Trick wrote:I don't understand this post, you say begginers exercises can lead the practitioner to get this Aiki, but you also say a practitioner need "special guidance" to get Aiki skill....A non Aiki skilled practitioner can become "exceptional fluid and powerful", so what will an Aiki skilled practitioner become then?
Trick,
What I was trying to articulate, is that internal body methods (of which Aiki is a part) are taught incrementally, starting with exercises that work with movements and abilities that most people already have and can relate to. This is because the connective tissues -- muscles, tendons, ligaments, fascia -- that are used in the creation of internal structure and power, are almost never already conditioned to do the kinds of movements required in internal method. A neural-muscular has to be developed, first.
And before that can be done, the individual has to be able to recognize, isolate and activate very specific tissues; so, his awareness has to be trained, as well. For example, a lot of people can't recognize or find their psoas muscles, and activate them willfully. The beginning levels of training thus must focus on helping students to be able to recognize the body parts they'll need to be using, and they do this by starting with the parts of the body frame and musculature that the student does recognize and know how to activate, and then work from there.
That's why in both of the arts I study (one Chinese, one Japanese), elementary exercises focus on skeletal/joint alignment, relaxation, balance and distribution of body mass. Then they move on to a variety of simple movements that address the full range of human motion, including martial movements such as strikes and kicks, stepping, turning and deflection. There also is simple power generation by conventional means, such as the turning of the hips (using large muscles of the hips and torso), and swinging of arms and legs, centripetal force from stepping and turning, etc.
At this stage, the movements do not have any "internal" component; they are conventional postures and movements. BUT... they lay the groundwork for developing the ability to recognize the tissues and movements that are needed for internal skills. Once you recognize and can feel where something is, the next step is to develop the ability to activate those tissues at will. Then you can learn -how- to move them, and when.
In some arts, that's actually all there is, though -- the external foundation drills -- and students become more refined in those movements, and learn to apply them martially. But in the internal arts, there is a next-stage set of mechanisms that are introduced,with which the students are able to replace "externally" motivated movements (e.g. swinging or rotating the hips to move the arms and legs, etc.) with "internal" ones (using a combined set of muscles, tendons, ligaments instead of those gross-muscle and joint movements) to achieve the same set of movements.
The second set of movement skills are not something a person can teach himself, because it is so specific and so unconventional. The chances of stumbling across the "formula" for aiki and internal power, are pretty slim. So, while you might be able to teach yourself how to punch "externally," through trial and error, learning how to use your body effectively in the generation of internal power, or manipulative aiki, requires someone who has those skills to guide and instruct you.
The non-aiki person will develop fluid, powerful -external- movements. The aiki person will develop an unusual stability that is very hard to uproot, and a different kind of power that requires less overt-external movement, yet generates more force because it uses the entire unified body in a cyclical process that produces power at every stage (no starting and ending point), rather than "pieces" of the body in sequential chains of movement that have a beginning and an end, and then must be re-chambered or re-set.
Does that help?