29/08/2021
SHOWY OR EFFICIENT? - by Giedrius Dranevicius sensei
Important terms:
EFFICIENTE - achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.
SHOWY - having a striking appearance, impressive, attention-attracting, surprising.
Today martial arts serve as a specific and efficient tool to come into peace and harmony with yourself and the rest of the world. This tool includes physical, mental and philosophical personality development, sets certain life guidelines. It allows us to get to know and form relationships with both ourselves and others, it teaches us to overcome difficulties and overturn small failures into huge wins. However there also comes a big risk to lose the essence of martial arts by concentrating on “nice - looking forms” without understanding their purpose.
More often than not I hear people commenting like “B e a u t i f u l l y performed kata”, “Very n i c e looking technique”, “B r e a t h t a k i n g kick”, “Looks s t u n n i n g” and etc. We can hear this and similar kind of commenting not only from spectators, who are simply not qualified enough to judge anything else but looks, but also coaches and judges - professionals in this field, and that makes me worry.
It’s important to understand that beauty, just like taste is subjective. “Like - dislike; beautiful - ugly”, shouldn’t be phrases used by professionals to comment on the way competitors or students are performing techniques. A phrase that’s less subjective and based more on empirical experiences of practitioniers as well as the researches of contemporary sports science, would let us find more similarities rather than differences between other martial arts and sports. I would recommend using phrases “correct” or “incorrect”.
For me, a man practicing traditional karate do for almost 4 decades and still searching for answers in sports science, its getting more and more obvious that high mastery practitioners of any sport use the same principles no matter how different the outside forms seem to be. As well as that it doesn’t matter what different methods they are using to get those results, because there are thousands of methods and only a few principles. When you know the principle you will always be able to find the right method to develop it, however knowing only methods it’s really easy to get lost in them and start using them inefficiently.
So, correct or incorrect? Efficient or effective? These should be the questions and criteria that coaches, judges and practitioners rely on. Budo martial arts have always reached for maximum efficiency. And efficiency could only be guaranteed when we add all of the puzzle pieces together: biomechanics of the techniques, preparation of functional systems, physical characteristics improvement, mental state of mind of a warrior and being able to keep calm under stress, the formation of strong skills, psychological preparation. All of these components are equally important and they all let us get closer towards our limits and goals.
Why Budo martial arts explicitly focused on efficiency? Because original purpose of martial arts was self defense, not sport, not health, not entertainment - simply surviving. And surviving under really difficult conditions. That’s why the efficient techniques reached the daylight of 21st century and none-efficient - disappeared alongside the warriors who were using them. The efficiency of techniques was always tested using SHIAI, learning from either your own or your partners mistakes. In today’s civilized world it’s not as relevant or important, since our safety is guaranteed by certain laws and structures. And that’s why big risk occur: losing the essence of Budo martial arts.
To this risk (losing the essence) sport competitions contribute as well. Since in sports all that matters is victory, sportsman and their coaches adapt: work with only a few techniques that give them most points and are showy and not necessarily efficient. Seems like win - win. Spectators get more attractive event, sport organisations get bigger financial support. However, in such way martial arts are losing their identity, soul and most importantly - efficiency. Karate do becomes more SPORT than martial ART.
Effectiveness was always the core of martial arts. The ability for a small person to overcome a big guy, the ability to beat strength and speed with skills - that’s what made martial arts so popular as a style of active life. I would like to wish all of the instructors to not lose their path, to constantly remind themselves about the origins of martial arts and, when practicing them always, raise yourself a question WHY? Why should we do one technique in such way and not the other? And that question should be answered considering 4 different angles: biomechanics, health, efficiency and philosophy. If what we are doing we’re able to back up with reason from all of those angles, then we are most likely doing the technique correctly. And for the ending I’d like to leave you with these Hidetaka Nishiyama - Sensei’s words: “Not everything that is beautiful is correct, but everything that is correct is beautiful.”
