A chilled Filly

Wednesday 25 February 2015

Another exercise

Talking of relaxation there was a second technique to keep in mind that I find very useful when playing online with a horse.

Bear with me on this one  

It starts with two folks holding your forearms with both hands. They hold tightly such that your upper arms are out horizontally from your shoulders and your elbows bent so your forearms are point vertically downwards. They can even lift up a little on the forearms to put you in a very awkward position. You'll find that you can barely move and indeed I have seen film of police marching someone off like this.

However the reason you can't move is that the grip on your arms makes you want to move your arms.
The trick is to forget about your arms and realise you can still move the rest of your body. So totally relax your shoulders and just leave your forearms where they are. Take a step back with one foot and gently kneel down. Then whilst kneeling slowly sit back on your heels, still keeping your arms loose. You'll find you have to be leaning forwards from your waist at this point. Then just slow raise your torso to the upright position, still kneeling and put "weight" in your arms so they drop to your sides.
You'll find that if you are still loose in your arms your opponents will be inexorably pulled off balance and if they don't let go will fall to the ground either side of you. At no point did you use your arm muscles or really use any strength at all, just position and your weight.
I weigh 86 kgs and I've had a 55kg girl pull me over doing this, so relative weight is of little importance.
Tony, my sensei, describes the feeling on the uki (guy holding the arm) as "whoa, ok I'll go over here then" rather than "your not pulling me over there". Done properly this should provide a feeling of wanting to follow the pressure rather than wanting to pull back against it.

So how does this relate to horsemanship?
I now try to avoid using muscles when I play online. I think more about body position and just having weight in my arms.
So if a horse pulls my arm out straight I don't use arm muscles to pull back. They are way to weak and when applying that much power cannot be subtle enough with the way the power is applied and released.
If the horse pulls I try to imagine my arms are very heavy and want to swing back to my side from whence they came before the pull occurred. If the horse still pulls I just think about sitting back away from the horse similar to what I just described. Not kneeling down of course, but the same intention.
The same idea of relaxed but powerful ki drawing the horse towards me. But the drawing is in a smooth way.

It is the way that the force is applied that matters rather than the amount used and to apply the force correctly I try to use relaxation and ki (intention).


After a little searching on youtube I came across Seishiro Endo Shihan demonstrating the ideas to a class in Japan. It's not the same exercise that I just described but has many of the same ideas. If you look at around 4 minutes 30 seconds into the video you'll see some ideas that more closely relate to online work. Hope this helps the understanding of my ramblings

  Seishiro Endo Shihan

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