Let’s try to look at the practice of a martial discipline from the perspective of balance.

As training progresses, we soon realize that posture gradually changes and with it the ability to keep a certain balance. Over time, the two concepts somehow overlap and represent our ability to manage the body in the most functional way possible in relation to the conditions around us.

More or less instinctively, the practitioner of Martial Arts develops the awareness that balance is an adaptive phenomenon: the body, even in a state of rest, makes continuous postural adjustments.

This is a first, fundamental, re-discovery: balance does not coincide with rigidity, rather it is exactly the opposite. In fact, when a beginner starts with the first exercises, he/she usually expresses rigid movements: it is an inevitable remapping of motor skills.

Through the exercises performed, one experiences some key “sensors” of physical balance. By hooking a partner’s head under the chin (irmi nage) with our arm, we disrupt the internal mechanisms of his/her ear. These are real accelerometers that return information about the position of the head in relation to the axis of the body and which, when disturbed, compromise the balance.

The blurring of vision with a close and not necessarily impactful atemi, confuses the system’s ability to compensate for the anteroposterior movements, making the person unable, even for a fraction of a second, to move forward or backward in a fluid and free way.

Going barefoot on the mat amplifies the capacity of those that are real pressure sensors (baropressors) that, through the skin, return information about the quality of the ground, making the feet capable of absorbing and returning energy, giving stability to the body. In this, we directly and continuously experience the fundamental and continuous contribution of the ankles and hips to balance.

As practice progresses, physical balance is perceived as the result of continuous external and internal information to our body, which involves both the sensory organs and the fine perception of the adaptation of the musculoskeletal system and the viscera.

By becoming familiar with the angles of imbalance, the practitioner experiences the limit of his/her own stability. Walking itself represents a continuous going beyond the limit of stability to search for a temporary point of support and balance.

The contact surface of a human being on the ground (or on the tatami!) is very limited. The various postures, such as the rooting of the guard (think of the hanmi in Aikido), increase the support polygon, that is, the surface given by the joining of the posterior and anterior parts of the contact points. However, these only partially resolve the precariousness of balance.

The attack, whatever it is, therefore requires that there is, at the same time, the renunciation of balance by the attacker (who goes beyond his own stability limit) and contact with the body of his partner.

Upon closer inspection, the physical connection -let’s think above all of a grab- gives the attacker a bond that gives him two more contact surfaces (the feet of the attacked) and therefore a much larger support polygon than he could ever create alone.

Without having orthopedic and posturology skills, the practitioner of Martial Arts therefore becomes an expert in the field of his/her own and other people’s Tonic Postural System and the techniques reveal themselves for what they are, that is, tools of awareness, where the controlled predation of balance activates a system of restoration of the entire system.

At least three small conclusions can therefore be drawn.

The first is that the principle of yielding, inherent in all traditional martial disciplines, is an essential requirement for being able to fully experience a totally lived balance.

The second is that the execution of techniques according to the pre-established lines allows the dynamic restoration of the conditions of balance disturbed by an attack in the most functional way possible. We can notice that the lines that ankles and hips define in the execution of technical forms are the most direct to facilitate the activation of all postural muscles.

The third, intuitively trivial but not so from the point of view of the real consequences is that conceiving aggression as a predation of balance changes the approach to conflict situations. An aggression is not and will never be acceptable but seeing an embodied imbalance in the aggressor can change our response.

A response that, in unbalancing someone who is already de facto unbalanced, does nothing but give back to him what is most precious: a mirror.

Without forgetting the small detail that in practice… half the time we are the preyed and the other half of the time, we are the predators, those who have lost their balance to the point of having to look for it in others.

Disclaimer: Picture by Alexas Fotos from Pexels