“Jigoro Kano envisaged judo as an educative process for the masses of all countries….He developed this into a system of physical and ethical education. His strategy embraced two ideas: 1) maximum efficiency with minimum effort, and 2) mutual welfare. We have forgotten that the first maxim covered life as well as sport judo and few of us seem to have ever learned the meaning of the second (which means simply love).”
-ROBERT W. SMITH, Martial Musings
Developed over the course of two decades, Slowing Down Faster is a comprehensive system designed for improving gait, stride, posture, agility, flexibility, functional strength, balance and even gracefulness in movement. Rooted in traditional Chinese martial arts (including bagua), modern martial arts (including judo and boxing) and the Feldenkrais® Method, SDF consists of a host of complex lessons, all created by Edward Yu and all geared toward deepening your athletic prowess.
SDF Formal Training Program
“Many people make the mistake of confusing information with knowledge. They are not the same thing. Knowledge involves the interpretation of information. Knowledge involves listening.”
-HENNING MANKELL, “The Art of Listening,” New York Times
Synopsis:
The distinction between humans and machines is becoming increasingly blurred with the rapid incursion of artificial intelligence, liquid crystal display monitors and computer mediated “virtual” experiences into every aspect of our lives. It follows that in this day and age, where life is increasingly simulated on LCD monitors, shared via smartphone apps, tabulated by heart-rate and step monitors, and controlled through digital keyboards, we are becoming divorced from sensing, feeling and connecting, not only with those around us, but our own selves. That is to say, now that life is no longer something that we truly live in our own flesh and blood and thus, experience with our own beating hearts, we are becoming more machinelike, not only in our movement, but in the way we interact with the world around us.
Rooted in traditional Chinese martial arts (including bagua), modern martial arts (including judo and boxing) and the Feldenkrais® Method, Slowing Down Faster is a movement-oriented educational program designed with the hope of providing some countermeasures to the dehumanizing trends that affect virtually everyone in modern society. As a result, SDF offers a uniquely humanistic perspective on learning and skill acquisition that is largely absent in more conventional approaches to fitness and movement. More practically speaking, SDF provides both a method and a curriculum by which to gradually acquire and possibly even master a wide variety of skills, ranging from the rudimentary sort touched on by typical somatic practices, to more complex combinations that are fundamental to sports, dance, martial arts and “natural movement” regimes.
Intended for:
- Athletes
- from the weekend warrior to the professional and Olympic level athlete
- from track & field to soccer, tennis to basketball
- Dancers
- from the amateur to the professional level dancer
- from ballet to breakdance, folk to contemporary
- Martial artists
- from the amateur to professional level martial artist
- from jujitsu to Shaolin, boxing to bagua
- Fitness trainers including
- Pilates teachers
- Gytonics and Gyrokinesis teachers
- Personal trainers
- Crossfit trainers
- Teachers, students and aficionados of “Natural movement” and “movement culture” (i.e. teachers, students and aficionados of MovNat®, Ido Portal, Fighting Monkey®, Primal Moves, EvolveMovePlay, etc.)
Areas of focus:
- Improving strength, flexibility, resilience and/or response-ability in the following areas:
- Neck
- Shoulders
- Feet, including arches
- Legs
- “The Core”
- Hands, wrists and arms
- General:
- Posture/Acture
- Dexterity/Coordination
- Balance
- Agility
- Breathing
- Gracefulness & fluidity
- Improving functional movements such as:
- Standing
- Walking
- Running
- Sitting on Chair
- Sitting on Floor
- Squatting (heels down)
- Sitting on chair to standing (and reverse)
- Sitting on floor to standing (and reverse)
- Lying on bed to sitting to standing (and reverse)
- Lying on floor to sitting to standing (and reverse)
- Lying on floor to one-legged squat to standing (and reverse)
- Throwing
- As in shuaijiao, judo, and other grappling arts.
- As in baseball, cricket, American football, and other sports.
- Sweeping (as in shuaijiao, bagua, judo, and other grappling arts.)
- Kicking
- Kicking (as in soccer, American football, etc.)
- Kicking (as in sanda, karate, Muay Thai and other striking arts)
- Pushing/Pulling
- Punching (as in boxing)
- Various movements related to contemporary, folk and ballroom dance
Applications in:
- Sports
- Dance
- Martial Arts
- Fitness, health and wellness related fields such as:
- Pilates
- Gyrotonics & Gyrokinesis
- Physiotherapy
- “Natural Movement” and “Movement Culture” (i.e. MovNat, Ido Portal, Fighting Monkey, Evolve/Move/Play, etc.)
- Crossfit
- Personal training
Possible improvements in the following categories:
- Sleep
- Eye-strain
- Jaw tension
- Repetitive stress injury (RSI) in the hands, wrists and forearms
Goals:
- Developing a new approach to as well as a new understanding of fitness
- Discovering novel ways to fundamentally improve posture/acture, general movement, athletic/dance/martial arts performance
- Discovering new possibilities for moving in general as well as for performing complex movement sequences, whether in sports, dance and/or martial arts
- Creating new, challenging and fun choreographies for getting in shape
- Discovering/creating new forms of calisthenics
- Developing a fundamental shift in perspectives on learning and teaching
- Developing a new approach to learning, both in the sensorimotor (“physical”) and intellectual realms
- Understanding intellectual learning as an extension of sensorimotor (“physical”) learning
- Understanding left/right biases on a deeper level
Levels:
“When you get a black belt ranking it doesn’t mean you’ve gotten a foot in the door. It means you have learned how to find the doorknob.”
—DAVE LOWRY, TRADITIONS: ESSAYS ON THE JAPANESE MARTIAL ARTS AND WAYS
- Level 1: “Searching in the Dark”
- Level 2: “Finding the Doorknob”
- Level 3: “Turning the Doorknob”
- Level 4: “Opening the Door”
Training format:
- Lessons
- All lessons are SDF® originals and therefore, not found in any other training program
- All lessons are rooted in the following:
- Traditional Chinese martial arts such as bagua, taiji and shuaijiao
- Modern martial arts such as boxing, judo and aikido
- The sport of running
- Feldenkrais
- All lessons help to uncover what could be considered “organic” or “natural” movement–the type, that is, witnessed in higher levels of dance, sports and martial arts
- Practicums
- Practicum at beginning each segment (based on previous segment)
- Teaching practicum
- Choreography (optional)
- Final practicum at end of training
- Teaching practicum
- Choreography (optional)
- Practicum at beginning each segment (based on previous segment)
- Homework
- Group practice w/ regularly scheduled meetings between students
- Log for hours spent working through lessons
- Log for (practice) teaching hours
- Those who cannot participate have the option of writing down observations and conclusions
- Questions to be answered both individually and as a group (each segment)
- Reading list
- Excerpts from books and articles
- Books
- Group practice w/ regularly scheduled meetings between students
Content & theoretical concepts:
- Exploratory movement vs. performatory movement
- Constraints (in the context of learning)
- Neurophysiological constraints
- The limits of attention (limits of the human brain)
- What is learning?
- How do we learn?
- How do we (unconsciously) block our learning?
- How do particular societies block learning en masse?
- Viewing learning and the acquisition of knowledge in terms of complexity and reversing entropy
- Information Theory approach to learning and the acquisition of knowledge
- e.g. From an Information Theory perspective, what is the difference between Albert Einstein and Michael Jordan?
- Neurophysiological approach to learning and the acquisition of knowledge
- Information Theory approach to learning and the acquisition of knowledge
- Concrete vs. abstract learning
- Theories by George Lakoff and Rafael Nuñez
- Where Mathematics Comes From
- Philosophy in the Flesh
- Theories by George Lakoff and Rafael Nuñez
- Cartesian reductionism vs. systems theory
- Western medicine vs. Traditional Chinese Medicine, naturopathy & other forms of “holistic medicine”
- Origins of biomechanics
- Limitations of biomechanics
- Misuse of biomechanics
- Limitations of imitating (or more accurately put, attempting to imitate)
- Neurons vs. flip flops (i.e. humans vs. machines)
- Humans (and other biological organisms) in contradistinction to robots and other machines
- What does it mean to be human?
- How is this related to the organizing principles of society?
- Brief history of the fitness industry
- Focusing on skill vs. focusing on morphology
- Quality of movement vs. quantity of movement
- Olympic weightlifting vs. bodybuilding
- Ancient Greeks vs. modern bodybuilders
- Greek statues vs. Arnold Schwarzenegger
- From where did the term “fitness” arise?
- Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection
- Abuses of the theory of evolution
- Social Darwinism & colonialism
- Current fitness trends
- Fitness and “New Age” or “Self-Help”
- What do marketers mean when they advocate, “becoming a more heroic version of yourself”?
- Fit or Unfit for what?
- Should Albert Einstein, Jane Goodall, Confucius, Laozi and Socrates be/have been considered “unfit”?
- What is exercise?
- Exercising in contradistinction to moving with:
- Functional purpose
- An ideal image that is rooted in movement (as opposed to an ideal image rooted in morphology)
- i.e. ideal image rooted that is dynamic frame of reference opposed to being rooted in static or frozen frame of reference
- i.e. ideal image rooted in quality of movement as opposed to quantity of movement
- Limitations of conventional exercise
- What are calisthenics
- Utility of calisthenics
- Limitations of calisthenics
- Pilates, Gyrotonics and other forms of exercise as a skill vs. Pilates, Gyrotonics and other forms of exercise as calisthenics
- Exercising in contradistinction to moving with:
- Somatics: What is it and what are its limitations?
- Jigoro Kano, F.M. Alexander, Charlotte Selver, Moshe Feldenkrais, Thomas Hanna, Don Hanlon Johnson, Stanley Keleman, George Lakoff
- Limitations of martial arts, Feldenkrais, Pilates, Gyrotonics, yoga, qigong, meditation
- Limitations of SDF and other somatic and quasi-fitness systems
- Ideal images
- General vs. specific
- Importance of
- Overreliance on
- Form and function
- Dialectic between form and function
- How function circumscribes form (mainly in an ontogenetic manner)
- How form circumscribes function (mainly in a phylogenic manner)
- Pedagogical models
- Enlightenment model
- Teaching as a process of observing and searching for (and eventually discovering or simply remembering) particular constraints
- “To correct is incorrect”
- “To correct is correct”
- Role of vision and teleceptors in shaping perception, movement, awareness
- The 3 axes of rotation (or 3 planes of action)
