The Way of Least Resistance

Introduction My preceding discussion about the pitfalls of "natural stepping" 1 has prompted me to address the issue of why so many karate schools put great emphasis on stepping in basic stances. Certainly, historical factors play a role: just before and after World War II, karate was popularized in Japan as a kind of exercise for school children. Karate masters like Gichin Funakoshi (who was a school teacher and who is credited as being one of the first to introduce karate to mainland Japan) are said to have quite deliberately tailored their classes to mass teaching, emphasizing basic training in large groups, often at the expense of bunkai (applications) and more in-depth understanding. When Westerners came to Japan in the post-War years, this "basic" karate was generally what they encountered - and naturally it was this karate they brought back. To some extent, this "basic" karate remains a fixture in classes right around the world to this day. Onl...

When I first started this blog my main objective was to put down on "cyber paper" some of the martial principles and methods that I've taken for granted for many years but which I hadn't seen discussed elsewhere, at least to my satisfaction. It surprises me that after 3 years of blogging I still keep coming across martial principles/methods that I take as self-evident, but of which others might not even be aware. One of these is the difference between karate and xingyiquan as regards the methods of stepping and punching/striking employed in those arts. Given my recent experience in Taiwan (which involved many, many hours of xingyi practice), I thought I'd start the year with a discussion of just this issue. My friend and colleague at the Traditional Fighting Arts Forums, Victor Smith recently posted this video of the xingyi lian huan quan form and suggested that it bore a certain similarity to karate. I think he was right: An example of xingyi's...

A colleague at the Traditional Fighting Arts Forums recently posed this question: The only explanation i've ever heard for the crescent stepping (other than just being able to generally move in various ways) comes from George Mattson's "The Way of Karate" where he states that it represents protecting the groin as you move into the opponent's range. Any other explanations? Surely there's more to it than that..? My answer is: not really. To my mind, the crescent step is the way one should perform basic ayumi ashi (natural stepping) when there is no initial lunge with the front foot (more on this in a minute). This is primarily so as to protect your groin (which the crescent step achieves by bringing your knees together during the step). There is very little "time loss" because the arc drawn by your knee inwards does not significantly alter the path taken by your hip. So crescent stepping is quite useful for general movement because it is inherently p...