Kihon for Kihon

You need some basics before you can learn the basics.

Practice started without doing any kata. We didn’t even do kihon waza (basic techniques). I’ve long joked that the only things I really teach are how to breathe and how to walk. We haven’t been doing too much with this in practice lately because right now all of my students have been with me for at least a couple of years, and they’ve been through the breathing and walking stuff a few times. Lately though, I’ve been working on some new ideas.

I had a conversation with a Shinto Muso Ryu teacher last year that is rolling through my head like a snowball down a mountainside in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. We were talking about getting your arms aligned properly. He had some exercises he’d discovered in an interesting little book about improving your health and budo by swinging your arms properly. What he described and showed me aligned nicely with some things I was beginning to understand in my iaido practice about aligning the hands and shoulders. I’ve been playing with this since then.

I started out by trying to put my arms in good alignment. This was difficult, and as soon as I stopped thinking about it, my arms would roll back to where they normally sat. The point of this is not really about the arms though. The arms are just signalers for how well aligned the body’s central structure is. I started making progress when I stopped trying to get my arms to align with my centerline and swing straight, and instead dug back along the muscle chain. The real progress occurred when I started playing with the position of my shoulder blades. As soon as I moved those back and down, my arms and hands fell into alignment.

I’ve spent a lot of time as a jodo and iaido teacher trying to fix my students hand and arm positions. It’s been frustrating because I haven’t had much success in fixing things this way. I’d show people where their hands and arms should be, and they’d mimic the position for a while, but the next practice I’d be correcting the same thing. Then I started looking at the basics of movements.

When we move our hands, the movement isn’t based in our hands. We usually think of the arms moving the hands around. What I have realized (and forgive me taking so long to figure this out) is that all movement has a base, a foundation, and if that foundation is off, all movements originating there will be off. The base from which the arms move is the upper back; the spine, the scapulas, and the muscles connecting them. When I looked at my students, I realized that even when they put their arms in the right place, they weren’t getting them in place the right way. They were moving their arms around below their shoulders without changing the base that supports their arms. Those bases were all over the place, which explained why students couldn’t keep their arms in the right places without conscious effort.

I stopped trying to correct students' hand positions, and started working on changing the way they hold their upper backs. As soon as they focused on the position of their shoulder blades relative to their spine, their hands and arms magically corrected themselves. I noticed that if their backs were correct, they couldn’t hold their arms wrong. Once they fixed the movement's base, incorrect movement became difficult, and the correct movement became easy.

Whenyou follow the muscle chains far enough, you end up in the ball of the foot. I’ve understood that proper stance is important, but I’m just beginning to understand that it is almost everything. All the muscle chains, all the body’s structures, originate with the feet. Nothing can be correct if the feet aren’t right. So now I’m working on kihon for how to stand, and I’m thinking I haven’t done nearly enough work with my students on just standing, much less walking. I’m rebuilding my own structure from the ball of my foot up, and all sorts of interesting things are happening.

The kihon for jodo and iai are seemingly simple: swinging the sword, swinging the jo, blocking, receiving attacks, redirecting the opponent’s weapon. These are taught in the kihon waza. There are even more basic elements though, such as: How do you hold the sword? How do you hold the jo? How do you raise your arms? How do you breathe? How do you stand? These are just assumed in practice.

On this day we didn’t assume them. Practicing kihon cuts and strikes assumes that you are standing correctly, breathing correctly, and walking correctly. I’ve discovered it helps to break out these most fundamental of fundamentals and work on them without all the confusing and distracting activity that’s going on when doing kihon waza. Just standing in a proper, efficient, powerful structure takes a lot of mental focus and effort at first. We have all sorts of bad habits when it comes to posture, structure, and breathing. All of these have to be fixed before we can advance to the subtle and challenging art of holding the sword and the jo properly.

Standing properly for budo is a complicated art in itself. Your weight has to be forward on the balls of the feet. Your hips have to be above your ankles, with your butt slightly tucked. For those of us who spend our work days sitting at a computer, this is challenging. My hips and quads are used to being bent 90^o in a chair, and they pull in that direction when I stand. The first thing I do now is stretch out my quads so they have the length to allow my hips to be in the proper position without tension.

Once I get my hips settled, I can work on my upper body. The whole time I’m at the computer, I’m fighting the natural tendency to slump my back, roll my shoulders forward, and tip my head over the keyboard. Doing these things isn’t healthy for anyone, but they are especially bad habits if you want to do good budo. I’m constantly fixing my lower back, pulling my shoulder blades together and down, and pulling my nose out of the keyboard. The reward for this battle with myself is that when I’m standing, my trained habits are to have my hips, shoulders, and head all aligned so that the structure of my body is supporting me and I’m not using any unnecessary muscles to do the job.

That day, for practice we just stood around, wiggling our hips and shoulders, and rolling our heads around, until we found the sweet spot where our weight is on the balls of our feet, and our hips, shoulders and head are properly aligned above our ankles. For something as simple and obvious as standing upright, something we think we’ve all been doing for decades, this turned out to be a complicated and time-consuming exercise. We all have decades of bad habits to unlearn, and as soon as someone stopped focusing on their structure, their weight would rock back on their heels, or their shoulders would slump, or they’d stick their neck out.

Just standing around turned out to be the most valuable thing we did all day. As people’s awareness of how their body felt when it was properly aligned increased, the easier it became to maintain, and that improvement showed throughout everything we did afterward.

Next time we may try walking.

Thank you to Deborah Klens-Bigman, Ph.D., for all of her editorial support.