A good article at The Budo Bum regarding optimal movement and Budo practice. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.
I saw someone on reddit saying that the footwork in Kendo feels unnatural. My immediate reaction was “Of course it feels unnatural, it’s budo.” Budo isn’t natural. Budo is about doing everything in the optimal way. Budo is about letting go of the things we’ve learned naturally and refining ourselves.
“Natural” gets used a lot in 21st century marketing. So many things are marketed as “All Natural” that you’d be forgiven for thinking that “natural = good health.” Natural just means that humans haven’t manipulated something. Natural doesn’t have any positive or negative connotations. All-natural honey tastes wonderful. All-natural rattlesnake venom will kill you quite naturally. Mother Nature isn’t a gentle lady, and you shouldn’t assume that “natural = good.” Until the 20th century, the majority of children didn’t make it past childhood, and more than 1 woman in 100 died in childbirth. Look at the animal kingdom, pick any species, and you’ll see that the vast majority of offspring die before they can mature. This is “natural.”
We learn to breathe, stand, walk, and run, naturally. If the natural way of doing these things was the best way, musicians and athletes wouldn’t spend years learning to breathe properly. If the way we naturally stand was good for us, Feldenkrais and Alexander Technique teachers wouldn’t have jobs. If the way we walk and run was naturally optimal, there wouldn’t be any track coaches.
There is nothing natural about using a sword well, about throwing opponents smoothly and effortlessly, about hitting someone’s face with your fist in a way that damages them but doesn’t break the delicate bones in your hand, about taking a little jutte and handling a guy with a sword. These are not natural acts. Budo seeks to optimize what nature has given us in both mind and body. We train in budo not to be natural, but to make the optimal seem natural.
The first lessons in budo, I suspect in any ryuha, are techniques but are also about learning to use your body properly. I teach new students how to walk and how to breathe. They think they are learning to hold a sword or staff, learning how to throw someone, or learning the footwork to a kata. They aren’t really learning any of these things at this point. They are learning to use their bodies properly. Students usually take a year or more to overcome enough of the bad habits they picked up naturally to be able to start learning to hold a weapon properly, or even walk without throwing themselves off-balance with every step.
They’ve learned to use their bodies naturally, and what they’ve learned is all wrong for budo. They grip things with their thumb and index finger, because it feels natural. They sway side-to-side and bounce up-and-down when they walk. These are natural habits. Only once they stop reflexively gripping with their index fingers and throwing their bodies off-balance with each step they take will they truly start to learn to hold a weapon or move through a kata.
Optimal budo comes from the optimal use of the body. To get there you have to start with the fundamentals. What’s more fundamental than breathing? Optimal breathing is a learned skill. Just ask a trained vocalist or flute player. Developing great breathing skills takes time and effort. Classical budo ryuha all have pretty firm ideas about how to develop a great martial artist in their tradition. There are specific techniques and kata that are studied in specific order so that the student develops that unnaturally optimized body and mind that make their budo powerful and adaptable.
The flip side of learning to do things well, is learning to not do things that don’t need to be done. One of the key things in optimizing the budo body and mind is getting rid of everything that is unnecessary. Unnecessary movement, tension, and mental noise all have to go. Unnecessary movements create openings and opportunities that a good opponent will make use of. Unnecessary tension slows you down and makes it harder to move and respond to what is happening. Unnecessary mental noise stops you from realizing what your opponent is doing until it is much too late to do anything about it. There are many reasons the great martial artists throughout Japanese history spent time repeatedly talking about mushin 無心 or “no mind”.