脱力【だつりょく】(datsu-ryoku)
To let the body’s strength go; to release muscular effort; to relax one’s muscles.
To lose energy or strength; to become enervated or listless; a state of weakness.
— 脱力感: a feeling of weakness/enervation.
Kanji note:
脱: to remove, slip off, get out of.
力: power, strength.
Tenshinryu places great importance on releasing tension.
But this does not deny building muscle.
What matters is knowing how to use it.
No matter how much cash you have in a bank account, it is meaningless if you don’t know how to withdraw and use it. In the modern world there are online payments, but if you don’t know how to use them, the vast wealth in your account won’t help you.
In real situations, simply having strength is indeed a major advantage.
However, physique and strength have limits.
If you learn how to use your body, understand technique, and fight with sound tactics, you can overturn advantages and disadvantages in body size. It is also highly efficient and curbs energy waste, allowing you to fight for long periods. On a prolonged battlefield or in a chaotic melee, optimizing energy consumption is critically important.
In other words, you must spend at least as much time mastering how to use your muscles as you do on increasing strength—if not more. As your strength improves, your bodily functions must be further optimized. Training has no end.
We are not denying muscle; we are denying the failure to learn how to use it. That is the teaching behind releasing tension: for optimal body handling and movement, the mindset of ‘zero power’—thorough release of unnecessary effort—is indispensable. Of course, if the human body were completely without tension, it couldn’t even stand. Some people therefore reject this approach. But that is a misunderstanding. Only when you maintain correct form and movement at the right speed, and then rigorously suppress wasted effort by releasing tension, does true optimization occur. Trying to hunt for some ‘optimal number’ and adjust your level of muscular exertion to match it is a misguided effort. Aiming for zero and letting optimization arise of itself—this is the wisdom reached by the ancients through a history of life-and-death combat.
