“Experienced practitioners of the martial arts can demonstrate impressive feats of coordination and skill. Often their skills are shrouded in mysticism and eastern spirituality and these feats are sometimes attributed to the development of Ki or Chi energy. In particular the ‘internal arts’, which are those that use primarily soft blending movements, focus on the development of Ki and Chi. This paper focuses on these internal aspects as applied the physical test or feat called unraisbale body and its development in the art of aikido, but is somewhat generalisable to other martial arts. Some historical background to the concept of Ki is presented as well as suggesting why it is used as a teaching paradigm. Unraisable body, a teaching curriculum example of Ki development is presented and an equivalent physical paradigm is suggested. The test is performed under laboratory conditions with a tri axial force plate to validate the physical paradigm.”
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Interesting. Have been thinking about joints and leverage. Part of the unraisable body success is relaxation of muscular tension that would give the lifters leverage. Part, as mentioned in the article, is changing the relationship of the lifting force to the levers (arms) of the lifted individual. When the “liftee” does things right, the lifting force is neither aligned well with the “lifters’” bodies, nor with “liftee’s”. The experimental technique could be expanded to lifting with a bear hug…
Excellent study.
I am disappointed when people put Ki on a pedestal and treat it as some magical force. With your study, you have wonderfully explained mechanically the ins and outs of this classic test.
That is not to say that Ki does not exist or the use of imagination is useless. It allows our minds to integrate with our bodies and perform the structual adjustments necessary to render our body unliftable.
I like to treat Ki and Imagination as the way to tap into our ‘body mind’ or our intuitive intelligence to rapidly calculate and implement what is necessary to perform an action. I suppose we can consider it to be an analog explanation of what you have described that readily maps to our bodies and the way we move.
After all, the act of walking is driven from our subconsious. Imagine if we needed to calculate the forces and timing required to take a simple step. We would get a headache and fall flat on our face just trying to lift our foot. (Which is why making a authentic walking robot is no simple feat)
With the knowledge you have provided, it frees the budding aikidoka from trying to be more powerful by forcing their Ki or making it bigger in some way. Once they understand that Ki is not the engine or the source of power for these feats, but is rather the steering wheel they can focus on refining it or making it more delicate and sensitive rather than big and dull.
Just another add on…
Ki is something which can give the practicioner faith, and slowly wean them off resistive instinctual behaviour.
Just as religions like to use icons as something to which they can focus their devotion or practice. Many people would have trouble praying to nothing… I can’t even imagine how you would word a prayer without mentioning some deity, be it God, Nature, the Universe etc
Ki is similar in that it is something that we can use as a basis or philosophy with which we can tie our techniques together, and pass learnings to others.