ARE WE TRAINING  OR PLAYING? 

Data Retrieval: If we buy into the whole ‘our training will kick in’, we expect this to just happen.

This is a thought exercise to lead us into the new year. We have been working towards this end for some time, so it should ring a bell or two.

Every Martial Artist hopes that in a time of extreme stress, our nervous system will choose, without any conscious intervention on our part, to use a certain set of movements that we are familiar with over other different sets of movements, some of which we may be even more familiar with.

This is the whole “our training will kick in” ethos.

Empirically, there are some very mixed results; for some people, this is what happens: “our training will kick in”, while for others it does not.

If we hope to be part of the first group, which I am sure we all do, we need to understand why the situation exists in the first place.

Bear with me while I make a slight detour, I promise this is not as nerdy as it may at first sound.

Something that changed my way of looking at life in general was when at school, I  found out about ‘Information Theory’,  described in 1948 by Claude Shannon in a paper entitled A Mathematical Theory of Communication, in which information is thought of as a set of possible messages, and the goal is to send these messages over a noisy channel, and to have the receiver reconstruct the message with low probability of error.

This is not just about maths or computers; it has influenced everyday thinking in all experiences on all levels and can be crystallised in the meme term ‘signal-to-noise ratio’

The stronger the signal, the weaker the noise, the clearer the signal.

Think about this, we research by reading, but not all reading is research. Why not? . The action is the same.

When we are researching, by reading, we consciously try to turn down the outside noise, to somewhat insulate ourselves from distractions; in that way, we make the signal stronger, clearer, easier to hear.

Or as Shannon put it “the goal is to send these messages over a noisy channel, and to have the receiver reconstruct the message with low probability of error”.

The question becomes, is our training research, or are we just reading?

Are we training, or are we playing? The action is the same.

There are movement sets and actions from our working life that we know far more intimately and perform many times more often than our Kung Fu movement sets, yet we expect our subconscious to choose these less familiar sets when we are in trouble. How does that work? Because for some people, it does work, 

Sitting in the shadow of ‘Information Theory’ we can clearly see the progression as …

Data Collection..

Data Collation..

Data Storage..

Data Retrieval..

And as in all shadows, it is far from clearly visible.

Data collection; This is the same if we are training or playing, it is just us doing stuff, any stuff, Kung Fu, Gardening, or Work, essentially Raw Data.

Data Collation: This is the big step. The organising and structuring of the Raw Data from various sources into a coherent, usable dataset. This is where we put files into folders. This is when we separate Kung Fu Data from all other sources and create a dedicated file.

Data Storage:  This is the vital step; this is where we organise our many, many files and folders into Groups. Some files are needed in multiple folders, and some folders are needed in multiple groups. The movement we know as Tarn Sau is the same as paying for a pie, the same movement as putting our hand out to catch a ball, the same movement as showing our hands are empty. All require different folders. In the case of our Wing Chun, where every movement is based on natural human movement, we will find a copy of everything in every file.

Data Retrieval: If we buy into the whole ‘our training will kick in’, we expect this to just happen.

And for some, it does.

The key is understanding the difference between playing and training, especially as  ‘The action is the same’.

It is more fun playing at being a “Bad Ass” than it is training to become one, but deep down, we know violence is serious, so why would our nervous system choose to play when we need to get serious?

NEWS FLASH… it won’t!

Our main aim next year is to fix this so that it does.

It should come as no surprise that this requires us to stop playing.