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Solo practice vs. Partner Practice, with particular reference to IAI
I was at the recent Aiki Expo, and a Systema practitioner came up to the table where I was selling my books, leafed through Old School (my book on koryu), and then rather scornfully threw it back on the table and said to me, “Too old for me.” I said, “Oh?” And he replied, “Yeah. It’s form training. Any form training is absolutely weak, because it’s limiting. The only effective martial art has no form. We in Systema are far more powerful than other arts because ours is an art of freedom, because we are not bound by forms.” I said (Jeez I’ve mellowed in my middle years), “You have a good point about how forms can limit one, but freedom to move is limited by your neurological organization. You can’t do anything that your brain and body won’t let you do. The open question is, ‘Can you achieve freedom without “formal” training to teach your nervous system to do things it couldn’t otherwise do?’” The conversation ended there, with the young man’s contemptuous shrug.
I am not offering this as an opening gambit to discuss Systema. Those interested, please save it for another thread. I raise the subject only to say this: any sports system has basic drills and movement to train the nervous system. (In fact, I would assume Systema has basic drills as well, even if they don’t look like kata). Rules limit “freedom,” but they also concentrate training into certain essentials which allows developments that otherwise could not have taken place. The boxing hook, for example, would probably never have been invented if cross-hip throws had not been eliminated from boxing.
Which leads to a consideration of form. I’ve recently become passionately re-involved with hsing I, training two-three hours day minimum. Hsing –I, “form directed by the will” is, very definitely such a neurological retraining system. And it’s primarily solo form. (None the less, partner practice and later, sparring is considered essential, but even so, the solo form is considered the primary training).
The recent threads about iaido and jo provoked my interest. I’m amused by the vehement reaction to Meik’s rather silly joke (man, talk about power. One joke – 125 replies later!!!!!), but I was more interested by his cogent discussion about blending two ryu, and about the merits of training solo vs. partner. (This post is NOT about the merits of simultaneously practicing two different systems, something I’ve written all I have to say elsewhere, but more about solo vs. partner.)
Thinking about it, I’ve done far more solo training in koryu than partner. For many years, I did hours of suburi, often at midnight at a local shrine. I’d go over one side or the other of forms, or simply do suburi. Thus, my physical system, my nervous system got very well trained, as I did the movements so many times that they became “natural” to me. When I take a kamae in Araki-ryu or Buko-ryu, it is like pushing the keyboard and up comes Microsoft Word. The program is booted up and on. The result of this was WHEN I did partner practice, I had the “space” to worry about my partner/enemy, and really study ma-ai, kiai, etc., because where to put my feet, the position of my arms, my breathing pattern, etc., was taken care of. In this sense, my koryu training turns out to be not so different from my hsing I training.
Which leads me to muse, yet again, on iai, BUT, NOT ON MUSO JIKIDEN EISHIN RYU!!!!!!!!! Please Lord, not about that. So Charles Mahan, none of this is directed to or applies to you or what you practice. Anything that you find agreeable is absolutely accidental, and any disagreements or criticisms of iai exclude any thoughts of MJER, a totally unique martial practice utterly unlike anything I have ever seen. ('')
Iai, in it’s original form was, as Meik writes, an auxiliary training method, but I think a very significant one. Notwithstanding such advanced training as Wm. Bodiford describes in Kashima Shin-ryu, almost all partner practice was with bokuto, etc. Yet, the sword itself was as essential an “article of clothing” as a kimono to a bushi. He had to know everything about it – from cleaning it to walking with it to drawing and returning it. Iai, in addition to all the things I and others have written in the long thread about “seiza and iaido,” served another very important purpose. It taught a person how to handle a sword, how to draw it (yes, even for surprise attack and all the other scenarios, sure). But, the most important functions it provided were two-fold: It’s a damn sight more interesting solo practice than suburi, both for it’s practical utility and complexity (this encouraging the trainee to practice that much more, and in far more sophisticated sequences than mere sword swinging,") AND, it was the equivalent of a gun-safety course. There in the preparation for the forms and the forms themselves are the equivalent of gun cleaning, checking your load, weapon awareness and retention, etc. It was so essential that it was included in most sogo bujutsu, and in many systems, it’s absence was considered such a lack that it was later added (Yagyu Seigo-ryu was, in my uneducated opinion, added in just this way to YSR).
That it later got “abstracted out” as a stand-alone practice (actually, a seiza-alone practice, in many ryu) is an artifact of history, of different practitioners’ interests and preoccupations. Once abstracted out, like any specialty, circumscribed, it developed it's own idiosyncracies and unique merits, . . .but this has been discussed elsewhere, hasn't it?
Best
Ellis Amdur
[url]www.ellisamdur.com
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) is about. Many of the statements you make illustrate exactly why it is so important that iai be practiced with a live blade. You just can't get the same feeling, sense, feedback, etc. from a bokuto or even an iaito until you are totally familiar with a shinken. It is also one of the reasons that in the dojo I trained in I didn't handle a bokuto in class until I had already been at it for 3 years with first an iaito and then a shinken.
From Outa Left Field.....
