Karate

Karate and Self Protection from John Titchen

martial arts

the constant student

Last week I sat down and attempted to schedule my working hours to better accommodate the increased training time my changed weight training programme demands. It provided a refreshing opportunity to review how I allocate my time and brought me to a startling conclusion.

I invest more time each week studying to learn new useful information and practices than I do revising or repeating material I already ‘know’.

Like many people that took up martial arts at a young age, there are some things that I have practiced for decades. There are kata that I drill every week that I have known for many years. I may feel different when doing them, I may be more aware of what my body is doing, I might aesthetically look better, have better motor control and balance, but I am essentially ‘revising’ or refining my understanding of ‘old’ material. In similar vein, while there are some elements that I currently train in classes that I’ve introduced after a few months of trials in comparison with past approaches, there are other techniques and drills that have been a staple of my training for ten, twenty or thirty years.

Most of my physical training is spent revising and refining previously learned material.

Outside the dojo I’m constantly learning.

I will reread texts because as I learn and change there will be elements of other people’s work that will resonate differently with me. For example, from my own books, people with a narrow understanding of karate may sometimes be put off my application texts because the stances or kata are slightly different to their own. After gaining more experience they may see the parallels with older versions of the same kata as depicted in books or how other styles use the kata and realise that such details can be adjusted according to requirement. In similar vein some people may read one of my kata books and simply take a single application or two they like, whereas others might look beyond the techniques and instead adopt the flow system method of failure cascade that I’ve been using for over twenty years and apply that to their own sparring, with or without my actual applications. Others might take my training assessment criteria and apply them to their own repertoire to assess the efficacy of what they do as I did (with some tweaks) from Bill Burgar’s criteria.

The value of any book or information to a reader depends on the individual’s experience and understanding.

I’ve been teaching since 1989 and have formal teaching qualifications across a number of different disciplines, but I regularly look at how my own students teach, how other instructors teach and listen to podcasts on coaching to try and see how I can improve that element of my work.

I used to lecture on personal safety and self protection, but mainly now deliver information relevant to that vast subject through my syllabus and my sim days. It remains however the field where I still feel I have the most to learn even though I am currently writing a book on the topic. Over the decades the focus of my study has shifted and of course over the years I have been researching a number of my peers in the field have published their own books and the drive towards evidence-based crime prevention and policing has meant that the resources and information available to draw upon keeps growing. I do not anticipate ever reaching a point where I will feel I ‘know enough’ in this field.

I first qualified as a fitness instructor in 1995, the same year I was awarded my Shodan in Shotokan Karate. Sports Science is another continually developing field as we expand our knowledge of the human body and how we can enhance performance across multiple fields and recovery from injuries. I’m continuously trying to improve my knowledge in this field to see how I can enhance my personal training, my classes and the supportive information I give to my students in their syllabus.

I enjoy my current physical training and feel that in terms of what I do and what I teach I offer a useful holistic combination of skills to my students. My curiosity to learn more goes   beyond that. As I depend on being injury free to work, I am very cautious as to how I cross train these days; I’m wary of being at the mercy of a student with less control than an experienced instructor, but I do seek to learn more through watching others (and then trialling with my own instructor team) and through judicious cross training.

As teaching karate is my main occupation, I have the luxury of the time to continually endeavour to further my knowledge. Every day is a school day and I love learning. The thought of limiting myself by not continually seeking to improve my understanding of something is anathema to me.

I am always going to be a student and that makes me happy.

Progress through practice

When I first started training martial arts, I did so with an inferiority complex.

Most of my physical education experience up to that time was outdoors. Rugby, football, (grass) hockey, athletics and cricket. I didn’t do well at these. I was usually the last or second to last guy to be picked on teams in compulsory sport. In fact, I was so bad that I didn’t even notice that when it came to rare indoor physical education sessions of volleyball, crab football, weight-lifting and gymnastics I actually out-performed many of my sporting peers. The root cause, not spotted until I left school and changed doctors, was that my childhood asthma was very poorly managed and physical education coaches of the time were either not trained or not invested in helping lower ability students progress through that type of medical hurdle.

Beginning training in Karate at the age of seventeen I did so with the automatic perception that I was worse than the students to my left and right. It was a new club so we were all the same grade, but I was certain that everyone else was better.

I took matters into my own hands.

Every evening, before going to sleep, I made sure I worked through all my fixed kihon sets at least ten times on each side. I would also work my fixed kumite sets and my kata. I didn’t have much space so there was a lot of shuffling on the spot.

When the old doors were removed from ‘my’ Squash Court Dojo to be scrapped as part of its renovation, I kept this souvenir.

Personal training outside of class is something I have never dropped. Whether I was only making two classes a week or eleven classes a week, I’ve made time and found space. That may have been training on the spot in a narrow gap between a bed and a wall, walking down to Squash Court 3 at Birmingham University every weekday for a 7-9am session before lectures, or finding an empty space at a Leisure Centre for an hour. I’ve stretched and trained in front of the television, in the kitchen while waiting for a kettle to boil, in hallways waiting for others to get their coats on.

Repetitions count. Static repetitions of martial arts moves may not be ‘as good’ for learning as repetitions that are adapting to the fluid dynamic of paired training, but so long as they are not done to exhaustion and are not hindering recovery from any other training, they will be beneficial.

I’ve not limited my ‘out of class’ training to my martial arts techniques.

I’m lucky to have a well equipped dojo.

I’ve had a few gym memberships over the years, but I’ve generally preferred to see what I can do ‘cheaper’ around my own schedule at home. When I was 21, shortly before I qualified as a fitness instructor, my sister bought me a weights bench and I still have that today even though I’ve changed the types of weight and exercises I use. I’m lucky because I have my own dojo these days where I can set up my bench, keep my free weights and bar, hang my heavy bag and speed ball, attach resistance straps to the bag hook, or use my rowing machine, but I’ve seen others do the same in garages or garden sheds. There are multiple things anyone can do to improve their strength, power or achieve hypertrophy without buying kit, just so long as they can find a space to train.

Students finding space to train and video training at home during lockdown.

You don’t need much space to train. If you have room to do a push up, there’s a lot of different bodyweight exercises you can do in addition to kata or kihon on the spot. Weather permitting you develop explosive power jumping on the spot outdoors. You can improve your VO2 max running up and down stairs (again possibly best in a venue where you aren’t going to wake people or cause cracks in the plaster work).

There is so much you can do outside of class and it actually takes so little time. Micro workouts count. Too often people feel that they have to lump everything together or be in a particular place, placing self-imposed obstacles in their path to greater health. Listen to a podcast or audio reading of a work text while exercising, use the rest breaks between sets to make bullet point notes of the last few minutes (I do this a lot). Watch your favourite show while working out on the spot, listen to your favourite tunes.

Forced online training during lockdowns showed how people could find space to train indoors and outdoors.

You won’t know what you can do until you try. Start small: choose something that is easy to do regularly and then increase either intensity or frequency or both, then add something else. It’s amazing how much supporting exercise we can add into our lives without feeling as if we are ‘losing’ any time. Technically speaking by improving cognitive function and health through exercise we are gaining time.

I hope you enjoy the benefits of personal training as much as I do.

Motivation, Discipline and Habits

I’ve been training for a while now.

Some evenings I really don’t want to get in the car and drive in the dark through the pouring rain and carry the kit bags to the venue. It’s cold, it’s wet, I’m tired.

Of course, I have to go. Others depend on me. Once I’m there I’m glad I went. The mental and physical challenges of training release a welcome amount of dopamine. I am motivated by the engagement and achievements of others. I know that what I’m doing is good for me and good for those training with me.

Motivation

  • enthusiasm for doing something
  • the need or reason for doing something
  • willingness to do something, or something that causes such willingness

Discipline

  • training that makes people more willing to obey or more able to control themselves, often in the form of rules, and punishments if these are broken, or the behaviour produced by this training
  • the ability to control yourself or other people, even in difficult situations

Habit

  • something you do often and regularly, sometimes without knowing you are doing it

It is often observed that motivation may get you training to begin with, but it can be difficult to sustain. We are often told that we need discipline, the self control to continue to train, even when it is not the easiest course of action.

Discipline is important, but it requires motivation to be fostered in the first place.

Motivation is driven by reward and results; enjoying the activity, feeling stronger, seeing improvements in co-ordination or flexibility or mobility, experiencing any desired (and worked for) changes in physical appearance. There are many overlapping reasons that might motivate a person to start a martial art. Our motivations may change over time.

I believe that motivation does not require discipline, whereas discipline always requires motivation both for its creation and to be sustained. Discipline will carry you on occasions that you lack short-term motivation, but it requires the longer term motives of reward or punishment to be sustained in the long term. You may lack the short-term motivation to attend one particular training session at one time, but the discipline that drives you to do it anyway comes from longer term motivation and force of habit.

The best ways to motivate yourself in training are:
1. to enjoy it, and
2. to gain rewards (physical satisfaction, mental satisfaction, social needs, goal achievements) and to recognise them.

By feeding motivation you create incentives for repetitive behaviours which become habits. The more habitual your training, the more you are likely to gain from it, especially as it will bring incremental and observable progress. The more habitual your training, the more routine it is, the less conscious willpower is required. Training becomes swimming with the current rather than against it.

Regular activities become habits. Things that you do, often without any conscious mental effort. To get to the stage of doing something habitually I either need to want to do it (I’m motivated) or I need to make myself do it even when I don’t want to (I’m disciplined). This may seem like semantics but I would suggest that once something is a habit, it is not a discipline.

So how to stay motivated?

From a coaching perspective, training needs to be a positive experience, even when it is hard. Good effort and good techniques need to be praised. Improvements noted. Students should feel welcome and valued. Feedback on lower quality performance should be focused on why and how to adjust. Effort and ability should be rewarded with activities that enable personal expression (just because something may be a game does not mean it cannot develop and refine integral attributes and skillsets) and are both challenging and enjoyable.

From a personal perspective motivation comes from enjoying the activity (which could be either the activity, the company or both) and/or seeing desired results from the activity. For the latter regularly setting SMART goals can help.

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Achievable
  • Realistic
  • Timely

We can set SMART goals ourselves, or in coordination with other students or coaches. It is better to have multiple concurrently running and overlapping small step SMART goals rather than a single distant goal. Regular recognised success increases the likelihood of leaning into effort which in turn increases the likelihood of future success. Too often we overreach on our targets; just choose to increase a bodyweight exercise by one rep a week, or choose to do one kata a day  – after a month the change will be noticeable and you can adjust the goalposts. Small changes to routines are also easier to accommodate, leading to their becoming habitual behaviours.

In the last year I have made more progress recovering from training injuries than in previous years because I have been less ambitious in my goals and set SMARTer targets. The smaller increments have allowed more continuous forward movement than the bigger leaps that in the past have exposed me to further injury. I have strength targets for different exercises, aerobic targets for rowing and bagwork sets, flexibility targets and balancing targets. The measurable progress I have made has rewarded the effort invested and increased my motivation to keep stretching my limits.

I have always made a habit of daily training. On some days that is a fixed workout in a designated location, but once again starting small can build the habits to springboard to greater results. I do kata sporadically throughout the day. Tekki / Naihanchi and my own kata Initiative and Escape require small footwork areas to enable opportunistic practice. On some days my bodyweight workouts are spread out with sets as and when I have a moment to do them. I’ll do abdominal exercises or stretches whenever I have a free moment to lie down at home. I’ll stand on one leg while catching the weather forecast or waiting for the kettle to boil. Micro-workouts enable multiple reps and can keep the metabolic rate high throughout the day. Once you stop thinking that an exercise has to make you sweat or requires a change of clothes or at least an hour it becomes a lot easier to sustain more training away from the gym or the dojo. This form of training can either be a pathway to begin more intense set workouts or a performance enhancing supplement to them.

Identify your motivating factors. What is it you like? What is it you want? It’s okay to have ‘big’ motivations, but don’t neglect to recognise the SMART smaller ones that will keep you going.

Identify your training time opportunities. Recognise moments you can steal for training (and learning), moments you can fix for training, and maximise and enjoy moments you set aside for rest and relaxation.

Continuously set SMART goals to achieve and acknowledge those achievements.

Training Inflation

“I’ve been training ‘X’ years.”

I’ve seen it written with such assurance and finality. The writer seems to feel that the statement, be it three years, ten years, twenty years or forty years, validates and elevates their argument and opinion to an infallible status.

I tend not to frequent martial arts forums any more. I used to engage in long discussions on elements of training and the rationales behind different approaches, but over time I gradually switched to books and blog posts instead. This was largely a matter of prioritising my time; writing long answers with evidence in online debates could take up days and those could be wasted if the other person had no intention of ever changing their mind or was simply trolling. I do still however encounter debate and comments on social media on the posts of some of the groups or friends I follow.

“I’ve been training ‘X’ years.”

Have you though? Really? What do you mean by ‘training’? Was that an unbroken period of regular study and working with others? Are you including your time in martial arts creche training as a young child?

I’ve noticed people ignoring gaps in their training where they took time out due to a relocation or a different job or to raise children. There’s nothing wrong with taking a break when other life pressures rise, but if you weren’t training… you weren’t training. Subtract those five, ten or fifteen years from your training total and be honest with yourself and others about your experience.

Experience. Experience and longevity are not the same thing.

There are many people that train once a week. Others train two, three, four or as much as seven days a week. Some people only train in classes, others supplement their class training with kata, drills, bag work or other martial arts exercises. If you are only ever training on your own (bag work or forms or shadow boxing) and not meeting up regularly with others to get peer or instructor feedback, are you really ‘training’ or just ‘mucking about’?

(That’s a genuine question, I really don’t know. Does it depend on the experience of the person? Does it depend on the nature of the training?)

When I was eighteen years old, in school term time I would do 17 hours of Karate classes a week in addition to 7 hours of personal training time (kata, weights and running). That’s the same number of class hours in a single year as someone training once a week for 12 years and I’ve met a lot of people that can only train once a week. Your ‘ten years’ might not involve as many hours actually training as another person’s ‘three years’. It’s okay to only attend once a week if that’s how martial arts fits into your life, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that it’s the same thing as training two or three times that amount in the same timeframe.

Experience and longevity are not the same thing.

Some people either push themselves or are pushed by their instructors or their training system’s ethos to continually refine their repertoire and to broaden and deepen their study. No two years are ever the same. They are always developing. Others sadly get stuck on a hamster’s wheel, repeating the same year of training again and again. Their training still has value, but they aren’t really learning anything or furthering their skillset. In many ways they are perpetually stuck in a Groundhog day, their training years never truly increasing.

I’ve been training for a fair number of years now. No two years have been the same. I am always tweaking what I do and what I teach and trying to improve both. I am always actively looking for alternative techniques or training methods that can supplement or replace what I do if they prove to be superior for the context I envision. Those years don’t magically make me more knowledgeable than someone that’s trained regularly for a year in an area that I don’t study (such as swordsmanship) or in a field that is peripheral to my own syllabus (such as grappling on the ground). I’m ready and happy to learn from people that have trained for fewer years than me because I may have less experience and knowledge than them in their particular fields. I read a lot, I watch a great deal, and when I can I train with others that I feel have something to offer.

I’ve been training for thirty-one years now. That number doesn’t mean anything on its own. It conveys no status. It indicates no fixed level of ability, knowledge or experience. I don’t feel I have anything to prove, I do feel that I have a lot more to learn and a lot more that I can achieve.

Introducing Self Protection to Martial Arts Classes

I consider myself first and foremost a self protection instructor, it’s the subject area on which I spend the most time, but in my regular evening classes I’m teaching Karate, a martial art.

On one of the nights I teach there are two other clubs running alongside mine on neighbouring badminton courts: one teaching a Kickboxing system, the other teaching Krav Maga. These clubs aren’t teaching self protection either and (in the main) neither are teaching self defence.

What do I mean?

Self defence is the physical aspect of using force to protect yourself or others. It is a term given to the legal use of force that might otherwise incur criminal charges. It is however commonly used as a catch-all term instead of self protection; the broader umbrella comprising the more important aspects of crime prevention through personal safety awareness, avoidance, deterrence, threat negation (running away, de-escalation through language and body language), psychological preparation (to improve both the ability to avoid force and to use force), physical control (where necessary and appropriate) and self defence.

I am teaching a martial art in my evening classes. My students learn techniques, they practice forms to rehearse techniques and footwork, they strike pads and they spar freely with one another. But because every drill and training method has been analysed from a training safety perspective, has been assessed as the necessary and reasonable response to the levels of potential injury concerned in the attacks concerned, and I include habitual acts of violence in addition to ‘martial arts techniques’, I make sure that what they do also falls into the legal category of self defence.

Introducing the concept of self defence into martial arts classes is not that hard. It just requires a little work. The broader the repertoire of your chosen art, the easier it is. It is mainly selecting appropriate responses to stimuli and understanding when to stop.

Is the teaching of martial arts skills as self defence a problem? Self defence is a legal construct rather than fighting skills and as such is not a fixed item. What qualifies as self defence will vary according to circumstances, personal perception, and from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. It’s not always easy to say that this part of this system is self defence while another part is not, it’s not always that clear cut. But there are some skills often taught that cannot be self defence because they are designed to maim or kill a person when they are no longer in a position where anyone could reasonably claim that they believed they still had the potential to do harm. Teaching such techniques and leading students to believe that they are learning self defence is a problem, and it is one that is prevalent in both the RBSD community as well as traditional martial arts. The teaching of techniques that are quite simply fantastical in the context of application in non-consensual violence is a problem that is prevalent in both RBSD and TMA, but in martial arts is not an issue if they are competition rule-set appropriate for the club concerned.

Introducing self protection into martial arts? That’s harder.

People often come to martial arts looking for self protection, but what they want in their regular classes is a physical workout, not a series of lectures, group discussions, story sharing and introspection. Regular classes also tend not to lend themselves to accompanying physical attacks with realistic elements such as verbal abuse, de-escalation opportunities and decision making.

I have what I feel is a good working solution that allows me to teach self protection through martial arts. It all comes down to my syllabus.

My syllabus document keeps changing and growing. Like most martial arts syllabi it contains a list of what I expect to test at each grade along with martial arts vocabulary, but that’s just the first 18 pages of a 152 page A4 document. Most of the syllabus is dedicated to personal safety advice, the theory that underpins our training methods, legal information, self protection book recommendations and real crime reports. I’m always adding in more material and I still haven’t included every element that I used to discuss in my self protection lectures.

While I enjoy discussions and talks on the many-faceted elements of self protection, I am particularly fond of reading information since the written word affords the opportunity to stop to analyse and absorb information that is often lost in live presentations. I thus feel it is important that all my students have access to written resources that they can revisit as often as they like.

This does raise an important point. How can I be sure that my students will read the information that I have provided? That I am providing self protection rather than a self defence focused martial art? To do this I use written exams for the majority of my gradings. Students are asked questions on the syllabus to ensure that they know the underpinning theory and personal safety material I want them to know (either through reading my syllabus, reading books, attending courses with me or others or just general life experience and emotional maturity). I recently moved from paper exams to online questionnaires where students can attempt to answer multiple times (each time having to re-read questions and answers) until they get perfect scores.

This is a balanced holistic approach to giving students the exercise that is good for their physical and mental health, skill sets that will give them an edge should they ever be in a violent incident, and ingraining information and personal habits that will help keep them safe. It’s also a ‘non-intrusive’ approach to self protection teaching in martial arts that I would like to see as a template for more clubs that advertise themselves as providing ‘self defence’.

In this manner my students get constant access to high quality information from me and other sources and have the opportunity to question me further in person or through email discussion. I also provide further opportunities for them to test their decision making, conflict management and martial arts skills under pressure in my Sim Day scenario training outside our regular class schedule with debriefs involving a discussion of tactics, ethics and legal considerations.

You can combine martial arts with self protection.

Circling but never landing

I don’t like flow drills.

Wait a moment, haven’t I written 5 books on Flow Drills? The (out of print) Heian Flow System and the four books of the Pinan Flow System?

Yes, I wrote those books. No, they don’t contain Flow Drills, they outline a Flow System.

What’s the difference?

I see a Flow Drill as a fixed sequence of moves, generally performed as a cycle of one person’s actions requiring a fixed response from a partner, sometimes involving the participants swapping roles on a fixed regular basis.

A Flow System by contrast is a training methodology designed to help users flow seamlessly between grappling and striking options in accordance to the dynamics of their sparring. While there may be static ‘fixed’ responses the first time a combination is introduced, extra variables are quickly added so that there really isn’t anything ‘set’ and the open-ended training is only limited by the experience, skill and imagination of the participants. Limiting yourself to only moves in the Heian / Pinan kata (which not all of my Shotokan students do) is hardly setting tight constraints.

So why don’t I like Flow Drills? Why am I so unreasonable?

Flow Drills is a blanket term. In principle I am in favour of any form of training that develops skill sets and attributes. I am in favour of any training exercise that is enjoyable (because people are more likely to show up to do it). I am also wary of anything that has a tendency to lull people into metronome-like behaviour and to become too accustomed to set responses to set stimuli. Like many instructors I am concerned that often people can fall into a distorted focus on becoming fast and proficient at the drill (the set sequence of movements) rather than proficient at using the techniques independently with a working understanding of how and when to use them and how to adapt them.

So like everything in the martial arts, whether flow drills are good or bad depends on their use in the overall structure of training, too much or too little of any training method has the potential for health or harm. If you continuously circle but never land then you are setting yourself up to crash. If a Flow Drill is fixed then it should probably be short. If points in one flow drill match up with points in another then students that know both should actively be encouraged to randomly switch; the more ‘overlaps’ and thus switch points the better because a Flow Drill will instead evolve  into dynamic sparring or even alive sparring (if anything can be done). The more time in class we ‘lock’ students into fixed combinations the more we limit their ability to become skilful in recognising opportunity and proficient in adaptability and improvisation. Those traits must not be sacrificed for rigid training in the name of ‘skill development’.