The Way of Least Resistance

In my article " Xingyi stepping vs. karate stepping " I noted 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". While I'm on this topic, and while I'm on the topic of lessons learned from studying the internal arts (see " You know too many forms "), I thought I'd deal with another topic that I have, for many years, taken as a given - namely the answer to the "engima of tiger mouth in cat stance". You might well ask: "What is this enigma?" I'll start by explaining that the tiger mouth (tora guchi) is a commonly used technique in Okinawan kata, particularly in the Naha te systems. It usually comes at the end of a mawashi uke (roundhouse block). Sometimes the technique is executed in a sanchin dachi ("sanzhan" in Chinese systems). But more often than not, it occurs in a neko ashi dachi (cat stance). ...

My good friend Zach Zinn asked the following question on the Tradtional Fighting Arts Forum : "Do you think maybe age-uke is just Goju's hiki-uke done higher than normally seen? I find myself performing it more like hiki-uke most of the time and it works fine, and since age-uke is notably absent from every koryu Goju kata, it makes me wonder what is being said by it's presence in the first kata usually taught." I think the age uke and hike uke are very different in their basic form, but they do approach each other when applied... Age uke is a basic rendering of haiwan nagashi uke - the block one sees with the simultaneous upper block and punch as is found in long fist, taiji, bagua, xingyi etc. The key difference between this block and the age uke is that the body turns (at least to some extent) to let the attacker's momentum be deflected sideways, not just directly up. This is the case even with pao quan from xingyi (where the " simultaneous " punch is...

Like most other karateka, practitioners of goju ryu faithfully practise the standard age uke (rising block) during basics training. They will apply it in ippon kumite (one-step sparring), "find" it in kata bunkai (application analysis) and desperately try to apply it in sparring. But is it really a goju technique? What karateka call "age uke" is really a basic shorin technique. The only kata in which it is found are the 2 gekisai forms, developed and introduced by Miyagi in the early 1940s as basic kata for school children. Prior to that one wonders whether it was even practised in goju dojos... This question has lately led me on a journey to discover whether goju ryu has its "own" rising block. What did goju/naha te practitioners use for defences to head height attacks before age uke was incorporated into the syllabus? As summarised in the video below, I feel that the answer is to be found in goju's famous "mawashi uke" or roundhouse bl...