Physical Development vs Mental Development

[Jiyoui]

Nothing too deep here. Just trying to get everyone opinion regarding which they view as more important in Kendo. Physical Development (waza etc) or Mental Development (seme tame etc)

I know idealistically we all want to say both but that's why I'm not adding that option.

In your heart of hearts, which do you think is 'more' or 'most' important?

[JSchmidt]

See here:
http://kenshi247.net/blog/2011/03/07/pursuing-the-spirit-and-modern-kendo-part-3/

[johnjonathanseo]

mental developement. 8th dan who is obviously weaker and old can beat any of us, because they are mentally trained.

[stealth_monkey]

mental developement. 8th dan who is obviously weaker and old can beat any of us, because they are mentally trained.

They are also physically trained. Reaction time, cut speed, accuracy of attack is all stuff that naturally comes from a lifetime of training. As an exaggeration, do you think an 8th dan would still be able to beat any of us if they didn't possess the physical co-ordination to hit men, kote or do?

Personally, I think the question is meaningless. You attempt to separate things into two distinct camps where no distinction can be made. Would you consider reaction time physical or mental? What about the ability to notice an opening? or the ability to judge the correct length to lunge in order to strike a target properly?

[UnimportantHero]

From what very little I know, the importance of mental over physical will always be dependent on so many factors. Level at which a person is competing. Whatever natural talents the kendoka in question does or does not possess. How they individually approach shiai, keiko, and so on. Even between two specific kendoka in a specific match at a specific time. More variables than that. Hard to say.

[tagonagy]

At my current stage of development (shodan), I'm still trying to get a handle on the physical aspectsd of kendo. I suspect the spiritual development will become more important as I get more advanced.

[rfoxmich]

Sorry you can't take away the option 'both'. FIK says:
http://www.kendo-fik.org/english-page/english-page2/concept-of-Kendo.htm

from which I'll quote "...To mold the mind and body..."

[Neil Gendzwill]

Both required but if you read the page Jakob linked to, you will understand that earlier in your career the focus is mostly on physical things, and once a physical base is established then we can work on more mental things. But no matter the level, you still have to execute.

[Bokushingu]

Last few years, i have been doing a lot of study into Sport Psychology. Mainly my focus was how to bring my practice game to my competition game. However, now my focus is how to utilize my basic practice to the most(Goal shift to improve instead of win).

One thing that i have discovered is that Physical development IS Mental development. The Link to the article that Jschmidt posted authenticates this understanding.

Therefore you cannot seperate them because they are linked as one. The tricky thing about development is that mental barriors can and will impede physical development. The same with Physical barriors...they can and will impede Mental development.

Based on my post, i decided not to vote...sorry.

[hl1978]

tai gi shin, shin tai gi

[Abramo]

Both, uncompromising. This is what my heart of hearts says.

[turboyoshi]

I wonder what your purpose is in asking this question. Are you trying to determine what you should be focused more on? Are you trying to determine which is more valuable to winning shiai? The truth is, what is more important changes as you age. At some point, the opportunity for physical development is taken away from you and you have no choice but to try and make up the lack with mental strength. But now, when you are young, you should focus on improving yourself physically as much as you can. Mental development takes both experience and the calmness/patience that comes with age so it's not something you can rush anyway. If you were to focus more effort on mental discipline at this point in your life, then when you are older, you will degenerate too rapidly to execute. Even though you will know what to do, you won't be able to do it.

[nikozamo]

i have a question regarding this thread:

now in my dojo we are doing an ''extra'' physical training. the thing is we have a lot of different people... different age and body type and the type of training sometimes it's too difficult for some people... and worse... we are wasting too much time on this and we have much less time to do the ''bogu training''

I think a lot of the people in my dojo is just seeking for entertainment and/or a hobby. I said to my senpai that the dojo is a formative/recreative kind of place and we should take the physical training (or at last the half part of it) for nacional team training because if the people there wants to do kendo... not having a gym-kind of training: he didn't listened too much about.

(Now the question) What to do regarding this? what do you think about this?

[turboyoshi]

nikozamo, I've had similar debates with my sempai on this issue. My opinion is that physical fitness is our own responsibility and when we are at the dojo, we should be focused on kendo, not fitness. Some of my sempai say that we don't train hard but they are comparing us to japanese high schoolers and college level training which is not reasonable. We have jobs and limited time in which to do partner(bogu) work and should make the most efficient use of it. People who want to do good kendo will find the time on their own to make sure they are fit enough to continue advancing in kendo.

With that said, there's not much you can do if you can't seem to get sempai to see your point of view unless you have other dojos you can train in.

[nikozamo]

thanks for the reply! i can't go to other dojos but sometimes i can do iaido by myself during kendo training as our iaidokas do until the madness is gone :D

[krys]

now in my dojo we are doing an ''extra'' physical training. the thing is we have a lot of different people... different age and body type and the type of training sometimes it's too difficult for some people... and worse... we are wasting too much time on this and we have much less time to do the ''bogu training''

I think a lot of the people in my dojo is just seeking for entertainment and/or a hobby. I said to my senpai that the dojo is a formative/recreative kind of place and we should take the physical training (or at last the half part of it) for nacional team training because if the people there wants to do kendo... not having a gym-kind of training: he didn't listened too much about.

(Now the question) What to do regarding this? what do you think about this?

Dojo's training regime is decided by people in charge. They have their ideas on what's needed and what kind of dojo they wish to manage.

For example if beginners are in poor physical condition it may make it hard for them to practice correctly and they need to strenghten a little during keiko or maybe be shown/taught how to strenghten themselves on their own.

You may gather other members and show the sempai that you are not only one displeased with the situation, surely he will listen more attentively.

But if you are the only one and you still do not like it so much, then stop whining and open your own dojo or find one more to your liking.

[ben]

If you think back to the Eiga Naoki doco "A Single Blow" (ただ一撃にさせる Tada Ichigeki Ni Saseru) you'll remember how he went back to cleaning the dojo when his kendo reached an impasse. Being beaten by Miyazaki was like a kind of koan he couldn't work out intellectually. So to address it he went back to a very simple, fundamental kind of physical training. This is a very interesting way to surmount a problem, by addressing it with the body as much as the mind. Going for long walks does the same thing for many people: the repetitive physical action helps generate new ways of looking at things. I'd wager that what's happening is new neural pathways are being created in the brain as a result of the physical exercise, hence one is able to make a conceptual breakthrough — "eureka!"

So even at a high level, it's not a matter of the brain dispensing its wisdom and experience to a well-trained body, as if the brain is the master and the body the servant. It's the brain and body in a loop of mutually supported (re)discovery. b

[Winter67uk]

False dichotomy. They're both equally important, and they aren't mutually exclusive.

[BAMBINOMONTANA]

To quote one of my favorite movies "The body can't live without the mind".

[enkorat]

In my experience, to emphasize one over the other becomes an issue of diminishing returns. Some dojos spend a lot of time doing physical conditioning, and so their players are fast and have lots of stamina, but lack depth, sophistication, and application of strategy in their kendo. I found that this manifests itself with fast and strong players who have only one excellent waza. If the other player has enough time to figure out what that "tokui-waza" is and counter it, the other player is in trouble.

Likewise, a player who comes from a dojo who spends a lot of time talking and philosophizing but doesn't do kakarigeiko, gigeiko and basic kihon as conditioning, might have excellent shinai control (from the hands), but can't move from a standstill, or runs out of energy after 2-3 hits and goes all dead in the water. Once you're dead in the water, shinai control and control of center becomes a defensive fallback, trying to invalidate multiple attacks. This then in my experience becomes a waiting game that favors the attacker, because eventually you either make a mistake, the sheer number of attacks by chance favors the more aggressive stamina trained player, or the judges begin to get bored. Once the judges get bored or impatient, especially at lower grade divisions, they get more permissive as to what is an ippon.

Yes personal fitness is the responsibility of the individual, but that's really not looking at the larger picture. First, many people here (in my local area), have very poor personal fitness particularly as a beginner, or there is a very large range between individuals. So depending on who shows up on a certain day, you have to adapt to what the majority of people need. Second, kendo fitness is fairly specialized, and a lot of beginners just don't have the neural connections from the brain to their muscle groups for adequately fine muscle control of their body. Thus a lot of time gets spent developing body awareness. Third, a lot of people are in fact budgeting their weekly time for kendo as "fitness" in addition to everything else, so "conditioning" is a valid thing to do.

With advanced people (and the advanced class), as we get older, yes we make excuses and in doing so, probably slack off in terms of physical conditioning. In my experience, this is a big mistake. We may not be going as hard as a Japanese high schooler for sure, but we still need to do kihon, kakarigeiko, and gigeiko as much as we can.

After all, "mental development" in kendo is a personal thing, its not something a sensei or anyone else can directly tell you. It comes from "doing" kendo, matching with different people, and reflecting afterwards on what went well and what went badly. "Mental development" can be facilitated during keiko through senseis who adopt different strategies when doing keiko against students, and perhaps talking to them afterward, but other than that, I'm not sure much more can be done.

The danger there is that you take away from floor time, and start delving into long-winded philosophical lectures that would be more suited to a powerpoint presentation, and you lose half of the people in the practice because they don't really have any personal experience on the things you're talking about.

[Rabo]

I agree with Stealth_monkey, they go hand in hand. Even still, I voted Mental development, because the question didn't state a deeper notion of physical incapability as JohnJonathanSeo was referencing. In my opinion, the question was more in the sense of what is required, that inner development of one's mind or the physical aspect of every martial art/sport, which is Muscle - tone and size ( Not to mention Ability, which without the mind.. i mean .. useless right?) . Obviously they go hand in hand, one cant be without the other. As far as training oneself for a lifetime, which makes every reaction so natural its like breathing, thus much much quicker then someone who has not trained for that long, like previously mentioned by someone here. ( cant remember plus i tried looking but im on lunch at work and dont have all day lol ) Anyway im rambling.. ultimately the brain which controls our muscles, IS a muscle itself, they are one and the same, that's Not what the question meant. In MY Opinion. take it as you want, as a martial artist of Kendo and others, Capoeira and Kung Fu I believe Kendo relies largely on the Mind, more-so then my interpretation of what the question was referencing --> when asked, physical or mental. If you asked me for another art or sport, i might change my answer.. One love.. PS i only started Kendo 2 weeks ago.. lol.. so .. this is my opinion.. thus far..

[Draken50]

In my opinion the development of the physical precedes mental development. In Flashing Steel, the author introduces a concept of Shin, Ku, I or Body, Mouth and Mind. I'm paraphrasing quite a bit here, but esentially order of causation is reversed from the order presented, but that a person trains in the opposite direction of causation. The way it is explained, exercising control over our body leads to us exercising control over our speech which in turn affects our thought processes.

This of course would seem to be due to the practice of outward showings of respect and other actions we take within the dojo, but in my experience, even at a normal gym, the members that have been working on their fitness the longest tend to be the most helpful and respectful to beginners. Obviously it is not a hard and fast rule, but it is a trend in my own admittedly limited experience.

This post is already kind of rambling but one other thought I've heard and while I haven't yet done the research to back up the claim is that martial arts, that some believe originated in India were developed because it was noticed that those in better shape could meditate for longer.

That is why I voted for Physical training, for while I believe mental training is many practitioners ultimate goal, it seems to me, that much of what is gained may come as a side affect. I've found that concentrating and then eventually losing myself in my physical training has benefited my mind in that I have problems with thinking too much.

I am however a novice, so I would not be surprised in the slightest if my viewpoint changes as I grow more in my martial arts.

[Thunder]

Personally I chose mental development.
Physical is part of it for sure, you have to be in somewhat good shape to go through the cardiovascular workout portion of Kendo. We all know how tiring 5 minutes of high intensity can make you.

I chose mental development because it really changes the way you approach Kendo in your life, friends, in your routines, family, work etc. You need to be prepared to sacrifice components of your life to make room for Kendo. I look back at my life pre-Kendo to today almost 6 years later and find my mental preparation for living life has improved along with most of my personal relationships.

Kendo, keeps you honest with yourself.

[DCPan]

I picked physical development because without that foundation, there is no mental development....

[b8amack]

Physical.

[Anorymous]

Ozawa Hiroshi, in his "The definitive guide" book, opined that that's a matter of one's experience. To get started, he says, one needs about 20% mental and 80% physical ability. As time passes, those percentages change linearly, until one ends up needing 80% mental and 20% physical development.

As an entirely personal opinion, I'm a fan of body awareness. Once I got a decent hang of what muscle should be used where and when, I managed to work on both physical and mental development at the same time.

[b8amack]

I agree that it's a false dichotomy. But ultimately, kendo is a physical activity.

[degeneral1]

I just started reading "The Unfettered Mind", and there's a section that seems to address this. His conclusion, "Technique and principle are just like the two wheels of a cart."


I know idealistically we all want to say both

Perhaps there is nothing idealistic about saying 'both'; maybe it is, in fact, both.

[sirius1906]

I picked physical because that's where I am right now, but I understands the mental aspect of it. And iai helps.

[Silverpine]

From where I am in my limited experience, I need an emphasis on the mental. Even though I have low stamina and my legs can't move quickly enough, the ability for me to overcome those challenges is through mental fortitude. I have been forcing myself to the gym to do conditioning exercises - it's hard to balance the time with my schoolwork, but that's just another part of my development as a person... I have to make the choice and the commitment to continue and improve myself. If I only

But I feel, even though I'm fairly new to Kendo, that I can't just prefer one aspect over another. That's weakness. I have to be good in both, neither one overshadowing the other.