A Variation of Uki Gatame (‘floating pin) aka Knee-on-Belly
Taikyoku Budo originated as a set of principles, a different way of looking at martial art techniques and the body skills and mechanics that make those techniques work. The idea, originated by Ellis Amdur, was to give practitioners of the so-called aiki arts, aikido specifically, a set of solo exercises for conditioning the body in a way that would both engrain the movement patterns utilized in partner practice so that those would be more instinctive in a freestyle setting and would also provide a container for a specialized kind of strength training. Budd Yuhasz then saw the universality of these principles and began applying them to grappling and striking. The history of Taikyoku Budo has been written about from multiple perspectives on the Taikyoku Mind & Body site, however, so I will get directly to the point of this particular post. Taikyoku Budo requires that the practitioner maintains his or her options throughout a martial encounter.
One of the fundamental principles of Taikyoku Budo is that all desirable grappling positions are reversible. That is, for a position to be considered ideal in Taikyoku Budo, it must give the practitioner three strategic options: maintain, aggress, or egress. In other words, the practitioner’s goal is to get to a position from which he or she can control the opponent using a pin of some sort, do damage to the opponent with strikes, or get up and get away from the opponent with minimal resistance, all while minimizing the opponent’s ability to defend attacks or do counter damage. This means that any position from which the practitioner cannot easily disengage is not desirable because that position is not reversible.
Many of the best positions for submission grappling (BJJ), and even MMA, such as full mount (high mount is an exception), closed guard, or side control, do not meet this requirement because the person in the less dominant position (uke or ‘receiver’) can still hold the person in the dominant position (tori or ‘taker’) in place by way of a bear hug or the like, making it difficult to disengage and escape, even from the top position, should the circumstance warrant it. Imagine being stuck in full mount while the person on the bottom holds you there so his friends can kick you in the head or securing a perfect side control and the person on bottom suddenly pulls out a knife. These are genuine problems worth considering, but no martial art is meant to do everything perfectly. With limited time to train, we must specialize so that we can maximize our skills in whatever aspect of the martial arts we feel best suits our goals.
For Taikyoku Budo, for our ne-waza (ground grappling) training goals, uki gatame (‘floating pin’ or ‘floating hold’), commonly called knee-on-belly, knee-on-stomach, or knee ride, is the ideal position. Uki gatame is most often seen as a transitional position in submission grappling because it is not the most secure pin from which to attack the neck, arms, or legs and it is often difficult to maintain in MMA because of the slipperiness and flailing that happens in the fight, but the transitional nature of this position is exactly what makes uki gatame perfect for Taikyoku Budo, namely that it is easy to move in and out of. From uki gatame, tori can pin uke down, land devastating elbows or hammer fists, or disengage and retreat or reengage from a better angle. Uki gatame is a position of options.
Originally published in Severna Park Voice, January 2019
For those interested in martial arts in our modern age, the sheer volume of information and options can be overwhelming. Many people will default to that which is close, convenient, or shows up at the top of a Google search. If we think about martial arts as essential life-skill training instead of simply a hobby, more akin to swimming or driving than soccer or stamp collecting (not that there is anything wrong with either of these activities), then we begin to understand that choosing the right martial art or martial art school matters quite a bit, especially when it comes to our personal or family safety. Choosing the right martial art or martial art school should begin with defining one’s goals.
Martial arts can be divided into four main categories of interest. There are martial arts that specialize in self-defense, those that focus on the sporting side of martial arts, traditional or classical martial arts, and those that specialize in addressing predatory violence. Self-defense based martial arts tend to be those that teach an individual how to successfully protect him or herself in the most commonly experienced social violence scenarios, like bullying, street fights, and other such altercations. Sport martial arts teach practitioners the skills and fitness levels that will best enable them to win in specialized competition events. Traditional or classical martial arts are those that have histories dating back before modern times and tend to require an interest in both the historical as well as the physical aspects of martial arts. Martial arts that address predatory violence are much more specialized, teaching techniques and strategies for recognizing, avoiding, and surviving the darkest side of human violence, such as assault, rape, kidnapping, etc. and tend to deal more in small workshops or seminars than ongoing classes like the other three types of martial arts.
By first defining one’s concerns and goals, one is better able to discern which martial art is best for addressing those concerns. Determine first what you hope to get out of martial art training for yourself or your loved ones. Research the different martial arts available in your area and choose the discipline that best suits your interests and goals. Then, seek out the school that offers the martial art or martial arts you are interested in. Many martial arts schools offer multiple programs for individuals with multiple interests or for families who may have a diverse set of interests amongst the members. Do not compromise or settle on a martial art school because of price or proximity if your interest is more than just finding a casual extracurricular activity because not all martial arts, martial art schools, or martial art instructors are created equal. Finally, find the art, school, and teacher or teachers that feel right. Take your time and trust your instincts.
“For me, after leaving my home and living 13 years in a foreign country, if all I did was go there to come back and replicate what I learned over there, as if I had not returned to a very different world, I believe that I would be failing one of the functions of what koryu was, namely, to influence society. I don’t mean something simplistic like, “Well, I’ll modernize it, and I’ll use a baseball bat instead of a sword,” but it has to somehow fit and contribute to my society as opposed to being just an antique that people visit.”
This quote is an example of how a single idea can change our life’s direction. For some context, the word koryu (古流 ‘old flow’) refers to classical Japanese martial arts that originated prior to the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and Ellis Amdur is a licensed instructor in two koryu: Araki-ryu torite kogusoku and Toda-ha Buko-ryu. Ellis Amdur has had a significant influence on my martial art path and, therefore, my life in general. His writings rerouted me from Korean hapkido to the Japanese martial arts and, in an indirect way, Brazilian jiu-jitsu (something I will write about at another time). He introduced me to my teacher and friend, Budd Yuhasz, and my dojo, Kogen Dojo, is named after an amalgam of Japanese characters 古 (ko), meaning ancient or classical, and 現 (gen), meaning present or modern, that he originally put together for his martial art blog: Kogen Budo. The above quote, the topic of this post, was a seed planted in my mind that led to the creation of my own blog, the one you are reading now: Holistic Budo.
If a principle is true, that truth, that principle can be extrapolated and applied in other aspects of life. I never lived nor studied koryu in Japan, but I have been a student of martial arts for most of my adult life. Reading the above quote and the two-part interview it is from, I began thinking about all of the principles and object lessons martial art training have taught me over the years. I then began thinking about how the arts in general, music, literature and even the culinary arts, have shaped and influenced my life. If the arts have given me so much and have helped to make me who I am today, what is my contribution to the landscape? How can I pass on some of what has impacted me and influence the culture around me?
It is not that I like writing, per se. I like telling stories, stories that have meaning to me and may help others to see things from a different perspective. Whether or not anyone reads or finds value in my writing is not my concern. My goal is to have written, to have put my work into the world, to transform what is in my head or in my past into something tangible and potentially useful. For the same reason I show up to the dojo day after day to pass on what has been passed on to me, I do not write for myself, but to be part of a continuum. For me, writing is not about creation or regurgitation, but transformation, the transformation of that which has inspired me into something that may inspire others.
“You can tell real history from fake history because real history is rich and complicated. Fake history is simple and straightforward.” – Damon Smith.
Before I started the Heretics podcast with my old Xingyi instructor and friend, Damon Smith, I thought I knew a bit about martial arts. After all, I’d been practicing, researching, debating, arguing about and had generally been involved in both Chinese and Japanese martial arts for about three decades, earning a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-jitsu along the way.
Japanese martial arts had never appealed to me as a young man – a sea of emotionless robot men in white suits doing unpractical, rigid kata against the air was not my thing. Instead I gravitated towards the Chinese arts, which seemed to be more fluid and full of clever techniques. The reality was that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. But most importantly I didn’t know how Japanese martial arts made more sense once you understood the historical events that gave rise to them. Martial arts are a part of human history. To study them in isolation is to have only a partial understanding of their origins.
I can hear the counter argument to this already – “No! Martial arts were invented to give you the tools to beat the other guy’s brains in, anything else is irrelevant!” No offense, but that’s wrong. Nothing that simple is ever true. Remember, real history is always complicated.
As well as Xingyi from China, Damon is an expert in Japanese Kempo and a serious practitioner of Shamanism. Every week since November last year we’ve sat down on a Thursday night with our microphones and chipped away at a mountain of history to try and find some gold. We started the podcast in Japan around the year 1,000AD. Moving through the different Shogunate eras, from the collapse of the Ashikaga through to the warring states period (1467 – 1600), eventually resulting in the Tokugawa shogunate which lasted up to 1862. Along the way we looked at the Japanese martial traditions that built up through a mix of different influences: shrine sumo (which was way more diverse and complicated than the modern sportif version, and goes back to a time before recorded history in Japan), weapons orientated battlefield arts (which evolved into various schools of jujutsu) and schools of Chinese-influenced civilian martial arts, known as kempo, a Japanese translation of “Quan Fa”, the Chinese term for martial arts. These all added to the mix and so did their connections to various secret societies, religions and yakuza groups.
Tokugawa Tsunayoshi was the fifth shōgun of the Tokugawa dynasty of Japan.
In contrast to the preceding Ashikaga, the Tokugawa shoguns adopted the Confucian model of leadership. Everything in society became highly regulated, including religion, government, contact with other countries and, of course, martial arts. In this way any activity that could become a threat to the Tokugawa was suppressed. It was this period that saw the development the famous Koryu schools, the supposed battlefield arts of Japan preserved as martial arts. In fact, the Koryu were developed after most of the battles had stopped, and were highly controlled by the Tokugawa rulers, which explains the stilted look that was introduced to the martial arts, and still plagues many Japanese martial arts to this day. To be fair to the practitioners of this time, they had no choice. ‘Aliveness’ (to borrow the phrase from Matt Thornton) in martial arts practice was dangerous in the eyes of the Tokugawa rulers. It was a threat, so it had to go.
The Samurai of this period were also not the brave warriors of popular imagination, fighting on battlefields for their Lord’s honour. In fact, they became more like institutionalised bullies with the right to ‘kill and walk away’ to any peasant who happened to rub them up the wrong way. The Katana, the famous Samurai sword, was more often used for lopping of the heads of the defenseless peasantry, than it had been on any battlefield, where horses, guns, spear and bow ruled the day. Underground civilian martial arts in this period and secret societies were developed as a method of protecting the population from ruthless Samurai who pushed things too far.
After the Tokugawa-era ended with the bloody Boshin war followed by the Meiji Restoration (1868), Japan slowly opened up to the outside world. In fact, it was forced open by the British and Americans using violent gunboat diplomacy, but eventually the new era was embraced by the new rulers and also reflected in a new spirit of openness within the martial arts. Aliveness was back in fashion and innovators like Jigoro Kano breathed new life into the martial arts they inherited using the practice of randori (free sparring). His approach was so effective that Kano went from never having trained martial arts at all, to founding his own style in less than 6 years. Ultimately Kano’s Judo would outshine all the other styles of Jiujitsu and change the course of martial arts in Japan entirely, not to mention the rest of the world.
Kano Jigoro (right), the founder of Judo, with Kyuzo Mifune (left)
But there were also new influences coming into Japan from outside during the late nineteenth century. The Japanese were as fascinated by Western culture then as we are in the West by Eastern culture today. They looked to the West for inspiration in effective martial arts and found it in Western boxing and wrestling. The first western boxing gym opened its doors in Japan in 1896, meaning Western Boxing is much, much older than Karate in Japan (a post World War I kempo import from Okinawa in 1922) and even older than Ju Jitsu landing in Brazil (Maeda first arrived in 1914, and returned to live there in 1917 teaching Kano Ryu Jujutsu). Just think about that.
Before the shutters came down again on Japan, with the rise of militarism and nationalism as the result of rabid empire building, leading ultimately to some of the worst atrocities known in human history, some of that martial arts knowledge got out, and spread. Martial artists schooled in these new traditions of Japan travelled to Europe and America, demonstrating their prowess. One of them, Mitsuyo Maeda ended up in Brazil where he met a member of the Gracie family called Carlos Gracie. Free to pursue this randori-style approach to fighting Jiu-Jitsu evolved further in favour of effective ground-based techniques setting it on a path that would eventually lead it all the way to America and the Ultimate Fighting Championship in 1993, where Royce Gracie showcased Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to the world.
The Meiji Restoration period also saw the rise of Shinkōshūkyō, the ‘new religions’, in Japan. In fact, these were the reinvention of old religions. This was the re-emergence of the roots of the original Shinto religion of Japan – shamanism – after being suppressed under the Tokugawa. It was from the corrupted remnants of these new/old traditions, mixed with a new martial art that claimed to be a Koryu, yet which also claimed to be older than the concept of Koryu itself (Daito Ryu), that Aikido ultimately emerged. Its connection to extreme nationalist politics, militaristic societies and a cult-like religious movements is often airbrushed from history, but it explains a lot of its chosen form of expression. And without the full picture of the history that preceded it you wouldn’t have a clue what you were looking at when you saw Morihei Ueshiba throwing people like puppets in an Aikido demonstration.
Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido, 1957.
After the horrors of the second world war were over a defeated Japan looked back to the Meiji restoration period as a golden age of liberalism. The Japanese economy, without a military to fund, and with the US capitalist model to follow, was free to grow. Post-war karate was marketed tremendously well by innovators like Mas Oyama, and pro wrestling found an audience with firebrands like Rikidozan leading the charge. These influences, mixed with the indigenous kempo, and everything else that had gone before, funneled into a new form of fighting that we now know today as MMA. And while the focus has switched to America in modern times, with the UFC, every MMA fan worth his salt will have heard of the PRIDE FC organisation in Japan and legends of the ring like Kazushi Sakuraba. But it was also an organisaion that became famous for featuring some of the best fighters from outside the country – Rickson Gracie, Fedor Emelianenko, Chuck Liddell to name but a few, and of course it was all tied up in Yakuza money.
Rikidozan – one of the most influential men in professional wrestling history.
Our History of Jiu Jitsu and Kempo series ended up being 5 episodes long, and we feel like we only really scratched the surface. If there’s one thing I’ve learned so far it’s that it’s not the art that is the issue, but the way it is trained that results in it being effective. We’re just started a new series in the podcast on China, beginning with its unification under Qin Shi Huangdi and moving forward from his short lived Qin Dynasty to the golden age of the Han Dynasty. I expect there will be many more revelations to come, particularly about the Chinese martial arts. Come and join us.
About the Author:
Graham Barlow started martial arts with Tai Chi Chuan and Choy Lee Fut in 1993, then added Xingyi in 2001 before finding BJJ in 2011 and getting his black belt in 2018. He currently trains at Gracie Barra in Bath, UK and is also a member of the Yongquan Martial Arts Association. Graham runs a couple of marital art blogs and a podcast. You can read about what he’s up to at Tai Chi Notebook, The BJJ Notebook, and listen to the Heretics podcast on iTunes or Spreaker.
Meditations on God 