Fundamentals are critical no matter what cause one day you get older and having a solid foundation in fundamental principles means you will still be formidable. Fundamental principles of martial systems never expire while youth does, speed does and so on. It is just a fact of life, if you wish to be able to defend yourself you had better focus more on principles over the fun stuff.
I am sixty-two this Xmas and I have a bum knee, a torn cartilage behind that same knee, stiffness in the legs and other issued in the legs from my time with Polio (one day stopped walking, a year later the legs came back and as age becomes prominent those same legs are enduring repercussions. Then there is all the stress on my body over the years. What does this mean, I can’t do what I use to do at age twenty-five.
As I aged into my forties and fifties it was about teaching and training practitioners who were in their late teens and early twenties with a smattering of thirties and forties thrown in and I can tell you that when it came to two person practice and kumite, etc. I can not and could not move the way I did at twenty-five so …… I had to be sneaky.
I am not saying all the time because there is a time to teach and a time to teach, i.e. teach by allowing things to happen in a manner that allowed the practitioner to see, feel, smell, etc. and make conscious decisions then a time to teach by going at it as hard and as fast as possible to stress things a bit. In other words we played a lot and had fun then we got serious and played a lot having some fun.
At sixty-two I feel a need for solicitude in practice and training. There is much I can accomplish without the stresses and strains, both mental and physical, and injuries that come with seriously practicing while having fun at it (me, I was very serious but I still had fun being serious).
Many of these younger practitioners often asked, “How do you manage it?” Mostly what I say is that I have learned how to use my body and mind so that when I age I can still use them properly and with seemingly ease but in reality it is the use of craftiness in that I use principles to achieve results over just “muscling it, etc.”
It comes down to “Whole body machinations.” When you work hard and diligently to get the most out of your body it tends to work well, better than others who lean toward muscling it. Whole body machinations are about proper application of physiokinetics (one of the major fundamental principles of martial systems). When you add in “techniques” along with the two others as additional supplements to push whole body machinations to maximum overdrive, i.e. theories and philosophies, you get good stuff. All this provided, for SD, you have also trained the stress of SD.
Old men who are “Smart men,” can go the distance. We have read about and seen this in those Asian Martial Artists who have gone on even after dropping deep into the “Winter years (age 60+),” Oh, yeah, it doesn’t hurt if you are one of those guys who has built up a lot of real life experience.
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