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. 

 

 

 

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! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Over the years I've observed an ongoing debate about stance.  Some people believe in training using a fixed stance as a basis for developing more dynamic movement.  Others claim there's no such thing as 'a stance,' only a constantly changing position.  Most martial artists, particularly those with a traditional grounding, fall into the former camp. 

If you look at the clip, you'll see that Tyson is using what might be termed a horse stance.  Others show a lean-back stance, or kokutsu dachi, and lean-forward stance, zenkutsu dachi.  You can find many more if you look for them.  A traditional martial artist might look at this clip, see the traditional stances in their fleeting appearance, and find validation for the traditional practices they advocate.  He might even believe somehow that by practicing these stances he's somehow going to improve his performance.  Wrong.

Why?  Because these 'stances' are the consequence of what the fighter has to do at that moment.  His personal attributes and manner of fighting may emphasise certain postures more than others, but he doesn't sit in a horse stance to practice.  Tyson has probably trained that stance, but as in the fight, he will have been ducking and weaving and bobbing and dealing with his opponent in the process--he's not consciously trying to do a horse stance.  The leg and foot positioning are a response to the situational stimuli. His response isn't motor-oriented.

I've talked about stimuli-oriented vs. motor-oriented response before.  In the case of the stimuli-oriented response, the changes in joint angular alignment, sequence, rate and timing that produce a specific movement pattern are being organised at an unconscious level.  In a motor-oriented response, the conscious mind deliberately controls those same changes to the best of its ability.  But the conscious mind hasn't been designed to do that job, and it's impossible for the conscious mind to replace all the functions of the unconscious.  The movement patterns that result from this motor-oriented approach don't resemble natural movement and lack the efficiency and effectiveness of the natural movement that evolution has bequeathed us.  Even sports scientists with all of the technology and data available to them have great difficulty in analyzing movement patterns.  The motor-oriented approach is not the way to go.  No matter how slow you go, or how deliberate you are, or how fancy your scientific equipment may be, you can't break it down, and even if you could, putting it back together into functional movement is a whole other story.

When you practice any skill, including stance, sensorimotor engrams of that particular skill pattern are formed.  These engrams are your quickest reference to producing that skill when you need to.  If you've formed your engrams based on a motor-oriented response such as standing in stances, or moving from stance to stance as in traditional practice, then that's the engram that will be called up.  Traditional martial artists tend to assume or hope that these patterns they've practiced so rigourously and worked so hard to imprint, will be valuable to them when the shit hits the fan.  But there's a fundamental mismatch between the motor-oriented engram that's been trained and the violent changing situation of a real fight.   Not only is the motor-driven engram inferior to the stimuli-driven engram, but it's been imprinted in calm and controlled conditions.  The fight is anything but calm and controlled.

In my experience, a traditionally-trained martial artist who finds himself in a fight against someone from outside his tradition for the first time will attempt to use the motor-oriented patterns he's trained, but for the reasons I've just detailed, they won't work (unless his opponent is a dufus).  So he then reverts to the stimuli-oriented response that all of us possess from childhood.  However, because he's been training in a motor-oriented way, these engrams haven't been developed specifically for fighting (unless he's one of those who has also had fighting experience.  Then, when he falls back, he falls back on the enhancements that have occurred based on his real fights, but he's still not using the motor-oriented skill he learned in the dojo).  So the traditionally-trained guy falls apart in the fight.  He's a stranger in a strange land.  He's not familiar with the environment of the fight, and the skills he's learnt are worth nothing.

You will get traditionalists claiming that they have successful fighters within their traditions.  Usually you find out that the 'traditional' fighter is also a doorman, or is doing MMA/submission training on the side, or there is fighting within the club itself.  However, the traditional motor-oriented manner of training the skills does nothing to support the fighter, even though he might believe so.  As for those who train in the traditions but skip the fighting:  you don't stand a chance in a real fight.

Fighters work off engrams produced through response to a stimulus.  Tyson may well have trained that momentary horse-stance position in the gym, but he will have developed, tested, and practiced the stancet within the context of his sparring, not by standing in it or walking up and down the gym in it.  He hasn't focused on practicing it as a static stance. 

Fighting is important because of the way the brain learns.  It is the sensory information gleaned by repeated fighting experience that is then stored as a motor engram available for instant recall and adaptation to the situation at hand.    We learn by doing.  As that storehouse of information grows, we become better and better able to tweak it at need.  This facility leaves the conscious mind free to scan the environment and strategise.  It's like when you're driving your car.  If you're an experienced driver, most of the effort is happening unconsciously and you are free to plan your journey, talk, sing along with the radio, etc. 

Waht do I want you to get from all this?  Everything has to come back to the fight.  The sensorimotor engrams that you are building in your training must match the conditions of the fight.  And the best way to ensure that is to fight in your training.  So when I refer to traditionalists, I'm not just having another go at them.  This principle applies across the board.  Tyson has prepared for the limited environment of a boxing match.  Put him in an MMA ring and he'd be out of this depth--he'd have the wrong engrams, unless he did further training to include the other dimensions that are left out of boxing but which exist in an anything-goes match. 

And as for the stance--is there such a thing as a stance?  Yes, and no.  I think you've just got to look at the clip and see that they exist, just as footwork exists, but the traditional manner of training and practicing the stance and footwork is often completely out of context.  When it comes to fighting, context is everything.