THERE IS ONLY THE IDEA.

THE TRAINING OBJECTIVE IS ALWAYS ABOUT UNDERSTANDING THE IDEA.

Hey guys;

This post is, in part, a reflection on the WhatsApp conversation this morning; it is in no way a criticism, just a reminder.

There is a paradox in training, all training, that although we all know it, and we do know it, we find it difficult to resolve.

This is one of the reasons there are so many analogies used in training; the reality is awkward to articulate.

This awkward reality is that what we are training is not what we intend to use.

That is a SPORTS mentality.

Our training may at times look like it, and often feels like it, but nevertheless, it is not IT.

Because what we do is not SPORT.

Awkward.

If we use the analogy of listening to a record, especially an old Reggae record, for those of us who remember records and understand what the ‘Dub” was, in training we are laying down the“B” side, the ‘Dub’, but in application, when we need it, when it is show time, we will play the “A” side.

Stick with me: our brain knows that when we get in trouble, we will always play the ‘A’ side, and unless we are working hard not to allow it to, our brain will try to find the ‘A’ side in the ‘B’ side… instead of focusing on the task at hand.

In training, we are trying to learn ‘HOW’ to do a thing and not ‘WHAT’ that thing is or implies.

In case you are a bit lost, when I mention ‘Step and Punch’, what do you think of?

Our brain will try to con us and say it is thinking of the total thing, but we all know it is thinking about punching.

The step becomes a means to an end, which takes a great deal of importance away from the mechanics of the step.

“Hey, we got there, didn’t we? And boy did we hit him hard”

This is what our brains do, and it is a very large part of how we made it this far as a species without going extinct.

Our brain is a self-organising pattern maker; it can look out at a completely unknown scene, and it begins to make sense of it. It creates a pattern that did not exist before from the chaos that it first experienced.

This is an absolute lifesaver out in the wild, but not in training.

In training, the thinking should be “If I can make the perfect step, I can hit him with anything”, which places the priority where it belongs, on the mechanics of the step.

It is hard work to prevent ourselves from slipping into a pattern once our brain knows all the moves of a sequence, all stops on the line, so to speak; it pretty much ignores all but the first and last stop.

We have all experience practicing a FORM only to stop and think “What comes next”?

We started thinking we knew the complete FORM, but as it turned out, as we began we only thought about the first move and where we finished, but not all of the stops in between.

A really obvious example, we all know that the Knives and the Pole are not real weapons training.

Without understanding what the real lesson is, we get sidetracked into thinking about what the knives or the pole are doing, about trying to control the knives or the pole, which means we are thinking about something that is not connected to the training exercise.

The training objective is always about understanding the IDEA.

There is no pole; there are no knives. Chi Sau and everything else we do in training is theatre.

Theatre aimed at discovering the IDEA.

HOKKA HEY!