Natural movement/XingYi animals/Morris

[C.J.Wang]

I feel that the goal of martial arts training, from the combative point of view, is to introduce a whole new, efficient way to move, respond, and generate power that most difinitely feels anything BUT natural at first to a beginner; the challenge, therefore, is whether one's able to eventually turn the "unnatural" into "natural" through years of dedicated practice.

For a person who is untrained or hasn't acquired the "unnatural" body skills, trying to follow instinct and utilize natural movements basically mean relying on size and muscle.

[middleway]

hang on ... IMO Morris is discussing the 'hunt' mentality within the context of a trained framework.

The cheetah he uses as an example IS TRAINED!! That's what cubs do for most of their formative years ... they play hunt. Now sure this is built in and is instinctual ... but they are training their skills.

It would be like the kid in Shanxi training fighting from age 2 and nothing else ... when he is adult he knows what he is doing.

The whole idea that natural means Untrained is just falling way wide of what is being said in the original article in my opinion. Morris is a BIG advocate of correct training as far as I am aware ... Here he is talking about the mindset to make that training work.... where has all this not trained ... just being 'natural' and untrained come from??

....

Cheers
Chris

[I-mon]

If something is intuitive, then by definition, it isn't taught. It means a given behavior is inherent in human physiology and species-specific, capable of being demonstrated with maximum proficiency with no learning.

My dog, never having been taught to kill small furry animals, intuitively bites into stuffed toys and shakes them until they're 'dead'. That's intuitive.

we intuitively fight and wrestle, but we're taught not to by our parents and teachers - you can't let your kids fight and wrestle in public, and definitely not with other people's kids. we intuitively climb trees and jump and swing from branch to branch, or from one rock to another rock, or just generally climb all over and up stuff and jump off it, for fun, often while chasing each other around and maybe hitting each other when we get angry. but our teachers and parents all do their very best to stop us from doing these things.

for our species, our current living situations are extremely "unnatural", given that we haven't had time to adapt to them genetically, so the way we use our bodies as adults is a pathetic shadow of what it should be, what it would be if we had lived our lives using our bodies as we did intuitively. like a professional climber/runner/wrestler/animal stalker/swimmer (ever see the video footage of babies swimming on some documentary?).

in other words - the "natural" human is fucking hardcore. like a monkey, but bigger and stronger and smarter, with a weapon held in the preferred hand already wired into the brain (ever seen how babies intuitively pick things up, taste them first, and then try to bash with them?).

we are a bunch of extremely confused apes who have been given silly haircuts and told to sit still all our lives, until we thought it was normal.

but the knowledge is there! the body methods are there! in the spine and lower parts of the brain i guess, along with a lot of other stuff.

and the application of the higher parts of the brain to this inherent intuitive knowledge is what gives us all these physical systems....and application of higher-than normal parts of the brain have left us a few systems of pure genius like taiji or bagua.

there's only one way to end a post like this.



no wait,

[BruceP]

I-mon nailed it.

what it would be if we had lived our lives using our bodies as we did intuitively. like a professional climber/runner/wrestler/animal stalker/swimmer (ever see the video footage of babies swimming on some documentary?)

My thoughts exactly.

An Inuit hunter stands motionless (sometimes for hours) on the ice in sub-zero temps waiting for a seal to emerge from a breathing hole. Whan a seal finally appears, he goes from total stillness to an explosion of activity, harpooning and hauling on the tagline to get a couple hundred-plus lbs of seal up out of the water. Natural selection and his development as a hunter through play and observation give him the discipline and physical means to get meat.

I've spent my entire life camping, hunting and fishing in the northern canadian wilds. I've been face to face with every apex predator on the continent and have seem them all take game - even a wolverine. I've watched their cubs and pups playing and scavenging as they develop their hunting and fighting skills. I've gotten to know a few of them as residents of certain areas I frequent. I have a fairly good understanding of their behaviors and general attributes as well as their individual traits as lone hunters and pack members. Of all the bears and other dangerous predators I've encountered close up, I've never had to kill a single one because of the understanding I have of them, and how to use body language around them. I would never try to emulate a single attribute they posess to make myself a better fighter I'm a human with all the attributes, natural movement patterns and mind/body intuition that I need for that silliness.

I've been into traditional archery (all wooden bows) for a few years now and have hunted with buddies whose ancestors have hunted the game up here for millenia before any europeans showed up. I was out last month with my buddy, Chris, on a deer hunt in the mountains just west of here.

We were tracking a buck we'd seen a couple of hours earlier, when we came to a knoll backed up against an escarpment with a game trail winding between and down the side of the knoll. He knows the area well and said there was a mineral lick down in the hollow just below us. He would cut through the brush and I'd spot from the top of the knoll. I pulled my cammo net over myself and got as flat as I could right on the peak as he started down into the draw. He was halfway in when I spotted the buck right where Chris said he'd be. I signalled with a 'crane's beak', flexing my wrist, and then rolled my hand over so my thumb was pressed against my flattened palm and four fingers crooked upward. The game changed. Instead of heading the buck off for an ambush, he was now stalking.

As he made his way through the brush, he came to a tangle of low branches between a few trees. Then I saw it. He brought his right foot heel-heel with his left and as he sank on his right leg into a squat, he extended his left beneath the tangle. With his left hand, he fed his bow through the opening along the length of his left leg while leaving his right arm bent back to keep his arrow from snagging until he'd gotten the bow through. Then he shifted his body forward onto his left leg, unweighting his right and pulling himself back to standing on the other side of the tangle. A more perfect snake-creeps-down you will never see. As he crept toward the low brush between himself and the deer, he was careful to step on roots that were available above ground at the bases of any small aspen trees. As he made his way along he would stop in mid-step and half-draw his bow as though he thought maybe he had a clear enough shot. Some very nice golden-roosters, I must say. Nobody taught him those natural movement patterns. They were of necessity.

If you want to get under the pelt of a true predator, talk to Chris or one of those inuit dudes. You can't single out an atribute of an animal and expect to have the essence of that creature's prowess. Their atributes are constituent of a synergy and without the mind/body intuition being taken into account, it's like trying to make apple pie without the apples.

[Josealb]

Damn, Bruce. You just gave me a hell of a lot to think about.

(and im not talking just martial arts. Im into cooking, and actually hunting/fishing live stuff instead of going to the supermarket is just one of those things ill definitely do someday.)

[GrahamB]

At least my post had the power to draw Bruce back out of the ether. How is that for Yi? Eh?

Welcome back Bruce. I enjoy your tales of the wild, but there's one wild animal out there in the Canadian wilds you've never faced. I believe it's called a 'Mixjourneyman'. Believe me, you've never seen anything like it...

[BruceP]

I've been face to face with every apex predator on the continent...

Check that. I've never run into a polar bear. I'd have no clue how to body-language myself out of that one. Probably end up as a snacky treat.

Graham, you had me at, "Natural movement"

I really liked what I-mon wrote. He sounds like a feral dude.

[somatai]

nice to read your perspective again Bruce

"the study of the human soul lies within the province of anatomy"

-Andreas Vesalius

the human brain has not only the wiring for the reflexive patterining of the animal kingdom at a sub cortical level, it also through the cortex has the ability to inhibit and thus control those reflexes at will through proper training......so we can learn to control our movement and our tendancy toward movment at a profound and concsious level, this is a uniquely human freedom I think.

[CaliG]

natural to me means innate, already there, pre-existing

Me too.

Here's an example of what Morris likes.

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1981

[Ian]

If something is intuitive, then by definition, it isn't taught. It means a given behavior is inherent in human physiology and species-specific, capable of being demonstrated with maximum proficiency with no learning.

My dog, never having been taught to kill small furry animals, intuitively bites into stuffed toys and shakes them until they're 'dead'. That's intuitive.

we intuitively fight and wrestle, but we're taught not to by our parents and teachers - you can't let your kids fight and wrestle in public, and definitely not with other people's kids. we intuitively climb trees and jump and swing from branch to branch, or from one rock to another rock, or just generally climb all over and up stuff and jump off it, for fun, often while chasing each other around and maybe hitting each other when we get angry. but our teachers and parents all do their very best to stop us from doing these things.

for our species, our current living situations are extremely "unnatural", given that we haven't had time to adapt to them genetically, so the way we use our bodies as adults is a pathetic shadow of what it should be, what it would be if we had lived our lives using our bodies as we did intuitively. like a professional climber/runner/wrestler/animal stalker/swimmer (ever see the video footage of babies swimming on some documentary?).

in other words - the "natural" human is fucking hardcore. like a monkey, but bigger and stronger and smarter, with a weapon held in the preferred hand already wired into the brain (ever seen how babies intuitively pick things up, taste them first, and then try to bash with them?).

we are a bunch of extremely confused apes who have been given silly haircuts and told to sit still all our lives, until we thought it was normal.

but the knowledge is there! the body methods are there! in the spine and lower parts of the brain i guess, along with a lot of other stuff.

and the application of the higher parts of the brain to this inherent intuitive knowledge is what gives us all these physical systems....and application of higher-than normal parts of the brain have left us a few systems of pure genius like taiji or bagua.

there's only one way to end a post like this.



no wait,

Maybe I missed the part in your post where you addressed this point. If so, my bad!

I agree that many human activities are intuitive, but I still think it's ludicrous to only do what comes naturally. What we need to know and execute just might involve complexity and require highly specialized knowledge.

Shooting a pistol intuitively causes people to flinch, but this introduces tension along the barrel via the trigger, causing them to miss.

It can't be natural to hold a small explosion in front of your face!

How do you recover from an oversteer/fishtailing skid? Intuitively an untrained person will grip the wheel and jam the brakes. But what you want to do is remove your foot from the brake, disengage the clutch, turn the wheel in your intended direction, then counter steer to prevent another skid, at which point you've regained control.

What am I talking about? I don't know.

[D_Glenn]

the human brain has not only the wiring for the reflexive patterining of the animal kingdom at a sub cortical level, it also through the cortex has the ability to inhibit and thus control those reflexes at will through proper training......so we can learn to control our movement and our tendancy toward movment at a profound and concsious level, this is a uniquely human freedom I think.

Nice post. That is, in chinese thought, the 'Hun' (human soul) gaining control of the 'Po' (animal soul) in our own body.

***


Tom,
Interesting post, that's a good way to think about standing as "poised for action", and true 'stillness' is vital in almost all manners of hunting.
Some of the other possible benefits that I believe in are that the body in this 'poised' position goes into an aerobic state in preparation for the coming action but without the movement builds up a surplus of energy (in this case ATP/ADP).

.

[Sprint]

Interesting article on "natural" movement and martial arts by Ellis Amdur:

http://ellisamdur.com/article_naturalmovement.html

Let us consider xingyi ch’uan (lit. “form directed by will”), a Chinese combative art that specializes in the explosive application of force at very close range. This martial art requires the repetitive practice of five core movements that allegedly express the structure of the universe in the Taoist schema of five basic elements. Xingyi is claimed to embody the “natural” flow and permutation of energy in the cosmos. Technically, while xingyi looks like trapping, deflection, redirection of force, AND explosive, short-range attacks, what makes xingyi so powerful is the ability to exert an astonishingly powerful amount of force with no wind-up – as long as you can touch him, you can level him.

This ability is the product of systematic practice including long periods of standing – immobile – rebooting the organization of the body, so to speak, by standing in the same kind of active relaxation that the Inuit hunter must have maintained while poised with spear in ready position over a breathing hole in the ice.

Why is standing still so valuable? If you move, you take the stress off the nervous system and the body, and simply continue to compensate in a way that you are used to. But if you practice “not-moving” long enough, the brain gets the information that it is going to have to deal with the fact that this body will stay in this position, like it or not. The result is that the brain begins to reorganize to make the posture less stressful, and hence begins to enervate the muscles differently to aid in maximum efficiency. Almost all so-called internal arts either practice include standing practice, or use simple repetitive movements, through which one achieves similar results, in essence achieving “immobility within motion.”

He does not explain how you get from standing practice to "exert an astonishingly powerful amount of force with no wind-up – as long as you can touch him, you can level him."

It seems to me he misleads the reader, implying that if you do standing the rest will follow quite naturally - that's just not true. There is a vast, vast gulf between being able to stand correctly and proper fa li.

[xingyijuan]

Interesting article on "natural" movement and martial arts by Ellis Amdur:

http://ellisamdur.com/article_naturalmovement.html

Let us consider xingyi ch’uan (lit. “form directed by will”), a Chinese combative art that specializes in the explosive application of force at very close range. This martial art requires the repetitive practice of five core movements that allegedly express the structure of the universe in the Taoist schema of five basic elements. Xingyi is claimed to embody the “natural” flow and permutation of energy in the cosmos. Technically, while xingyi looks like trapping, deflection, redirection of force, AND explosive, short-range attacks, what makes xingyi so powerful is the ability to exert an astonishingly powerful amount of force with no wind-up – as long as you can touch him, you can level him.

This ability is the product of systematic practice including long periods of standing – immobile – rebooting the organization of the body, so to speak, by standing in the same kind of active relaxation that the Inuit hunter must have maintained while poised with spear in ready position over a breathing hole in the ice.

Why is standing still so valuable? If you move, you take the stress off the nervous system and the body, and simply continue to compensate in a way that you are used to. But if you practice “not-moving” long enough, the brain gets the information that it is going to have to deal with the fact that this body will stay in this position, like it or not. The result is that the brain begins to reorganize to make the posture less stressful, and hence begins to enervate the muscles differently to aid in maximum efficiency. Almost all so-called internal arts either practice include standing practice, or use simple repetitive movements, through which one achieves similar results, in essence achieving “immobility within motion.”

Interesting post!

It seems to me he misleads the reader, implying that if you do standing the rest will follow quite naturally - that's just not true. There is a vast, vast gulf between being able to stand correctly and proper fa li.

Nowhere in that excerpt does he imply that. He specifically say that standing practice is *part* of the training that permits "the ability to exert an astonishingly powerful amount of force with no wind-up".