Before driving into the mechanics of locomotion. I thought I'd take a moment to talk about efficiency. A topic that comes up quite often in conversations surrounding martial arts, but in reality, isn't really a necessity. After all, one might argue that as long as you win, doing so efficiently is either entirely subjective or neither here nor there. This is especially true if that efficiency comes at the cost of time that could be spent training other more practical skills. I.e. Reading long winded articles on body mechanics rather than hitting the bags (you know who you are).
This has long been a point of internal contention in my own training. So in this article I hope to explore what efficiency means and its potential role in the pedagogy of movement. This should help to set the stage for following articles on locomotion and give more context to the discussion.
I’ll start with a memory. When I attended my first Shastar Vidiya Italy camp, Gurudev Nidar Singh told me, “if you master the walk in Shastar Vidiya, you master the art”. At the time I didn't fully understand it, but over the years it began to make more sense.
Understanding efficiency.
Ideally, even if not absolutely necessary, in most cases we want to minimise inefficiency. There are various arguments for why, like saving energy or producing more power etc. But that's not really the focus of this article. What I want to discuss is what efficiency actually is, and how it changes depending on the context. In that, a physically efficient gait for jogging, isn’t one for sprinting. Then there is the efficiency of the training itself. Though you can work out alone, working with a qualified specialist will ensure you reach your goals efficiently and safely. There's also mental efficiency, whether that be in mental arithmetic, strategy or athletic quick thinking. Properly defining what type of efficiency we are ultimately aiming for, is important on many levels of pedagogy. Building on this, it's important to consider how time itself plays quite a big role in efficiency.
Temporal Efficiency
More broadly speaking, you have what you might call a kind of general efficiency in relation to time - A person's ability to process information and with minimal effort come up with solutions, either using or in relation to available time. Put another way, the ability to use time, efficiently. An attribute that often relies on a combination of intuition, insight and adaptability. Whether that be the intuition for playing music, being agile and quick thinking in a sporting context, or having the insight to quickly come up with elegant solutions in any other domain.
For example a dancer may have peerless time keeping that makes their movements effortless. A footballer may quickly calculate the optimal timing to avoid defenders. An engineer rapidly devises solutions to save a big project.
Unlike the other types of efficiency, this definition spans physical, mental and most importantly, time dimensions.
The Efficient Use of Time.
Learning: An Intuitive approach
I learned to play piano by ear when I was quite young, driven by my interest in music and obsessive nature. However, counterintuitively, I was actually a very bad student when I tried my hand at classical lessons. See, by that point, me and a friend of mine were already playing music together in church. We’d learned our instruments largely via experimentation and coaching on the go from other musicians. Because of this, I found it extremely difficult going back to square one with the slow teaching style of classical piano.
I just couldn't grasp the point of trying to learn in such an in-depth and exacting manner so early on. In these lessons they tried to teach me exactly how to sit, move my hands and to play really basic songs like twinkle twinkle little star, “properly”. Bear in mind I learned to play Fur Elise (poorly) via experimenting when I was 10. To me, It felt like aimlessly jumping through hoops.
In my mind, the best singers, dancers and musicians probably didn't learn their skills this way. I believed an intuition for playing could only be achieved by feeling your way through the process and getting the chance to experiment early on, as I had in church. You'd be given a couple of chords and maybe a few notes in the right key to play with, before being encouraged to just try to keep up with the band. Over time, you'd be shown new skills and drills to practise that you could incorporate into a very functional understanding of playing music. I'd seen so many amazing singers and musicians learn this way, who didn't have much if any classical training at all. Yet, technically very skillful and the subject of my admiration as a young musician. Needless to say, I saw this classical approach of laboriously aiming for perfection from day one, as a real hindrance to my process.
Learning: An Un-intuitive Approach
It was only years later when attempting to play the cello, did I recognise the pragmatism of using my time differently. See the experimental method that worked so well with the piano alongside certain styles of gospel music. Didn't fit nearly as nicely with the cello.
When I first approached learning the cello, somewhere in my head I believed, if I could just take a few lessons and get some notes out of the instrument. I could probably just feel my way to playing it intuitively, thanks to my background as a church musician (the sheer hubris 🤦🏾♂️). But after buying my cello and taking my first lesson, I quickly realised not only would this plan have failed. It would require a gargantuan amount of time, effort, and pure talent to get to that stage.
This isn't to say that learning the piano wasn't also difficult, but making a decent sound was just a matter of pressing a key. I'd also spent years messing around with the piano as a kid, long before I started playing in church. Meaning getting to grips with experimentation on the fly didn't take very long. With the cello however, even that first step would require some serious practice and discovery, not to mention cramp in my hands and shoulders. Without explicit instruction on how to reliably and efficiently make the right sound, there’d be a huge mountain of groundwork before I could even begin to experiment musically.
I learned that although experimentation has its place. There are some skills with such a high floor that this method becomes extremely inefficient time wise. In such cases reliability has to take precedence. This becomes even more critical when you add risk into the mix. Where repeated mistakes can compound and form habits that further increase risk as time goes on. Making learning more and more difficult, and at best leading to a repetitive strain injury, at worst, increasing the likelihood of serious injury or death in some scenarios. Because of this, the relationship between time, risk and movement have to be considered from the very beginning.
Kal Kavach : The Armour of Time, Death and Movement.
This got me thinking about a concept we’re taught in Shastar Vidiya called Kal Kavach. Kal is commonly translated to encompass time, death, space and movement, whilst Kavach means armour. Though its significance had been impressed upon us, I had taken it to simply mean “don't be in the wrong place at the wrong time”. My experience with the cello however, made me realise that Kal Kavach, is actually a really tidy way of discussing and prioritising efficiency of movement in any context.
Prioritising Training with Kal Kavch
Time and risk play a crucial role in movement across all contexts. In sports, movement style can often be inferred and optimised based on how Kal, or time and the risk of injury/death, relate to movement.
For example :
Duration - This determines the priority for the economy of movement. Whether movements will be optimised towards explosivity or endurance.
Space - This determines the priority for tempo and timing. Over large distances, rhythmic movements that use a tempo, become optimal. As balanced cyclical and or reciprocal motions have less inertia, and thus reduce effort. I.e marathon running Vs an MMA fight where darting footwork is more optimal. As for Timing, by this I mean the ability to anticipate an event and act at precisely the right moment to capitalise on that foresight. I.e the difference between knowing exactly when to pass the ball in team sports, as opposed to the sheer reflexes required to hit a ball in pro baseball. Over larger distancing, timing becomes more crucial than reflexes.
Synchronicity - This determines the priority for keeping time. Which is to say a person's awareness of the passage of time and their ability to maintain a consistent tempo or rhythm. This becomes a priority for coordination when multiple participants need to act in unison. I.e. Horse riding and dance require great synchronicity, whereas wrestling is inherently more sporadic in nature.
Risk - As mentioned, this for me determines the importance of reliability, as well as influencing the degree of risk. If something is very high risk, it might benefit you to spend more time practising the basics. While the less available time you have to avoid serious risk, the higher the inherent risk.
Prioritising Temporal Efficiency
Then there are more open skills which incorporate a strong cocktail of all of these requirements. Things like free style dance, various team sports, and of course, traditional battlefield arts. They incorporate numerous skills for both large and short distances, have short or long durations, have elements of high and low synchronicity, whilst also having high and low risk movements.
In this context, it's a person's use of available time that becomes THE* deciding factor on efficiency. Counterintuitively, slowing down and drawing out a movement can be strategically more efficient than moving quickly. When time is at stake, an efficient gait for covering a lot of distance in a straight line, can have a different rhythm when aiming to do so in a tight snaking fashion
Time is intimately linked with both physical and mental efficiency. It influences our movement, predictive power and strategic thinking, which can appreciate or depreciate depending on the time available. Moreover, time directly impacts the level of risk in our decision-making process.
Mastery in these open skills is determined by the ability to use time efficiently. I.e. prioritising intuition, insight and mental / physical agility, over any single athletic skill.
Aiming for this kind of mastery of time, can only be done by:
Investing an inordinate amount of time on trial and error to hone your intuitions on the go.
And
Potentially accepting the high risks of injury/death in some cases
Or, on the opposite end of the spectrum
Learning in a slow, deliberate and exacting manner for reliability, before experimentation.
And
Prioritising training around avoiding the possibility of injury / death.
Which is the very type of classical teaching style I've always had problems with. Reflecting on this, I realised my own training methods needed adjustment.
Reflections On My Own Training
I think my problem with classical teaching styles stemmed from a perception shaped by experience with skills that had relatively low entry points. These activities, like boxing, allowed for a sense of accomplishment and progress even as a complete beginner. Landing an effective punch in sparring, for example, doesn't require extensive skill or practice. As the saying goes, "everyone has a puncher's chance." Contrasting sharply with the chance of a beginner holding a decent note in concert on the cello, which inherently requires a great deal of prior skill and practice.
I'd also lost perspective on the time it took to develop my own skills and the risks involved in training. This became particularly evident when I introduced 20kg vests to my class to simulate traditional armour. My decade-plus of experience had honed my awareness of the body and as a result, I'd underestimated the genuine challenges and potential dangers this exercise posed for less experienced practitioners.
This skewed perception influenced my approach when teaching martial arts. I initially believed that early experimentation in sparring, coupled with clever combat games and corrective exercises, would naturally lead students to refinement. I didn't appreciate the importance of reliably moving in an exact manner before experimentation, or the need to develop a deeper appreciation of timing. Having forgotten that even in boxing I spent months doing things like skipping, road work and bag work before being allowed to spar. All of which contributed greatly to my reliability and timing.
My mistake was equating my matured perception of combat and movement, with the actual experience of beginners. As well as equating a traditional battlefield art, with a combat sport. Which though share superficial similarities, have been moulded by very different core requirements.
Though I still see great value in this non-classical approach, after all even my teacher encouraged experimentation and sparring early on. In recent years I’ve started to pay greater attention to the classical teaching style of mastering not just learning the fundamentals.
Mastering the Fundamentals
So what have I changed about my training ? Well In a nutshell, I put a lot more value and focus on “getting the right sound” out of the body so to speak, and the role of time in the fundamentals. Both in how I prioritise my training but also how timing affects different aspects of efficiency. For instance, timing and synchronicity play a huge role in creating structures, agility and avoiding injury. More specifically, rhythm is essential when creating dynamically balanced movements that combine cyclical and reciprocal motion for efficiency. Movements we commonly refer to as pendulums.
One movement that fits the bill well and is rich with utility, is walking. Something we already spend an inordinate amount of our lives doing, which can be practised slowly and very deliberately with very little risk of injury.
By paying greater attention to our walk, we can develop a deeper understanding of fundamental elements of time like; tempo, timing, balance and rhythm. Benefitting locomotion across various gaits and contexts. Because though gaits and movements change, the fundamental physics and timing that make them efficient, do not.
This brings us full circle to the beginning of this article, where I learned the importance of mastering the walk in Shastar Vidiya. This foundational concept sets the stage and context for future articles, where I will delve deeper into my understanding of locomotion and movement efficiency.
Summary
In summary we tend to discuss efficiency through the fairly narrow lens of our own experience and skill sets. Leading us to ignore the arguably more important discussion around context, time management and risk. When we look at traditional battlefield martial arts where the context is fluid, risks are high and motion needs to be intuitive and adaptable above all else. Efficiency largely comes down to our ability to play with time, without injuring ourselves. The latter, a key consideration when your movements may involve armour. Because of this, in the art I study Shastar Vidiya, walking (or marching) like in most militaries, plays an important role in pedagogy. As within this practice, the finer elements of time can be fully appreciated and studied.
Beyond Time
As I'm sure any musician can tell you. It's one thing to keep time, but it's another thing altogether to play with it. Think of the appreciation for time a drummer has, as opposed to a car mechanic. Although timing plays a crucial role in both, one is calculated, the other is entirely intuitive. To properly develop and use this ability, you need to develop an additional trait which I can only describe as a subconscious confidence.
For example, when you play the piano whilst barely being aware of what your fingers are doing, or instinctively pull off that perfectly timed move in a sport or dance. What you require above your temporal awareness is a combination of; comfort in not attending your actions and thoughts, yet a sub conscious complete trust in your ability to keep time. Whether it be in the physics sense of efficiently coordinating complex movement. Or in the time saving sense of cutting out the fears, questions and mental hesitancy associated with uncertainty. Those that disrupt the flow of thought. Time is to rhythm, what sound is to music, what confidence is to temporal efficiency. In terms of training, you might say that developing that faith is as crucial as anything else.
Preview of Next article
Dancing With Gravity part 2 - Time and Gravity
We've spoken about using gravity to initiate a momentum transfer, its effect on structures, and how it interacts with muscle function via our reflexes. What we haven't discussed in any detail however, is gravity's role in collapsing structures to release energy, and the importance of time in this process.
In the article on efficiency, we mentioned that timing and synchronicity play a huge role in creating structures and preventing injury. That being the case, wouldn't we need to establish some sort of internal clock to prevent moving out of sync ? Whilst there are various methods like playing counting games, or using a metronome to achieve this, they primarily engage the mind. Though this has it’s benefits, It doesn't necessarily follow that doing so will allow us to coordinate complex movements across the entire body, in time. Think about robotics, where mimicking a natural human walking gait is still seen as a difficult task, due the sheer amount of processing required.
Fortunately, our bodies possess analog mechanisms for capturing and processing complex information in real-time. One way in which we achieve this, is using universal constants of nature to maintain synchronisation effortlessly. Those constants being time and gravity.
But in true 'martialmachines' form, before we get to this let's look at locomotion in a little more detail to understand how we might get there...
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