If you want to get from Destination A to Destination B connected by an autobahn over a 300 km distance what type of car would you drive?

This is a generic type of question so the answer is pretty much any car will do.

If the question is modified to “if you want to get from Destination A to Destination B connected by an autobahn over a 300 km distance what type of car would you drive if you want to have a comfortable drive” then your answer could be a car with plenty of leg room, leather seats and great company.

And if the question is “if you want to get from Destination A to Destination B connected by an autobahn over a 300 km distance what type of car would you drive if you want to get there in the shortest possible time” then you would want a high performance sports car with low centre of gravity.

If you then modified the question to if you want to get from Destination A to Destination B connected by a river over a 300 km distance what type of car would you drive then obviously unless there is a road spanning the river you would have to cross by boarding a ferry (assuming that such a service is available) that can bring your car across or ditch the car and go for a boat.

Learning the martial arts can sometimes be like this. There is no one size fits all. You want to find the right vehicle to get to where you want to go depending on whether the destination can be reached via a normal road, a rough terrain, jungle road, river or even ocean.

Similarly, when I wanted to teach Paul how to develop arms that react like the proverbial willow tree branch in that when an opponent applies pressure on his arms they would instantly and automatically absorb, and spring back without hesitation to counterattack thereby optimizing the speed of response by converting the technique into an automated reflex action, I put together the 3-NS training sequence.

What I did not emphasize is to be soft or be like a wet noodle. Instead, the emphasis is only doing it over and over until one can perform it without thinking, without hesitation, from which point the arms are at. Not to mention that one need to tweak and refine as one goes along.

Why did I not put the focus of the training on being soft?

The reason is because to do so would defeat the purpose of training the arms to be like the willow branch. You might be puzzled as to why being soft is contradictory in this case. If you are, puzzle no more. In the old days I would recommend to head to the library or bookshop and go straight to the science section. Nowadays, you just do the search in Google and the AI would throw up the answers.

I first came across the explanation in a book on architecture. And of course, the same explanation can be found in mechanical engineering and physics. Yes, the answer is literally out there in these three areas of study.

When you understand the core principle you would grasp why trying to be soft defeats the purpose of training in this manner and why so many try to be soft yet still miss out on mastering the skill because they are focusing on the wrong thing.

The small, mundane things matter. The RELEVANT, small, mundane things.