So Much More than Self-Defense
Last Friday I attended a one-hour intro self-defense course here in Stony Plain. My friend had invited me, and I thought it would be interesting to see the overlap with our own teaching, and I was eager to do some kung fu adjacent work with my friend. Since I talk about it all the time, I was excited to see how she would act and react to the techniques.
Right away there were lots of similarities to some of our own techniques: elbows, palm heel strikes, and wrist escapes but the way the instructor approached them was quite different than our own. With each explanation she was focused on application, rather than technique as well as showing us how to use momentum to generate force rather than timing and skeletal alignment. She said something as she was setting up the context to do a donkey kick (a low back-kick) That really illustrated the difference for me. She explained that kicks should probably be a last resort since as soon as you lift your foot you're at risk of compromising your balance, and it can take extensive practice to be able to kick with authority or power. This was another one of those "huh, I guess what we do almost everyday does fall into the realm of the extraordinary" If you had asked me the day before this class, I would have said kicks are a common and foundational type of technique, but now I have a greater appreciation for how hard our kicks can be, and how hard we have to work to get them to work for us.
Speaking of how hard kicks can be, I want to expand on what I mentioned before briefly: the Donkey Kick. I have always had trouble with back kicks. My balance always feels all over the place because it feels like I'm fighting the way my skeleton wants to move, I find it difficult to keep my vectors pure, or to acquire my target, and they just never feel all that powerful because I feel like I cannot get my hip to engage like I can with a front facing kick. But this instructor explained this Donkey kick in a way that opened my eyes to how I was doing my back kicks! She explained that you can swing your leg in an arc until the point where your knees line up, after that you had to thrust straight out, and because of the set up of the ending of that swinging arc this meant that your leg had to thrust down (at about a 45 degree angle). And BOOM! I could finally feel my hip engage! I could finally start to feel power! And because the kick was so low I didn't feel the need to bend down to counter-balance my leg flying our behind me!
And in sitting down to write this blog I realize that I tried to set the standard WAY too high for my back kicks when I was first learning them. When I started I applied what I knew about our front kicks, that you want them at belt height, I tried to work on my technique there, hoping to add the power and accuracy and speed later once I had the motion of the technique down. But I think because I set the standard too high from the beginning, I never gave myself a chance to improve the kick enough to be able to progress to those later stages! Once I was given the explicit instruction to kick really low I was able to finally understand!
This class was great for the fun I had with my friend and the insights it gave me. Along with the lessons I mentioned earlier, I also left with a clearer understand how the Art comes into Martial Arts. Since I saw some of these techniques isolated, only used for application, shown to be used by someone with little to no training, now I can more clearly see the connections and flow in our own applications, how our techniques can also be tools to make us stronger, or more flexible, or faster rather than only being a means of transferring power, and how kung fu takes so much patience and relentless practice to even begin to take shape in us.
Hence why the back kick starts to become a side kick when going for height. The gluts get in the way of raising that back kick above your waist without excessive leaning to fake the altitude but that always comes with a disengagement of the hips. Bring the kick more to the side and you eliminate the interference of the gluts and now you can re-engage the hip again at altitude.
ReplyDeleteThank you sifu! This is a good reminder for me, I’ll try to apply this when I’m working on them, this might be the last piece of the puzzle I need!
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