As I've started to progress at Studio X and learn more material I'm finding it difficult to come up with good, distinctive names for the blocks used in various forms. This is a function of several factors:
- Studio X doesn't name blocks like it names strikes. Every strike (more or less) has a unique, descriptive name, whereas the same is not true for blocks.
- There are a lot of important variations on basic blocks which are hard to describe concisely in English.
So I'd like to take a moment to think about blocking terminology in the context of the notation system and see if I can't come up with some systematic conventions that will help simplify the blocking bestiary.
The ultimate purpose of a block is to prevent a strike from hitting the defender. Should we describe blocks in terms of the strike? I think not, because there's more than one way to block a strike and one block may be effective against multiple strikes. but, instead of describing blocks in terms of the anticipated strike what if we describe the block in terms of the region being protected? That seems like a better mapping since each block is designed to protect a particular region of the body against a particular class of strikes.
What do I need to know to execute a block?
- The region to be protected. We've already come up with a system for designating regions in our discussion of targeting and grappling.
- The region that serves as the blocking surface.
- The direction of the strike. We can obtain sufficient granularity using the 6 cardinal directions (front/back, left/right, up/down).
- How the energy will be dissipated. This item merits further thought because it's not something that we've tackled before.
What you do with the energy of an incoming strike is one of the fundamental (if not THE fundamental) dichotomies in the martial arts: "hard" vs. "soft", "internal" vs. "external", "yin" vs. "yang". At one extreme the defender can halt the strike, dissipating the energy using eir musculo-skeletal system. Or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, they dodge/deflect the strike, allowing the energy to dissipate harmlessly once it misses the target.
So, for example, a block could be described as a "rightward deflection of a front/rising strike to the stomach using the right hand" except for the tiny problem that, while the description is technically accurate, it's totally useless for most purposes. Students, especially beginning ones, will have no idea at all what block is being called for. The challenge in front of us is to translate this technical description into something approaching plain English.
Slicing the problem another way, let's switch the focus from the incoming strike to the performance of the block. Using region designators for the blocking surface and area being protected still seems like a good idea to me; "block your stomach with the palm of your right hand" should be sufficiently clear to even a beginning student. What's left is figuring out a good way to describe the motion of the blocking surface relative to the protected region.
After chewing on the problem for awhile I've managed to convince myself that it is sufficient for mnemonic and didactic purposes if we describe:
- The nature of the motion: Is it linear or circular?
- The direction of motion in terms of upward vs. downward and inward (towards the center line) vs. outward (away from the center line)1.
The template for describing a block would then be something like "<linear|circular> <inward|outward> <upward|downward> of the <region> using the <region>". Which, while clear, is not particularly concise.
When I was writing the original draft of this post this was the point where I went off into the details off what blocking notation might look like. But since then I've come to the realization that there's a fairly deep symmetry between blocks and strikes. In the case of a strike you're projecting a striking surface along a defined trajectory towards a target region. In the case of blocking you're moving a blocking surface in a defined trajectory in relation to the target region that's being protected. It's been easier to describe strikes than blocks because strikes have a better nomenclature, thus allowing us to sidestep the specification of striking surface and trajectory. So really, what it comes down to is finding a decent naming system for blocks. Let's turn our attention to that for the moment, shall we?
Blocks have, as mentioned above, the following characteristics:
- A blocking surface
- A trajectory that can (usually) be described in terms of circular/linear/static and inwards/outwards/upwards/downwards
- A region being protected
How do we turn the above into comprehensible names? As strikes tend to end with "punch" or "kick" blocks should end with "block". Preceeding the "punch" or "kick" is usually a descriptive name that implies trajectory and striking surface; it's these descriptive names that we're lacking when it comes to blocks. It seems to me that the blocking surface should, in general, preceede the "block", giving use name like "palm block", "elbow block", "forearm block", and so on. The remaining trajectory items can be described by prepending the appropriate identifiers in the order which makes the most sense in English: "inward linear palm block", "outward circular forearm block", "static palm block", and so on. In the cases where descriptive names do exist, such as "intercepting block", we can use those instead. Changes in trajectory, such as blocking to the side rather than to the front, can be handled using the usual direction notation. The only item that remains to be described is the region being protected; that can be done using the same notation we currently use for describing the target of strikes. The only difference is that, in the case of blocks, the region specifier is interpreted as a region on the defender's body rather than a region on the attacker's body. One final simplification that this symmetry brings is that I can get rid of the use of "double" in block descriptions since a "double" block can be written as paired left and right blocks of the same type.
Ok boys and girls, I'm off to experiment with the above and see if it works in practice.
1 Technically there's a third dichotomy, towards vs. away from, but it's a subtlety which doesn't seem all that important in this context.
