Rec and Sports

A Few Thoughts on How You can have Perfection of Form

After forty years of practicing the martial arts, of studying Karate and Shaolin and Aikido and other arts, one thing about learning to fight has become very apparent. This truth is that people who study classical martial arts become better fighters. And, inversely, people who don’t study classical martial arts don’t always become better fighters.

The very interesting thing about all this is that most people don’t really know what fighting really is. People are locked into the bang and pow of such things as reaction time, and they never really open up to the subject of developing intuition. Only through classical forms, such as are taught in such classical martial arts as wing chun or Shaolin, will a person make serious inroads into and start to develop the reality of this subject of intuition.

Most training methods in modern, tournament oriented karate, you see, rely on making muscle, on increasing speed, on being bigger and better and faster. Yet, the sad truth is that being the biggest, bestest fastest does not always make the best fighters. The best fighters in the world are the ones who have developed the ability to see what is coming before it arrives.

Most martial arts training methods, you see, rely on the development of reaction time, have reaction time built into them. Reaction time means that you are moving in response to something, which means that you are moving too late. To not learn to move too late you must train in a classical method, such as ninjitsu or Aikido, which teaches you to move before.

Thus, to accelerate yourself as a fighter, to improve yourself on every possible level, you need to study martial methods, such as form training in classical styles such as hung gar and wado ryu, which address you in areas other than just muscle and reaction time. The forms of the classical arts accelerate your ability to fight as I am discussing here. Yes, they sometimes seem unweildy and one does often have to adapt and change what they learn to make the various teachings work, but the benefits are great and far in advance of meat and muscle and bone, and a person will be vastly improved, on an intuitive level, as a fighter.

When you do a classical form you are traveling down the same, old street. After you have traveled down that street for a while you begin to realize that you are seeing the same things over and over. After a while you gain the ability to predict what is going to happen on that street before you even start down it.

This kind of prediction is at the heart and core of the real and true martial arts, and of fighting. The real key lies in building the peculiar silence that develops as you practice your forms, which is available through such arts as Uechi ryu and Goju ryu. In the middle of such profound silence, silence that is spiritual in nature, you can find and define the exact thought that motivates every action.

Nothing in this universe is ever going to move unless a thought moves it first. Thus, the study of the classical martial arts, done with correct forms, with correct training methods, aid the fighter in developing his intuitive abilitiess. Yes, studying forms, such as in Isshin ryu and shito ryu, opens your mind and allows you to build the real qualities of the martila arts that are not found by the fellow who just fights.