Aunkai - Towards the creation of a martial body

Aunkai Bujutsu is a relatively new school (created in 2003), built around the very simple idea of creating a martial body. In doing that, it chose the opposite direction from every single school that bases their pedagogy on the learning of forms or techniques, which is… most of them.

 
Reverse engineering martial arts

There’s nothing wrong with learning forms or techniques, and this is an approach that has proved to work in a great number of instances. However, it also comes with a number of issues:

• If the forms are made to teach you a certain way of moving, there’s no guarantee they will succeed in doing that. Even more so when these forms saw changes over time, and become practiced as a choreography more than anything else;
• Adepts from the past were much more physically active, often working in the fields, and as a consequence had bodies that were much better developed than your normal 9-5 worker spending his days in front of a computer;
• Practice time is limited for most people so you might just never get there

 

In Aunkai, the pedagogy goes exactly in the opposite direction. We focus our attention on the quality of our movement before we immerse ourselves in any technical elements. Why would we do that? Simple. If you take grappling, for example, it is obvious we are not all born with the same body qualities and that it has an impact on our efficiency on the mats. If my goal is to unbalance my opponent, but my body is by default already unbalanced, I am starting with a disadvantage. The opposite is true as well: if my body is strong and its different parts are already working well together, unbalancing me and throwing me to the ground will take much more.

Aunkai focuses on just that: rewiring the body and the brain to make them fit for martial arts practice. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter much if your interest lies in striking, grappling, or anything else, all you need is to have a body that’s built for it.

How does it work? Through a very simple approach that goes back to
basics, and allows going back and forth between its different elements. In its simplest form, the method is built on four pillars.

 Read more on the website of the Seishin Tanren dojo