habitual Archives - Page 2 of 2

Six things you should do in your training

1. Train against attacks to the head

The head is an obvious target. Not only can we be knocked unconscious through strikes to the head, our ability to hear, see, shout and even our balance can be damaged. We do have natural reflexes to protect the head which will be activated should our eyes receive a stimulus once it is too late to access and execute a trained protective action, but these reflexes are not always effective. The best way to become skilled at protecting the head is to have to defend against attacks to that target on a regular basis. It does not matter whether those attacks are intended to make contact or not, all that is required is the incentive to continuously protect our head from impact and to learn carry the arms in such a way that we can do so speedily with ease.

2. Train against HAOV

Pushes, shoves, grabs, wild haymakers, head butts, headlocks, shoulder barges, tackles, clinches, stomps… the use of habitual acts of violence in training can be controversial. From a self defence perspective they are essential training tools, for in a violent situation you are far more likely to be attacked using haov than any more precise form of attack, even if your attacker is themselves a skilled martial artist. The downside of training against haov is that it means that a proportion of the training time is spent delivering a skillset in which you do not want or need to become proficient at employing. How much time you spend on training against haov should be weighted according to your primary skill development aims.

3. Train at Close range

By close range I’m referring to tactile contact and working at a distance where you are generally within at most ¾ of the arm reach of your training partner. Most violent confrontations quickly close to this distance no matter how skilled a ‘long distance’ fighter one participant may be, and this infighting range is one at which it is important to be comfortable.

4. Make Contact (actually hit people and pads)

Contact in training is tremendously important. I’ve written about it in Volume Three of the Pinan Flow System. Both making and receiving contact is important. Experiencing contact in training so that real shoves or knocks don’t faze you or affect your will to continue is invaluable, and it doesn’t have to be knockdown or dangerous/damaging to do so under the supervision of a good teacher.

5. Use verbal abuse and distraction

Verbal abuse, whether by one person or a group, can freeze a person unused to personally experiencing it more effectively than the shock of contact. Exposure to bad language at a distance, or on the screen is not the same. There is a big difference between facing a silent focused training partner, enduring the kiai of a confident partner, and having one or more people swearing and shouting directly in your face.

6. Train against multiple opponents

Dealing with multiple opponents isn’t easy and it isn’t pretty. There are lots of different ways that this can be done: some that genuinely put the trainee under gradually increasing pressure, others that are frankly ridiculous either because they are always so intense that they offer no chance for progression or learning outcomes, or because they are so spaced apart that there is no added pressure or learning gained. There’s no guarantee that training against multiple opponents is going to enable you to fight more than one person (and you should try to avoid even fighting just one person), but this form of training will make you aware of the difficulty, give you indications as to things that definitely don’t work, and possibly provide a more appropriate focus for your one on one strategies.

I haven’t picked these six training paradigms at random. From the experience of observing many trained and untrained people from a range of backgrounds in hundreds of simulated aggressive and violent confrontations, these are the six factors that determine how easily a person is able to access their combative skill set. The more of these a person deals with in regular training the easier it will be to access their skill set, the fewer of these they work regularly or have experienced the harder it will be to access that skill set. This model helps explain why personality, upbringing, martial arts styles and training regimes all have an effect on how successfully people can physically defend themselves.

Not everyone is able to meet all six of these criteria in their regular training, but that doesn’t matter. I have seen people who meet only three criteria in their martial arts class (attacks to the head, contact and close range) do exceptionally well because in their work as LEO (Law Enforcement Officers) they have encountered verbal abuse, haov, and dealing with multiple opponents. The more you meet the easier it will be. If you identify a gap in your class, and if you are not in a position to fill it (or your instructor doesn’t want to) then it is usually easy to gain experience and have fun by cross training at a seminar, or inviting an instructor to teach at your club or workplace.

Have fun and train safely!

Environmental awareness

Environmental awareness is a crucial attribute in self protection. It is also something that is often given lip service without further explanation of what people need to be aware of or indeed how to improve their awareness.

The majority of self protection lies in the assessment, avoidance, deterrence, and de-escalation of aggression and situations where conflict is likely, but regrettably this is not always possible.

Training your physical skills against habitual acts of violence increases your understanding and recognition of their telegraphs, an attribute that can increase the likelihood of reacting in time to a physical attack or preventing one through pre-emption. Scenario training can increase your comfort in dealing with verbal aggression and increase your ability to identify the behavioural precursors to a physical attack (if these are accurately replicated in the training).

Unfortunately we can often miss these indicators due to our focus on trying to resolve the situation peacefully. Our brains can become overloaded by the tasks of watching the person in front of us, trying to hear what he/she is saying, trying to think about whether to talk or hit or run, wondering what our friends will do, or what our partner or children will do, working out what to say and watching other people etc… This means that despite our knowledge of the telegraphs – we often miss them.

One solution to this in regular training is to work pad drills from a fence practicing hitting (or ducking) while listening and talking and adding in additional distractions.

In this video students and instructors from a range of different styles get caught off guard and hit by role playing aggressors. I hope the footage proves useful to you in your own training.

While training for event management is good, improving your ability to avoid the event altogether is more important. The ‘Driving School’ method of self-narrating what you observe in daily life and thus highlighting things that you might otherwise miss or dismiss is a good way to improve your ability to recognise potential dangers and to have greater mental stamina with regard to staying alert in public. I’m very bad at facial recognition until actively engaged in conversation so I tend to read people by body language and location rather than recognition of known versus unknown quantities. With practise and experimentation people will naturally gravitate to approaches that work best to how they think, and rather than being an intrusive or ‘paranoid’ approach this should become as background and unobtrusive in our thought processes as checking for traffic before walking across a road.

Sticks and stones

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me.

Whoever came up with that particular saying might be shocked by how false it seems in the modern world. I’m sure that every coach / instructor / teacher or businessman/woman reading that phrase is only too aware of how damaging words can be. In theory reputations can be salvaged through litigation, but a word once uttered flies away beyond recall.

My opening phrase is not about litigation though. It is the adage that verbal abuse cannot harm compared with physical abuse. In this day and age of psychological study we can see the fiction in this as well as the truth, and those that work in any form of education or group workplace are keenly aware that verbal bulling can be as great a problem as physical bulling. What may remain a closed book to a number of martial arts instructors is that suffering verbal abuse can lead to an increased risk of physical harm.

I’m not talking about psychological trauma and self-harming here, but the damage that verbal abuse can do to our immediate physical state in a self defence situation. I train my students to make appropriate physical responses to physical attacks. I also teach my students pre-emptive striking techniques based upon their assessment of the probability of violence – in other words if they are unable to make a retreat and sense that their attempts to verbally de-escalate the situation are failing, and it is their honest belief that they are about to be hit, I train them to hit first. In this approach I may fall into a smaller group of instructors. In addition to this (where my surroundings permit) I have my students verbally abuse one another in role play simulations prior to the physical drill – and here I imagine I fall into a tiny minority.

So, why add in a verbal element to physical practise? This comes down to your training rationale. If you are training in a martial art for the love of the competitive element involved, then you would naturally spend the majority of your time learning to fight or perform within the rule set of your chosen competition – drilling and sparring in the attacks, defences and tactics used there. If however you are training in your chosen art for the purpose of self defence you should want to spend your time drilling and defending against habitual acts of violence (haov). That is a logical step to take. But a large proportion of violent incidents do not start with a push, a haymaker, a grab or a headbutt – they start with a verbal attack in the form of an argument, a misinterpreted glance or jostle, a torrent of unwarranted abuse, a demand or a con tactic.

As an example I used to do a drill where a person was pinned against a wall by their throat and threatened by and attacker’s fist. Students quickly became able to break out of this position using a combination of high and low movements. When the exercise speed was increased, and their attacker protected with body armour so as to take full physical contact, they continued to be able to do it. Then I had the attacker put their face only a hand’s length away from their ‘victim’ and shout “What the f*** are you f****** looking at, you f****** piece of s***. I’m going to f****** smash your f****** face in!” Suddenly the drill fell apart, the victim froze and the technique was executed after a delay and with less conviction – if at all. The impact of the verbal abuse reduced the ability of the target to access the gross motor skills they had previously been employing and left them vulnerable to physical attack.

Some people might note the over-use of the F word in the above phrase and I stress that the students chose their own language. We have become used to this and other words and probably use them ourselves under our breath or out loud, but rarely up close. We see and hear aggressive language in television drama and it doesn’t really affect us. Up close it is a different story. I suspect that the F word in particular is powerful up close because of the contortion it gives to the face, exposing the teeth in an unaccustomed way and shortening the nose. The combination of the volume of the shout and the primal (almost gorilla like) visual display gives it power and its aggressive use can sap confidence, awareness and conviction.

Gradually my students became accustomed to the verbal posturing. After they experienced it about five times on the trot they were back to about 50% effectiveness, a percentage that gradually increased with more exposure. But imagine what might happen to you if you never trained this scenario. What if you only did your techniques in a sterile environment? How certain are you that you would cope, that you wouldn’t ‘shut down’, that you would remain calm? The impact of words on our mental state should not be under-estimated.

What became clear from the performance of these drills was that although the majority of students had a low level of adrenaline running through their system during class, and had experienced high rushes of adrenaline in other activities, they were simply not prepared for the impact such intense verbal pressure had on their physiology. In this and in other drills many were caught out by the fact that their unconscious reaction was to step backwards and away from the noise, others by the difficulty they had trying to speak whilst their digestive system had temporarily shut down. As with normal physical drills, repeated exposure brought acceptance, confidence, and an increased ability to maintain dialogue – a key factor in trying to avoid conflict.

In the years since I have run many heavy contact scenario training days for my own students and for visiting trainees from a broad range of other systems. In these events it is not simply the contact and the use of haov that ‘de-skills’ the majority of first timers below their normal performance, it is the novelty of experiencing a personal verbal assault and the difficulty of making a decision under such pressure as to whether to pre-empt or to continue to attempt to talk. With each exposure trainees become desensitized and improve, and crucially it is not simply a matter of their physical skills improving but their physiological state improving. If the training is done well then they will experience some adrenaline, but not as much as before, which means that their heart rate is lower, they can access a slightly greater range of motor skills, and they are able to make more rational choices.

The Kiai used in paired kumite incorporates an aspect of this verbal assault, but I would stress that its effect at close range is insignificant compared to personal insults and threats. Some instructors might feel that they can’t do such things, even if they would like, because of the youth element of their classes. You will find that it is possible to work these scenarios without using ‘swear words’ per se; “Get back to where you came from!” is an unpleasant thing to say with the proper inflection, as is the challenge “what are you looking at?” I would actually advocate the use of such drills with classes involving children along a carefully designed word and intensity continuum, simply because although we might try and pretend it doesn’t exist, verbal bullying of this kind does occur and can frighten young people. Preparing young people for verbal aggression can help prevent problems and fights (at that age). There are a number of tricks that can be employed to encourage normally reticent people to shout at their friends and to depersonalise both aggressor and target. Whenever you are doing this form of psychological training it is important to be aware that if you are not careful in your methodology you may harm vulnerable adults and children, and while we want our training to be realistic and effective, it should not cause damage.

Whether you incorporate drills of this kind alongside your physical practise boils down to a simple question – do you want to teach something that is useful for self defence? Our physical skills are of no use for self defence if they cannot be accessed under pressure, and that pressure can come as much from having to process the visual and aural stimuli of a sustained verbal assault as any physical assault.

Train safely and have fun.

Targets

Targets seem to be the bane of anyone who works these days. Whatever line of work you’re in, I’d be surprised if you haven’t been set either a sales target, efficiency target or an energy saving target and so the list goes on.

Targets have been around for a long time in the martial arts too. What are gradings, certificates and belts but targets for students to achieve – indications (in theory) of progress. There are a number of students who covet their belts and focus all their training towards them, students who love the gradings, students who covet belts but fear and dread gradings, and students who couldn’t care less about rank and just want to train. After all, isn’t the journey more important than the goal?

What is the goal?

If your goal is to become fitter or healthier, then the set targets of gradings can help you achieve that aim by pushing you harder. If your goal is to gain ‘a black belt’ then gradings and their targets are pretty essential in that you can’t achieve your goal in most systems without them (although you could just buy a belt). If your goal is to become imbued with self knowledge and self discipline there are possibly better ways of spending your time, but the targets set by your syllabus and the lengths you will have to go to achieve them will certainly improve your self discipline. If your goal is to become a zen warrior – you probably need to get out more.

Are you training Kata to know its meaning or to look good? Both can benefit your confidence but only one can benefit you in self defence.

What if the goal is to become a better fighter or improve your ability to defend yourself?

I separate these two because to my mind they are distinct entities that can overlap. The psychological and physical training needs and goals of a person wishing to successfully fight in a ring or competition differ from those of someone wishing to successfully negate, survive and escape violence. Both actual events, when they occur place physical and mental demands on the individual, but the emotional, psychological and physical environment and consequences of each are very different. There are elements of training common to both, but there are also significant differences and this is where the goal becomes more important than the journey. If you aren’t fixed on where you are going, how can you select the best route and means of transport to get there?

You must decide if karate is for your health or to aid your duty. Anko Itosu

If you are training for a fighting competition then there are a number of targets that you will set for your physical techniques when determining your repertoire:

competition appropriateness – there’s no point in you drilling an item that will get you disqualified.
attack specific – the rules and previous fights mean that you know what is going to be coming your way, you can thus take steps to drill how to evade and counter combinations of these techniques.
adrenaline tolerant – physical movements that your body can do using predominantly gross motor skills,
Initiative – keeping/gaining this until the round/fight is over
speed – how fast can you execute a technique
power – is the technique going to do what you want?
redundancy – does the technique leave you with options if it doesn’t quite go to plan?
transferable skills – when learning one thing helps develop something else you are doing,
unbalancing – taking control of the other person’s balance,
multiplicity – learning individual things that can work against different attacks,
multi range – being able to use your body to hit and escape no matter what position you find yourself.

Ground fighting is more commonly trained by a broader group of martial artists these days and most rule sets make it a sensible strategy. But rolling on the pavement with someone who might take the fight to a new level may not be so effective. It’s an important part of a rounded self defence arsenal, but generally we should be training tactics that are proven under pressure to enable us to avoid it.

In addition to this as a fighter you will have combat related targets such as your strength, stamina, weight, diet and conditioning.

If we now look at the technical physical development targets you would set yourself for a self defence repertoire, we see overlaps but also clear differences:

habitual acts of violence – training is focused on what are statistically the most likely attacks,
adrenaline tolerant – physical movements that your body can do using predominantly gross motor skills,
speed – how fast can you execute a technique
power – is the technique going to do what you want?
predictable response – the knowledge of how people think and talk and move,
initiative – keeping/gaining this until the danger has gone,
redundancy – knowing and training what to do if something doesn’t work,
low maintenance – easy to learn and easy to do without much practice,
transferable skills – when learning one thing helps develop something else you are doing,
unbalancing – taking control of the other person’s balance,
multiplicity – learning individual things that can work against different attacks,
ballistic response – predominantly using striking as your physical means of escape if verbal strategies fail,
multi range – being able to use your body to hit and escape no matter what position you find yourself in,
vital points – knowing the weakest points of the human body.
verbal strategies – appropriate speech, tone and body language and behaviour patterns to negate danger or distract,
legally underpinned – appropriate responses that keep you and others safe, but reduce the likelihood of post event prosecution.

Force on force threshold and pain management training is important for both competition and self defence training. If you haven’t experienced it you don’t know whether it will challenge or threaten you. Is pain management on your list of targets?

Compared with the competition fight your strength, stamina, weight and diet are less significant. A real encounter is not likely to last as long as a competition one. Although there would seem to be many similarities between the two sets of targets, the first target in each will separate the paths considerably.

These are merely targets to help you chose what to train. You can then just pick some techniques to work with, but again – if you want to get the psychological benefits of realising improvement, you need to set yourself targets. How accurately can you hit? How much can you stretch? How much can you move the bag? How long can you sustain a high aerobic level? Your targets should always be SMART, that is: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Rewarding and Time limited.

Specific: Make clear and unambiguous statements about what it is you are going to achieve.
Measurable: There must be some way to determine when the objective has been met. Make a statement that describes how you will measure success or failure of the objective.
Achievable: It must be possible to reach the objective. It is important to understand in advance whether or not the objective is achievable. It is important to remember, however, that many tasks when first approached seem impossible, so it is important to set the bar at the right height initially, you can raise it once you’ve achieve it.
Rewarding: The goal should bring sufficient reward that it is worth undertaking. There is always a cost / benefit ratio to consider. Every task has its cost. It is always important to consider what the cost and benefit will be before initiating a task.
Time limited: There should be a clear time frame set out for when the target will be achieved. It is important to approach tasks consistently rather than sporadically. Breaking the goal or target down into sub-targets and estimating time frames is essential if you are to understand the cost of the task.

Sometimes I wonder whether the lack of clear goal setting by instructors and students is responsible for the high drop out rate in the martial arts. Without clear objectives and recognisable, understandable and achievable targets towards that objective how do we measure our success and gain mental satisfaction and confidence from our training?

Kata: dead or alive.

Kata is often viewed by both detractors and supporters as a dead beast. Supporters respect its usefulness through the technical repertoire it provides while detractors point out (and they do have a point) that the same skills could probably be learnt more usefully, effectively and efficiently through the dynamism of sparring. There are of course many Kata techniques that are never seen in sparring (the majority of them I suspect), primarily because the rules (and the range and limitations they enforce) do not permit it, but also because the techniques themselves are either inadequately understood or too hard to control in the struggle of close range combat.

It is through bunkai (and oyo – if you really want to distinguish between the two) that we attempt to realise the intent of the techniques of the Kata. Bunkai is often very different to the sort of sparring described above, adhering more to a beginners one step or two step dance than a challenging dynamic exchange of techniques. I often see tremendously contrived bunkai where an attacker has to make several specific techniques in sequence in order to the assigned bunkai to work – fine if these reflect techniques or combinations of techniques that the defender in question is likely to face (whether in self defence or in sport) but pathetic if they require a rigid sequence, technique combination, timing and distancing that match no plausible attack. Then we have the current flavours of our time: bunkai involving the use of pressure points and bunkai utilising grappling techniques. I have no problem with either of these (since both have a traceable past in early Karate texts such as the Okinawan Bubishi); they do however need to reflect attacks and positions that both defender and attacker could find themselves in (again either in a sport or self defence situation) and are reliable under extremes of pressure and adrenaline.

So can bunkai be brought alive and applied in unpredictable training? This does depend upon the definition we choose to use for alive. I’d say it’s where either practitioner has the freedom to use whatever techniques they want (with no pre-arranged technique type (for example punch or kick) or range, but I do wish to add a caveat. Much of traditional Karate technique relies on impact. By this I refer to the fact that when you hit a person, their body moves and their posture changes. The movement of the target as a result of impact will naturally affect the choice of any following technique and thus alive training should either be almost full contact with both participants wearing good quality body armour or touch with both participants endeavouring to move as if they had been hit. The latter action takes some training and fast reflexes in static and dynamic bunkai practise and is probably near impossible in alive training – hence for me if both are to deliver powerful techniques then protection is required – that way each person will move naturally since all they will have to consider is the fight (well – almost, but I’ll get on to that) rather than how they should move if hit.

There is a further catch, and this comes down to the purpose of the bunkai. If the bunkai is solely being practised to become a better Karateka or sport competitor then all that I have said above is fine, if however the bunkai is being practised for self defence then the situation above only applies to the defender since the attacker should predominantly be constrained to the use of habitual acts of violence.

If you look at the make up of Karate Kata you can see that there are comparatively few punching techniques overall compared to other body movements. This may come as a shock, it may not be something you’ve really considered, but if you don’t believe me – go ahead and count. In close proximity many of the techniques that seem too cumbersome to utilise in ‘real’ sparring take on a new dynamic as they push and unbalance and turn other people both before, during and after making contact. Distance changes everything. It’s difficult to use a straight or reverse punch when you are almost chest to chest with someone (or if you are), the so-called blocking techniques come into their own. Start a trend – call them receivers and alter your student perception of them from day one.

Can we make bunkai alive? The answer is yes, but we do need to decide what level of compromise we are prepared to accept. If we want to keep techniques directed towards the eyes then obviously a visor is needed. If we want to use controls then some form of verbal safety escape cue is required (if you train to tap on the street what happens if your attacker taps you while in a lock?). If you want to hit to the head then you need to pull techniques on impact and wear gloves and head protection, otherwise you won’t be training for long, but if you want to be able to grapple you’ll need to restrict the padding on your gloves.

Once you start exercising Kata in this way you’ll be amazed at how the movements can take on a life of their own – how in many cases the precise sequences of existing forms actually do work (in many different ways) in their precise sequences. The training can be done dynamically without safety equipment, and I have taught my flow drills in both the UK and the USA in this way, but I would advise anyone wishing to take the big step to aliveness to get some high quality body armour – and given the techniques of Kata, I’d advise coverage for the legs, knees, groin and back, in addition to the normal head and torso protectors.

Should Kata bunkai be trained alive? If you are training for self defence or for any form of close range combative contest my answer would be yes. Alive training pressure tests you and your ability to apply techniques and keep thinking in a manner that no other training can. Alive bunkai carries a relatively high risk of injury compared to other forms of practice and thus, in my opinion, should be restricted to students with sufficient experience (and previous pressure testing) to exercise control. Dynamic bunkai training in set drills is a reasonable alternative until students reach that level. In general in Karate we are used to seeing three levels of sparring, pre-arranged static sparring, pre-arranged dynamic sparring and freestyle. Why don’t we train bunkai in the same way?

Kata doesn’t have to be dead.

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