Be The Technique

By Julius Anastasio

Julius is a Level 5 (Blue) student at Wu Dao

I used to have this one Aikido teacher - a really insightful guy - who threw out all the superfluous moves and had me practicing only a few essential, blatantly practical moves and throws. His theory behind stripping everything bare was that you shouldn't have to train for 20 years to finally have a style’s effective techniques revealed and taught to you. Why read War and Peace when you can just skim the CliffsNotes?

At the time it made sense, and it's a very tempting approach, but it forgets to consider the concept that, as Shi-fu (and Kung Fu Panda) says, in martial arts "there are no secrets."

Lately, a lot of us have been attempting to apply some of the Shaolin techniques into sparring (while simultaneously tweaking them to avoid the limb-braking parts). One of the main problems I've come across is that it's just so darn hard. It’s very tempting to consider trashing all but a choice few Shaolin techniques that obviously show promise in the ring. You know, like the straight punch.

This is a terrible idea.

Having only a few moves at your disposal would have an extremely negative impact on how much of a style you actually internalize. Like many styles, Shaolin is explicitly made up of movements and forms that are designed to train your body to optimally execute effective fighting techniques. There’s not a single wasted movement in what we learn. The trick is figuring out what each (seemingly) superfluous section of a technique actually does. If you don't DO those sections, then you run the risk of severely limiting that technique's range of application. But, how do we figure out what those sections and techniques do?

We’ve all heard it a thousand times: "Do a technique 1,000 times, you know the technique. Do it 10,000 times, you ARE the technique."

While I might feel like I "know" how to do many of the techniques in Shaolin (at least passably), I certainly have not gotten to the stage where I feel like they're internalized.

I better go get training.

Martial Biking

By Julius Anastasio

Julius is a Level 3 (Orange) student at Wu Dao

Anyone who has navigated the streets of Boston by bike can recount how harrowing an experience it can be. A few days ago I was biking home from Kung Fu class during rush hour. Zipping by the adjacent gridlocked cars, a passenger-side door opened into the bike lane, catching my handlebars and sending me into the air.

The next thing I knew, I found myself kneeling on the ground, about 10 feet in front of my bike. After being thrown from my bike, I had unconsciously tucked into a dive roll, and had landed unscathed, sunglasses still on, the take-home container of leftovers in my backpack unopened.

I got up immediately and brushed myself off. Being the martial arts nerd I am, I was actually disappointed in how I had reacted (hitting the ground in stride would have looked SO much cooler). The passenger who had opened the door asked if I was alright, glancing over at my bent, sorry-looking bike. “I’m fine,” I said as I tried to bang the handlebars of my bike into some ride-able state. A woman who has witnessed the accident from the sidewalk asked me “Are you alright? That was quite a display of acrobatics.”

I replied with another quick “I’m fine, thanks,” as I got back onto my crooked bike seat just in time to catch the next green light. I rode the rest of the way home contemplating the events that had just occurred, particularly how useless the tune-up I had just gotten the day before was at this point.

Reflecting on the accident made me appreciate how lucky I am to have practiced martial arts for the majority of my life. Living in our current society, the chances that I will have to fight for my life aren’t very great. Accidents and falls, however, are much more likely. My years of martial arts training have conditioned me to internalize many movements, allowing my body to react unconsciously and automatically to protect myself in unexpected dangerous situations such as a bicycle accident.

We don’t always consider the beneficial side-effects of our Kung Fu training. We have a tendency to focus on the height of our sidekicks, the deepness of our horse stances, or the fluidity of a form. While Kung Fu does give way to these more concrete accomplishments, it also allows you to internalize those movements and become a part of you. Sometimes it takes real-life situations to make us to understand the true extent of what we are accomplishing in the countless hours we devote to training.