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.

A little about the learning process. In recent years, animal scientists have been observing how hunting species teach their young. Their findings support the way that I have always thought about teaching martial arts. 

First is a clip of a female cheetah who creates a hunting situation for her cubs by bringing home a young gazelle to play with. Cubs live with their mothers for a year, in which time they observe her hunting and attempt to hunt for themselves, so this particular learning methodology is one of several that they experience. But the key element in all aspects of instruction of the young cheetah is that the prey is always live. And ultimately whether or not the mother has done a good job will be determined by whether or not her offspring survive independently of her. http://www.arkive.org/cheetah/acinonyx-jubatus/video-09d.html

And here are some links on how meerkats teach their young survival skills.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5177594.stm
http://www.livescience.com/animals/060713_meerkat_school.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13845020/

One interesting experiment that the meerkat researchers did involved three groups of young. Over a three day period, the researchers presented to them 1) a live scorpion without a sting, 2) a dead scorpion, 3) another food. On the fourth day, all of the young were presented with a live scorpion. The group that had worked with the live (unstinging) scorpion previously were able to cope with the real thing. The others weren’t. 

I think the application of this study to martial arts instruction is pretty obvious

Now here's a link about how dolphins teach their young to forage for food. The dolphin parents prolong the search and chase phases of the hunt and exaggerate the catching movement of the prey to teach their young, then repeat the process by releasing the prey and re-catching it. So we can see that there is some mileage in the idea of exaggerating key points of a move, and in repeating parts of a process in order to reinforce a pattern. 

However, note that this ‘exaggeration’ behaviour is exhibited only in the presence of young dolphins, and once the young have picked up the move, they’re on their own to hunt. There is no ‘practice for the sake of practice,’ and the exaggeration itself is bound to fall away as soon as the young dolphin has to deal with the prey. He’s not going to be rewarded for making his catch in a certain style! I’ll be discussing the exaggeration phenomenon in a future piece about the peak shift effect. 

Here are the dolphins:
http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/080807_dolphin.htm

In none of these examples is the learning process prolonged beyond what is necessary to get the young animal doing the business for itself. The martial arts makes a meal of extending the teaching process across a lifetime, but the reality of learning to fight is like the reality of learning to hunt. It’s do or die. Any instruction has to happen with the idea that the real thing is right around the corner.  The 'teacher' has to have hunted and killed successfully or she would be dead, not the parent of a litter of cubs.  The representation of the hunting situation is real.  The situation has been made slightly easier, but not significantly different.

Finally, on a slightly different note, here’s another illuminating link.  An experiment was done with two female chimpanzees, each the respective leader of a hierarchial group, each being taught different ways of accessing food through a device, one method superior to the other. In the experiment, even though one method was obviously working better than the other, the followers of the leader who had learned the ‘inferior’ method continued to practice this method even in light of evidence that it didn’t work as well. What does this remind me of?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7913-more-animals-join-the-learning-circle.html

I present this information for you to consider in the context of how we train in martial arts. The way these hunting animals operate offers us some great lessons, and let’s not forget the chimps! As close cousins of the chimp, we may be predisposed to playing ‘follow the leader’ at the expense of what is best for us as individuals, and I know I see this phenomenon happening in the martial arts pretty much on a daily basis!
 

I’ve spent most of my life looking for ways to raise my game as a fighter, and one key element to this is power development. In the 1970s I found I’d reached a plateau. I was over 16 stone (225 pounds) of solid muscle. I’d done all the powerlifting shit. I was into the Chinese martial arts methods of force development. But I wasn’t getting more out of myself, and psychologically I felt discouraged because I knew that I should be able to go forward. I was seriously bad news to anybody who had to fight me around this period, but inside myself I wasn’t satisfied with my performance.

I looked everywhere I could think of and I wasn’t getting any answers. I was on the verge of quitting martial arts. David Dubow was going to send me to America to go to University—he knew I wanted to improve myself, and being an alumnus of NYU and Columbia himself, he’d always supported the idea of higher education. That was the plan. 

But, like most of my life, something happened. In this case, the source of the trouble came from a ginger tom cat called Gallagher. He fell off the top of a wardrobe and I noticed that he twisted his head and the body followed so as to land him on his feet. In that momentary impression of Gallagher falling, I’d seen something that would be a clue to where I was going to go next.

Up until then I’d been using my head to lead the action, but not in any conscious way. In fact, when I did karate and Wing Chun I was expressly told not to move my head. But when you look at the cat falling, you’ll see that his eyes and his head orient to the ground, and sequentially the rest of the body follows. You can see the rotation of the spine. 

I took that imagery to the bag and bang! Up went the power. 

I hadn’t yet made the connection between the head posting over the foot to create an axis; that would come later when watching 100m runners coming off their blocks. But for now, it was enough to make me cancel the plane ticket to America. And, as Foyles bookshop was just up the road, I paid them a visit and asked them about cats. Unfortunately, the cat books they had did not help me! But, I persisted, and eventually I found myself in the kinesiology section. 

Then I was a kid in a candy shop. The rest is history.

Here’s a clip of a cat who does somewhat resemble Gallagher. You can see him in slow motion as he falls. Pick up on the way the head leads the action and how it fixes on its target (in this case, the ground, but in your case, the man’s head). Try and internalise the concept.

Here’s another clip which shows you how the head initiates the rotational action of the spine, but in this case it’s a shaking action. This should be of particular interest in the context of the Fujian systems and their derivatives. Again, try and internalise what you see here. The clip will show you the biomechanics in action in a natural context. This is how the body is designed to work. 

Use it, but don’t turn it into a motor-oriented action where you shake for the sake of shaking. You have to have an objective, and that is the production of force, first applying it against a dead target like a bag, and then against a man within drills, and then against a man who’s acting as a hostile adversary. 

For me, the next clip is a personal favourite: the cheetah. Again, it’s not that you’re going to go from 0-60 in a couple of strides. It’s picking up the impression of the intensity and rate of the movement of the spine in a bending and extending pattern. The head is involved, but only as much as is needed; the cheetah still has to keep its eye on a target that is trying to evade it. 

This is where I get this cyclonic sense of movement and repetitive action. Here’s a representation that is alive, and it works, and it’s teaching you directly how to move. You’re not getting a second-hand (or third or fourth hand) representation off some master. You can see something that the ‘ancient masters’ never could see, because of the technology that brings the cheetah right into your room. 

To me the best way of teaching is by representation. I work so hard when I teach because I teach by example. I can break it down, but the breakdown is never going to be as good as what I can do, and it’s too left-brain. These representations might be only videos, but if you make the effort to get into it, relate to it like a kid would. Empathy is a strong tool. Use it. Don’t be inhibited about it. 

I have one more clip for today. I always had a problem with how to breathe. Do you breathe through your nose? Through your mouth? Do you make a particular sound? Do your teeth close? Do you tuck in your tongue? The only information I could find was based on what other martial artists were doing, and often I was unconvinced that they knew what they were talking about. 

At Bourne Hill I had a Saluki mix called Jed. He took it upon himself to guard the yard where we had all the horses. I learned a lot from Jed over the years, but here’s one thing that was very important to me. I noticed when he barked that the bark seemed to come from his whole body. In fact, he’d more or less lose contact with the ground on every bark. The sound seemed to be initiating this sudden, explosive shift of his weight. And the head was again involved. You could see the total body movement in the bark. 

That told me something. The sudden, explosive contraction of the rectus and the diaphragm supported a sudden and explosive sound for Jed; but I also realised that I could use the same means to support a sudden and explosive release of power through the limbs for myself.  The involvement of the core muscles in the barking ensured that any movement was interconnected from the feet to the head. Everything was involved. It wasn’t just about making a sound.

Also, he didn’t get tired. The nature of the effort facilitated repetition over and over. And the closer the perceived threat got to Jed, the higher the tempo and the intensity of the barks. And here’s another thing: the rhythm wasn’t regular. The barking was expressive.

I’d seen the same sort of barking behaviour in baboons. Unlike many of the sounds that come out of the martial arts, this was a way of vocalising aggression that I could relate to. When I talk about vocalisation, the barking of the dog is a good representation. There’s emotion, there’s purpose, there’s intent all expressed and integrated in a physical way.  The bark supports the bite.