Karate

Karate and Self Protection from John Titchen

rbsd

You can’t train with them!

You can’t train with them! You can’t be my friend if you’re their friend! This ex-instructor is stealing all our secrets! This ex-instructor is offering a lower quality product! You can’t train with anyone else but us!

It seems like it’s a playground out there. Not a nice one either.

What’s on my mind? I recently saw a letter that the JKA sent out to its members forbidding them from training with an offshoot organisation. A letter that also that also states that attendance at such seminars may violate their ‘ethics and discipline regulations.’

Wow.

It’s not as if I haven’t seen this behaviour before though: across Karate styles, in other martial arts, and in the ‘Reality Based Self Defence’ community. For my own part I’ve had an editor remove my name from a karate article that recommended me and I’ve known one instructor to imply that my decades of knowledge (and magazine articles and the karate system name in use before we even met) are based on the little common material he shared in two weekend seminars. I find it a shame that people can be so insecure.

There are good ways to attract and retain students and there are bad ways. There are good reasons to recommend someone not train with another group and there are bad reasons.

Let’s start with cross-training, that training element that probably every style founder and good quality teacher has in common. That training approach of taking and adapting good information from multiple sources that is best practice in every single physical discipline and common to all top tier professional coaches. After paying attention and putting in effort, cross-training is probably the single most important thing you can do (whether that is in person, online or through wider reading and research).

The only really good reasons to recommend that a group or instructor be avoided is if you have evidence of poor safety practices, fake qualifications, or knowledge of inappropriate behaviour that may put trainees at other risks (which, if held, should have been reported for investigation if it breaches any laws). It boils down to ‘Is there a physical or mental health risk or risk of abuse to my student?’, if not, it’s none of your business.

Any other reasons are probably bad reasons. If what is being taught elsewhere clashes with your organisation’s approaches it is up to the student to rationalise or compartmentalise such differences and to be able to separate them. If the process of doing so slows their ability to perform appropriately for gradings, that is their choice. If they decide to continue their training elsewhere and no longer train with you, that is their choice too. Students are not serfs.

If an instructor leaves an organisation and chooses to teach under a new umbrella, that is their choice. If they have been awarded grades then they are a reflection of that organisation’s standards. Those grades are not automatically invalid; they will always be an accurate reflection of how their skills and knowledge were valued at the time they were awarded. Organisations also need to accept that they may not have been the only source of an individual’s knowledge. It may be that a departing instructor is actually offering a more appropriate different training opportunity for other people. It might be that their choosing to move on should be cause for introspection rather than isolation or insults.

If an organisation chooses to ‘kick out’ an instructor for any non-criminal activity, or suggests they move on, that does not remove their ability to teach what they know. When an organisation seeks to undermine the qualifications of any former instructor or student they are actually discrediting their own current students and teaching. The martial arts are no different from any other walk of life; you will get ‘bad eggs’ and sometimes these individuals are very skilled at concealing undesirable traits and actions, but how long they are able to do so and how much responsibility they are given also says something about the culture of their parent organisation.

Students pay for the training and knowledge instructors provide. That information is already in the public domain, across multiple martial arts styles and in multiple publications. The information is rather like food; all teachers, texts and styles do is create interesting menus and dietary plans and recipes of dishes, they are not bio-engineering new crops or inventing new cooking methods and their organisations cannot trademark their techniques or knowledge because it isn’t new. Non-disclosure or non-competition agreements have no validity given that the techniques and information that are passed on can already be learned elsewhere. There is nothing new under the sun in thousands of years of human violence. The only thing that can be trademarked are logos and any in-house teaching terminology devised to describe pre-existing (and often common) concepts.

So how do you retain students if they are able to train with whoever they want? The simple answer is you make your club or organisation a place where people want to train.

There are many different reasons why individuals may take up a martial art, and their interests and aims may change over the time they train, but there some aspects that encourage people to stay that I think unite most:

  • good quality instruction in good quality material
  • a welcoming and supportive training environment
  • opportunities to progress
  • to get fitter, stronger and faster and be pushed but also to enjoy the training
  • good value for money
  • safe and hygienic practices
  • feeling valued and respected

These are not unreasonable expectations. It’s also not unreasonable for you to raise concerns about how you or anyone else are treated.

It is unreasonable to be told with whom you can or cannot train with in your own personal time. It’s okay for a supermarket to say that you can only use their rewards card to get discounts off their items, it’s not acceptable for them to attempt to forbid you from shopping elsewhere, from holding multiple reward cards, or to track your social media to see if you are shopping elsewhere.

Wherever I train I look first and foremost for the top item on the list above, but if the other items aren’t met then I wouldn’t stay. There is a world of amazing instructors out there that meet all those requirements. Find them and enjoy your martial arts journey.

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!