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One of the primary characteristics of studying and training in any complex physical discipline such as martial arts, dance, gymnastics, or any of the professional sports is constant rigorous practice of the basic skills required. Not only to make them second nature but to hone them to as effective and efficient level as possible. You program your body to become an ideally suited instrument for the discipline. Achieving such a result is worth being proud of but if you then seek to train in another discipline those different sets of physical programming can often end up at war with each other.
Even though dance and martial arts in many ways are very different disciplines I was eventually able to find a rather impressive amount of overlap between my them. It was a very specific moment which first enabled me to bring both skill sets into the same room and interchange their applications but we’ll get to that in a minute.
Before I started dancing I spent just under eight years training in Goju Ryu Karate, a style of Karate originally from Okinawa which combines hard linear Japanese techniques with soft circular Chinese elements. This gave me a very balanced palate of physical skills, very much of the martial arts variety, and I…