Top 11 Reasons I Love Taido

A while back, I posted an arti­cle fea­tur­ing my “Bottom 11″ — the things that, in my opin­ion, suck about Taido. Some of these have been fleshed out in more recent arti­cles, and some are just so dense that I have a hard time try­ing to work my way around them. I plan to expound on each point in due course, but some of them will take seri­ous work. I hate to leave things on a neg­a­tive note, so in the mean­time, I present this oppo­site list: my Top 11 –the things I love most about Taido.

Unsoku/Unshin

Let’s start at the tech­ni­cal end of the spec­trum. I love Taido because of this inge­nious strate­gic inter­jec­tion. Unsoku per se is noth­ing new to mar­tial art, but its imple­men­ta­tion in Taido is quite unique. All mar­tial arts of which I am aware have some notion of foot­work since they were designed by and for bipeds. Moving on our feet is nat­ural for humans, and this is exactly why most humans do not con­sider the strate­gic capa­bil­i­ties of their footwork.

Footwork, as defined in many mar­tial arts, usu­ally means one of three things: step­ping to con­trol dis­tance, step­ping to dodge an attack, or shift­ing stance to facil­i­tate deploy­ment of a spe­cific tech­nique. In such cases, there is often no method for using foot­work. Rather, stances and tech­niques are drilled, and foot­work man­i­fests as what­ever spe­cific step­ping adjust­ments are nec­es­sary to trans­late the kamae and kihon prac­tice for kumite pur­poses. Footwork tends to arise in per­for­mance. This is not true for Taido.

Of course, I don’t want to make too many broad gen­er­al­iza­tions about spe­cific mar­tial arts. I am not an expert on mar­tial art. I do know that, con­trary to what my instruc­tor claims, there are mar­tial arts with sophis­ti­cated foot­work, includ­ing some schools of silat and aikido. It could also be argued that wrestlers use a form of unshin.

My point isn’t really about what arts use what kind of foot­work though. What I find absolutely cool about Taido’s unsoku/unshin is how it fits between kamae and waza as a strate­gic link. It’s not sim­ply a by-product of trans­lat­ing from prac­tice to appli­ca­tion. In Taido, we teach spe­cific move­ment strate­gies even to begin­ning stu­dents. What’s more — the unsoku/unshin move­ment is con­nected — inte­grated - with the over­all attack/defense method. In skilled Taidoka, it is dif­fi­cult to dis­cern where unsoku ends and sotai begins.

I also love that unsoku can be used as a strate­gic method for non-combat appli­ca­tions, as I wrote I an ear­lier arti­cle. My men­tal unsoku often works as a heuris­tic between the obser­va­tion and thinking/planning stages, help­ing me to deter­mine the obser­va­tions on which I should base my plan­ning. As in jis­sen, this unsoku helps us to fil­ter oppor­tu­ni­ties so we can find our best chances for success.

International Community

Through my Taido expe­ri­ence, I have made some of the best friends of my life. I’ve met some truly fan­tas­tic peo­ple from var­i­ous coun­tries that I would not have had the oppor­tu­nity to meet through other means. In the past cou­ple of years, espe­cially, Taido’s inter­na­tional com­mu­nity seems to be grow­ing larger and stronger at a faster pace than ever.

This isn’t so unique to Taido — many mar­tial arts pro­mote inter­na­tional exchange, allow­ing access to other cul­tures and ideas. Actually, I think that this point cur­rently stands as one of the key areas we, as Taido stu­dents, need to put our ener­gies into improving.

Nonetheless, we are get­ting some­where. Due in no small part to the inter­net, we Taidoka can now com­mu­ni­cate inter­na­tion­ally and share our expe­ri­ences and ideas. There have been Taido web­sites (that I was aware of) since 1997, but now most schools have their own home­pages. This means that we can eas­ily get in touch with Taido stu­dents at almost any dojo in the world. This is a very good thing, and it holds great poten­tial for the future of our art.

Evolving Applications

This is another aspect of Taido that can be indi­vid­u­ally empow­er­ing for stu­dents. I think it’s obvi­ous that Taido’s tech­nique looks a lit­tle dif­fer­ent every year. It’s cool to see new ideas come up, be tested, and either get adopted or dropped. This is true in the tour­na­ment events as well as in practices.

I have a lot of friends who prac­tice Shotokan karate. Looking back at Shotokan’s his­tory, many of them joke about orga­ni­za­tional splits that began over such tri­fles as the cor­rect way to keep score in tour­na­ments or the exact hand posi­tion in kamae. In Taido, the tech­niques and meth­ods evolve and change. This is a very good thing because it allows us to con­tinue work­ing together — even if we have dif­fer­ent ideas. We can get together, share, test, and decide.

I love how Taido is designed to change. Being an incor­ri­gi­ble cus­tomizer, I enjoy spend­ing a good por­tion of my time look­ing at how things are cur­rently done and ask­ing myself “how could we do this bet­ter?” I do this with indi­vid­ual move­ments, strate­gies, prac­tice meth­ods, cur­ric­ula, com­pe­ti­tion meth­ods, judg­ing meth­ods, and any­thing else I can think of. I even ana­lyze my own thought process to deter­mine if I can find a bet­ter men­tal model for the prob­lem at hand. Through my teach­ing and through this web­site, these thoughts nec­es­sar­ily fuel the evo­lu­tion of Taido because they influ­ence other students.

If I can get things wrong enough, even­tu­ally some­body will find a way to make it right — and that makes for bet­ter Taido.

Theory Integrated at Every Level

You may not have noticed this, but a lot of my arti­cles link to oth­ers of my arti­cles. There is a good rea­son for this: in writ­ing about any one aspect of Taido prac­tice, I am also mak­ing state­ments that can be applied to other aspects. This is because Taido has an inte­grated the­ory at its core. Let’s not under­es­ti­mate the power and unique­ness of this point.

In many mar­tial arts, the the­ory is actu­ally reverse-engineered from the tech­ni­cal appli­ca­tions. Students prac­tice punches and kicks until they can repro­duce them with per­fect form, and then start think­ing about how to apply them and why they work (or don’t). In Taido, we have the oppo­site par­a­digm — tech­niques are extrap­o­lated form the the­ory. As an exam­ple, I cre­ated my dice game as a means of the­o­riz­ing pos­si­ble tech­niques before I actu­ally attempted them. There is no process for doing this in most arts.

I look at Taido’s the­ory as being the mar­tial equiv­a­lent of the harmelodic the­ory in music. Basically, it accounts for every­thing, whether it specif­i­cally intends to or not. There was a lot of stuff that Shukumine didn’t explic­itly include in Taido, but I have yet to find any­thing that his the­ory doesn’t address.

Works with Any Technique Set

As we are dis­cov­er­ing in American Taido right now, Taido’s the­ory holds true even for tech­nique sets that are not tra­di­tion­ally part of Taido prac­tice — specif­i­cally, grap­pling. American Taido stu­dents are find­ing that they can apply Taido’s the­ory to no-holds-barred fight­ing just as well as they can to jis­sen. Taking this even fur­ther, I sug­gest that we could also apply Taido the­ory to the use of weapons, includ­ing firearms.

The tech­niques we use are just a vocab­u­lary. Two of the things that give mean­ing to words are con­text and syn­tax — sit­u­a­tion and use. In Taido, we can think of the the­ory as a gram­mar for mar­tial art. The dif­fer­ent engage­ment venues (jis­sen, grap­pling, what­ever) could be con­sid­ered dialec­tic, and the tech­niques are cre­ated, adopted, and dis­carded more quickly than most peo­ple real­ize. The thing that defines the lan­guage (Taido) is the gram­mar — the spe­cific rules of arrang­ing the nom­i­nals, ver­bals, and etc into mean­ing­ful sets.

Applicable to Everything I Do

Since the the­ory inte­grates across all aspects of prac­tice (if done well), appli­ca­tion is unlim­ited. When you begin to real­ize this in a big-picture sense, it almost feels like magic. Just as I can apply Taido the­ory to jis­sen and gen­eral scrap­ping, I can apply it to music, my job, and my relationships.

Being a man of many and var­ied inter­ests, I find it dis­agree­able to com­mit too much of my energy to any one of my pas­sions. I like being able to kill two (or five) birds with one stone (and some­times, I use poi­son). Thinking of ways to apply one of my pas­sions to another gives me the joy of doing each in half the time. Though my near­est Taido dojo is four hours away from my home, I am able to prac­tice an aver­age of eigh­teen hours every day. This is because I am always think­ing about how to Taido-ize what­ever else I may seem to be doing.

Integration with Lifestyle

Similarly, the phys­i­cal prac­tice of Taido move­ment sup­ports my health. Some of my friends think I am a “health nut” because I read med­ical jour­nals and study such things as exer­cise phys­i­ol­ogy. I con­sciously avoid known car­cino­gens (such as arti­fi­cial sweet­en­ers, cooked oils, burned foods, alu­minum, cig­a­rette smoke, and chem­i­cal clean­ers) and take multi-vitamins. To some, this behav­ior seems exces­sive or silly — even though I am very relaxed about my health prac­tices. My response is always the same — “I would say ‘I told you so’ when I reach 120 years, but you’ll be long dead by then.” I am not exag­ger­at­ing when I say that I won’t stop prac­tic­ing Taido until I have done it for at least a hun­dred years.

I feel that Taido sup­ports my health in a num­ber of ways. Obviously, it is exer­cise that builds my phys­i­cal attrib­utes, and it offers many pos­i­tive men­tal effects as well, but there are other things that Taido offers over most sports. In com­mon with other mar­tial arts, it’s some­thing that I have to do myself — my per­for­mance belongs to me rather than to my team. I also have the chance to test my per­for­mance against a resis­tant part­ner or oppo­nent. These two alone are priceless.

But even from a strict move­ment per­spec­tive, Taido offers things that most mar­tial arts do not. The focus on sophis­ti­cated, inter­est­ing, and beau­ti­ful tech­nique is one thing. Specifically, Taido is designed to move in 3-space, just as the human body exists in 3-space (plus…). Taido’s tech­niques nat­u­rally move all the joints and tis­sues through their ranges of motion. In con­trast to weight train­ing or mar­tial arts like Shotokan, in which the move­ment is typ­i­cally lin­ear, Taido tests the body to the edges of its anatom­i­cal limits.

In addi­tion of all of that, Taido gives me more oppor­tu­ni­ties to teach things that I feel are ben­e­fi­cial to oth­ers. As an instruc­tor, I have the abil­ity to change peo­ples’ lives — and I feel I have had a pos­i­tive impact on a large num­ber of oth­ers through Taido. I’ve also been on the receiv­ing end of this phenomenon.

Taido is my fam­ily, my hobby, my job, my pri­mary area of study, my sport, my relax­ation, my work­out, my excuse to travel, and dur­ing some lonely peri­ods, my girlfriend.

Simultaneous Offense/Defense

This is one of those things that I just think is really damn cool. Since most peo­ple don’t know any­thing about Taido, I’m often asked how Taido is unique. My response is usu­ally to demon­strate ebigeri, then I help them stand up (just kid­ding). I show them how it avoids an oncom­ing attack and coun­ters simul­ta­ne­ously by chang­ing the body-axis. It’s such a sim­ple, ele­gant tech­nique when applied prop­erly. Most peo­ple are pretty impressed with the notion.

This kind of move­ment is of course not lim­ited to ebigeri; all of the hengi use this con­cept, and it is also inher­ent in rendo rentai seiho (con­trol by con­tin­u­ous move­ment). Very skilled jis­sen play­ers score most of their points while avoid­ing their oppo­nents’ attacks as well.

Like every­thing else in Taido, this idea isn’t lim­ited to com­bat­ive appli­ca­tion. It can be used, just for one exam­ple, in the per­sua­sion process. When you are try­ing to con­vince some­one to see things your way, they often have objec­tions or issues that run counter to your desires. One of the bet­ter ways to deal with objec­tions is to under­stand the val­ues behind the objec­tion (why this per­son is telling you no) and use those val­ues to turn the objec­tion into a poten­tial benefit.

Sophisticated Movement

There is no deny­ing it: Taido is com­pli­cated. I think this is a very good thing. I get bored doing the same things over and over. Anything too easy isn’t worth my time. Taido is com­pli­cated and dif­fi­cult, and this makes it interesting.

Taido has, by far, the most sophis­ti­cated move­ment palette of any for­mal­ized mar­tial art I have ever seen. I think that’s great. The tech­niques are beau­ti­ful to watch and fun to per­form. They may be a lit­tle chal­leng­ing for begin­ners, but as our train­ing and teach­ing meth­ods improve, I believe that this will be less of an issue. Taido:s sophis­ti­ca­tion is def­i­nitely not to be viewed as a limit or detri­ment — greater sophis­ti­ca­tion is a nat­ural part of the process of mov­ing toward self-actuallization.

Ability to Use Modular Training Practices

Since Taido’s the­ory is built around a thought process (see, think, try, prac­tice, think, apply), each step can be prac­ticed indi­vid­u­ally as well as I series. The same is true for the tech­ni­cal meth­ods and hokei. Being able to zero-in on a par­tic­u­lar aspect can be really help­ful in train­ing. For one thing, break­ing things down to into chunks gives us a bet­ter abil­ity to mea­sure our per­for­mance and cre­ate achiev­able goals for improve­ment. Another thing we can do is cre­ate incre­men­tally more-sophisticated drill patterns.

It sounds com­pli­cated and tech­ni­cal when you are read­ing about it, but with just a lit­tle bit of prac­tice, it isn’t dif­fi­cult to make use of mod­u­lar­ity in your own train­ing. I’ve out­lined some prac­tices that make use of mod­u­lar think­ing here, here.

Always New Things to Try and Learn

There is lim­it­less poten­tial to chal­lenge myself and grow by prac­tic­ing Taido, because, as soon as I get one thing down, I find new ways to do it that make it even more fun. There are always new ways to kick, punch, and move in Taido.

Beyond the obvi­ous stuff, my inter­est in Taido inspires me to study var­i­ous related fields like phys­i­ol­ogy, kine­si­ol­ogy, and exer­cise sci­ence. My inter­est in teach­ing Taido inspires me to study ped­a­gogy, devel­op­men­tal psy­chol­ogy, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. My inter­est in run­ning a Taido club inspires me to study busi­ness, group dynam­ics, and man­age­ment. And those are just the books I read last week (really).

The super-cool part is that, as I apply all of these stud­ies to my Taido prac­tice, I can also apply my under­stand­ing of Taido to my stud­ies of these other related dis­ci­plines. In putting together this web­site, i’ve had to learn a lot of stuff that I had never thought about before. It would be dif­fi­cult to describe how I apply Taido to the design and exe­cu­tion of this site, but Taido the­ory is on, in , under, and around every aspect of the Taido/Blog project.

And so those are my “Top 11.” Please leave a com­ment and share your favorite things about Taido too.