middleway wrote:But i think there is something else to this discussion asside from 'skill'. It is how the trained body can help us against greater, more classical strength, or body mass. There are things you can do with the body that completely negate incoming forces during exchange, even with huge guys. I wouldnt necissarily call the trained body a 'skill' per say, it is more of a 'state'.
What are peoples thoughts on this?
Off the top of my head, I would break it down to skills and attributes. Skills could further be broken down to active skills and passive skills. Active skills are what folks commonly think of as skills, whereas a passive skill might be something like all the different ways you learn to breathe through experience when rolling with someone. You don't necessarily think about it, and many might not even be aware that they do it at all, but being able to breathe into the chest or belly or back or upper ribs or whatever, and switch between them, is kind of important when you have someone trying to smother you. You can learn to do it actively, but in practice it's something that your autonomic nervous system does for you automagically.
I would break attributes down into trainable and untrainable as well. Attributes like strength, speed, and endurance can be trained to certain limits. Sensitivity is almost limitless, but may reach a point of diminishing returns. Size and body type (not body composition) really can't be trained.
So when you talk about the ability to negate incoming forces, it depends on how you do it. If you're talking about allowing it to pass through your structure (whether skeletal, liquid, or something else), I would consider that a passive skill. If you've just conditioned yourself through practice (internal or external) to where your body is like an old tire and stuff kind of bounces off, then I would consider that an attribute. I think size comes up because it's pretty much the only thing that really can't be trained for at all-- your genetics are what they are.
In the broader sense, I believe all of this MA/IMA stuff is a collection of simple things that interact in complex ways, but that doesn't change the fact that the component pieces are in and of themselves pretty simple and straightforward. So I'm interested in the simple component parts, but when the conversation moves to conceptually esoteric things like qi or "internal", or somatically esoteric things like "fascia" or "dan tien", I tend to lose interest, as it's just not useful to me.