Re: Dan Harden and Roy Goldberg
Posted: Tue Nov 22, 2016 7:44 am
From Facebook
Dan Harden wrote:The recent videos that I appear in:
Much has been said about the work appearing in the videos being "what I do." The truth is that what I currently do and teach appears in only a few brief moments on the videos. This is not how I normally teach. This seminar was a Daito ryu oriented seminar. In it Roy and I offered an explanation of how I took some things from classic Daito ryu waza and changed them for use in more combative environments. I also did not cover any internal aspects and how to train it. It was more of peak into my past - hence me doing the techniques. Something that no one around the world has ever seen me do for the past twenty years.
My last comments are on the nature of ukemi (voluntarily cooperating for the successful completion of a technique). Ukemi is indeed a voluntary process. If any of the men in those videos (including myself) had decided to turn on and use their connected structure? You could never move them that way. So, why bother doing it? It is to help the person doing the techniques to develop a feel, a skill, that they later use in increasingly stressful pressure testing - to include sparring or perhaps, fighting.
Make no mistake, there is a tremendous amount of work to do to first develop the skills in a cooperative venue. You cannot transcend to simply using them combatively. In short, if you haven't fought, or at least engage in sparring or grappling? You can never transfer these skill sets over to that environment. It is not wise to make assumptions of effectiveness based on the earned experiences of other people. You need to develope your own.