side or another. To pre­vent this lim­i­ta­tion, all hokei actu­ally should be per­formed on the “back” side as well as the usual way (ask you instruc­tor why you aren’t cur­rently doing this impor­tant prac­tice). If you don’t have the time or space to do many hokei, you can still work to remove your resis­tance to rely­ing on your non-dominant hand and foot.

Most folks won’t be able to write with either hand, but we can all ben­e­fit from chal­leng­ing our­selves to use our non-dominant hands for small tasks. Brush your teeth left-handed. Drink your cof­fee with the other hand. Most peo­ple always dial a phone with the same fin­ger — change it up and use your ring fin­ger (the weak­est fin­ger with the least ner­vous con­trol). Sleep on the other side of the bed some­times. We know that the sides of the brain have some­what dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter­is­tics and per­son­al­i­ties, by stim­u­lat­ing them with dif­fer­ent activ­i­ties, we may find greater adapt­abil­ity and creativity.

A Couple More little Games

Courtesy of John Roberts: for those you who watch TV. Do ten push-ups dur­ing every com­mer­cial break. Build up to sets of twenty. You will even­tu­ally be doing well over a hun­dred push-ups a day. If, like me, you don’t watch tv, you can surely find another sched­ul­ing device: I do push-ups when­ever I drink a cup of cof­fee — that’s a lot of push-ups.

Courtesy of Buddy Fossett: brush your teeth in fudo­dachi. Or on one leg.

Courtesy of Tatsuyuki Negishi: hold eji­dachi with your knee an inch above the floor for as long as you can. Do both sides twice a day. Try to add ten sec­onds every week. He cred­ited his insane ver­ti­cal leap exclu­sively to this prac­tice, which he con­tin­ued for his entire col­lege career.

Also: keep a hand grip­per some­where you will see it often and do a few reps every time you see it; grip strength has been shown to have a strong cor­re­la­tion with ath­letic per­for­mance. Do some fin­ger exer­cises, i.e. play­ing a musi­cal instru­ment, learn­ing to type bet­ter, learn­ing to roll coins or per­form some sleight of hand tech­niques, etc. There are more nerves in your brain devoted to your hand than to any­thing else, so hav­ing strong and agile hands may make you smarter and more coordinated.

Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough

And there are about a thou­sand other ways you can inject some Taido prac­tice into your day. The above list rep­re­sents some of my favorites, and you may notice that many of them address the 5SRs. However, this list is by no means exhaus­tive. I find that, the more I think about it, the more I notice myself look­ing for bet­ter, Taido-ized ways to do all the things I nor­mally do. This is not only a great thought exer­cise, but results in more effi­cient ways to do almost any­thing. It also improves my abil­ity to under­stand and teach Taido move­ments and techniques.

I’m sure you can think of at least a dozen things I haven’t men­tioned that can help turn your off time into prac­tice time. Feel free to post your own ideas in the com­ments. As you get used to the idea, you’ll likely come to the con­clu­sion that inten­tion is the pri­mary fac­tor that sep­a­rates doing some­thing nor­mally from per­form­ing it as a prac­tice activ­ity. Keep your eyes open (and your other senses too) for oppor­tu­ni­ties to apply your prac­tice of Taido to your prac­tice of life in general.