Martial Arts Balance

In our adults training Balance along with Distance and Timing (plus others) is taught as a principal embedded in technique. In martial arts, like life, balance can take on many different meanings, some examples are ….

• Training the right amount of time, don’t over train but train enough
  This is one way of protecting yourself, train enough so that if you need to use it one day then you’re ready, but not so much that your body suffers from injuries or you get bored and want to quit.

• Being an Uke and a Tori i.e. both giving and receiving techniques
  Lean how to apply techniques on another person, but also how to take pain and fall safely without it effecting your spirit.

• Doing enough to be safe while not hurting someone more than necessary
  In real life if someone tries to hurt you do enough to protect yourself , but if you do things to another person that are outside of a reasonable self-defence application you could end up in trouble with the law.

and also ....

• Controlling your own balance while breaking your opponents. This is the main focus of the rest of this post, but only from a physical balance control point of view. We’ll talk about mental and spiritual balance another day

Physical Balance

Let’s try a simple drill, imagine your standing in Ichimonji, you look down and draw an imaginary line that’s runs about 1 cm out from around the outside of your stancekind of  like a skateboard but not as big and not on wheels .

You  can shift forwards and backwards until your knees line up with your toes along the centre line (for arguments sake) North & South for some distance perhaps as much as 50 cm, but if you try to go East and West by leaning to the side for as little as 10 cm and your balance becomes unstable very quickly. Your heels start to raise of the ground, your toes start to grip the floor and your arms start to raise away from your body……..your body becomes preoccupied with the process of balance recovery.

Let’s go back in time …..remember when as a child you would walk along a fence and start to lose your balance, your arms would go out away from your body and wobble as you tried to regain it. Sometimes you would recover and sometimes you would fall, but for the time in-between the two outcomes your balance has been captured, you are occupied by the process of trying to regain your balance, you are neither in nor out of balance.

with that in mind if I say that

• in balance is when your centre remains on the surface area that is the skateboards deck and

• off balance is when your centre of balance is off the surface area of the skateboards deck then

• capturing balance is the edge of the skateboard and this is where you want to try to place your opponent

What a great time to apply a technique. This where they are at their weakest, in that moment of….. to step or not to step, “do I try to maintain my balance here or step to correct the loss”.

In martial arts terms this is exactly where you want your opponent to be, confused, doubtful, preoccupied and internally focused on themselves instead of externally focused on you.

Craig Guest

www.ninjutsumelbourne.com.au