The number of existing martial arts is very high, different sources provide different numbers. To be conservative, we can consider that there exist more than 150, each one of them developed in a different place, for different reasons, with different names, and goals. Despite that, all of them are disciplines based on the body, regardless of whether you can use weapons or not, the foundation of each martial art system is based on the knowledge of the body. From the knowledge of the body, its biomechanics and movements, common principles can be found. They can be discovered because despite all the variations, an effective martial art is based on the optimization of the resources that we have, and the main resource is the body. Like you can find common physics in flight, and you don’t have a different law for aircraft, helicopters, and pigeons, this is the same for martial arts. I’m not saying that all of these systems fly in the same way, all of them are particularly different in the specific mechanism, but the generalization of how they fly is governed by the same lift principle. In the same way, not all people are the same, but generally, all of our bodies are composed of the same components.
The epiphany
I was astonished when, during a lesson of Taekwondo, a Korean system mainly based on kicks, my teacher explained to me the technique to throw a punch. It was incredible, during that time I was going through my second year of university and I was studying some new cool things about physics. My teacher told me that when you throw a punch, you should be fast following the shortest path between you and the opponent, and the movement must be a combination of a straight line, and a rotation. It was incredible for me, he was telling me how to maximize the energy associated with a moving body by leveraging all the components of the kinetic energy.
My teacher was not a physicist or an engineer, as probably neither was the person who invented Taekwondo. But this was a principle, and it was discovered just through experience of repeating the same movement multiple times.
It is probably funny, but this has been an epiphany for me. I realized that the world is based on some principles, and discovering patterns across different fields and systems is amazing!
Judo and WingTsun
I started practicing WingTsun (WT) almost 1 year ago, and I practiced Judo for, well, I don’t really know how much time, but it is more than 10 years. These two systems are completely different at first glance:
- Judo is based on hand grips, while WT completely avoids them.
- WT is based on small movements, while Judo is based on very big ones.
- Judo has a big part of the system based on ground fighting, while in WT this is the worst situation you can find yourself in.
- WT is based on punches, while Judo is based on projections.
We could continue the list, but this is enough to get the point. The two systems try to achieve the same goal, which is personal defense, by following a completely different approach. The fact that the two martial arts are different is one of the most interesting parts for me, because since neither of them is perfect, and it is always possible to find synergies and improve your personal system.
Despite the specific rules or movements being different, the more I started diving into them, the more I started realizing how they are both based on some common principles. In the remaining part of this brief article I will try to present the common principles I’m discovering. The order in which they are presented is not associated with any logical or temporal order, and the list will be updated based on the continuous learning of the system.
Reduce muscle activation
Every martial art is based on contact with the opponent. Assuming we are not the first mover, because we just want to use these systems for self-defense, our action is based on some sort of information that the opponent is sending us. This information can be perceived with the eyes or with physical contact. The more our muscles are engaged, the harder and slower the information will arrive at our brain, allowing us to act on it. The result is that if we become aware of a particular danger later, we also have less time to react, and our reaction will be more impulsive and less controlled.
I like to compare this phenomenon to voltage, current, and resistance, whose behavioral relation is governed by Ohm’s Law:
In this metaphor, current is the information that reaches our brain, voltage is the stimulus from the opponent, and resistance is our muscle tension. The higher the resistance, meaning our muscle activation, the less information (current) flows from the contact point to our brain. There is an inverse relationship between the two.
For this reason, muscle activation should be limited as much as possible to let the principles on which the system is based make the difference. It is probably just a myth, but WT was invented by a small female monk, and for this reason, its movements and techniques are not based on muscles by any means, but are designed to be effective regardless of the opponent.
I used to do push-ups before every WT lesson, and regularly, two of my classmates used to point out how my structure was too rigid. It was very hard for me to understand what they were trying to tell me; in the end, it was not something to understand with the mind, but with the body. I then discovered that doing the initial push-ups was the reason. This pre-training phase was forcing all my upper body muscles to be engaged and conditioning the movement, making my perception of the arms more dulled.
Be one with the ground
TODO
Rotation around the center line
TODO
Connection with the opponent
TODO