People, in karate and other martial disciplines, lean heavily on muscling the movement, technique. Until people gain a realistic experience in applying physiokinetic's through application of physical methods/techniques they don't really understand how the dynamic tension of muscles is NOT a manifestation of power. It looks cool and is perceived by the minds lack of applicable experience as strong, powerful and applicable to applied methods/techniques.
It is evident in both basics and kata that what is also explained as "chinkuchi" is applied power but, it isn't. At least on a level that is conducive to defense-protection simply because as explained later in the sub-principle of "relaxation" it is a high consumer of energy and thus power and force.
This is why so much effort must be applied to proper teaching of folks for defense-protection applications and methodologies because only through those principles can one actually defend and protect. People are taught way to often that there demonstration of dynamic tension and muscling it are how we defend and protect ourselves without fully understanding that there are a plethora of missing components ergo the chapters on “arc” that follow later in this book.
Dynamic tension has other values and benefits such as muscle conditioning and, even, strengthening. It is tantamount to weight lifting that strengthens muscles and creates as a benefit health and fitness but as to applied power and force in the heat of an attack - not so much. This type of training contributes a lot to one’s endurance, fitness and mind-strength but not much to actual force and power, let along appropriate realistic methods and forces necessary to stop the damage of an aggressive attacker.
Take for instance the dynamic tension used in the sanchin kata, the effort is to tense to such a degree that you witness a certain amount of excessive laboring of the breath as well as the muscles. To my mind this is an American driven exercise because we believe, assume and perceive strength through the demonstration of such dynamic tensioning. In truth, the type of dynamic tension used in sanchin is way above the natural balance one should seek when performing the sanchin kata.
When a practitioner applies too much tension, stress is the real culprit here, they cause and trigger the results of bad stress that actually can result in a loss of health and fitness also creating a greater stress of the cardiovascular systems such as that measured through taking blood pressure readings. The true application of sanchin is a proper amount of sanchin breathing and dynamic tension that can only be taught properly and learned adequately by an application of yin-yang sanchin.
If you have to “strain” in performing any aspect of the kata then, in my belief and understanding, you are not performing the kara correctly. This is like weight lifting where the lifter believes that to lift heavy weights they have to take a breath then while lifting hold that breath to achieve a stronger and heavier lift. That also is excessive unnecessary stress and strain; one should be able to lift their maximum while breathing, i.e., not holding the breath at any time in the lift. The same process should be used in sanchin performance.
Muscling it is a misnomer and based on misinformation and misunderstanding so that should be taken into consideration when teaching and training defense-protection as well as martial discipline regardless of its intent overall, i.e., sport, philosophical or defense-protection.
Let me add in, if you perform sanchin-shime on a practitioner and you are hitting them hard, slapping moderately light is best, then you are not performing shime correctly either.
Many martial artists will argue this point but I suggest that using the idea of greater strength, etc., from sanchin is that they are achieving those levels through a collection of many fitness endeavors and that those supplement the degradation of fitness and strength of excessive sanchin application along with all those other muscling it applications.
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