Author: The "D" Man

“Are these moves really important, or are we being played”?

The ‘RULE OF THREES’ is a useful tool when presenting anything to an audience, it tends to get more engagement.

When we consider how closely related Kung Fu is to Theatre and Ritual it is easy to see why this tool is so widely used in Kung Fu Forms.

In Wing Chun, we are told that any movement in any form that is done three times is of more value to our training than something done twice or only once.

The question arises, unwelcome as it is…

“Are these moves really important, or are we being played”?

All that aside, on Thursday evening we did some things that I would like us all to be on the same page about.

Solo training can be difficult to value, but I assure you without a serious approach to solo training we remain nothing more than players.

like most of the posts on FaceBook this sounds good, but, it is actually Bullshit.

This is a reposting to keep the information flow going, somehow I keep messing up the videos, we had a great session this morning but I forgot to turn on the Camera, DUH. Hopefully I will record it on Thursday evening.

This video is about similar things to what we are working on so I hope you get something from it. Try to look at it from the perspective of getting in place to use a one-inch strike, which as we have been talking about is the only way we can exchange maximum weight with maximum accuracy.

Hey Guys,

Sam, Costas and I were working on stuff on Saturday that I thought was quite important to share, we lost the sound early into the piece so there is no commentary on the practice, all the same I am posting a few frames of what we did, with a bit of Timo Mass playing, to seed the water so to speak.

We will revisit this on Thursday evening so if you can, be here, and get all the information instead of just about 5% which is all we really put in these videos.

The heart of this matter is a better understanding of the whole idea of being fast.

Mark Zuckerberg once stated that his motto for Facebook was “Move fast and break things”, like most of the posts on FaceBook this sounds good, but, it is actually Bullshit.

The Wolves do not train for what they do, it is part of their nature, and this is important.

The title of this post is also the title of an essay by By LTC (RET) Dave Grossman, author of “On Killing.”  

Here is a paragraph from the essay and a link to the complete text.

“Then there are the wolves,” the old war veteran said, “and the wolves feed on the sheep without mercy.” Do you believe there are wolves out there who will feed on the flock without mercy? You better believe it. There are evil men in this world and they are capable of evil deeds. The moment you forget that or pretend it is not so, you become a sheep. There is no safety in denial.

“Then there are sheepdogs,” he went on, “and I’m a sheepdog. I live to protect the flock and confront the wolf.”

Here is the link to the complete essay.  https://www.mwkworks.com/onsheepwolvesandsheepdogs.html

To a minor extent, people who choose to study any Martial Art fit into the Sheepdog category, even when they aim only to defend themselves.

I do not expect many people to take the time to read the whole essay, especially as it is specifically American and mostly aimed at “First Responder” types, so here are two of the final sentences that sum up the mood of the text.

This business of being a sheep or a sheep dog is not a yes-no dichotomy. It is not an all-or-nothing, either-or choice. It is a matter of degrees, a continuum.

The degree to which you move up that continuum, away from sheephood and denial, is the degree to which you and your loved ones will survive, physically and psychologically at your moment of truth.

There is a great deal to unpack in this essay, some may find it challenging to see their own life and experiences reflected in it, but it is there for all of us if we know what to look for.

Generalising and simplifying society into these three categories in a way we can relate to could be that there are people who willingly and without excuse randomly and viciously attack people they do not know.

This would be the Wolf, its main weapon is deceit and surprise, and these people rarely take any kind of organised training.

Then there are the Sheep, we all hold our own IDEA of who and what they are.

And lastly the Sheepdog.  A person who unflinchingly places themselves in harm’s way, even if it is for only personal safety and this type of person is usually trained and frequently still training.

The Wolves do not train for what they do, it is part of their nature, and this is important.

It helps us develop a deeper understanding of the “Context” involved in random violence, it helps us get a deeper understanding of what we can expect from our training, and it allows us to face without the slightest embaresment the claim from “Combat Athletes’ or even those in our traditional Martial Arts community that favour competition, that our training is bogus and useless due to it focusing on simplistic “Generic Attacks”.

Which of course it does.

But that is the point.

IF YOU REALLY WANT TO GET BETTER,

DO NOT TRY TO DO MORE.

THINK LIKE A CHESS COMPUTER AND DEAL WITH THE JOB AT HAND.

Something that I think we are all a little bit guilty of is to think that there is more to dealing with violence than there is, we all do it, and I am not sure if there is any way to prevent this, so our best way forwards is to accept it and find a way to work around it.

A well proven method to improve anything is to reduce it to the simplest form that can still do the same work.

This is the Principal of Parsimony. {A.K.A. Occam’s Razor}.

The principle that the most acceptable explanation of an occurrence, phenomenon, or event is the simplest, involving the fewest entities, assumptions, or changes.

This is the philosophy of many Martial Art styles, but it is by no way the practice.

Even with Wing Chun, which has at its core the Principle of Simplicity, we spend many years learning how to deal with something that happens in a split second.

Can you relate to the tale below…

As a kid I was a decent Chess player, I represented my School and up until my early 30s I was an active member of a chess club. 

Like all chess enthusiasts I had dozens of books, I re-played famous games from past masters to try to improve my game, and like everyone else I thought that we must be able to see 5 or more moves ahead.

Then around 1983  I bought my first consumer level chess computer.

Even at its lower levels I lost.

I only began to win games once I began to play the way the computer played. And that was by treating every move as a seperate problem that only needed to solve that single situation.

I was still a chess club player and in what appeared to everyone else as overnight, I began to win a great deal more matches than I lost, along the way I took some notable scalps for my current standing, to be expected the much better players still beat me, but I went from “D” grade to “B” grade in 2 tournaments.

THINK LIKE A CHESS COMPUTER AND DEAL WITH THE JOB AT HAND.

From a personal prospective what is the problem we are trying to solve? 

What is the simplest way of solving it?

For instance….

From a “Fighting” perspective this is simply “how do I hit my opponent”?

As a Self-Defence problem it becomes “how do I stop my opponent hitting me”?

This approach allows for great personalisation instead of trying to make someone else’s IDEA work for us.

So how do we stop someone from hitting us?

The answers vary from run away, to hit them first, and all things in between.

But whichever answer we choose it will be our own answer.

Now we can direct our training into something we think is a good IDEA.

But how do we train that IDEA without getting swayed by our partisan bias?

My Tennis coach would tell me that “It makes no difference how hard you hit the ball if the other guy can’t reach it”.

Something that should be completely obvious to all of us, and I think it is, is that making contact is the only game in town.

And that is coming from a Self-defence guy.

Be it a fist, a forearm, an elbow strike, a headbut, a knee strike, a shin kick or a foot up the watusi, if we do not make contact with our attacker when we interact, it is down hill all day.

Forget style or technique, if we are not hitting them, they are hitting us.

As this thread started off from the IDEA of hitting harder and working to that end, my own experiences tell me that by far the most important thing is to hit first.

To use a quote from my tennis coach back when I was competing at club level, “it does not matter how slow a ball is going if your opponent cant reach it”.

Being first gives us a great, and frequently a winning, advantage.

So the first consideration is how do we make contact before our attacker takes the high ground.

The key is to delay the attack until missing is more difficult than landing the blow.

When we understand it, this is the impetus of the one inch punch.

VIDEO

Because of what my Tennis coach told me I am more of a results guy than a methodology guy.

Only out of the “WHAT” can emerge the “HOW”.

Being focused took it to the next level.

There is a huge misconception about warriors and spirituality, mostly based around the Samurai, the ancient Greeks and Spartans practice of meditation and developing a strong sense of ethics.

These legendary warriors where not planning for the next life but rather trying their level best to find a way to survive in this one.

Simply put, meditation and living honestly enabled them to develop the ability to hold the smallest of things in crisp, unblinking focus, while still being aware of the world around them.

Can you even imagine what it would be like to take part in a clash of clans, tribes or states?

The noise would be deafening, horses braying, men screaming, drums and horns blaring and steel crashing into steel, the air filled with smoke and the smell of death.

Not being overwhelmingly distracted amid all of  this was almost a super power.

Being focused took it to the next level.

It was this ability more than any swordsmanship or strategy that gave them the best chance of survival.

The favourite tool to help achieve this state was the Zen Koan and the Greeks Cynicism.

In Zen/Chan Buddhism a Koan is a paradoxical anecdote or riddle without a solution, used to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and provoke enlightenment.

Ancient Greek Cynicism served the same end.

“Be here now”.

In the todays society we term these things thought experiments and talk of cognitive dissonance, but the goal is the same.

Keep your eye on the prize.

When we start looking at force from a scientific perspective, as opposed to from a style based position one major benefit is that we open up a multitude of available, workable examples, that many of us are already familiar with being from popular sports of even car crashes.

It is always much better for us when we find our own information, follow our own intuition, but just to get the ball moving here are a few paragraphs that I have copied and pasted from various sites, but mostly here,  https://pdhpe.net/the-body-in-motion/

1. Force, velocity, and field strength are examples of vector quantities that have both magnitude and direction. Speed is a scalar quantity because it has no defined direction and only magnitude. Velocity is a vector quantity having both magnitude and a direction.

2. A change in velocity is known as acceleration. Such a change can be a change in linear motion, such that the “speed” of the object increases, or it can simply be a change in direction. Acceleration is caused by applying a force to an object, whether it be stationary or moving. Acceleration can be positive or negative (often called deceleration) depending on whether the change in velocity is positive or negative.

3. Acceleration can also be uniform or varied. uniform acceleration is when there is a constant change in velocity, such as gravity acting upon a discus flying through the air. More often, however, the acceleration is varied. This could be from an opponent tackling a forward in rugby, with changes in velocity including positive and/or negative acceleration, and multiple changes in direction.

4. In theory, force summation occurs when all body parts act simultaneously In practice, the strongest and lowest body parts around the centre of gravity (e.g. trunk and thighs) move first, followed by the weaker, lighter, and faster extremities.

Summation of Forces, is something we benefit from researching, it is a very important subject if we wish to understand how to maximise effort, by the multiplication of force.

MOTION REQUIRES FORCE.

Aristotle.

Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person’s behaviour [as in what we are doing], and beliefs [as in what we think we are doing], are out of alignment and do not complement each other. 

ANALOGIES, COGNITIVE DISSONANCE, AND MAKE BELIEVE.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been trying to finish the post I began with 3 bags of cement.

A post about power production, power transfer and power release.

A post prompted by the quest to develop more power, and how to hit harder.

I have made numerous videos that while we were in the process of making them appeared to clearly cover all of the bases, but on playback failed miserably.

Why is that?

 Because what we are trying to show cannot be seen.

What we think we are doing, especially in training, is not what is happening when we do it, and whats more, again in training, what we tell ourselves we are trying to do frequently cannot even be done.

This creates the condition known as Cognitive Dissonance, 

Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person’s behaviour [as in what we are doing], and beliefs [as in what we think we are doing], are out of alignment and do not complement each other.

Something we are aware of, but perhaps underplay, is the fact that the world we think we live in is not the real world.

It is a construct created by our Brain and populated by things that we created in the first place.

Not exactly Blue Pill – Red Pill, but not too far removed either.

Because of this everything makes sense no matter how fanciful or strange it may be.

This is very much part of the human condition and we all fall for it.

A perfect example is the way we use analogies  to try to explain complex training ideas.

A personal favourite of mine is the “Coat hanger and the overcoat analogy’.

Our head and shoulders are like a coat hanger hanging on the back of a door, high and steady, and our body is like an overcoat hanging from that coat hanger.

Or better yet the Anchor that hangs from our Butt.

These analogies are very useful to initially grasp a difficult concept but they are a million miles away from any kind of reality.

My head is not a coat hanger, my body is not an overcoat and happily there is no anchor hanging out of my butt.

Yet I still use them and you guys understand them.

These analogies, like all analogies, are so far away from the truth they are as good as ‘Make Believe”.

Because we do not have the words, or do not have the correct components we use analogies made from IDEAs we do have to approximate what it is we are trying to say.

Analogies say to us “It is something like this”.

What analolies do not say however is “But in reality it is nothing like this’.

I am not proposing that we do not use analogies.

Analogies are great tools to make that initial connection to an abstract idea, but if we hope to progress past the abstract toward something we can use we need to translate, transpose and explain the analogy with real science.

But before we can apply scientific thought we must remove all of the make believe.

Our idea of how energy flows through the body like water flowing through a hose is just an analogy, 

A very useful and powerful analogy but it is not correct.

Something that is believed even argued about in many Martial Arts is the IDEA that we move our centre, or move from our centre [the counter argument] ,in fact the very IDEA that we have a centre is another analogy.

A very useful and powerful analogy but it is not correct.

Analogies serve a vital function that allows us to climb onto the first rung of the ladder of understanding, but to progress onto a deeper level of understanding we must defer to the widely accepted science, and align with the laws that govern our universe.

We do not need to dig deep, just high school level physics.

The fundamental classical mechanics, that involve forces acting on matter, using the laws of motion and gravitation, throw in a touch of Thermodynamics and finish with a pinch of general relativity, just the bit that treats gravitational fields as equivalent to acceleration.

Even if we think that we have forgotten these lessons our Brain has not, we all know this stuff inside out for the simple reason that it is how we experience the world around us, we live it every day.

A final word.

If for any reason you do not agree with what I am saying here, which is your right as an individual human being, and I would not exactly blame you for it especially as I have disagreed with myself on many occasions, realise that it is not me you disagree with, you disagree with the LAWS, not theories, the LAWS that govern our Universe.

As a non-believer in Established Science, you qualify for free, immediate and lifetime membership to both the “Flat Earth Society” and the “Richard Cranium” Collective.

“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I.M.O. Wing Chun is not a fighting art, it is a way to think!

This is a reposting of a previous reposting from August 2021, but it is really well aligned with what we are discussing at the moment, the whole 3 Bags of Concrete is really an Einstein thing, so…

Listen up Tribe!

Albert Einstein was of the opinion that “time is an illusion”.

Without time nothing happens, so nothing moves.

Hence the confusion because of his own words ‘nothing happens until something moves’.

Well, I hear you ask, what does Uncle Albert have to do with Kung Fu?

Here is where I am coming from, I.M.O. Wing Chun is not a fighting art, it is a way to think, it is a philosophy, an IDEA, it is a specific logic.

It is a concept.

This is why it fails so often when people try to use it as it is taught, as a stand-up fighting skill.

I do not think that this was ever Dr. Leung Jan’s intention.

How we engage with the work mentally is more important than how we engage with it physically.

Mental fluidity is essential for us to reach out and touch the ‘Little Idea’.

The ancient Chinese monks that established and expanded Kung Fu, be they Buddhist or Taoist, considered their training as a form of alchemy, turning lead {the initiate} into gold {the master}.

Most of my own training is a hybrid of all the things that have affected my life, Boxing, Judo, numerous diverse sports, cooking, and even music because it is through this eclectic lived experience that I view my Wing Chun.

To be expected, you will see it differently as you have lived differently.

A common issue with all solo training is that we can begin to doubt that we get it, begin to doubt that we are doing the right thing.

Problem solved, there is no ‘right thing, there is only ‘doing‘, use Yoda’s voice when you verbalise that.

So as not to overwhelm us all with too much information I will post a follow-up blog article, I am writing it as you read this so it is fresh info, hopefully in the next few days.

Stay tuned.

The Edge… there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. 

Hunter S. Thompson