Pruning the decision tree, retrieving the shears, and finding a point

Pruning the decision tree: The first drill we did tried to work skills to set-up reaction. If you use one or two longer range techniques, such as a jab, jab-cross, kick, jab kick, your opponent will either be hit or react. If you do it again they will typically counter. On your third application, you should then be able to pick up their counter and find the opening it presents. It is critical to move in, deliver your opener, and move out to read the response. The move in to deliver the opener and react to the likely response. The entire point is that, in a fight you have to create reaction in order to land effectively. You have to be brave enough to place the opening bet but patient enough to grow the pot. You have to cultivate your pitch before you seal the deal. In other words play the long game to find the rapid victory.

Retrieving the shears: The second drill we did tried to explain how to regain momentum, when someone is deliver their opener pushing you toward the ropes, how to recover the action. In it we tried to read the first opener and react to the second, pivot stepping or countering to shift momentum toward your opponent. Key to this is interrupting your opponents striking and striking to push them into the ropes. The fight swings on a pendulum the fighter who controls the angle and speed of it’s swing is most likely to win.

What’s the point when my technique fails: The point is to learn, to grow, to try something new, to realize the limits if your knowledge and work to develop to a higher level, to conquer fear, to realize the lesson inside the fight in the gym is not one of win or lose but how adversity can be challenged and we can become better complete human beings because of it. The point is that that job you want, that raise you need, and that girl you like aren’t going to punch you in the face (and if they do not with a fraction of the power I can), so go for it.

Winter Wisdom

You have reached a new level of wisdom when you don’t remember the six pieces of wisdom preceding the piece that you have been allegedly quoted upon. So I will now attempt to reconstruct all the pieces the Joker mokuroku that I don’t actually remember ever uttering:

1. Don’t run in the snow. The cardio benefits are probably not mitigated by the potential ankle, knee, and blunt force traumatic injury of falling on your @$$.
2. Don’t leave your gear in the car all day, there is nothing more futile than trying to warm-up in a subzero jiujitsugi. Either grab your gear at home just before class or bring it into your nicely heated office (if you have one).
3. Warm the mats up. Cold mats are harder and suck to fall on.
4. Not a clue. But I want 12 Winter Wisdoms.
5. Check the weather forecast and road conditions before going to class. No amount of rolling around with sweaty dudes is worth getting stuck in the snow or in a fender bender.
6. Wear gloves from home and into class, jamming your ice cold fingers onto a frigid floor ranks up there with kidney stones and child birth in pain level.
7. Wear a hat from home and into class, cold ears have vasoconstricted blood vessels that are more likely to burst if traumatized and hence produce cauliflower ear.
8. Garage training is for the late spring, summer, and early fall.
9. Cold does not sterilize. You still need to wash your combat sports attire after each use. Anecdotally the incidence of skin infections increase over the holiday season, probably because people believe that a cold, sweat-soaked gi is magically cleaned as well as the fact that people are going home and training at the filthy gyms there.
10. The cold does not cause upper respiratory tract infections (e.g. “colds”), you need germs and people infected with them to get sick. If you are snotty, sneezing, coughing, or febrile stay away. Your training is not worth my health.
11. Bring separate (dry) shoes for training, ice in treads turns into a water hazard.
12. Remove all wet attire prior to leaving practice. The Northwind will find it. And inflict frigid pain for it.

Steel tests steel

Training today with Mat Stratta of Endurance Training Center Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu we talked about a challenging training environment.  The idiom that “steel sharpens steel” is often used to describe training hard or with people that push us.  While I appreciate being compared to an amalgam known for its durability and ability to keep an edge, the idiom is historically inaccurate and more importantly perhaps not the best way to view training.

When steel hits steel, it was in battle, blades were notched, bent, and blunted not sharpened.  Blades that were true served their masters without breaking but certainly they lost some of their edge.  Competition tests but it also injures, if you are always competing you’ll be tried but you’re unlikely to improve.

Steel is sharpened on stones, either a whetstone or grindstone, whose friction was carefully applied to sharpen and straighten.  The battle tested the mettle, the sharpening was a careful and skillful assessment of weakness and dullness that was then meticulously ground out.  When we train we refine, we sharpen, our coaches and training partners are our grindstone, they smooth our imperfections and sharpen our edge.

Steel tests us.  Stone sharpens us.

Teaching to my detriment

I’ve been involved with martial arts since 1985 and have always had a striking component to my training.  I started with hard styles of Uechi-Ryu and Shorin-Ryu Karate-Do, but found that I wasn’t training the way I was fighting.  I gravitated to the eclectic Goshin Jitsu which used a boxing and kickboxing framework for their striking which seemed more applicable.  I’ve trained for many years in Jeet Kune Do, which is more of a philosophy than a style as it evolves to what works rather than being a dogmatic method.  I subsequently became interested in Muay Thai and have trained that for over a decade.  The unfortunate side effect of training this long is that eventually you become the senior member of the class.  It is not because I am more skilled or more able that I coach, it is because I’ve been too dumb to quit.

Now that I’m doing muay thai private lessons my technique is under a microscope.  I have bad habits, mostly I assumed from injury and lay off.  In muay thai, the way that you throw kicks or knees is by extending on the base leg.  I don’t do that.  I see people doing it, but I don’t do it.  I teach the extension, but I don’t do it.  Sure I can blame deconditioned leg muscles or poor balance but honestly my legs are stronger now than they have been in years.  Training this week, we figured it out:  It’s a bad habit from teaching.

In order to show that I was using the point of the knee to strike and since on average people are smaller than me, I was pulling my knees and crouching so that I didn’t obliterate half my demo partner’s rib cage.  I look sort of like a toddler being toilet trained who is trying not to pee themselves.  The more you coach, the more you teach, the less you train.  So by demoing it to prove one point, I managed to teach myself wrong.  You can do the extension and rapidity of a knee well, and focus on that by “slapping” them with the distal anterior surface of the thigh rather than trying to drive the bony part of distal femur through their thorax.  Try.  You like.

The above point came up when we reviewed material from the Matee seminar a few weeks back.  We review catching the jab, cross, clearing the cross hand and pivot stepping while side clinching to deliver the knee. Alternatively you can slap their rear hand down and let them step into your rear horizontal elbow.

The other (cool) thing we worked on was saving yourself from a caught thai kick.  I threw the rear thai kick rapidly and relaxedly.  As soon as it hit, I rotate the knee outward and recovered.  Next when working with my coach, I threw the kick on Ian, who caught it.  The rotation freed my foot so that I could place it on his torso/hip and push kick away.  You’re not pulling your leg out, you’re freeing it to push your opponent away.

Open mouth, insert foot

I seek simple solutions.  The more complicated we make processes the more they tend to develop errors and essentially not work.  This aspiration to simplicity typically makes me favor high percentage technique, I like attacking and defending in ways that work most of the time, no matter who I'm working with or how fatigued I am.  It has to work despite me, not because of me.  This makes me disregard or shelve technique that for me, nobody would ever let me set-up as the easiest and simplest ways of avoiding, in my mind, exist.  It makes my approach, my game, old school basic.  The only way I'm making a highlight real is if they catch me, people have seen my arsenal ad nauseum.  But it works, its teachable to anybody, and it reduces the chances of self inflicted injury, all of which I think are positives.  However, life is about challenging perspective, if you're not asking questions about why you might be wrong, you're assuming you're right, and there is a famous saying about assumptions and rear ends.

So today the class was taught oma plata off the defense of the cross body straight arm bar.  From your guard you attack with the straight arm bar, if they defend you can use the arm closest to their legs to pass their arm bent and inferiorly to set-up the oma plata.  Makes sense, high yield, and a valuable addition to any guard player's game.

The next technique was taking the back from the oma plata.  Here, in order to defend the oma plata your partner straightens their arm, bring it straight across your pelvis.  Most likely you've lost the position and they are going to limp arm out of the position.  If your lucky you can do the mao de vaca (cow hoof submission) or even an arm bar.   Instead, we gripped their far lapel with our near hand pulling it into their axilla.  Now you tilt their far side toward you and as you do swing your near leg over their head and back while bringing your near foot in as a hook, in other words taking the back.

I admit I shelved this technique almost immediately as being low percentage, with my luck they would be out of the poor position before I could even find their lapel.  Then after class, lo and behold I was rolling, had set-up an oma plata when my partner's arm plopped, magically, suddenly, across my pelvis.  Without skipping much of a beat I grabbed his far lapel, rolled him over and took his back.

Any technique, when it works, is a 100%, even if the sample size is only one.  A low percentage technique is only that because the situation where it works all the time is rare, not because the maneuver is intrinsically "bad".  A high percentage technique applied at the wrong time never works, it is still not relegated to the realm of "bad" technique.  If our goal is to elevate our skill, to craft the best game for us, the techniques whether high or low yield, must be arrayed in our arsenal to be used when the situation, the time, and the opponent is optimal for the application not by preconceived notions of what will and will not work.  Perhaps I, in my experienced wisdom, I should not be so quick to judge.

Chess Puzzles

My father was an accomplished chess player who tried to instill this in his son.  Chess puzzles are the 2-, 3-, and 4- move combinations that should cleanly end in checkmate.  The comparison between combat sports, particularly sport jiu-jitsu, is often made.  The cerebral aspects of strategy certainly exist in both games, however in combat sports size, strength, speed, and athleticism can, and does, beat technique, skill, and tactics.  While the proper game will win chess, the proper game in fighting does not always end in victory.  The pieces and board of chess are equal the difference is only in the intellectual skills of the players.  Being mat smart is certainly an asset but does not guarantee victory.

However as a I play these puzzles I notice certain parallels between the mat and the board, between pieces and positions, in essence strategy can transcend the game:

• Winning is based on a foundation of position - All chess puzzles are based on an end-game with pieces distributed in specific positions.  The a priori placement of the pieces predicate certain moves for victory.  In order to solve the puzzle some of these pieces may not change position but without their current placement, movement of other pieces would not insure victory.  In combat sports the relation of your body to your opponent makes certain attacks and counterattacks possible.  You cannot execute an attack without position, submission and placement are equal, the felling blow and footwork need each other.  Even if your legs and hips don't perform the motion of a kimura that your hands and arms do, the placement of your lower half is paramount for the submission.

• Attack with intent, intending to defend is initiating defeat - The old adage that the best defense is a good offense holds true.  If you attack with the intent to finish, i.e. checkmate, you will placing your opponent in check for two reasons.  First, by forcing them to defend "check" they will change the configuration of the board to prevent losing now but increase the chance of defeat later. Second, they cannot finish you, if they are one the defensive.

• Play one move ahead, allow one escape - We are told to think several moves in advance, which is extremely difficult given the number of permutations in what our opponent can do.  We can limit the number of moves we need to think in advance, by being one move ahead.  By being one move ahead you have already limited the number of options your opponent has available, making your calculations simpler.  When closing the noose of the endgame, we allow only one escape, this is the epitome of a chess puzzle, if the moves are done appropriately your opponent is not initiating moves nor even reacting, they are behaving in a predetermined way due to the rules of the game and what you did.  Your fighting should be the same, be that move ahead and recognize the hole for them to go through should your attack not finish the fight.

• Victory can be solved by brute force or elegance - Sometimes the endgame is a series of captured pieces as we zero in on our opponent's king, this is brute force, literally battering our way through our opponent's defenses.  Alternatively the endgame can be elegant, placing pieces in jeopardy even as other pieces close in on your opponent's king.  The epitome of good gamesmanship the elegant solution is not better than the forceful one, both are needed, in different games to win.

• You cannot win without risking losing - When completing the endgame pieces will be exposed to capture or you might be one move away from being checkmated, however as long as they are in checkmate none of this matters.  Woulda, coulda, shoulda, does not stack up well against done.  Often times when we fight, we worry more about losing than we do about winning, and this can be a detriment to performance.  To inflict harm, to attack, means exposing yourself to the same.  Your game needs to be strong enough to be aware of this and transcend it.

Caring without caring, with no apologies to Bruce Lee

We generally pursue things because we enjoy them. We take classes that interest us, eventually seeking training in an area that interests us, creating some sort of satisfaction or joy. This hopefully leads to a career that we love, or at least enjoy. Whether we love or loath our classes or jobs, we will also seek enjoyment elsewhere. Seeking the company of others, of the same or opposite gender, is because they have features, mental or physical that we like, cherish, or stimulate us. The same occurs when we seek recreation, if so trivial a word can be used to describe the pursuit of martial arts. We did this because it looked interesting or appeared to be a fun way to spend time.

Then why is it that most of us who train have the haunted look of someone who just took a bite of something foul, the distraught face of the first inklings of a brewing gastrointestinal calamity, or the pained expression of a patient with a thick-fingered and ill-tempered proctologist. How can a fun activity create grimaces only replicated in a horror film? Novice students have no beatific expression let alone a smile, no phenotypic representation of fun. If you're not having fun, you cannot relax and achieve the state of using less muscle.

It is anecdotally obvious that increasing performance anxiety decreases the chance of success. If the tense jerky movements of the beginner were purely neurological in etiology then mechanical practice alone would increase performance. Yes correct practice does breed efficiency by maximizing the results from minimal muscular exertion. However the collected gym veteran, who is polished and fluid with their training companions, can easily underperform in competition or in demonstration before an unfamiliar audience. They haven't instantaneously lost any of the neurological framework of their technique and skills, but they have been burdened by the interference of psychological noise from anxiety, doubt, and fear. Fluid tactics are replaced with jerky flailing, both dangerous but only one deliberately so. The relaxed, dare we say happy, fighter has better endurance and more speed which equals more power.

Like all martial artists we seek guidance from the animal kingdom. Aside from genus felis, no animal suffers from embarrassment, they have no self-conscious psychological baggage when it comes to behavior. Animals don't care who sees them hunt, kill, scratch, or mate. Why do humans? As babes we have no compunctions about any behavior, we learn it through societal conditioning, through the ridicule of others, through praise for desired behavior. We do that which others say they enjoy, not what brings ourselves joy. While adopting all the impulses of the id is not the answer to surviving let alone succeeding in life, not caring what others think might make you happier. Yes we can learn from others, yes we can implement behaviors suggested, and yes we can grow through feedback from experts. But no we should not suffer the negativity of others, biased criticality, or discrimination based on who we are. The challenge is finding what someone says that will make you better despite your pride and what is simply hurtful prattling by negative people.

Care intensely about doing well, doing for others, and doing it to win. But don't care if you fail, they don't appreciate it, or if you lose.