This post is in answer to a comment left on my Context Is Everything post. It comes from Maija Soderholm, a student of the late Sonny Umpad. Maija is teaching Bagua and Eskrima in
So .... my 2 main practices are Bagua and FMA. Bagua is a movement based art, but forms are it's base.
Visayan Eskrima is the complete opposite. Many systems of FMA are taught in patterns of movement, but my teacher evolved over the years he taught, until his death in 2006, to get rid of ALL the patterns in his teaching. In fact he told me NEVER to teach pre arranged patterns, now that it is my turn to carry on his ideas.
Old school Eskrima was you, and your dad or uncle, or some relative, in the back yard with sticks. The basic teaching method was to keep getting hit until you worked out how NOT to get hit!!
Sonny, my teacher moved to the US and discovered that he could not teach that way here - people just didn't come back to class, so at first he went back to the pre arranged patterns that many FMA systems had borrowed from Japanese and other Asian imports to The Philippines.
By the time he taught me - for the last 6 years of his life, he had thrown it all away, saying that it held people back from learning how to really fight, so he started teaching everything in the context of 'random flow'.
I'll say that it was a very difficult way to learn, but ultimately was like being given the Rosetta Stone to understanding strategy.
Not saying I know how to fight, but I'm certainly alot closer from training with him than through the other arts I practice.
So ... after all this rambling on, my question to you, as someone who has thought about this a great deal, is -
I teach both Bagua and Eskrima now, and have come to realize that students LOVE the forms and the movements, and the system is quite easy to teach because of this.
OTOH, Sonny's Eskrima is very hard to teach because there really is no system ...it's all empirical experience and trouble shooting.
Do you think that a progression from structure (forms etc), to less and less is useful, or like Sonny, do you believe it slows down the path to the ultimate goal - fighting?
I ask because I am struggling with working out how to repay my debt to him and pass on his 'system' in an authentic way, and am resisting the ideas of stances, patterns, pre arranged drills etc.
I agree with Sonny. Forget the form as a starting point, but rather seek to extract from fighting those skill patterns that keep appearing again and again. These can serve as your reference point, rather than the templates handed down by the tradition. All martial arts traditions would have obviously started as ‘backyard’ or family systems, but once they’d begun to be widely propagated, nearly all of them have been standardized. The original essence of what was taking place in the backyard is lost. Sonny would have been an example of a 'master' in the original sense.
But martial arts being practiced today don't rely on that one-on-one 'backyard style' instruction, and they nearly always leave out the fight. So the problem you’re describing with your students is a problem I’ve lived with for many, many years. People want an easy solution. And there’s always the temptation to provide them with a template that will gratify their desire to learn something structured and that fits into their idea of what martial arts are about. But the truth is, the function of the trainer is not to teach a system, but to create situations that will call for a needed response. That’s how we learn. Nobody learns exactly the same way. Everybody’s got a different brain signature, so each person has to be allowed to address the ‘problem’ of the fight on their own terms. All you do, as the instructor, is to engage them with a rich supply of experiences that are fight-derived, and be of assistance if you see them going in an obviously wrong direction.
You can’t just teach a skill because there is no such thing. Everybody’s going to do it differently, and if a person is going to be able to respond spontaneously, then they have to learn in a spontaneous way. Teaching by rote just fucks everything up.
What you do get by backyard training, particularly within a family system, is a strong empathy between members of the training group—the kind of empathy I discussed in my post on mirror neurons. You’re able to pick up on the nuances of movement and get a feel for what the other person is doing. But even then, the members of the group aren’t going to look or fight the same. Take the Gracies. They all fight different. The challenging, competitive training allows the individual's own attributes to develop, so that each fighter finds their own way according to body type, personality, etc.
Once you start regimenting and organizing that, by saying what the movement needs to be, especially if you don’t have fighting in the training itself, then you’re not teaching the person to become competent. You’re just teaching them to perform the skill you’ve given them, often completely out of context.
Because of the peak shift effect, people get enormous gratification from engaging in stylized movement. There’s a psychological high from doing forms. So the hard part often lies in convincing the student that the form isn’t the way to go. You have to let go of the skill patterns and concentrate on the fight, and if your students are happy with their mastery of set skill patterns, they’re not going to like it. Fighting will obliviate all the nice moves they’ve practiced so hard. It’s a bitter pill sometimes.
I’d suggest you encourage the students to be responsible for themselves so they’re not expecting to be spoonfed by you. Try to get them to take an active role in their learning. And you don’t have to just throw them in the deep end. There are methods you can use to bridge the gap between the fighting and the fight preparation, and these are relatively safe. You don’t have to fall back on set patterns.
The advantage we have today is that we can reference a huge amount of fighting footage and watch it again and again. Skill patterns, and the tactics and dynamics that underlie them, can be extracted from video footage. When it comes to instruction, you can then use these common skill patterns as a basis for devising technical drills, situational drills, and conditional or open fighting against similar and dissimilar opponents. I’ve written about this in an MMA context, but you can pick up the principle off my website, and simply apply it to your own work.
Extracting from the fight is the most important thing, but you can also get a lot of ideas of what might be possible from doing flow drills. The problem is that whatever comes out of those drills has got to be tested. With a flow drill, even if it’s performed in broken time, there is a continuity and an element of predictability and compliance. Even with a live blade--maybe even, especially with a live blade. Because if there wasn’t, a lot of people would be seriously injured—or dead. If you are using the live blade, you will be holding back. That's why personally I prefer to use sticks or a substitute weapon for practice.
As an observer what I see coming out of the flow drill is not only spontaneous expression of what you need to do at the time, but most importantly the ability to pick up cues of delivery, particularly within the peripheral field of vision. You then become able to process that sensory information and act offensively, defensively or counteroffensively upon it. Cue drills teach you to see the beginning of the movement and you develop an enhanced perception of time. A lot of people don’t understand the interval of time, yet it’s within the process of development or renewal of a move that opportunities are often missed and where people leave holes for their opponent to exploit.
The problem with a flow drill is that it isn’t a fight. Now, we could just fight all out all the time, but then we wouldn’t be addressing some of the factors that are essential to fighting. It would just be sink or swim for the student. There would be no way to get across the key lessons of hitting without being hit, learning to synchronize and syncopate, and being able to retain an enhanced visual and tactile sense of the target.
So what I do, I’ll take a flow drill (empty hand on the feet, on the ground, or with weapons) and during the course of the exchange, without any warning I’ll call, ‘Fight!’ or ‘Hit it!’ and the participants go all out for ten seconds trying to get each other. Then I say, ‘Stop’ and they go back to flow again. This enables them to make a connection between skills they’re developing in the flow drill and the violent, unpredictable exchange of the fight. Sometimes I’ll give a role or a mission to each person to accomplish.
The progression of flow-to-fight and back will not only test the validity of the various possibilities that may arise in the flow, but because of the short duration of the 'fight' phase, you get a more accurate representation of a violent exchange than you would get with a prolonged, 'sparring' type exchange. And paradoxically, I've found that these brief, high-intensity exchanges are actually safer than the longer-duration, lower-intensity fighting.
I noticed on Sonny’s film footage that sometimes he would have a partner working at a slower rate to enable him to syncopate and fit several shots in the interval of his opponent's move. You can take this same drill and turn it into a reality. You still have one guy coming at you trying to hit you on a predictable beat, and now you’re trying to get three or four shots in between his attacks. But now he’s coming in hard, full power, and the intensity is fight intensity, not flow. That puts the pressure on. Then you can return to flow drill again.
One thing I do in my grappling is have them engage in a flow drill on the ground. Then I tell them to stop. Both parties stop, no matter what position they’re in. I’ve taken the flow and frozen it. I say, ‘Take a look around. What can you get?’ So they can see the opportunities or possibilities to gain positional control or a submission that might have normally passed by in the flow. Then I say, ‘hit it’ and they go for whatever position or submission they’ve discovered in that moment of freeze. Sometimes I will designate what I want them to go for. Sometimes I get them to tell me what they’re going for. Sometimes we keep it silent so the opponent doesn’t know what’s going to happen. Sometimes they both go for it, sometimes they each have a different role. The permutations are endless.
What I then do, I reduce the time I give them to see their opportunity. They have to spot it quicker. This starts to train them to rapidly process information and make an instant decision. This cutting in and out of the fight also teaches them to get a handle on their aggression. They can switch it on and off at will, instead of being either totally compliant or in a blind rage.
With regard to your Bagua, looking at Sonny Umpad and yourself on your channel, I think there are already strong elements of Bagua within what he did. Personally, if I were you I would be developing Bagua more along the same ‘backyard’ lines that Sonny used to teach weapons. You could devise a free-form flow drill using the circular principles of Bagua.
All of these traditions have a basis in fighting. I think that if there hadn’t come a period in time when the fighting was removed and the teaching was made more public, then the tradition would have continued to thrive and change. But without the fighting, it loses its way. Look at JKD. It started out with Bruce Lee’s intention to found something innovative and progressive, but after twenty or thirty years it has become an institution. I look at it and ask myself what would Bruce Lee have been doing now if he were still here? And I don’t think he’d be doing what they’re currently doing in JKD. Times change.
If you’re having difficulty with convincing your group to go the way you want to go, you might try having a group within a group. When I first started the experimental phase of anything-goes fighting in
It’s really sad that such a talented guy as Sonny died so young, and reading between the lines of your comment I guess you feel you are still his student in a sense. I find your loyalty kind of extraordinary. I respect you for what you’re trying to do in Sonny’s honour and I want to encourage you. But at the same time, it’s your path now. Don’t be afraid to take some risks. That’s what life’s all about.
We had some amusing discussion at Primal regarding Tai Chi wall bouncing. Rob Dick couldn’t get his head round it, so Rob, these clips are for you.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=QAHcjW6QSb
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=KGhkZduM39
And below, you can see masters applying Tai Chi plyometrics.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=WKtK-ifyas
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=7DfVzj55wX
After that we got on to some serious training, in which things don’t remain academic for very long! It was a really good session, and I know that because Rory said so. Rory’s a kind of hard guy to please when it comes to violent satisfaction.
One thing that I discussed was timing, or what I term ‘perception of interval of time.’ Most people haven’t developed or trained an awareness of interval of time. It’s an area that isn’t often emphasized in martial arts. You can learn timing holistically within the context of drilling and fighting, but sometimes in order to get off a plateau the issue of interval of time has to be addressed directly and in a specialized way.
We all have a sense of interval of time; otherwise we’d never be able to cross a road, catch, throw or evade a ball, merge with traffic, walk through a revolving door, etc. But the interval of time in a fight, both for the development of force and its opportunistic application, is a whole different thing.
I look at some guys and the way they develop power simply takes too much time. The guy might as well put a stamp on it and give it to the postman to deliver. They operate as if their big shot is an absolute solution. Many ‘big hitters’ (especially those who haven’t been challenged by an equal) have a power delivery that is full of what I’ll call ‘time holes’. A time hole is an interval of time within or between the development, deployment, and recovery phases of the shot, where an opponent could easily take advantage, and sometimes this time hole is big enough to drive a truck through. These guys either have time holes because the fight has always gone their way and they’ve never been punished for it, or because they aren’t aware that the hole is there. They don’t have a fight-specific sense of interval of time.
It’s no coincidence that those who work routinely in synchronized, regular beats are more vulnerable to having time holes. The synchronized training, where the rhythm is predictable, doesn’t enhance your awareness of what’s happening before or after the beat and so it tends to reinforce a sense of time where there’s a dead space between one beat and another.
In the knife and stick work that I do, I have a number of drills derived from the Filipino arts that address synchronization and syncopation. They teach the basis of improvised syncopation. Also, without you even being aware of it, they enhance the ability of your CNS to not only respond within a reduced time, but also to be coordinated in a way you may never have experienced before. Most of the guys I trained at Horsham in the stick and knife work experienced a surprising shift in time perception. You become able to do two or three things within the same time period.
We don’t normally do the stick and knife work at Primal, although I will be including some in the end-of-the-month open courses. But here’s something you can do at home, without instruction. Get out your music. Go in a room alone and experiment with moving. Let the music do the work for you. The body’s got a natural way of organizing itself if you get out of the way. Start just by moving and feeling the beats and the way the body parts can rhythmically interact and express the rhythmic variations in emphasis in the music. After that you can start to make your movements more combative. In the beginning, don’t worry about what you look like.
It sounds bizarre, but it’s the way in. If you have difficulty in expressing syncopation—say you only ever train to straight rock/metal music, for example—then you need to change your perception of timing and rhythm.
This brings me to the choice of music. This is crucial. I’ve written before that African-influenced music is of much more value in training than your Queen or Nirvana or Iron Maiden--or any other typical rock/metal music where it’s a steady 4/4 synchronized beat. The latter can be great for emotional inspiration or for helping you to keep going when you’re tired, but as a training tool for timing--forget it.
Personally I like the Black Eyed Peas but there’s a lot of hip hop out there as well as Latin music and other up-tempo, syncopated stuff—the key is to go for the faster-paced beats. You want something that is supercharged and that will challenge you in trying to move to it.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=F8VwQOGjhR
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfKCzMuLM
Trish just pulled up those links for me and I’m already jumping around...some of you big shots in the martial arts/SP might want to let your hair down (if you’ve got it) and try it. Learning to move to a syncopated beat could be just what you need to break you out of your rigid, military approach. After all, in a fight the opportunities don’t occur in a regular or predictable way. You can’t be playing off a score; you have to be able to improvise.
I’m going to put up some stuff to read on interval of time, but don’t get caught up in the theory of it. The important thing is to sense it. And the best way to do that is to play music and do your shadow fighting or your knife work or whatever, to that music. You can read about the subdivisions of a beat, but it’s more important to feel those subdivisions and their emphasis. Once you can feel syncopation, you can then see it when you watch fights, and more importantly you can begin to employ it offensively, defensively and counteroffensively within the fight.
http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/capsules/o
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1
http://www.vetscite.org/publish/items/00
I missed mentioning one very important thing in my last post about the exercises we’re training in Primal, and that is the need for vocalisation whilst making the repetitive movement patterns. I’ve posted about vocalisation before, but not quite in this context.
Say you’re doing a repeated right cross. You vocalise the tempo and your voice also needs to carry the intensity of the effort and the emotional content. The sound you make facilitates the timing and intensity that you’re going for.
If you’re going to do 8-10 reps before pausing for the big shots, you can accelerate the tempo as you progress through the repetitions, so that when you come to the culminating pause when you’re now going to summon everything you have to release the big ones, you’ve ensured that neurally everything is primed.
I’ve seen some mention of bows, arches, and spirals with regard to plyometrics over on Shikon. With this type of exercise, there’s no time to work on the dynamics underlying the skill. You just perform at a reflex level. That’s why Jon Law has found it works with people who previously could not absorb the technical information. We’ve bypassed that part; like I said, I’ve found a way of tricking the system.
That’s not to say that the Chinese martial arts, particularly those of
Like any other training method that I offer, if you are going to do these shaking/vibratory drills, you have to transfer that high state of CNS arousal immediately into a blow that is tactically representative of what you’re going to do in a fight. No drill is a pill! It has to be applied intelligently.
There are lots of claims made about the powers of Chi Kung practices to facilitate Fa Jing, or the sudden release of explosive force, in the martial arts. I read a lot of rhetoric about it, and I see some great examples of the exercises by which to facilitate this increase in neural drive (I’ll put some up in another post), but what I seldom see is the ability to apply the enhanced drive to a simple shot. Never mind applying it to a whole bunch of shots in continuous flow (although broken rhythm would be better). Just don’t see it.
At Primal, we can cut to the chase of what’s valuable about these old drills and employ that to very rapidly produce a better result. More importantly, we test it to see if it works in fighting. Otherwise it’s just fucking acedemic.
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