aikido Archives

Cross training

Cross training is something I strongly support. It’s also something I think I do every week, but what I consider to be cross-training may differ from what you think.

Last weekend I held a Shotokan Sandan grading. I was grading an instructor I consider to be one of ‘my’ Shotokan students (although he gained his other grades in another association) because he’s trained with me twice a week for almost 3 years (he also trains with another association each week too). To assist in the grading, I brought in two of my DART Dan grades to act as uke and two Shotokan Yondans from two different associations whom I know from their attendance at my seminars and courses.

The majority of the grading was focused on kata based HAOV related sparring with participants mainly using approaches I had taught them. The successful Sandan candidate also taught a kata-based lesson and we sparred using his approaches. When we looked at our solo kata performance however, there were definitely different flavours of Shotokan on display: no two kata were identical even though we traced very similar lineages.

I know where I’ve changed my Shotokan kata. My base template when I began training was Hirokazu Kanazawa’s kata as recorded in his 1980s videos. As time went on, I saw alternative versions in use in other groups and was able to see in books elements that had been adjusted or discarded. Over time I’ve mainly kept my ‘original’ template, but in some instances have made the conscious decision for practical reasons to tweak some elements back to Funakoshi’s recorded 1920s or 1930s versions. This means that you probably won’t find other associations that teach Shotokan kata exactly the way I teach them.

When I first began Karate, the mobility of my education and home life meant that while I would do sustained training, I would often be working with at least two different associations of the same Shotokan style throughout the year. Moving a few times meant that I might stay with one while switching another. It was immediately noticeable that everything was different wherever I went. The kata was the least changeable element, but even then, if you looked closely, each association did the kata slightly differently. What I was doing by going to more than one Shotokan association was cross training. Occasionally I would learn new material, but mainly I would experience a different perspective on the same thing: varied fundamentals combinations, distinct sparring work, alternative takes on stances and even differing ways of doing the same kata.

That is what cross training means to me. Gaining a different perspective.

As a kyu grade I learned from the different karate instructors in the various karate associations in which I concurrently trained, but I would also learn from instructors in other arts through books and magazines. I would also travel to seminars, training with Kung Fu instructors and Karate Instructors from other styles. I would often learn new material, but more importantly I gained a different perspective that enabled me to look differently at what I was already doing and gain a better understanding of it.

My over-arching purpose then was the same as now: to learn more and to have fun.

There have been times when I have been far more specific in my cross training. I studied Aikido on a regular basis for eight years with a view to improving my stand-up limb control, unbalancing and using angles of attack rather than strength to achieve my aims. I’d be a beginner now if I stepped into an Aikido class, but the perspectives that I gained from that training has been so integrated into my own practice that it’s all Karate to me now.

I am always cross training.

Going to another instructor’s club, going to a seminar, having a guest teach me and my students: these things are all cross training. Watching another instructor from a different background doing different things, whether in person or in video, I regard as cross training when I take elements of what I’ve seen and physically try it. It’s a rare week indeed when I am not working through something different from the direct influence of someone else, or that is inspired at a tangent from something that has cropped up while experimenting from cross training. I’ll do this in class, in mental rehearsal through movement and tactile imagination in my dojo, or through bag work. It may be months or even years since I had the original lesson in person or online; I work on things over long periods of time and I revisit lessons when current stimuli bring greater relevance. It ceases to be cross training when it is so ingrained in my practice and integrated into my approaches that it is part of my Karate.

For me the point of cross training is exposure to an alternative perspective to further my understanding. That can be my understanding of things I know, things that I only think I know, things that I know that I don’t know and things that I didn’t know existed. It can be with another instructor from the same ‘style’ but different background or current approaches, it can be from a separate system with a similar focus, or a discipline with a completely alternative emphasis. For me doing that is fun, and that alone is reason enough to do it.

Beyond the value of perspective and fun you may have particular goals. I chose to take up Aikido to develop a particular skillset and incorporated that into my own Karate. With far less direct coaching but for roughly the same number of years I have been drip-feeding myself cross training in two other disciplines with the express purpose of refining and expanding another part of my repertoire. That’s an ongoing process and I anticipate that that cross-training and integration project will last at least another decade. Over the last few decades, I’ve benefitted a great deal from numerous focused cross training dips into other approaches through seminars, videos and books. You do not have to stick with cross training in one thing only for years to gain insights, especially if it is closely related in form or focus to your own experience. Sometimes a single seminar or book can open the door to decades of study if you are observant.

How accurate and sustained your visual and tactile memory is will affect how much you may benefit from cross training and what form might best suit you. For those that need multiple repetitions to learn or understand or integrate an element, attending or watching regular classes may be best. For some this may mean having to attend a class every week, for others with an established relatable visual, physical or tactile memory set, observing a video or referencing a text book may serve the same purpose. Anything relatively close to my knowledge base I can see or experience once and have enough ‘memory’ to work on that for a long time (on my own or with partners) without further reference, like attending a seminar which uses the same movements as me but for a different purpose. With things that are on the fringes of my experience or completely outside my knowledge I’ll need to revisit the source again and again. That almost always means dedicated repetitions with a training partner and access to the source material (so regularly attending a class or training with a video or book with a good training partner).

For me cross training is when I am working on material from an external source or a different perspective to my current training.

I find it invaluable. Even when I make the decision not to attempt to trial what I have seen or experienced, even when I discard something after a trial rather than choosing to integrate it, I think the exposure to different approaches makes that choice to continue on my own path a more educated one.

I believe that cross training is a form of expanding your knowledge and ability that is accessible to everyone. It could be attending a seminar, having a guest instructor, visiting another class, working from concepts from a book or from an online video. It does not have to be ‘outside’ your own style: instructors vary enough within any system to give you valuable alternative perspectives. There is a wealth of material out there and the more you access it and cross train with it to your chosen purposes, the less easily will you be misled by lower quality choices.

Now go and cross train.

Switching things up

It began with the warm up.

I can still remember the familiar routine of my first karate classes.

Star jumps, diagonal star jumps, running on the spot and bouncing in a ‘fighting stance’. Then would be the mobility rotations, neck, shoulders, hips, knees, ankles. Having ‘warmed up’ we’d all then engage in static stretching for about 10-15 minutes before engaging in syllabus drills.

The remaining class would be split in three pretty equal slots. We’d start with marching up and down in lines furiously drilling against thin air in ever more complicated (and often ridiculous) but fun and technically demanding combinations. We would then pair up and do fixed sparring drills. Finally we’d finish with kata. Whether it was the two hour class (I’d do six of those a week) or the one hour class (I’d do five of those a week), the template didn’t vary much. It was a practical way of addressing the demands of that syllabus. That’s not necessarily the same thing as addressing the needs of the individual students.

Expressing attitude and about to do one step sparring as a teenager.

At other Shotokan clubs that I trained with the pattern was fairly similar. As a fairly mobile military dependent I trained at six clubs across five associations before being awarded my Shodan. A number of clubs curtailed the thin air work on a regular basis in favour of hitting pads. Often the length of the three-way split would vary so some sessions might be almost entirely sparring while others might be mainly kata, and then there were occasional ‘thin air beastings’ of hundreds of kicks or punches against thin air for football match lengths of time but without the injury breaks or half time. Quite standard stuff then and for a lot of clubs it’s still the norm.

Aikido was different. The soft art? Pfft. Attack, boom on the deck, jump up, attack, boom on the deck… and repeat. Even mats hit hard when you’re hitting them about 12 times a minute for about half of a 2 hour class. Jumping to your feet again, and again, and again is a really good workout. Warm ups were rolls and breakfalls and then the entire remaining class was sparring. The feel was very different to the distanced Karate classes. A hand- on art required more hands-on coaching, so instruction was far more individual to sparring pairs rather than ‘front of class’ demonstrations.

Aikido may be ‘gentle’ but equally keen training partners mean you hit the mats often and hard!

I’ve trained with a lot of people from a lot of different systems and I’ve also been taught in a lot of different ways in a lot of different fields myself. In my own background I’ve been qualified as a fitness instructor, a karate instructor, a secondary school teacher, a university tutor, an obstacle course instructor, a weapons instructor, a low and high ropes confidence course instructor, a physical intervention and restraint instructor, a conflict management instructor, a first aid instructor, a casualty simulator, a self defence instructor (3 different external groups to my own system), and have held military and civilian qualifications in risk management. I’m not afraid therefore to switch things up, draw on ideas from different fields, and vary my teaching and training methods to try and optimise the opportunities for my students.

Over the years I’ve changed almost every element of what I do in some way. Whether it be techniques, combinations, drills, training methods or ‘warm ups’ everything is subject to a continuous assessment process. When it comes to training and teaching, I am not a sentimental person.

Over the last year, since resuming ‘in person training’ since the last lockdown, I’ve been devoting the majority of my classes to sparring with reduced time on pads and on forms. That’s not surprising given how much time we’ve all had to do ‘thin air’ training whenever guidance has forced us to train online, on pads only or to work with limited numbers of partners.

What I have also changed in the last year is the weighting between static, dynamic and alive sparring. Static being a single attack and response (ideal for learning and refining movements), dynamic being fixed (or multiple choice) failure cascade options such as punch to tackle or boxer’s hug or clinch (ideal for improving positional recognition time and response), and alive being ‘anything goes’ from their repertoire within the compromises set for safety. I changed the weighting of those three from being 40/40/20 to about 20/40/40.

The greater amount of time spent sparring, especially free sparring, over the last year has seen students at all grades improve in position and option recognition and adaptability, in fact it has shortened the time required to gain particular levels of ability across a broad range of skill sets. That’s a strong argument for spending more time sparring.

In my classes kata tends to get squeezed in at the start or the end. I don’t like devoting large amounts of time to the solo rehearsal of movements my students employ in sparring when they actually have training partners to spar with. I’ve been doing kata to teach it and to assess it and expecting students to work on that in their own time at home. I do a lot of kata on my own at home. Examining their kata has shown that for the majority that hasn’t been the case. Even without watching the kata I can generally tell in sparring who will have good kata or not because those that do have greater precision and better biomechanics in the close quarter stand up sparring.

Pad work is a training medium I rate highly. It is so important to hit pads and to learn how to effectively deliver and control force. It is equally important to hold pads, to absorb the impact (and to give accurate and appropriate resistance, not to be a brick wall), to ‘spot’ the striker and to learn to recognise the telegraphs of different movements and to understand angles. Pad work is often be far more physically demanding than sparring because you are actually hitting a target with everything you have again and again. Done correctly it refines skill sets, improves speed and develops stamina.

Using pads in some of my venues is not a problem, they are already kept on site. In other locations I can resemble a squire from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, walking into a Leisure Centre weighed down with kit. This has meant that I don’t always do as much pad work as I’d like in those classes.

I’d arrive at class like a Python Squire.

It is all about balance. The increased sparring has been great. It has enabled rapid attribute development, but at the slight expense of some of the skill refinement I want to develop. I want both. It’s time for a change.

So what am I doing?

I’m not making permanent changes. Not yet. What I’m currently doing works, it just could be better.

That leads me to believe that rather than introducing permanent lesson format changes what I should do instead is run ‘boot camp’ style ‘Switch Months’ where the lesson format and weighting is altered for a few weeks to help me address a perceived problem or enable students to refine particular skills that they can then hone better in our current format.

So, what am I going to do?

The recent April to December 2021 lesson format has been:

10% Forms

20% Pads

70% Sparring (20% Static, 40% Dynamic, 40% Alive)

The Switch month format will be a three-station rotation in each class:

33% Forms and Ground sparring/rolling (50:50 split)

33% Pads

33% Sparring (25% Static, 25% Dynamic, 50% Alive)

Crucially the grade range of the club will be split each lesson across the three concurrently running stations so that the pace and standard in each element can be influenced by the most senior grades.

How often will I do it? That will be result driven. I anticipate one month in four, but what we do will be driven by how the different training routines reinforce each other.

Karate Doesn’t Work!

“Karate Doesn’t Work!”

Heard it before?

How about “Tae Kwon Do doesn’t work”? “Wing Chun doesn’t work”? “Tai Chi doesn’t work”? “Aikido doesn’t work”? “BJJ doesn’t work?” “Traditional Martial Arts don’t work”?

You get the idea.

To me it’s akin to saying “Cars don’t work”. It’s a statement so broad that it’s nonsensical. Occasionally people might narrow it down, “BMWs are rubbish!” – okay… all BMWs? Rubbish for what? Is that what that particular model is designed for? Is it the car of the type of driver it attracts?

Returning to martial arts, the two biggest critiques that frame such broad condemnations tend to be the contexts of either use in MMA or Self Defence or both. Dig a little deeper and it quickly becomes obvious that in some respects these arguments are built on sand.

As many exponents of traditional martial arts are quick to point out, it’s very difficult to find any move in an MMA competition that isn’t visible in the forms or drills of a traditional martial art. It’s also easy to find people with solid TMA backgrounds successfully competing in MMA. I doubt anyone has ever been bored enough (sorry, dedicated enough), to draw up a spreadsheet of every move used in any decade of any particular multi-discipline combat sport competition against the syllabi and/or forms of a broad range of martial arts, but I believe that if they did they would find that most traditional systems include somewhere between 60-90% of what has been utilised. Not 100%? Well if you study any particular competitor you’ll find they don’t use 100% of the compiled list. In similar vein there are a number of things you’ll see in some TMA syllabi that you won’t see used in a competition format, but you might see on video in effective use by Law Enforcement groups that invest in Ju Jitsu or Aikido training.

The elephant in the room here is of course the word ‘include’. The kata of karate are a comprehensive catalogue of physical movements that can be interpreted into techniques and combinations. It’s therefore easy for someone to read one of my books, watch one of my videos, train internationally with me, or with any number of the excellent seminar instructors from the thriving British Karate scene, and look at something in MMA and say “Oh we have that too in Karate”.

But do you?

You’ve only ‘got it’ if you train it regularly with partners and you can use it in live practice. I can see lots of sequences in Karate forms that can be interpreted as hip throws, but I don’t personally teach hip throws. My training journey has led me to prefer distal unbalancing, leg reaping and unbalancing over the leg to hip throws – so those are the unbalancing methods I teach, all of which I can relate directly to sequences in traditional kata. When it comes to my students, we don’t ‘have’ hip throws even if some of the kata they practice do.

But efficacy is not just about techniques though, it’s the training methods employed that build the mindset and the ability to effectively use physical skills appropriately. The technical differences between martial arts are minimal because we’re all working with the same problem of human body against human body – that’s a broad canvas that can be viewed from multiple angles, but we’re still painting on the same canvas. It’s less a case of “Art X doesn’t work!” and more a case of “Training method Y is less efficient!”. It’s not just the car but whether you’ve been taught how to drive it in different conditions.

But can we separate pedagogy from ‘style’? If we’re all doing pretty much the same motions with our arms and legs, isn’t how something is taught the only way to determine differences and apply ‘style’ labels?

Well yes. And no. I don’t think it’s that simple.

I’ve been around the block a bit over the years. In my core original art I trained regularly in seven clubs across six associations before I gained my Shodan and in the decades since then I’ve not only taught multiple people from multiple styles and associations, I’ve trained with, learned from and talked with instructors and students from a huge range of arts and professions all across the world. One of the things I’ve learned from this is that ‘styles’ tend to be illusory branding because once you really scratch the surface you’ll find more commonalities than differences. While some teaching practices are more common in some arts than others, or with some age groups than others, you are always doing a significant number of practitioners a disservice any time you attempt to pigeon hole any martial art by pedagogy.

Another thing about having ‘trained around’ for a long time is that whenever I see “ X doesn’t work!” I study the list of ‘reasons why X is bad’ and then the list of ‘why Y is better’ and strangely enough I’ve experienced multiple examples of clubs in Y doing what X is condemned for, and multiple clubs of X doing what Y is praised for.

Thus rather than write about ‘why Art X doesn’t work’ I think it’s more productive to write about techniques and training methodologies and the contexts in which they excel and why. That way we can avoid the obfuscation of stereotyping and pigeon holing and focus on ways to help each other improve.

Don’t let your past restrain you

“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”
L.P. Hartley

No matter how much we try to keep things the same, we change. Even if the syllabus and pedagogy of your martial arts club has undergone no changes in the decades that you might have been training with them, the nature of your own training will have changed because you are not physically or mentally the same person that you once were and neither are the people around you. The differences may be subtle, they might be profound, but they will be there.

If I look back along my own training timeline this is very true. I am not the white belt with the broken wrist in a fibreglass cast practicing his basics on the spot on his own every night after class because he felt that everyone else in the new club was better than him. I’m also not the 19 year old who would run 2 miles six mornings a week, lift weights three times a week, and attend 17 hours of karate lessons a week in addition to fitting in his own training in a fierce desire to be stronger, fitter, faster and sharper. I’m also not the 30 year old reluctantly saying goodbye to his Aikido training because on moving to a different part of the country he could not find a local club with a similar practical ethos.

I was all those people, but I do not let the student that I was define the student that I am now. I not only train in a very different way but I also know so much more, and I continue to learn or understand more every day. While I may have some regrets for time that I didn’t use as well as I could, or exercises that I wish I had moved on from earlier, I recognise that I have those regrets with the hindsight of greater experience. I do not regret time spent in training exercises that I no longer use because that training improved my aerobic fitness, my flexibility and my health and brought friendships and fun into my life. Those training lessons and mistakes have helped make me what I am today, but they do not define me. While others may benefit from what I have written or taught or videoed in the past, I choose to define myself by what I do now.

Most of the time we have the ability to recognise our growth. We can gain pride and confidence from past achievements even while accepting that we may no longer be able to repeat those feats now. At the same time however it can be all too easy to let past negative experiences haunt us and limit our perception of who we are now and who we have the potential to become.

We do not define our ability to write by the work we produced in our first year of school. We do not define our ability to use a computer by the first time we ever used a keyboard. We do not define ourselves as martial artists by what we could do in our first class. We move on. In the same vein we need to acknowledge that the person we were in the past is not actually the same person we are now and the memories we hold of that past self can be a weight holding us down, a foundation to bury but build upon anew, or perhaps a springboard for a brighter and different present and future. We have the ability to change and we need to set aside, store away or throw out past memories and perceptions that might hold us back. Most people have these negative or self-limiting memories or perceptions; many can be more horrific, scarring or deeply entrenched than others, and some may require help and support from friends, family or professionals for us to leave them behind – others may never truly be gone – but they happened to the person you were, or were things said and done by the person that you were, not the person you are now or whom you can become.

Our memories mould and make us, but they are only a part of who we are. They are unreliable, distorted by perception and repetition, and we can be poor collectors for our own mental health when it comes to which we keep and what we manage forget; we do not recall every success and forget the many mistakes, and we do not cherish every bright day and throw out each dark moment. We can focus on what will help us. We can sit down and create lists of the good things that we have done, the good things that have happened to us, the things we have achieved, and the enjoyment we have had and make the choice to identify and highlight the positives in our lives. We have the ability to act, to create new memories, and to recreate who we are. The past is who we were, but we should not let it hold us back.

Why I train alone (and so should you).

Your instructor’s class isn’t designed to improve your skills.

That can’t be right surely? Your instructor’s aim is to help you improve.

Yes and no.

In theory your instructor’s aim is to help you improve, but he’s also trying to do that for all the other students in the class, and their needs aren’t going to be the same as yours. As a result every instructor makes compromises. Every time they try and help one specific person, other people aren’t going to be training what they need the most. So training with your instructor will help improve your skills, but not as fast as if you also work on them alone.

You can’t drill your technique enough in class.

Most people who’ve trained for any amount of time with a good instructor will have memories of one of those classes where you did one technique over and over for 60 – 90 minutes, so surely this can’t be right. You drilled that technique for a long time. You got lots of practice. So surely what I’ve just said is wrong?

Yes and No.

Lots of repetition of a technique is good and performance enhancing. Lots of repetition of a technique for a sustained period of time however can lead to fatigue which means adaptation (or sloppiness) and can create poor technique. As an instructor I still do long classes where I focus on one technique, but I try not to do them in such a way (ie different speeds and intensities and/or thin air/partner/pads) that the technique itself deteriorates. For all the time a student is drilling that one technique the instructor has chosen they’re not drilling others, which takes us back to the original statement. If the class is working a technique in which you have an average to good ability and not addressing one in which you are poor, you need to train alone to make up for that.

Your instructor’s class is too fast.

In a lot of classes techniques are drilled at a steady medium speed pace, but as I explained a number of years ago in Jissen magazine, that isn’t necessarily the best approach – it’s a compromise to enable the whole class to cover as much as possible in the time available. When training alone you don’t have to compromise this way, you can set best the pace to achieve your goals.

Your instructor’s class is too slow.

See above.

There’s too much impact in class.

Impact is good. But it isn’t always what you need. Sometimes you have to step away from the pads and look at your biomechanics, work through the movement at varying speeds and make adjustments. If there isn’t enough impact in class then by contrast you need training time elsewhere against a bag to develop those skills.

There’s too much paired work in class.

I’m a great fan of paired work and in fact there’s very little time in my own classes outside the warm up and warm down where students aren’t paired up or working in groups. Pairing people in martial arts training is logical, we’re not practicing something that is designed to be used against thin air (except you martial artists in certain styles, you know who you are).

Once you are paired up to a large extent you are playing someone else’s game: even when you are dominating the situation, it is the other person’s position that dictates the fine detail of your timing and position. Training at home alone allows you to break down movements and refine them so that when you next do them paired your performance is improved.

Training alone is not a replacement for training with other people, but it is one of the best ways to ensure steady improvement. It doesn’t have to be for a long period of time, it doesn’t have to make you sweat, but it will make you a better martial artist. So the next time you put that kettle on, wait for that toast to cook, or just have a few minutes to spare, why not work something slowly on the spot?

Have fun.

Keep on training

I don’t know the origin of this text, but it was given to me by my Aikido teacher John Tidder in the late 1990s.

It’s never let me down.

Sometimes nothing seems to go right, you feel

sluggish and uncoordinated –

train.

Sometimes the practice will appear confusing

– no worries – train

because you will understand when the time is right.

Sometimes bits of a technique go well

– good – keep training.

But when you try to put the whole technique together it

falls apart – this is natural, be patient – nobody juggles

seven balls in just a few months –

train.

Sometimes the practice is so brilliant that you can’t wait

until next time – be patient.

Next time you don’t feel like going because you’ve had a

tough day and you are tired –

train.

You will always feel better for training.

aikido

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