Is the right posture in practicing of table-games so important? Let’s have a look at a boy’s back in
the picture.

What can happen if a trainer will ignore such a ‘back’? We can state at least scoliosis. How
should we correct such a pose (or a stand if we regard Go as a practice of martial arts)? The first
thing, that catches our eyes, is the child’s position relative to the Go board. The board should be
located rigorously on the center with respect to the medial vertical line of the body. Maybe, that
is why the school “Voskhojdenie” suggests that school trainers and teachers should train the approach to the board.
Do you remember a sport anecdote? The approach to the apparatus is 5 points, the dismount is 5
points. The average score is 3 points!
Let’s return to the picture. The chair location is wrong. A trainer should allow a child to sit only after explanations and trainings. Without trainings a trainer should set the chair himself/herself or check its location with respect to the board. In practice of table-games a chair is an apparatus. One must not treat it as any other thing. Of course “must not” sounds too harsh bur this firmness is scholastic. The questioning field is appropriate in amateur talks. But here we are at a school blog. It is strict enough. We should speak strictly somewhere, shouldn’t we?
We can see only one of the boy’s legs under the table. So, where is the other? The child’s left hip is showing up and we remember an aphorism: with the help of what is he thinking now? May be with the help of this cluneal part?

We need examples that will show what we should strive for. In the second picture we can see a boy from Chinese Professional Go School. Do you like his posture? He is not posing he is playing a game.

Look at his head. The crown “looks up” and the chin “looks down”. The neck lordosis is almost
excluded. The same poses of pupils we can find in Chinese professional Wushu schools. They
are not born with such postures; these poses are studied and trained. There some are trainers who don’t have an integral point of view on a pupil’s intellectual-somatic system. They don’t consider such nuances. What can we say to the trainers who have lack of special education but have general education? We can remind them of hand mincing machines. Of course, nowadays we can hardly find them as they have been replaced with electrical gadgets. But those mincing machines had screws with the help of which they used to be installed on tables. If you fasten the screw not tight enough the mincing machine will “fidget” and it will be impossible to use it. So the head position works on the same principle. In martial arts it is impossible to work in such a way for reasons of safety. As for the table-games practice it is likely that some day somebody will write a thesis on this topic. Speaking about Chinese schools, they just use this knowledge to hold the first position on sports Go in the world.

Igor Grishin.

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