Karate

Karate and Self Protection from John Titchen

syllabus

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.

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.