Several posts ago randomflow

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. 

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

randomflow

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!

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! 

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 California and asked a question about teaching form.  This question goes to the heart of the matter for martial artists. 
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 Earlham Street, I did it with a separate group that met one afternoon a week.  I liked it so much that I then decided to change the whole club over.  Guess what?  Everybody left except for the four or five hardcore fighters.  So I suppose in your mind you’ve got to work out what your priorities are.  Four guys won’t make you a living—believe me, I know!

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.

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!