BODY STRUCTURE
O’Sensei would constantly reminded his students that proper body structure is critical to feeling the movement. Wither practicing Kata or Kihon-waza we would be admonished to feel as if our hair was pulled into a topknot and it was attached to the ceiling. We should image that gravity pull us down onto the floor. We should then be aliened so that our bones were sitting one atop the other, balanced so we did not fall over, but as relaxed as possible.
“Put your mind in your Tanden” was a phrase we often heard from O’Sensei over the years. Many of the physcal movements in Karate, such as pressing your fist into and down from your hip area, breathing from the stomic, moving with the breath, expantion and contractions on puching and blocking techniques, imagining a bomb going of in your tandem, were part of O’Sensei’s and Karate’s attempt to have us students feel the movements of karate/martial arts from the tanden.