If you look at the photographs in this link, you’ll see examples of the natural throwing pattern as adapted for baseball pitching.  You can see that the legs, pelvis, trunk and shoulders are engaged so as to produce a dynamic stretch of the serape muscles running diagonally from the shoulder to the hip.  It’s the muscles involved in this group that are responsible for the development of the internal forces that transfer momentum to the arms or legs in throwing or kicking.

http://www.sportsci.com/topics2/presentations/Throwing_Doc_Presentation_ISBS99/mthrow.htm

http://www.pponline.co.uk/encyc/strength-training-improving-your-trunk-strength-will-improve-your-throwing-and-striking-40845

http://www.femaleathletesfirst.com/article.aspx?navid=9&articleid=13&animation=off

http://functionalpathtraining.blogspot.com/2005/09/more-core-serape-effect.html

The reason why I put Rufus up recently is that there is a strong similarity between the way he stretches the slingshot from both ends simultaneously, and the way that somebody throwing a ball double-stretches the serape muscles.  This is the shoulder-hip separation referred to in the first article.

This double-stretching not only engages the serial elastic component of muscle, but also the muscle spindles embedded within the muscle.  The faster you can initiate this stretch, the more powerful the contractual force that is developed as a consequence. 

So the trick is, how do you get this double stretch effect? 

In pitching you see a very exaggerated example of the front leg stepping forward while the rear shoulder pulls back.  In fighting, naturally this principle has to be adapted to the time frame and tactical situation required, so the movement won’t look obvious as it does with the pitchers.  However, in some form the double-stretch when present will enhance the force development of your shot. I used to tell Richard La Plante when he asked me how I got my power that I’d simply refined the process of throwing a stone.

I’ve been talking about the serape muscles and the importance of their engagement across the diagonal of the torso for thirty years, although I think I was mispronouncing the word 'serape' on the videos made in the late 1990s.  There’s nothing new in the concept; it’s been around since 1922 in Logan and McKinley’s Kinesiology.  I picked up the idea in the kinesiology books I bought in the early 1970s.   

Have a look at the photos and at Rufus.  Don’t get caught up in the detail, but get a feel for the separation and double stretch; i.e., stretching from both ends simultaneously and engaging as many muscle groups as you can in the kinetic chain.  No passengers.

Some of the old letters are up on Morris No Holds Barred.  A lot more archive material yet to come, but Trish is working on it.

This clip isn't about instinctive shooting (although it could be).  It's an illustration of what I call the double-stretch.  In several of my videos you'll see me go running for a rubber band to illustrate how the serial elastic component of muscle and the spindle can be more rapidly stretched and utilized to generate a more explosive force.

Look at this remarkable old guy (wait, he's the same age as me!).  I'll be talking about this double stretch more in a future post.  Meanwhile, there are some new replies in the comments thread of my last post. 

Several posts ago randomflow

asked ‘To use the example of my attempt at Sabre dueling, say I kept getting hit on the top of the head because my block was no good. Am I right in thinking that what you are saying is that I can practice not getting hit on the head by learning, say to land my block in the right place at the right time, and I can do this slowly and deliberately at first until I learn something that works, AS LONG AS it is done in the context of someone actually trying to go for my head?
Are you also saying that it is counter productive to practice the movement out of context because however hard I try to copy the outward shape of the movement, especially as shown by someone else's idea of how to do the move, it won't mean much when the context is added - for my own body?’

The short answer to both questions is ‘yes.’  The longer answer is that there are a number of reasons why in training you might want to slow down or reduce the intensity of the exchange or of the practice of a move.  However, none of these reasons (in my book) have to do with perfecting the mechanics of the move.  There’s no such thing as a perfect skill.  There’s only the necessity of what you have to do at the time—that keeps changing.

Here are a few examples of training at a slower rate, and how I use them.

One way we remove the anxiety of being hit is to get the attacker in a cue drill to drop the intensity of the strikes and do them just a little slower and with less force so that the guy on the receiving end can get used to being hit and not panicking.  At the same time, he learns to pick up on the ‘cue’ of the delivery, or the early part of the movement where the shot hasn’t gone off yet.  He starts to see the shot early.  He couldn’t do that if the drill was performed at full intensity and speed.  But this is only a temporary, fleeting phase of the training.  Once he starts to see the cues, within the same tempo he can start to respond to the feed.  He can pre-empt it, he can check it, he can evade, counter-move, you name it.  It’s one way we develop timing as well as the ability to take shots.  Gradually, we start to pick up the intensity and speed, and the responses become increasingly automatic, whether anticipatory or reactive. 

We’ve already discussed flow drills and the transition to high-intensity fight-level exchanges for a brief time period, and then returning to the flow.

I sometimes also get guys to work slower and then suddenly explode a couple of shots in.  Not only do they learn to break their time, but the other guy’s got to learn to pick up on broken time.  They can then play with tempo and intensity at will.  You can also do this on the bag.

If you were a fly on the wall in my home and you watched me train, you’d sometimes see me moving through a sequence nice and easy, at a walking pace.  But I’m doing that for the same reasons I walk: it’s just to reinforce a kinaesthetic sense of my body.  When I do this I can sense every joint and their changing interaction.  I use this process to become aware of how the different parts of my body are contributing (or failing to contribute) to an action.  Or at other times I might be working on my mental impressions and the movement is secondary.  In this case, inside I’m exploding, but I’m not carrying it through externally. 

But even when I move slowly, it’s not the kind of slow control that is seen so much in the martial arts.  It’s not deliberate, it’s just me getting a sense of my bones and joints.

Another reason you might slow down, of course, is in a dynamic warm-up.  Here’s Tim Lincecum throwing for real.

 And here he is warming up. 

 

 

There’s a distinction between taking the pace and intensity off a move in order to warm-up or for the other reasons I discussed above, and slowing the move down so as to instruct the person to perform it ‘correctly’.  The reason Lincecum is pitching slowly is to tune in the neuromusculoskeletal structure in preparation for throwing 100mph fastball.  In a few minutes, he’s going to be out there in the game and his reputation and livelihood are dependent on getting it right.

By the way, this pattern is a modified version of the throwing pattern that all kids use.  In this case, the throwing pattern has been modified for baseball.  I would modify the same pattern for fighting.  It’s there—you don’t need to rebuild it. 

Personally I can’t think of any sport where the beginning athlete is told to go slow in order to learn how to throw, kick, run, catch, etc. except for values of ‘slow’ that are like those Lincecum is displaying in the clip above.  In other words, slow movement in a sporting context is natural movement done a little easier than at game level.  It’s not the coach correcting every millimetre of the move.  The game situation and the drills the coach uses to support the game will take care of refining the skill so that the novice gradually becomes competent.  It’s not true in any sport I know that the beginner needs to be told exactly how to move.

From childhood we develop patterns of movement without instruction.  It is these patterns--crawling, walking, running, skipping, climbing, jumping, throwing, hitting, etc.—that serve as the basis for further adaptation in more specific skill work.  High level athletes rely on these fundamental patterns, which have usually been enhanced from early childhood through personal practice (not instruction)—that’s what’s called talent.  If you read the Vern Gambetta piece, you may have noticed how he laments the fact that in recent years athletes often come to him with too many sport-specific skills and not enough fundamental pattern work.  It’s the enhancement of the fundamental pattern that can sometimes make the difference between a mediocre performance and a potentially great one. 

So when I teach a guy, what I’m trying to encourage him to do is to access these original patterns and build on them.  We do a lot of this work at Primal.  That’s also why I’ll get a guy to throw a ball at a wall.  Or, if he’s got a problem with a round kick, to kick a ball.  Because I know he’s already got a throwing pattern that can serve as the basis for his punch and a kicking pattern for his kick.  I’ve just got to put him in touch with it.  Then I can give tips as to how he might increase the force of release to create a greater impact. 

It’s easy to take a natural pattern like crawling, throwing, walking, etc. and adjust it to turn it into a sport-specific skill.  And in the same way, once that skill has been established in the athlete, it can be tweaked.  The biomechanics of a move can often be improved, but this has to be done within the context of the individual’s movement style.  And everybody is different.  Just look at a road race to see all the different styles of elite runners.  The important thing is that the engram as a whole isn’t removed and replaced with a motor-oriented, controlled pattern devised by the teacher.  Instead, a key aspect of the move can be addressed.  And this has to be done in a way that doesn’t lose sight of the whole of the performance—otherwise the coach can do more harm than good.  And the more sophisticated the athlete, the more subtle the tweak is likely to be. 

A good coach in any field has a kind of ‘feel’ for movement.  It’s intuitive. This comes through long exposure and involvement with athletes.  By contrast in the martial arts, instruction tends to be neat, tidy, organized, systemized.  Everything is very rational.  The teacher is the authority, he takes on responsibility for the student’s development.  The material is often presented very slowly and is broken down piece by piece.  There is a strong use of conscious analysis and attention to detail and motor controlled skills. 

But nine times out of ten, the instructor doesn’t even know what he’s looking at.  He doesn’t have the experience.

My approach is whole-brain.  It involves all senses; I’m engaging everything in what I do and expecting you to do the same.  I don’t act as an authority; I create situations and the trainee takes on full responsibility for his development.  I present material in realtime speed, not speeded up and not slowed down.  I rely on subconscious processing and allow the trainee’s subconscious to take care of the details.  Novice or expert, it makes no difference.

When I demonstrate a move, I demonstrate the effect I want to cause.  I want you pick up on what I’m doing on a visual and kinaesthetic level, not a conscious/verbal one.  I want you to sense the generative forces I’m using to produce the effort, so that you can call on those same resources in yourself.  I want you to understand the order as a whole, using all your senses and keeping your verbal mind out of the way.  I don’t want you to get caught up in analysis at that point in the process.  I want you to feel it.  Your subconscious mind can do the processing.  Provided you realise your mistakes and persist, your subconscious will take care of it for you. 

I’m also a believer that you learn by your mistakes.  With me, it’s not about avoiding mistakes, it’s about creating an environment in which you do make mistakes and can learn from them.  People like to go slowly because they want to avoid making mistakes, but it’s the process of self-correction that teaches.  And by the way, this process of learning through exposure to a fight situation is progressive.  It varies from individual to individual.  When you teach a kid to swim, you don’t dump him in the North Sea.  But equally, even though he may be wearing armbands or using some other flotation device, he has to get into the water and work most of it out for himself.  You can’t impart the sense of the water to him while he’s on dry land.  It’s the same with fighting.

Just because you’re presenting something methodically and with a strong rational foundation, that doesn’t in fact make it effective.  Often in the martial arts the presentation is impressive but misleading. 

When you break down movement and concentrate on how to move rather than on the effect you need to cause or prevent, you replace the unconscious process with a conscious one.  The result of this is movement that is unnatural—visibly so, to my eye at least.   I can see the holding-back, the over-control.  It’s very obvious. 

And here’s the other thing.  When it comes to explosiveness, the Golgi-tendon reflex is the killer.  The Golgi-tendon mechanism relies on feedback in order to initiate the inhibition on release.  If there isn’t time for feedback, there isn’t time for inhibition.  When you involve the conscious mind in movement, you allow time for that feedback to occur, and in all likelihood the inhibition will kick in.  In order to access the superfast twitch fibres upon which explosive movement relies, there mustn’t be any second-guessing.  Your action must be like a bullet leaving the gun.  You pause to think--and the moment’s gone.  The recruitment doesn’t happen.

This explosion in the mind must be acted upon by the body instantly, without thought.  You can’t be worrying about how you’re going to move or be self-conscious in any way.  You let it go, completely.  Accuracy comes through practice and self-correction, not through slowing down the explosion.  That can’t be done.  The minute you slow it down, it ain’t an explosion any more.

If you train in a motor-oriented way, then your brain is always engaged in ‘where should I put this?’ and ‘how should I do that?’ and you can’t let go.  To produce this kind of explosive force, you need to let go, spontanteously and repeatedly.  When I look at guys who have practiced training in a motor-oriented way over a long period of time, they have got in the habit of consciously controlling their movement.  They can move naturally in everyday life, but as soon as they go into ‘martial arts mode’ the conscious control kicks in.  Guys like this find it very hard to move explosively, naturally, and most of all spontaneously as the situation demands.  They can’t let go.

Similarly, most people I’ve observed who engage in motor-oriented practice can sometimes produce one big shot when they’ve had time to set up and get ready to go, but they make their shot and then they’re done.  It takes them a long time to get ready again. 

The kind of delivery you need in a fight is one that can come out at any time, either in a synchronized manner or in broken time, and one that can be repeated again and again with each shot loading the next.  That’s what I mean by ‘Uzi mentality’ as opposed to the firing of an old cannon.  The use of natural patterns such as running or climbing automatically facilitates the ability to repeat an action.  In the primeval forest, if you had to climb a tree by numbers you’d never make it.

I’ve been making these points about movement for years.  And years.  Some people understand what I’m talking about, but from what I can see around me in the martial arts most don’t understand, or don’t want to understand.  I’m not discouraged.  When I see the size of this blog’s readership and the number of different national flags coming up on statcounter, I reckon there are enough people out there who are interested in this information for me to feel encouraged to continue providing it.

I got an interesting comment from Ken Milling about learning at speed; he had some trouble with his computer and couldn't get the comment up, so he e-mailed it for me to paste.  I've put it in the comments thread to slo mo no go, and in addition to some training tips there are some links I've included that are worth looking at. 

Over the weekend I also received some photos from Neal Lofts.  This is The Fight Ministry, and I think I've mentioned before that the way he's used the space is brilliant.  Also, Neal built his own cage and it's as good as anything I've seen with a big price tag attached to it.

I'll be at the Fight Ministry on 27 June.  It's going to be a good session--if you live up North and follow what I do, this is a great opportunity to experience it first-hand.  You don't have to be an MMA fighter to attend.  It's professional gym, but the door is open on the day.

I answered one of the Q&A questions yesterday.  But this one's been sitting in the box for a while from

randomflow .  It's too long to go into the comments of the 'Don't Piggyback' post, where she asked it.  There were some other questions thrown in there, too, but for now we'll stick to the function of a teacher....

I was thinking back to being asked (by Sonny) "Are you a good student, or a bad student"?
Of course this was kind of a trick question - on one level I was a good student, I listened, followed direction, and tried my best. But what he was getting at was that he didn't want me to do this ALL the time. He wanted his students to THINK, test out what they were told, never take anything as rote.
It was an interesting line to walk, because you wanted to do what he told you, that's only respectful, however you also wanted to not JUST do what he told you. He wanted to see your mind engaged in the process of understanding without being disrespectful to what he said ...
I've thought about this alot since, and what a fine line HE walked as a teacher also .... I'm sure it's so much easier when your students just do what they are told, don't ask any questions, and accept that they are not to change anything they are taught.
Perhaps the fact that he actually was a fighter gave him, and us more latitude in some way?
Perhaps a lack of fighting experience over generations goes hand in hand with creating systems and methods of teaching that preserve the status and power of those at the top without actually having to prove it?
I don't know.
So ultimately I am thinking about what the role of a teacher is.

 

He wanted to see your mind engaged in the process of understanding without being disrespectful to what he said

I’m a lot like this.  I require and encourage my trainees to take responsibility for themselves.  I’m an authoritive figure within the class because I know my shit, but I expect people training with me to try out what I’m putting across and see what they can get from it.  I don’t want to be obeyed.  I don’t my word to be gospel—it ain’t.  I want to get your mind working and involved in solving the problems.  From a ‘teaching’ point of view, all I can do is give you some clues, some tips, and some information that has helped me.  I can’t hold your hand and do it for you. 

Fighting can't be taught, but it can be learned.  The chaos of the fight can’t be tamed and broken down into an ordered curriculum so as to make it easy for the trainee to digest.  It can be made relatively safe, but once the chaos is removed, you ain’t got a fight experience.  You’ve got something else.  Bottom line: the fighter has to learn for himself.

When I teach, I deliberately throw a lot of shit at people.  Partly this is my personality, but it's also calculated at a certain level.  I throw it at them so that they are forced to process it holistically.  I used to have a guy in Horsham who came out of Shotokan, where everything is taught by rote, and he kept asking me if I could break it down and make it simpler so he could understand.  It drove me crazy.  I don’t want to make it simpler because it isn’t, and I need to train you to be able to deal with reality.  You need to think fast.  You need to get out of your verbal brain.  I’m throwing it at you that way on purpose.  My madness has a method.

Some people, usually those with some athletic or fighting background, are able to take to this approach quite easily.  Others struggle to make a transition, but once they've made it, they don't want to get back in the box.  And some can never get out of their A, B, C, D, E, etc. left-brain approach that is ordered and linear and predictable.  Which is fine, because they’ll have no trouble finding an instructor who works that way.  That instructor simply isn’t me.

I often say that the function of a trainer is to create a situation that calls for a needed response.  The trainer can’t impart his or her experience to the student.  But he can design ways of preparing to fight and ways of fighting that will short-cut the process of years of trial and error.  This is the basis of my method.

The ability to create exercises, drills and fighting methods that are realistic and safe requires an enormous amount of knowledge and experience, as well as the creativity and lateral thinking needed to use the information in a way that will be constructive for the individual student.  There’s no one-size-fits-all.  As a trainer, I’ve put in years and years of fucking hard work.  What might seem to be ‘off the cuff’ has sometimes taken 14 hours a day of concentrated study to master.  And I think that any coach worth his salt at a professional level would be doing the same.

I don’t burden the student with all the information I’m using.  I know what I need to achieve, and depending on the person and the problem I have to find different ways of achieving it.  Some of them are quite lateral.  Different people have different learning styles.  Sometimes I will use a familiar method, other times I have to create a drill or exercise on the spot. 

Not a lot of people can do that.  Many people in the martial arts field are hanging out their shingle and teaching without having a good grounding in the fundamentals of fighting.  They have little to draw on by way of experience and information, and this limits their options as a teacher.  Many are limited by their knowledge of a tradition or traditions.  Learning about traditions doesn’t teach you how to get outside the box and work progressively. 

There are other things that a good trainer needs to be able to do.  Me, I like to be an example in the sense of how I move, how I explode, the holistic way I behave in a training environment.  I don’t want people to copy me, I want them to pick up on the impression in the same way an animal cub picks up the impression of the behaviour from its parent.  That’s an unconscious process, and part of it involves me transmitting my enthusiasm, passion, and motivation to get better.  I want my trainees to pick up on my energy and find some of that same energy in themselves.  If you can get past the inhibitions created by society since childhood, you can find that intensity of purpose and that freedom.  That’s why I tell people when they’re training with me that they should be getting better at everything they do.  Run better, drive your car better, everything.  It’s about getting people in touch with what they are, but have forgotten.  That sounds New Age, but I mean it in a very practical way.

Another part of the trainer’s job is to use his (or her) critical eye to spot areas of a person’s performance that are stopping them from going forward.  If I get a person in a room and work with them, I can almost always improve them on the spot just by giving them some individual tips based on what I can see in their performance.  The only way to get that eye is to have a lot of experience, and all good coaches in any field have to have it.   

Finally, it’s important if you are teaching to remain current with developments across the board in sports science as well as current fight results and training methods.  It’s an evolving game, and you have to stay ahead of the curve, or at least don’t fall behind.  This means referencing and resourcing material from all kinds of sources. 

The hardest part about this last point is that sometimes the new information you get coming in contradicts what you believed was true.  It takes courage to change direction radically.  Sometimes people come to me with doubts about their (usually) traditional practice and I can see them hemming and hawing, afraid to throw away all that hard work.  And I tell them, ‘Just jump.’  You’re not going to die.  By jumping and relying on your own resources, you get so much more out of yourself than if you stayed to the safe path.  One of the best ways to progress in your own training (again, I’m always telling my guys this) is to try teaching somebody what you know.  (I don’t mean ‘teaching’ as opening up shop and charging money, by the way, although some novices could probably make a better showing than many of the so-called ‘experts’!)  Teaching will force you to raise your game.  It will force you to articulate, mentally and physically, what you are trying to do when performing a physical skill.  It will also take you out of your own particular limitations and preferences so as to engage them.  You get a sense of the bigger picture.

I try to encourage my guys to extend themselves beyond what I’m doing with them.  If everybody in the group would go off and learn a new skill (say a new submission move, because there are hundreds of those) and then come back to the group and teach it to the others, in no time you’ve got a whole bunch of new moves.  And even within the small group setting, they’ve been applied and tested across a range of body types and abilities.  In addition to increasing the group’s repertoire of moves, this process makes the members more independent and not reliant on me to tell them what to do.  They find their own competence.

The thing about the way I teach is that it encourages independence, not dependence on me.  I’ve had a long list of students over the years who have become successful as fighters and trainers.  But I’ve never had a successor or a cadre of followers.  Guys come to me, they take what I offer, and they go off and do what they want to do.  Later on I hear that the guy won this championship or has trained that fighter, or whatever.  Or I read in a magazine how he said I was an influence and inspiration to him, or he drops me a line after a number of years thanking me--and that’s enough for me.  I’m not looking to produce clones, but individuals who are empowered to make their own way. 

Perhaps a lack of fighting experience over generations goes hand in hand with creating systems and methods of teaching that preserve the status and power of those at the top without actually having to prove it?

That’s one of the points I talk about in the Scorpion’s Tale, and it’s by no means restricted to the Japanese martial arts.  Outside of the full-contact competitive martial arts, there are a great many ‘experts’ who are unproven, as fighters and as trainers.

Systemization and curriculum-building are a weak substitute for actually knowing what you’re doing.  It’s interesting that when I put up a post mentioning that I’m going to form an organisation around what I do, there were a number of people who commented on other forums how it was good that I was finally going to organise my system into a proper curriculum. 

It just shows you how little they know about how I operate!

Whilst crawling around the internet looking for trouble I came across this.

I draw your attention to this paragraph.  It could almost be Musashi, if he had a ten-gallon hat.

When I say that I learned to take my time in a gunfight, I do not wish to be misunderstood, for the time to be taken was only that split fraction of a second that means the difference between deadly accuracy with a sixgun and a miss. It is hard to make this clear to a man who has never been in a gunfight. Perhaps I can best describe such time taking as going into action with the greatest speed of which a man's muscles are capable, but mentally unflustered by an urge to hurry or the need for complicated nervous and muscular actions which trick-shooting involves. Mentally deliberate, but muscularly faster than thought, is what I mean.

I identify with Earp on this one, strongly.  Taking your time means being in control of the timeframe in which the action occurs.  You’re mentally independent of the action.  I’ve written about this before.  Also note what Earp says about simple movement being more effective than complex.  The time frame doesn’t allow for complicated movement. 

But remember, Wyatt was carrying a gun.  So no matter how quickly and smoothly he may have gotten into position to shoot, at that point all he had to do was pull the trigger.

Technology changes everything.

I haven’t got a gun.  I’ve got to produce the explosion within myself if I’m going to do damage.  And I’ve got to be able to do that as a single shot, repeated shot, in synchrony or syncopation and with opportunistic timing, all while my opponent is doing his best to give me a beating, take me down, and finish me off.   

I’ve got to be able to do it from multiple positions, angles and ranges.  Earp is right about the timing, but his advice only goes so far if you are fighting with your hands and your feet.  It only takes one well-targeted gunshot to drop a man.  Believe me, you can't rely on that happening in a fist fight.

Here’s one more link about explosiveness.  This really is about how you transfer the mass velocity, or momentum, of the body to the limb.  Because the limb is relatively light, under the conservation of momentum law the velocity of the limb is increased.  You’ll see this is the way I fire some of my shots if you look here.  The whip-like delivery I show in the clip is the same principle that the article discusses when talking about baseball pitchers--what I do is simply concentrated into a tighter frame of time and space, particular to fighting.  (The other way of firing I show on the clip is what I call the nail-gun effect.)

The important thing about this article is that references slow training vs. fast training and why the former is less effective.

One thing that keeps coming up recently is the question of the role of a ‘teacher’ or in my words, the role of a trainer.  I’ll be getting to that one soon.

 

When I posted earlier, I forgot to include this link. 

Athletic Development by Vern Gambetta

This is a book by one of the top functional coaches in the world.

On page 143 he talks about the fundamental patterns I'm referring to.   On page 6 he references speed.  There's a lot of other good material in the book.

This guy is somebody I can relate to.  Much of what he's saying rings true with me and my experience over forty years of training myself and others.  Read his book, read his blog, read his newsletter. 

Well, I'm used to doing everything backwards from everybody else in the martial arts.  Some issues have arisen as a result of my slo mo no go post.  I’ll try to clarify and expand on what I said, but it will probably take a few posts to look at all the angles on this one.

First of all, there’s the difference between going slow by necessity and going slow by design.  It’s one thing when learning a skill to feel your way through it and perform the skill at reduced intensity and pace in order to create a motor engram specific to the task.  But this ‘walk through’ of a move is the equivalent of the kid on the wobbly bike I referred to in my first post.  It’s a temporary phase.  You’re not intentionally taking it slow so as to break down every moment of the process and observe and tweak all the details to make a perfect move.  You’re moving slowly because you’re using sensory feedback to guide you through the movement, and you make corrections along the way.

There are some instances in training where we will go a little slower for a specific reason.  I’ll explain about that in a separate post.  But the reason for slowing down is not to break down and minutely control the movement as in the mime clip I posted.

The slowing-down effect serves our mime artist very well, because he’s all about creating a visual illusion in which visual detail is extremely important.  But when martial arts teachers use this same approach, they don’t seem to appreciate that by slowing down the movement they qualitatively change it.  If you take a film of an explosive physical effort and slow it down, it will not look the same as a film of a person trying to perform the same skill, slowly.  The two things ain’t the same.  This is leaving aside all of the physiological issues having to do with training the CNS and the muscle specific to the task.

The martial arts teacher who slows down the movement so as to observe it closely and make corrections believes that he can impose a superior pattern based upon his analysis, and encode that pattern into the student.   But when you disrupt the natural patterns inbuilt in the body and replace them with something thought-out, you are messing with success.  It may be tempting—particularly if the student is an awkward mover--but don’t do it.   As a teacher, you may think you know what the details in the movement are that make it effective, but the trainee’s body knows better than you. 

This is where I am out here on my own, because when I say this there's going to be a big chorus of, 'That's completely fucked-up, you don't know what you're talking about.'

Everybody's entitled to their opinion.  And I've got mine!

Personally, I trust the body.  I trust those fundamental patterns that are inherent within me and that have been developed since my early childhood, as well as those innate reflex patterns that support learned movement and provide the dynamics.  More importantly as a trainer, I also trust the fundamental patterns within my trainees’ bodies, even though not everybody who walks in my gym has got ideal genetics for fighting nor ideal childhood experiences.  Even so, at some level they do have the fundamental locomotive, non-manipulative and manipulative skills that are the basis for all advanced motor skills.  It is these basic patterns that I can then address through stimuli-oriented, task-specific situational training.  This natural process will serve the trainee far better than the kind of directive instruction that will tell them how to move. 

I realise that this is an unpopular view.  A lot of people have a big problem getting their head round this one.  It makes some people upset and angry, but I'm used to that!  Even Jon Law, who is a sports scientist, said he initially had a problem with the idea of building engrams for fighting skills based on fundamental patterns rather than imposing instructor-designed skills in a motor-oriented way.  Now that Jon has some personal experience of these natural processes working as they should, things look a little different. 

As a species, we like to think we’re smart and that we’re in control of everything, but in my opinion, we ain’t that smart.  Not yet.  The wisdom of the body knows better. 

 

 

 

The summer training dates for Primal have been set.  They are posted in the sidebar for quick reference.

21 June
5 July
19 July
2 August
16 August

If you are in the North, I'll be at Neal Lofts' gym on 27 June and I'll also be at Loughborough University on 9 August.

At Primal yesterday it was great to see Ray, who used to visit me in Horsham and now trains in an MMA gym.  You can really see how he's come on since leaving karate--much more natural in your movement, Ray.  Also a new guy turned up, Dan.  He mentioned that he hadn't been sure whether the session was open to novices.  I want to make it clear one more time: we train everybody pretty much the same at Primal.  You can be on your first day or you can have 20 years' practice under your belt.  I don't care. 

I do have a couple of posts lined up to answer some of the questions and complaints that have come up recently about training methods.  More soon.

Out of the blue I got a message from somebody called tobes09 .  It went something like, 'Hi, how are you, I just discovered your website, thank you for making me the fighter I am, Mark.'  And I was like, 'Mark?  Mark who?'  So I looked back at the address and it hit me.  Tobes?  Mark Tobin.

I got to admit, I choked up a bit when I realised who it was.  And the reason is that not only was Mark a great fighter, but also a great friend.  It's been nearly 30 years since he moved to Australia with his wife. 

Mark is one of the few guys I've ever had who I would truly call a student.  Like Vincent Jauncey and Tom O'Shaughnessy, he trained serious with me for a number of years when I had my gym.  Mark tells me he ran a kickboxing club for a while in Australia but couldn't keep it up while working full-time.  He trained a number of fighters, including one who won the Western Australia boxing title.

If you see the clip, Mark was not only a big guy, but he could move.  And he had a serious left hand (which apparently is still doing a lot of damage even though he's around my age).  He could also wrestle, so he was well covered in the standup and the ground.  At the time I tried to encourage him to go professional, but he didn't want to.  I didn't press it, because I am the same way.  Like me, he just loved to train and loved to fight. 

Back in the day, challengers would come up to Earlham Street and sometimes I used to enjoy standing back and watching Mark put them away.  Although he didn't turn professional, he was every bit as good as any professional I've ever seen. 

I saw Andy Dunne yesterday and told him about Mark making contact and he got a bit choked up, too.  Vince and Tom, if you're reading this, you can get in touch with Mark through his account here, I think. 

Here's a clip I've put up before to show how we used to work a partner exchange drill; this is Mark and I having a workout that focuses on my defence.  You can get an idea of his ability in this clip.

This guy embodies the teaching philosophy of many martial arts and self-protection instructors.  This idea that you have to ‘go slow’ when learning a skill is completely against the way I’ve learned and the way I teach.  The only time I’ve ever used something slow (like walking) in my training was to build a kinaesthetic sense of the interaction of joint angular changes taking place within my body.  I’ve never learned skills slowly and I most certainly don’t teach in that manner.
And I’ll tell you why. 

Even if you were to be able to break down the changes in alignment, sequence, rate and timing of your own movement as an example for your students, that movement is representative of your individual manner of performing a functional skill.  The important part to focus on here is the ‘functional skill.’  The student has to arrive at their own way of performing the skill effectively—that means, solving a combative problem.  They can’t just adopt or copy a movement pattern.  The movement pattern is the consequence of what you have to do, but in martial arts and self-protection the emphasis is often on ‘how’ you do what you do, rather than on the effectiveness of what you’re doing.  The how will take care of itself, provided that the student experiences the situation enough times and gets the opportunity to self-correct through failure. 

Now here’s the thing.  Even if you were to ask a top athlete how he or she performs a movement, it’s unlikely that the athlete could accurately and completely break down the motor events within the skill.  Many of those motor events are taking place at a reflex level.  Sports scientists will tell you that the elite performers upon whom they base much of their work display great variability in the details of how they move in order to be effective.  There’s no one size fits all when it comes to effective movement.

Although the sports scientist can tweak an athlete’s performance, it’s only a tweak.  The majority of the processing and development of the athlete has occurred through experience of the game situation, whatever game that might be. 

So the idea that somebody can come along and build 'from the foundation up' this process of movement upon which a skill relies, is nonsense.  It’s as nonsensical as suggesting that a sports scientist could teach a baby to walk.  Yet martial arts and self-protection instructors often present themselves and structure their classes with the idea that they can build you from the ground up.   They can’t.  They can teach you to produce a facsimile of functional movement just as a dance teacher can teach you to perform moves, but the movement isn't functional.  It's only visual.  The only way you get functional movement is by performing the function.

The function, when it comes to martial arts, is a violent encounter against a hostile opponent.  The fight will teach you what you need to know on an unconscious level, and if you have someone knowledgeable to act as a coach and offer you tips to tweak your performance, that’s all you need.  A way of moving that’s been imposed from outside is going to do you more harm than good. 

Of course there are elements that keep cropping up in movement, but they can’t be stereotyped and imparted in a fixed way as all too many teachers try to do.  They have to be absorbed and used by the trainee in the context of the big picture, which is the fight.  If the trainee overconcentrates on any one aspect of movement, the movement will turn into a parody.

When a kid learns to ride a bike, the reason why he’s going slowly and deliberately is because he’s struggling to coordinate all the different functions he has to perform while at the same time maintaining a dynamic balance.  He’s relying heavily on sensory feedback.  But once those skills are learned, they become imprinted as a motor engram.  So now the kid is free to go faster, slower, shout to his friends, or try a new trick.  And when he tries a new trick, he’s back to relying on sensory feedback to guide his actions, until that trick is learned and then it becomes automatic.  The process takes care of itself, as long as you have a bike, are motivated to ride it, and get back on it after you fall off.  Sure, you can put some stabilizers on there to assist with balance while the other skills are being learned.  But the stabilizers don’t interfere with the natural process, and eventually you have to take them off and learn to add dynamic balance to the skillset of riding. 
Fighting’s no different. 

The important thing about the progression of learning is that its basis is situational.  It’s about you individually coming to grips with a challenging situation.  A kid might need a day to learn to ride a bike, or might need weeks. 

For another angle on this concept, try this page of a book on climbing which refers to sensory feedback and motor engrams.  This is a good book, and the explanation here is very clear and easy to understand.

Going back to our mime artist, there is another problem with learning slow when you will be needing to perform explosively.  And in fighting, explosive movement is the general rule.

The problem is that explosive movement isn’t just a speeded-up version of slow movement.  Explosive and fast are two different things, and explosive and slow are two completely different things.  Motor engrams are specific  to what you have to do in terms of joint angular change in alignment, sequence, rate, and timing.  The neural drive and motor recruitment of slow-twitch, fast-twitch, and super-fast-twitch fibres vary depending on the engram.  If you don’t have an explosive engram, you don’t produce an explosive movement. 

And, if you don’t have enough of these engrams onboard to cover numerous possibilities and permutations of action in a fight, you’ll be in sensory mode like the climber in the article.  The more engrams you have, the more options you have when faced with an unfamiliar situation.  You have to have a broad skill base, on the feet and on the ground.  If you do, you are freed to strategize and think even as you're performing.

There is one reason why I suspect so many people favour the approach of going slow and exaggerating the movement process, and that is the fact that it plays into the peak shift effect.  Going slowly and moving in an exaggerated way gives kinaesthetic and psychological gratification.  But that gratification isn’t going to help you acquire a functional engram.  Try to avoid it! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We've got the description for the new DVD up on the site, but there were several orders straight away before we'd even had time to do that.  This is a good film and I recommend it.   If you've ordered a copy, it will probably go out today.  This is the write-up

----------------------------------------------

Feedback on the One-on-One: Round Kick Clinic DVD has always been extremely positive, and many people have asked for more videos in the same vein.  This One-on-One DVD focuses on some of the tips that I currently teach.  Included are some of the ways I've developed to improve reactive power and its application within the time frames, angles and ranges of a fight on the feet. 

I've written about a number of the ideas you will see expressed in the video, but now they are all shown in a manner that makes it easy for you to apply to your own practice.  This film is ideally suited for the individual.  It will aid solo practice, and if you work on these components on your own, you will see real improvements in your reactive power when you fight in the gym.

Topics addressed include:

Double-stretch theory and use of rapid repetitive movement to prep the CNS to produce more explosive force and imprint moves. 

Isometric exercises and breathing methods to recruit a higher percentage of fast-twitch and superfast twitch muscle fibre, including isolating different phases of joint angular change to improve possible problems and emphasizing the initiation, development, and follow-through aspects of the strike.

Anticipatory timing and reactive timing

Head position in relation to target and range and positional angulation on the feet

Principles of hand-fighting

Synchronized/syncopated beats

Interval of time

Advanced double-hip principle

Vocalization and its link to core stability, power release, and cadence

Developing peripheral awareness and avoiding tunnel-vision

Visual tracking

Ways of stepping/weight transfer when striking

Use of head to shift weight

Application of Tabata Protocal to bag work, with an added psychological element

--the DVD is 1 hour 35 minutes--

We've been working on the site and Trish has just uploaded a new version of Morris No Holds Barred.  It's not complete yet and it needs a few tweaks, so please bear with us.

There's going to be a lot of new content in the Fighting Arts Alliance section, which is going to be reserved for members of the organisation I've been referring to.  More about that in the coming weeks. 

We also have a new DVD out, the second in the One on One series.  It's much in the manner of Round Kick Clinic, which is one of our most popular titles.  More about that soon--we're just working on the glitches on the site right now.

By the way, we've made significant reductions in the prices of most of the DVD titles to make way for more new stuff that's in the pipeline. 

Steve Rowe made a comment over on The Martial Archive in which he said of my Machida post:  ‘To state the obvious, it's his traditional budo background and upbringing underlying his mma training that is giving him an advantage. All credit to him for recognizing it. I'm not Shotokan but can still see that the budo training has helped him.’

I’m not sure where the bit was that I recognized ‘budo training’ as influential on Machida’s success.  In fact, I talked about the baggage of the tradition needing to go.  And I’ve written extensively on the ideological implications of the word ‘budo’.  The term ‘budo’ alone is an offensive one, often misunderstood in the West as a collective description of Japanese martial arts.  Westerners use it (often romantically) without recognizing its political and ideological connotations.  However, in Japan the ideological meaning of ‘budo’ is clearly understood as character-building in support of nationalistic ideologies.  Budo is all about the superiority of the Japanese way, in all its hierarchial, right-wing trappings.  By the 1930’s ‘budo’ had become a term closely associated with indoctrination into Emperor ideology and military fascism in Japan.  Check out the links below to quickly find out more.

http://ejmas.com/jalt/jaltart_abe_0600.htm

http://www.kendo-world.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-79.html

Now the interesting guy here is called Nishikubo Hiromichi, who wrote of the distinction between budo and bujutsu.  The latter was a battlefield-derived killing art, but it fell by the wayside over hundreds of years of imposed peace during the Tokugawa period.  Nishikubo saw budo as a character-building practice to support Emperor ideology.  He was looking to produce through kendo practice boys and men for modern warfare who were loyal to the Emperor and unflinching in adversity, but he did not need to produce capable swordsmen.  The sword, by this period, was not only obsolete in the battlefield but also in personal combat. 

So the other problem with the term Budo is that it includes predominantly non-fighting arts with kendo and judo thrown into the mix.  Kendo and judo, whilst they do not fully represent fighting in all its dimensions, are nevertheless full-contact fighting systems that can impart important characteristics to a fighter.  However, the other budo systems of Iaido, kyudo, jodo, aikido, and karate do (with the exception of the modern inventions of Kyokushin Kai and Daido juku) do not include full-contact fighting.  There’s no test of the so-called attributes of the fighter.  As far as I’m concerned, these latter systems don’t belong in the same category as kendo and judo, yet they are lumped together under the aegis ‘budo.’

The semantics of all this are important.  This is because the budo systems coopted a lot of terms that originally had legitimate sources on the battlefield, and used these terms in order to wrap the practitioner in the ethos of a samurai.  But the budo practices themselves had no fighting, and the terms they borrowed from bujutsu had no substance.  They were just words.  Budo itself was largely founded on a fiction.  Read ‘Don’t Drop the Soap’ and look at the part on the Hagakure and Nitobe’s ‘Bushido’.  The foundations of modern budo are bollux.

Now, Machida has taken the principle of initiative (sen) and opening (suki) from the bujutsu (not budo) systems of the past and successfully applied these principles in MMA.  Because he’s successfully done it does not mean that the budo systems (which use the same terminology to suggest a direct connection to the past) are able to impart these same principles.  They ain’t.  Because you got to fight to learn these principles.

It’s very common in the martial arts for people to get hold of a word or concept and begin to converse about it with some authority, without ever having experienced it.  Now, the budo systems in the West don’t tend to be right-wing anti-Communist structures as they still are in Japan, but rather they have moved towards personal development as the goal of their practices.  Yet their use of the terminology of the past continues without ever being tested combatively.  So the Budo practices may contain such terms as ‘sen’, ‘suki’ and ‘zanchin’ but these terms don’t mean anything unless you know how to use them.  Most budo teachers haven’t a clue what these principles are, let alone how to teach them. 

The bottom line is, it’s no good being ‘principle based’ if you don’t have a first-hand understanding of the principle, and that comes through fighting.  People in the martial arts often use words and terms so as to appear to be an authority on a subject, when in fact they have no real-life experience of it.

Machida is the exception, not the rule.  Traditional budo practitioners should not attempt to piggyback on his success.  They haven't earned the right. 

 

 

 

 

Although I refer to a lot of science on this blog, my approach to science isn’t quite what you might expect.  I’ve said before that there is a wisdom of the body that supercedes academic knowledge.  And I trust this wisdom in my own body.  The scientific reading that I’ve engaged in over the years has been an effort to try to get an additional insight into what I intuitively felt was going on.  But I’ve never waited for science to tell me how things work or what I should do to move forward. 

Sometimes it takes a long time for scientific process to catch up with what we intuitively know.  Here’s a recent example of something I’ve been working with for some time that has recently been ‘proven’ scientifically, and it fits in with what I was saying the other day about Machida and his ability to act decisively while playing a strategic game at the same time.  

The clip below refers to recent studies that reveal how we have two independent ways of processing visual information: perceiving, and acting.  Each of these information processing methods runs at its own speed, which is why often we’re able to act faster than we can consciously perceive.  I found the clip on Dynamic Edge, where you can find a lot of the science behind the visual training I talk about.

I’ve been working with this idea for some time now.  I have drills by which to enhance both of these systems.  In fighting it’s essential not only to act quickly and decisively, but also to be able to self-correct and evaluate what is going on.  And it’s critical that these two processes should not interfere with one another. 

One drill I do sometimes at Primal is to engage two people in an exchange drill and then ask them to describe to me the room around them, whilst still engaging in the drill.  What usually happens is that they start to talk in the rhythm of the exchange.  They can’t decouple their actions from their thinking.  Funny enough, everybody can do this when they drive a car.  But when it comes to fight training, there’s a problem.  

When these two streams are working together synergistically, they make it possible for you to rapidly respond using the action process whilst simultaneously taking in the bigger picture with the perceptual process.  The perceptual stream is conscious, and allows you to strategise and plan ahead while the action stream takes care of itself. 

Developing the kind of timing that Machida demonstrates requires that both processes be challenged and enhanced within an environment that represents the punishing conditions of a fight.  Machida, of course, is not alone in possessing this kind of timing.  There are many fighters, including most of the great ones, with similar talents.

We have rescheduled the Loughborough course for 9th August.

Time:      Sunday 9 August 1-4 pm
Place:     The Performance Centre, Loughborough UniversityLE11 3TU
Cost:       £25 (£40 for two training together, concession for Loughborough students available)

Certain crucial principles in fight training are typically misunderstood or even overlooked entirely.  In this course we will be exploring these areas in depth, because they are the key to exponentially improving your performance. 

 Many of the drills and exercises I will be teaching are new.  They align closely with cutting edge sports science, and I have designed all of them specifically with the fight in mind.  Topics include:

*        Mindset
*        Dynamic visual training & coordination
*        Timing
*        Tactile perception
*        How to imprint moves
*        Prepping the CNS to generate power
*        Breathing and vocalisation
*        Role of reflex/behavioural patterns
*        1/2 man theory, red zone theory, 3 ranges/angles/levels theory

Whether you are looking to get an edge as a fighter or you want to understand the key factors that underlie the fight, come along.  I guarantee I can improve your performance.  Contact me directly for more information.  We'll take cash on the day, or you can book online to reserve your spot.  If you're a forum member of a relevant forum, please post these details to help us publicise the course. 

How many places?

One place £25.00 Training partners £40.00

There’s talk about Lyoto Machida.  A lot of MMA guys are having a problem with him.  In the recent fight with Rashad Evans it looked to me like Evans had lost the fight before he even got in the cage—Evans looked like he wasn’t even trying.  But that’s not to take away from Machida as a fighter.  He has some unique qualities that give him the edge in MMA. 

Shotokan practitioners are keen to point out the Shotokan influences visible in Machida’s performance, and I’ve seen a number of references to Machida as an example of the effectiveness of Shotokan.  I don’t agree.  Whilst it’s true that there are elements of Machida’s game reminiscent of Shotokan kumite, his recent knockouts have come from blows which bear no resemblance to Shotokan. 

The key to Machida’s game isn’t about style.  It’s about the strategic use of timing.   Machida’s father Yoshizo seems to hold tremendous influence over the fighter.  He even has Lyoto drinking his own urine as a health practice.  Yoshizo raised his son in the samurai ethos, and this included the strategy deployed by the samurai in personal combat against a live blade.  Watching Machida fight and reading about his father, it looks to me like Musashi has been a heavy influence, particularly with regard to the concept of ‘sen’ or taking the initiative. 

There are three related terms from Japanese sword-fighting that come into play here.  Sensen no sen means taking the initiative of attack before the opponent can move.  It’s an intuitive psychological or physical moment when you see suki, or an opening.  Sen no sen means taking the initiative during the opponent’s attack.  Finally, go no sen means striking after the opponent’s attack. 

Does this sound familiar?  It’s what I’m talking about when I refer to the interval of time before the beginning of a movement process, during the process, and after.  You’ll also find similar concepts within Western fencing: attacks on preparation, stop-hits, time-hits, and counter-time hits.  In Chinese martial arts, these principles are found collectively within the terms sim (to evade), jeet (to intercept), chun (to penetrate) and chon (to destroy). 

The principle of using the interval of time to beat your opponent transcends technique.  Naturally, economy of movement is important—these opportunities are fleeting and to take advantage of them, you have to be able to move without visible preparation and with great economy.  However, the onboard sense of time is the crucial faculty, without which you ain’t got nothing.  This is how Machida gains the advantage.

If you are fighting with swords, then you have no choice but to focus your mind on this momentary opportunity where a single movement could equal life or death and even a twitch could telegraph to your opponent what you’re about to do.  Machida fights as though his opponent had a blade.  He’s approaching the game from a different perspective, and his sense of timing is superior to his opponents’. 

This principle of ippon or one-hit kill was initiated within Japan during the 1940s when the Japanese military needed to get away from the idea of randoori or free practice and focus their soldiers on committing to making a decisive kill.  They wanted to create a mental attitude of killing as opposed to the sporting practice characteristic of judo of that time.  The samurai single-stroke kill was the inspiration.  The idea was also propagated within the JKA by Nakayama Masatoshi, whose father was a famous kendo master.  So the ippon approach to fighting originally comes from the sword.  The Machidas have simply adapted this principle and applied it to MMA. 

What’s important about Machida isn’t his Shotokan-influenced style of movement, but rather the sense of time that has been instilled in him.  You don’t have to study Shotokan, doing the katas, etc. to acquire this heightened sense of time and distance appreciation—in fact, the style is just baggage.  What Machida has got and his opponents haven’t got is the ability to sense time, appreciate distance, and read subtle cues (physical or psychological) in his opponent’s behaviour that allow him to take the initiative and keep it. 

The idea of the blade changes everything.  It raises the intensity of your mind and physiologically primes you to a higher level of response.  However, in Shotokan kumite, the ippon concludes the match—it’s a figurative ‘kill’—even though it hasn’t actually done any damage.  Machida, on the other hand, has to fight in a cage where the bout will be extended and multidimensional.  He has learned to sustain this knife-edge sense of timing within the complex chaos of a professional MMA match at the highest level.  He's employing this faculty within a complete game.  And that's how it should be.

One last point.  Taking the initiative sometimes involves a draw.  You appear to be open, but because of your heightened sense of time and your strategic ability to anticipate, you’re not open.  You’re baiting your opponent.  That’s why suki, or this moment of opportunity, can not only be given to you by your opponent, but you can create it.  That’s the game. 

We're working on these things every fortnight at Primal.  This is what I've been doing for years--this is what I'm expert at.  Anybody want to know how to beat Machida?  Give me a phone call.  No problem.

Way back in November I posted, ‘I'm going to put up a number of clips over the next week or so: cats falling, guys chopping and sawing wood, bush men lighting fires, cheetahs running, dogs shaking--a whole bunch of things.  I'll be making some comments, but really I think the imagery speaks for itself.’

Well, although I’ve been going on about sense of time on the comments to recent entries, I guess it’s been more than ‘a week’ since I wrote this last November!  Bit like the Nick Hughes reply letter…anyway, Trish has been getting on my case so I’m going to resume putting up these clips.

The one we’re looking at today represents something that was a big part of my life for over twenty years.  It’s about performance horses and their riders and trainers.  I got into it completely by accident.  It’s a long story, but when David Dubow died, his wife Erika was left with a whole bunch of horses she’d bought as a ‘business’ but it was really more of a hobby for her.  Now they were costing her a fortune, I was out of a gym, and it seemed only natural for me to step in and take over the running of the horse business.  Talk about diving in at the deep end.

The horses were American quarterhorses imported to Britain to be trained and sold on or used in a Western-style riding business in England.  Some came to us ready to be ridden, but others needed a lot of work before they could be sold on.  I was already familiar with the guys who David had been buying from: Bill House, Dick Hur, and Doug Thompson.  These are all established riders and trainers, and I’d picked up a whole heap of riding information off them informally.  I’d begun to transfer a lot of this understanding into my martial arts practice and teaching.  Some of it had given me a new insight into martial arts concepts and terms that had previously been kind of ambiguous or cryptic. 

For example, the Tai Chi expression ‘controlling a thousand pounds with four ounces’ could almost have been talking about a horse rider.  I’d seen riders at the sales in the States go through a selling performance.  It went something like this.  The guy would ride in on a horse, demonstrate what the horse could do, and then uncinch the saddle and slip it out from underneath himself so now he’s riding bareback.  Then he takes off the bridle and holds it in one hand while he uses one rein around the horse’s neck to go through the same performance.  In other words, there’s no advantage of the bit.  The guy is simply never letting the horse realise he’s 1000 pounds of animal.  He never lets the horse get past the four ounces of his control.  It’s always there.  When I started to understand the sensitivity required to do that, it became a challenge to me to do the same. 

Where in recent comments we’ve been talking about visual processing of information, this work is tactile.  And it’s being performed on an animal that’s often unpredictable.  The only thing you’ve got to go on is touch. 

The years I spent training horses had a profound effect on my practice and teaching.  Every horse brings a different problem to the trainer, and you very quickly learn to find different ways of getting around the problem. It's just like when you're training people.  It's not a stereotypical approach.  Or when you're fighting a new opponent.  It's a new game.  You have to be very adaptable.  And because the horse can't talk, you have to rely on your senses.  People tend to get caught up with language, but working with horses teaches you to get underneath that, to bypass language. 

When you look at this video, you’ll see horses doing spectacular things, but what you can’t see is what the rider is doing to assist the horse or anticipate the horse’s actions.  Going back to the story of how the riders sell the horse by showing off its performance, what you then see afterward sometimes is that the buyer gets on the horse and the horse doesn’t cooperate.  Once he’s been sold, he doesn’t put on the performance he did before; in fact, he usually does the wrong thing or nothing at all because the new rider is miscuing him all over the place.  The horse is talented, but the rider is extremely important.  In the clips, the rider looks like a passenger.  You can’t see what’s going on between him and the horse, but believe me, there’s a lot going on at a tactile level.  To ride at this level, you’ve really got to be switched on.  Otherwise you’re exiting rapidly from the vehicle!  No parachute included.

The phenomenon going on between the rider and the horse was what the Chinese sometimes call ‘listening energy’.  The problem with this principle in martial arts is that the person the master is working with is often extremely compliant.  Horses, from my experience, ain’t.  Especially stallions, and stallions with an attitude really will cut you no slack. 

So you’ve got to be in his heightened state of awareness, but not anxious, because the anxiety will transfer to the horse.  And you’ve got to act instantly and decisively on whatever the horse is doing, or whatever you want the horse to do.  You really do have to be in unison with the animal.  I found that this ability was something I could transfer directly into my martial arts.  The mindset I acquired by training horses was the same one I fight with.  It’s the same mind zone. 

Another thing about horses is the guys who ride them.  My exposure to the American trainers who worked with performance horses gave me a sense of who these guys are.  Typically they’d get a horse and they’ve got 60 days to have him ready; their business would fail if they took any longer.  Some of these horses are dangerous.  (At a personal level, I’ve been bitten, butted, kicked, stomped—you name it.  In fact, several times over the years people who’ve trained with me have remarked on the ‘muscularity’ of a region of my back.  I’ve had to laugh and tell them that the great big lump on my scapula is actually where I was bitten by a stallion—the teeth marks are still visible.)  To be in a profession where you have to get back up there every day and do your business no matter what’s happened to you the day before—these guys are mentally tough.  But they’re not hard men in terms of how they present themselves.  They slouch around, real low-key, don’t say a lot, and they’ve had more broken bones and physical confrontations than many fighters who act the tough-guy role.  You have to have a raw courage to get on some of these anaimals.  My hat’s off to these guys. 

There’s lots to tell about horses and riding, but I’ll end on the clip for now.

 

 

Recently I've had a few people add me as a friend, and when I go to their profile to find out who they are, it's empty.  If you want to comment on the blog, I need to know who you are as a martial artist.  That's why I've locked the comments to friends only.  So, to put you on my friends list I need to see a description of you on your user profile that tells me who you are in martial art terms.  I don't mind if you're a beginner or whatever, it's not about that.  It's about keeping the comments on the blog on-topic with regard to serious martial arts.  That's also why I screen comments.

I'm happy to take questions on the Q&A thread or in the comments thread.  New people are always welcome.