Ebigeri: Where to Look

A few days ago, I got an email from one of the stu­dents in my email coach­ing pro­gram, and I thought it was worth sharing.

I’ve got a ques­tion about this week’s Taido tip, you men­tioned that the back should be straight dur­ing ebi geri. Why is this, what is the advan­tage (other than bring­ing your head in to safety)? I always have it bent because oth­er­wise I’m not able to see my opponent.

Here was my reply:

Good ques­tion with lots of good answers.

Mechanically, a straight line from head to heel means that the force of the kick trans­fers more directly into the tar­get. Experiment: slowly kick a wall with ebigeri that way you nor­mally do, and see where your body absorbs once your foot touches the wall. This is the weak­est link in your kick, and I bet it’s your lower back. Keeping your back straight means that the force of the kick has only two places it can be released — the tar­get or the floor, through your arms. Since your hips should be mov­ing toward the tar­get, momen­tum favors the force going that way.

From the per­spec­tive of build­ing good habits, straight­en­ing your back will require you to bend your sta­tion­ary knee fur­ther, which is good for bal­ance and sta­bil­ity. The knee also helps you gauge how straight you are; if the knee is bent, you can tell how far it has turned, but this is more dif­fi­cult if the knee straight­ens while turn­ing. I don’t know why, but that’s just the way those mechanore­cep­tors work.

As for look­ing… are you fuck­ing kid­ding me? If your ebigeri is so slow that you have to watch while you’re kick­ing, you’re not going to hit any­thing any­way. Here’s the funny thing though: look­ing at your kick will actu­ally decrease your accu­racy. The sim­ple truth is that your brain doesn’t process an upside-down world very well and has a hard time adjust­ing to what you see. You’re far bet­ter off to look at the floor and focus on length­en­ing your spine. Aim before you kick. Aim where the tar­get is about to be. Kick fast.

Of course, that means that line and tar­get train­ing are all the more impor­tant. Lots of peo­ple look at their kick in ebi, but that doesn’t make it ideal. Proper body mechan­ics are the high­est law of technique.

Followup from the student:

Thanks for the answers!

By the way, right now I don´t look for aim­ing pur­poses; I look to see my oppo­nent. If he does kosuku for instance, that means that I have to get up at a dif­fer­ent angle so that I imme­di­ately face my oppo­nent — or he will be at my flank.

Or is speed again the answer, kick­ing and get­ting back up and doing so faster than the oppo­nent can do a kosuku…?

My reply:

I see where you’re com­ing from. Consider the fact that nobody throws ebi as an attack in jis­sen. There’s a good rea­son. It doesn’t work very well, and this is part of the rea­son. Ebi is a straight line tech­nique that Shukumine cre­ated for defend­ing against a charg­ing oppo­nent in a con­fined space. When unsoku isn’t an option, ebi is a good defense, but it’s not really viable as offense (you’re turn­ing a por­tion of your momen­tum away from the tar­get after all).

In some ways, yes, speed is a fac­tor in what you describe. A fast ebi really shouldn’t give the oppo­nent much time to move. Beyond that, you should get in the habit of exe­cut­ing tech­niques that are directed where the oppo­nent is head­ing to, not where he already is. This means attack­ing within the flow of unsoku instead of after a step is com­plete. One of the many ben­e­fits being that, if you know where he’s about to be, you don’t nec­es­sar­ily have so see him all the time (though see­ing is good — it’s not not required for the entire movement).

The rea­son I wanted to share this is because, as I wrote above, a LOT of peo­ple do ebi this way, while look­ing at the kick. I want to empha­size that, in 99 cases out of a hun­dred, I really do rec­om­mend keep­ing your eye “on the ball” while kick­ing. It’s just a good idea in gen­eral, but every rule has excep­tions, and this is one of them.

The main point here is about mechan­ics. Good mechan­ics are what makes any tech­nique work.

Taido is per­haps most accu­rately trans­lated into English as the art of the body. It only makes sense that we way he use our bod­ies is going to have a big impact on how well we are able to per­form Taido. What’s less obvi­ous is that there are at least two lev­els on which this is true: the mechan­ics of the tech­ni­cal (punch­ing and kick­ing) move­ments and the over­all mechan­ics of human phys­i­ol­ogy. Good tech­nique requires that both be sound.

Technical Mechanics

Technical mechan­ics are spelled out in Taido Gairon, specif­i­cally the chap­ter on doko, which appro­pri­ately could be trans­lated as “how to move.” This includes the doko5kai — five prin­ci­ples of mechan­ics for each of the basic tech­niques (which I’ve out­lined here: sen­tai, untai, hen­tai, nen­tai, and ten­tai).

The tech­ni­cal mechan­ics are unique to Taido and dif­fer from one tech­nique to the next. Furthermore, their exe­cu­tion may dif­fer among tech­niques even of the same gen­eral class. For exam­ple, the instruc­tion kihatsu seisoku for ungi sug­gests that the be care­ful with your rear (kick­ing or lift­ing) leg so the oppo­nent can’t stop your tech­nique. This applies to all ungi, but its appli­ca­tion will take dif­fer­ent forms in stand­ing tech­niques ver­sus jump­ing technique.

General Mechanics

By gen­eral body mechan­ics, I’m refer­ring to the nat­ural struc­ture and move­ment of the human body. We can call it phys­i­ol­ogy, bio­me­hcanics, or really any num­ber of things, but the point is that the body is built in a cer­tain way that favors cer­tain types of move­ments and posi­tions over oth­ers. There are lim­its to how we can move with­out injur­ing our­selves. There are also ways to move that pro­duce greater force than oth­ers. I’m over­sim­pli­fy­ing, but you get the picture.

General mechan­ics are not very thor­oughly spelled out in Taido texts, pos­si­bly because they are uni­ver­sal. However, being uni­ver­sal doesn’t mean that most peo­ple prac­tic­ing Taido under­stand or demon­strate them well. For exam­ple, though we all know that pos­ture is impor­tant, few of us have con­sis­tently good pos­ture. But good mechan­ics go far beyond good pos­ture and extend to cor­rect align­ment and use of all our joints. It takes prac­tice, and that’s the trou­ble: when we prac­tice Taido, we want to prac­tice tech­niques, hokei, and jis­sen — not some kind of abstract poise, or use (as the Alexander folks call it).

So we tend to ignore, or at least gloss over, the issues of body mechan­ics in our prac­tice, because we want to pri­or­i­tize our train­ing time for Taido. And that’s really OK for rain­bow belts. Taido is com­plex, with a lot of move­ments and ideas to inter­nal­ize. But then we have to work even harder to relearn every­thing with good mechan­ics later.

Back to Ebigeri

Anyway, to return to the orig­i­nal dis­cus­sion, check out this video from the finals of the 2009 World Taido Championships. Nakano and Pylvainen both have fan­tas­tic body mechan­ics all around, but specif­i­cally pay atten­tion to how straight their backs are when they kick ten­tai ebigeri after the first kiai — direct line from head to heel.

That’s what we should all strive to look like when per­form­ing this kick.