The benefits of a crash pad

I had a discussion the other day with some of my classmates about the use of the crash pad, and it brought about an interesting point that some may miss in the course of our training. There are two main reasons why I like to use the crash pad, not only when teaching and leading class, but when I myself am training.

The first reason, is perhaps the most obvious one: landing on a crash pad over and over is a lot easier on uke than landing and the harder mat over and over. And if we learn more the higher number of reps we do, it makes sense to do it in a way that will allow us to do it with less ware and tear on our bodies.

If you're just learning ukemi, say as a white or green belt, the crash pad can not only protect you when you're fall isn't 100% right, but it also takes a lot of the fear out of falling. Let's face it, the last thing we want to do is walk into a dojo and break something within the first couple of months.

When you ease that fear a little with a crash pad, uke can relax. And we all know tensing up is probably the worst thing you can do when taking a fall.

But even though I'm still relatively young, and have pretty decent ukemi, my theory is, if I want to keep doing this for another 30 years or more, I think I'm going to pace myself. 

Now, the second reason, may or may not be so obvious. Using the pad also takes the fear out of a young, inexperienced tori. After all, the next to last thing we want to do is walk into a dojo and break our partner within the first couple of months. I think newer students, if throwing on the regular mat, hesitate, knowing that they aren't going to throw correctly, and while worrying about not hurting their partner, self-sabotage the technique, in effect making it worse.

If they're working with an advanced player, of course, who has great ukemi, they needn't worry about it, but then they tend to think their sempai is "jumping" for them anyway.

With a crash pad, younger students can throw each other without some of the anxiety.

And, well, besides all that, it's actually kind of fun.

The cycle of ego

I've noticed several benefits of training in the martial arts over the years, many of which I never anticipated on the outset (I suspect few of us do). One such benefit involves tempering of my ego.

When I say "ego" I'm referring to the definition that reflects one's self-esteem, self-image or sense of self-worth, for better or worse. When I first started as a white belt, I was, needless to say, the least experienced person in the entire school. That feeling is pretty humbling, naturally. Fortunately, the feelings of inadequacy were often tempered by the kindness and patience of my teachers.

As I progressed and learned I acquired some skills and a certain amount of proficiency. At the same time, newer students who were less experienced than I came along, which meant I was no longer the least experienced or "worst" aikidoka.

Once I got to the position of being the higher ranking, more experienced person in a pair, even as a brown belt, my ego (or self-image or self=worth) inflated based solely on an admittedly superficial premise: I'm better at aikido than you. Look I can do the techniques and you can't.

I don't think I ever actually thought those exact words (and I hope I never said them), but I would feel it; not on a conscious level, maybe not quite so directly or succinctly, but still. I felt proud of myself, and I think most anyone would and does.

Then, what may be the very next class period, I would work with someone higher ranking than me, and naturally, their skills would far exceed my own. I think I felt that sort of disparity a bit more sharply in judo than aikido, as I would (as many of us phrased it) "get my ass handed to me." From there, my self-image would plummet, and the self-abuse would begin: I suck, I'm terrible, I'll never get this.

So for several years, my ego moved in a cycle much like the one depicted below, with wide, sweeping arcs, at times skyrocketing to the heights of confidence, and at other times diving to the depths of humility and abasement.

Interestingly enough, however, I've noticed that over time, whenever I found myself on one extreme or another, my thinking changed. When successful, or when I spent time as the higher authority, I would remember in the back of my mind how easily I could fall, either by the hands of someone more skilled than I, or simply by my own errors. And when I spent time on the bottom, and reminded of how much I have yet to learn, I would remember those students who looked to me for guidance and knowledge.

In effect, remembrance of one extreme tempered the other. I wouldn't get quite so full of my own importance, but I wouldn't beat myself up quite so badly, either. The cycle, then, began to look something more like this:

Finally, at some point, I realized that none of it really mattered. No matter how much I trained, or how much I knew, someone would always, always be better than me, someone out there could still "hand my ass to me." Not only that, but even if I were the best, baddest aikidoka or judoka in the entire world, some poor soul with no training whatsoever could come along and shoot me dead from 10 feet away, before I had a chance to do anything.

If someone is always better, and someone is always worse, then I myself am always better and always worse. Which is essentially a wash, and puts me... in the middle of nowhere. I simply... am.

I become less concerned with being right, and more interested in remaining open and receptive, knowing that learning opportunities and revelations can come from both red belts and white belts, from the old and the young, from the wise and the unlearned.

And at that point, I realized that thinking of what I was doing in terms of "better or worse than someone else" is a flawed paradigm. We all do it, of course. Perhaps it stems from some prehistoric, Darwinian foundation: we had to think about whether I was better or worse than someone because our very survival as an animal depended on it. The line of those ancestors who didn't are no longer with us.

But when you realize that death will always get us, that it can come at any time and at the hands of any person or thing, you (hopefully) let go of the fear and stop comparing yourself. The cycle then begins to look more flat (with some fluctuation, as we are all still human):

And in that flatness, there is, true, the absence of exuberance that we derive from success, as well as the absence of suffering that we derive from failure. But there is peace. Stillness. Wonder. Harmony. Love. Compassion.

While all this is a wonderful, priceless benefit of studying the martial arts, I don't know that one could ever communicate that to the potential student, like a sales point in a brochure. It would be a bit like trying to describe sight to someone who has been blind their whole life!

I'm glad I have trusted in the process and in my teachers, who most assuredly knew. Here's to many more "eye-opening" experiences.

Judo kasushi: Push/Pull

I've known about this little kazushi trick for a while now, and it's proven very useful over the years.

Recently, however, I've started playing with a little variation. I'll use my right hand (the collar grip to do the light "on/off" action to uke's shoulder as he's stepping back. Then, instead of using both hands flicking back to get him pitched forward, I'll simply lift my left elbow. The right hand stays out of it, and my left does literally nothing more than raise the elbow (the hand does nothing).

Using both hands, it seems, you get a fairly even reaction, and as Nick says, you can jump in there for any number of throws. With the method I just described, uke's reaction tends to be somewhat lopsided. I "tick" him to his back left corner, then "tock" him to his right front corner. Mostly, it's a nice set-up for harai tsurikomi ashi, just a little more diagonal. The elbow or the wrist do basically the same thing, I think, but going one side then the other creates some interesting vectors no matter which way you step (stepping around for a double foot sweep, etc.)

And along with it, I've been playing with changing up my stepping pattern. At the same moment I lift the elbow, I also take a slightly truncated, shorter step than what I had been doing, which exaggerates the forward pitch. This sudden change in the length of my stride has always been a fascination to me lately, but shorter AND longer.

Anyway, if you have a chance to explore the rest of these videos, DO. They will revolutionize your judo. Beautiful.

Nage komi video

A lovely bit of nage komi with Nick Lowry sensei and Greg Ables sensei.

Aikido brought to life

"Instructors can impart only a fraction of the teaching. It is through your own devoted practice that the mysteries of Aikido are brought to life."

—Morihei Ueshiba

Standing on the shoulders of giants

In a post the other day, I talked about how trying to decide which art is best is kind of silly, especially when thinking about what we do as an "art". Then Sensei Strange talked about the evolution of an art as compared to the koryu schools, who would like to keep things pretty much as they had been done for centuries. Both of us even mentioned Picasso, and it reminded me of something.

In college, where I studied graphic design, there would always be students who wanted to push the envelope with their work, like with typography, for example. They'd seen the likes of designer David Carson, who got all crazy with type, grunged it up, used numbers for letters, and completely turned it on it's head in ways that had never been seen before, and wanted to do take the same kind of creative leaps. The professors, meanwhile, had a bit of a challenge on their hands.

On one hand, they didn't want to stifle a young student's creative urges. They didn't want to say, No, stop thinking outside the box and conform to the way designers have been laying out type for centuries.

On the other hand, while getting crazy with your typography may look cool, if you've failed to communication a specific message to your audience (because they can't read the dumb thing, for instance), then ultimately, the whole design has failed. In other words, the Rules, the ones that have been around for centuries, where developed for a reason. Typographers learned from centuries of practice what will communicate effectively, and what won't.

In short, what the professors always told us was this: Learn the rules, master the rules, then learn how and when to break them.

Pascal Krieger described this process in his book "Jodo: The Way of the Stick" as Shu-Ha-Ri, the natural progression of apprenticeship, practice and mastery (not just in martial arts, but in any craft). In the first stage, shu, the student does exactly what his sensei tells him to do, over and over, sometimes without explanation. In the ha stage, the student breaks free, teaching on his own, learning new things and meeting people who have a different approach to the craft, although his style is still heavily influenced by his teacher. In the last stage, ri, the craftsman can return to his master and perhaps succeed him eventually, or more likely, he will want to do his own thing, to create a personal style based on his own ideas.

Let's take a look at Picasso again. Here are a few examples of his work as a young student:

Not what we typically think of when we think of Picasso, right? Who knew he could actually draw that well? (He was actually much better than his classmates and his own artist father even as a child.) But this is where he started, where all of us start—learning the Rules, the traditions, the way it's been done for centuries, because, well, there's a good reason why they do it that way.

It was only after "learning the rules" that he could find ways to break them. And what he did shook up the art world; no one had never seen anything quite like it before.


Even today, many people stand in front of his paintings in a museum and say, "Phh! Look at that! The figures are all crooked, the eyes are messed up. I could do that in about five minutes!"

But could you? I mean, really, could you? I always want to shove a paint brush and a canvas into the hands of those people and tell them simply: "Okay, show me. Go ahead."

I seriously doubt they could. What looks so deceptively simple, so new and fresh, is really the result of a long, intensive study and mastery of the old, which then gives birth to the inevitable personal expression. That's what I think of when I watch Ueshiba. That's what I think of when I see Picasso. And artists from both worlds have continued to build on what they did, to experiment, to push it further each one generation to the next.

The art world would suffer and stagnate if everyone simply learned to paint like Picasso did, right? If we learned anything from him, it's not how to paint, but how to learn to paint.

Which art is best?

I recently read this interesting article on Aikido Journal by Toby Threadgill, entitled "Assumptions." 

It begins: "Recently I was introduced to a gentleman interested in martial arts training. He was not really aware of what I teach or of what constitutes Nihon Koryu Jujutsu. He just assumed that because I taught it, that I must believe it to be “the best”. When I told him I did not believe the art I taught to be “the best”, an uncomfortable silence ensued. I finally broke this taciturn moment by explaining that there is actually no such thing as a “best” martial art."

It's a nice article, and I don't think I could improve upon it by anything that I say. Ultimately, no one is bulletproof. No art art will save you 100% of the time under 100% of circumstances. And the purpose of studying any given art will be vastly different from a police officer to a retired school teacher. 

In terms of practicallity, it's almost like saying a hammer is the best tool out there, and certainly better than anyone else's tool. Sure, as long as you encounter nails and things that need to be whacked in general and maybe pried apart with the back claw. But a hammer can't do what a saw or screwdriver can.

In terms of an art, well, such petty suppositions get even sillier. It's like saying Monet is better than Picasso. Better at what? They paint in different ways and set out to accomplish different things—but both wonderful and beautiful, and both changed the way the world looked at art.