Category: FIST LOGIC

Hoping to achieve relaxation by thinking about relaxing is just an “Are we there yet” moment.

The paradox of training for composure.

This is a bit of a brain twister and may need to be read more than once, if we are actively training for Composure then at that moment we are not composed, {if we are composed why are we trying to achieve it}and as such we have already failed and have zero chance of success because we have tricked ourselves into thinking that maintaining this state of non-composure will somehow lead to being composed.

If this does not make sense re-read it until it does.

Just like being relaxed, being composed is an end-state and not something we can engage in.

We become composed or relaxed due to other actions which, due to how we use language, especially English, appear to deal with the opposite condition.

Until we get this we will think that everything we are being told or asked to do is completely backwards from achieving the end state and find it difficult to engage in.

This can and often does bring about a level of cognitive dissonance.

We all know by now that if we are not mentally involved in the action we are doing we will struggle to get the outcome we are after.

Relaxation is the result of releasing, or at the least diminishing tension, as counterintuitive as it sounds, if we are not mentally connected to, and thinking about tension we will not become relaxed.  How can we release tension if we are not thinking about tension?

Hoping to achieve relaxation by thinking about relaxing is just an “Are we there yet” moment.

We need to build the correct mental architecture for the condition we wish to be in, which in this instance is composure.

As a starting point, it should be a given that we would only work on being composed if we think we are not composed.  DUH!

If we are thinking of being composed we will automatically measure our present state against our desired state, and no matter how close we are to our desired end-state not being there will create stress, which will just eat up whatever composure we have at that moment.

Here is where everything sounds backwards, If we are in a dangerous situation the only way we can remain composed is to not think about the danger we are facing, and the only way we can do that is to think about something else.

It is a bit like ‘Fight Club’.  The first rule of ‘Fight Club’ is not to talk about ‘Fight Club”.

Training for composure is Multi-tasking, it is about doing one thing and being completely involved with that thing, with the ‘intention’ of achieving something else, while also doing sometimes many other things.

This is not as weird as it sounds, there are many ways we do this every day, we do it when we are driving, for instance, and we do it when walking through the crowded city shopping district window shopping.

We fail because we are trying to turn these subconscious actions into conscious actions.

We need to think backwards, we need ‘Fight Club’ thinking.

The first rule of training for composure is that we cannot think about composure.

If you can unscramble this egg it will make tonight’s work so much easier.

This is a very counter-intuitive IDEA,  to do the FORM during a violent encounter.

The most important ability in a violent confrontation is maintaining composure.

Composure is the state or feeling of being calm and in control.

How do we train this, and most importantly how do we transition this skill from the training hall to the street?

There are only two ways to accomplish this.

1. Make training the same as a violent event.

2. Operate in a violent event in the same way as we operate in training.

The obvious problem here is that these two sides never meet, they are opposites, training is the camp of the left side of the Brain whilst actively using our training is in the camp of the right side of the Brain, with the left hemisphere being more analytical and logical, and the right hemisphere being more creative and intuitive.

The only sensible choice is #2.

This is neither as simple nor as straightforward as it may sound.

Without any intention of pointing fingers, most students mistake playing for training and spend far more time in that zone, there is nothing wrong with playing it is a very important part of transferring information and skill, but it is not the best vehicle for attaining knowledge.

In many ways playing or practising is similar to fighting, it is mission-critical with pre-determined objectives, namely coming out on top, whereas training is about understanding the things we will choose to use when we play.

Training is about understanding the theory, the IDEA, the WAY and not so much the how or the why, and this can only be done in a calm, relaxed environment, where no one else is trying to push their agenda, which essentially means that it can only be approached through solo training, through the FORM.

Through understanding the deep meaning of the FORM, or perceiving the connectedness of information regarding individual aspects of the FORM that are not about movement or shapes.

The WAY, and not the how or the why.

The WAY we make rather than use the movements and shapes.

This is why I say that Wing Chun does not fight, we use the WAY, the IDEA, the “FORM” even when we beat the shit out of attackers.

This is tricky stuff to write or talk about, mainly because many of us will believe we already do this, but frequently, and against our best intentions, our nervous system hijacks the situation at the last minute and we slip out of the FORM and into playing/fighting.

This is a very counter-intuitive IDEA,  to do the FORM during a violent encounter.

But think on this, when we are doing the FORM {correctly}, even amid Chaos, we remain physically, mentally, and emotionally relaxed, in short, we have the potential for COMPOSURE.

If I am fighting someone I am concerned with and responding to someone else’s agenda, this at the very least requires some level of multi-tasking, and trying to multi-task in a shit storm is not my IDEA of SIMPLE.

Words are tricksy, we will work on this.

THIS CREATES A DIFFERENT APPROACH, WHICH CREATES A DIFFERENT UNDERSTANDING.

How well we perform any act is never a reflection of the level of our training; rather, it is a direct representation of the level of our understanding. 

The last post was the first instalment of a packet of information that, if delivered in one shot, would more than likely miss the target, if you did not read the last post, read it before this, then take a break and read this when the dust has settled.

If we digest the content of these two posts before Thursday evening training, it will leave more disk space, more R.A.M. and more processing power for the work we will do on the night.

We want to get the thinking done before training because we will be hitting things throughout training.

To our missing brethren, if you are thinking of coming back to training, even if it is just for a catch-up, this would be the week to choose.

What is a ‘Theoretical Physicist’?

Very few people, myself included, have a deep understanding of what they are, what they do, and how they do it, most of us ask ourselves, ‘Do they just make shit up out of thin air’?

This is a tricky one to answer for a layman, while they do make shit up, it is not out of thin air, they make shit up from an atmosphere that is thick and deep with well-established and accepted facts.

And what they come up with, these new IDEAS or CONCEPTS are constructed from elements of that atmosphere and are measured against that atmosphere.

Before they can come up with something new, they must know and understand everything old.

As Carl Sagan humorously pointed out “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”. 

 When we are only ‘THINKING’, we need to build a solid environment in which the thing we are thinking about exists, even if we only build it in our heads.

How does that relate to this thing we do?

Like it or not, we need a complete and concise understanding of the physical nature of the environment before we can approach the non-physical aspects of that same environment.

This is the bit that all students, and I do mean ALL STUDENTS, because, at one point in time, everyone that became involved with Wing Chun was that guy, get the wrong IDEA.

The environment we need to understand is not the physical aspect of Wing Chun, and therefore, the non-physical aspect becomes the non-physical aspect of  Wing Chun.

The environment we need to understand is VIOLENCE.

To a very large degree, Wing Chun is the non-physical aspect of violence.

The reason statements like this can be a bit difficult to deal with is usually because we approach them with the wrong Mindset.

The most important thing to understand about Mindset is that different Mindsets bring about different patterns of thinking, IDEAS that make perfect sense in one Mindset makes no sense at all if we adopt a different Mindset.

Thinking that Wing Chun is a fighting style creates a different Mindset than thinking Wing Chun is a Self-defence system.

This creates a different approach, which brings with it a different understanding.

The work is the same, but the goal, and frequently the results, are very different.

HOW WE FEEL CHANGES WHAT WE THINK.

WHAT WE THINK CHANGES HOW WE FEEL.

THEY BOTH CHANGE HOW WE ACT.

A violent encounter is a form of ‘Culture Shock’, and the only way to deal with ‘Culture Shock’ is to accept, adapt and find the middle ground.

I recently read an article that claimed Western Intelligence is waning due to our avoiding reading over watching video.

Watching videos requires no mental interpretation, and as such, we are eroding our ability to convert words and IDEAS into mental images, as we all know our Brains love and live by mental images.

Just putting this out there, it has nothing to do with this post.

My Sifu’s school was an excellent place for beginners to engage with Wing Chun. It was orderly,  technically informed and above all, safe, but as you progressed to the intermediate level, very little changed in the approach, even as a Senior Instructor, the training was pretty much unchanged from the very first day we entered the school, still orderly, still technical, still informed and above all, still safe.

So, what is wrong with this approach?

Perhaps nothing.

It depends on why you are training in the first place.

My Sifu offered an approach where progress was measured by the ability to accurately copy what we had been taught and then to explain the established method of instruction to others.

This is an Academic approach to training, the system was a copy of organised education, a genuine SCHOOL.

As such, the end game was to progress from student to teacher {Instructor}, from teacher to professor, {Master} and finally from professor to recognised expert {Grand Master}.

It was an Academic approach where progress was measured by the ability to accurately copy and explain what we had been taught and to advance the established method of instruction.

This is in no way a criticism of my Sifu’s approach; he made it very clear that this is what he was selling, and as an Academic product, it was of a very high quality. We should be a bit more even-handed; this is the mainstream Martial Arts model of every style.

There were many occasions when asked about how we could use the training; my Sifu would say that it was up to the individual and how well they could transition the knowledge into practice.

If we step away from Martial Arts for a second, this is reflected in everyday life, it is essentially the tension between an Academic Expert and a Master Craftsman.

The value of each depends on context. If you wish to design a water delivery system, you would call a hydraulics engineer but when the pipes burst you call a plumber.

My Sifu turned out many quality Hydraulic Engineers.

How do we now become Plumbers?

ALL TRAINING IS INADEQUATE AS A METHODOLOGY.

Engaging with a violent and aggressive attacker is just about as far away as we can get from how and what we train.

But is it different?

If we revisit my Sifu’s comment that “ it was up to the individual and how well they could transition the knowledge into practice”, this implies that the information is already in the teaching and that once fully understood, there is nothing needed to add, nothing extra to learn.

I agree with this.

Once we see that most martial arts training is about training future teachers and not future fighters, it makes it easy to differentiate between what is an academic explanation and what is a practical methodology. 

But most importantly that they cannot be both.

Once we accept that all of our FORMS are collections of movements and not patterns of movements, and here again, that they cannot be both, we create fertile ground for hybridisation.

Training is inadequate when it comes to dealing with violence.

The difference between violence and training is not a difference of scale; it is not about being quicker or more physical or even more relaxed or more mindful, it is a difference of philosophy.

The difference is the WHY.

Neither is this a difference in identity; we are not trying to measure apples by oranges. Wing Chun is organised or systemic violence, and what the attacker is doing is, at least from our perspective, unorganised or non-systemic violence, but they are both expressions of violence.

A violent encounter is a form of ‘Culture Shock’, and the only way to deal with ‘Culture Shock’ is to accept, adapt and find the middle ground.

Ask any ‘Tradie”, and they will tell you that the answer always contains a level of compromise, that, like it or not, all work is done in the middle ground, which must work here and now while professors get trapped going over old blueprints, locked in their study looking for perfection, rapidly becoming irrelevant.

To be sure the best ‘Tradies” are the ones that know the most and compromise the least, but they still compromise.

Navigating a violent encounter is about capturing the middle ground, about compromise, about mixing what we know to be “RIGHT” with what we think is perhaps simply “NOT RIGHT”.

It becomes a sliding scale between what we know is ‘RIGHT” and what we know “WORKS”.

LEARN THE FORM AND THEN ABANDON IT.

LEARN THE WAY AND THEN ABANDON IT.

THIS IS HOW YOU FIND YOUR OWN FORM.

THIS IS HOW YOU FIND YOUR OWN WAY.

Hey Guys,

Just in case one of the lost children tries to come home this weekend be aware that I will not be here.

Mandy and I are away up the coast so in the meantime keep up your solo training.

One of the down-sides of reposting old videos is the visual proof that the passing years are not being kind.

Stay frosty.

Like all ‘TRULY SIMPLE‘ things, they open a portal to increasing complexity that can only be navigated if we can maintain the original SIMPLICITY.

Why do I prefer the term  ‘Fundamental Particle’ when other words such as seed, core, or root would do the same thing?

 Apart from being a bit of a nerd, it is because, by definition, Fundamental Particles are considered indivisible. There is no need to look beyond this IDEA and create confusion, but you can call it anything you want, they are only words, and it is the IDEA we are concerned with.

Let me ask a few questions first though.

Imagine, for whatever reason, that a ‘big’, fit, strong, and angry man is in the process of trying to punch you in the face.

Q. How important is it that your defence works the first time of asking, straight out of the gate, so to speak?

I know my answer but this question is for you.

In a random incident where there will be some level of surprise, there is a good chance that any response will not work optimally unless you are Bruce Lee reborn.

Bad Guys that intend us harm always follow up on the attack and follow-up fast, regard this as a rolling, almost continuous attack.

Q.  Do we think that our follow-up defensive action would be more effective, equally effective, or less effective than the initial defence?

It is your call, and in this scenario, your face, so answer any way that makes you happy.

Accepting for one moment that you are not Bruce Lee reborn, and did not finish off the Bad Guy at the instant of the first attack…

Q. How many chances do you think you will get to prevent disaster?

There is no right answer to something with so many variables; this is just establishing ‘CONTEXT”, and helping us estimate the cost.

The Fundamental Particle is ‘Physical Alignment’.

I told you it was SIMPLE.

In over 25 years of teaching, this is the cause of all the failed exercises I have witnessed.

Think of your training, and believe me, I can see it in my own past training, how often do we get the easy stuff wrong the first time of asking, only to have a ‘Facepalm’ moment when we realise?

Good results come from good application of technique; good technique is always dependent on the level of our physical alignment.

Like all ‘TRULY SIMPLE‘ things, they open a portal to increasing complexity that can only be navigated if we can maintain the original SIMPLICITY.

At this point, we could shift to the term SEED and ask what grows from this SEED,? And how do we nurture and maintain it?

If we get this RIGHT and maintain its RIGHTNESS as it migrates upstream, it becomes increasingly difficult for things to go WRONG.

STEP 1.  Establish correct physical alignment.

STEP 2.  Maintain correct physical alignment in dynamic and complex situations.

STEP 3.  When things go awry, as they most certainly will, regain correct physical alignment.

Think about this, and ask questions.

Or not, it is your face, after all.

Phew, that was close I hear you say.

This post serves as a precursor to my next post, I pose a question here that I want us to think about and form an opinion, so that it influences what we read in the next post.

I have a decent understanding of how our brains treat information, if I include this as the first paragraph of an article, it will be read and then ignored as we hunt down what we think is the “Meat” of the post.

This is just how our brain works.

I would like us to establish a self-evaluation Metric?

Q. What parameters need to be met for us to think that something is CORRECT?

Dictionaries come up with things such as accurate, exact, free from error, ‘in accordance with fact or truth’.  In short, for something to be correct, it needs to be 100%.

To be expected, if we talk about something as being Incorrect, the opposite is true, and the dictionary brings in such words as mistaken, wrong, in error, erroneous, and ‘not in accordance with particular standards or rules’.

If an action or idea is 1% incorrect it is not correct. DUH!

This leads to the counterintuitive statement that being 99% right is the same as being 100% wrong; it is not CORRECT.

Think about that for a moment, where do you stand on this?

This is a self-evaluation, I have no investment in your choice.

Q. Why is this even important?

A. Because it shows us how we measure things.

At the centre of any system, there is something, a component, a concept, a “fundamental particle” that influences and impacts the whole system to such an extent that being less than 100% negatively impacts EVERYTHING upstream.

It may not break the system, but it makes it impossible for the system to reach optimum operational status.

The next post will be on and around Wing Chun as a system, do we know what the “FUNDAMENTAL PARTICLE” of Wing Chun is?

There is an old joke about a guy who is walking down the street when a roofing slate slides off and falls downward, he dodged at the last moment and it missed sticking in his shoulder by 10cm.

Phew that was close I hear you say.

Unfortunately, it hit him in the head and killed him.

When it is a close call Metrics matter.

QUOTE

There is little doubt that we do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we perceive it, and this perception, this image, is built up incrementally over the course of our lifetime, it is never set in place and undergoes many reinventions.

As ‘out there’ as it sounds, the easiest way to improve something is simply changing how we see it, which in turn changes its importance. And this cascades into trust and priority, which we may not realise it is the basis of choice.

Last week’s training was mostly about punching, so keeping it in line with this, how do we see/perceive our punch and punching? How and where do we file it away in our ‘Battle Computer’?

I do not remember how many punch variations we worked on but let’s call it four.  

Did you perceive this as four separate punches or four variations of the one punch?

Why is this relevant?

Hick’s Law states that the time it takes to make a decision increases logarithmically with the number of choices available. Logarithmically means that every added choice takes longer to make than the previous choice.

Theoretically, deciding which punch to use will take more than four times as long as deciding to just punch, and although we will not consciously compare the variables, we will do it subconsciously.

How we SEE our punch might just be the difference between going home or going to the hospital.

Sticking with ‘PUNCH’ for the moment, what do we punch with? 

Are we using a FIST, or are we using a HAND?

I am sure you have a good IDEA of where this is going, depending on how I see my training to hit someone I may need to choose between a punch, a palm strike, a knife hand chop, a slap, a backhand, a hammer fist or a finger poke.

Refer back to Hicks Law to see the problem here.

Without meaning to over-egg the cake, “What are we striking with”?

Hands do not float independently in the air; they are connected to our wrists.

Consider my Sifu’s maxim of “Shoulder pushers Elbow, Elbow pushes Wrist”.

It is possible to get lost in the weeds with this type of regression to a point where we end up thinking that everything is initiated by the collective “BODY”, or if we are hooked on specifics with our Big Toe, so some level of compartmentalism is advised.

“Shoulder pushers Elbow, Elbow pushes Wrist” is, in essence, describing the general mechanics of all of our Hand Strikes, it is the fundamental mechanics of using an ARM.

Again I ask, why is this relevant?

As Martial Artists, we subscribe to the IDEA that it is INTENTION, and not conscious decision-making, that drives the physical application of our Martial skill, this position has been held for as long as there has been Kung Fu and is a central tenet of the work.

Now modern Neuroscience agrees with this age old wisdom, and while Conscious Intentions are formed through deliberate thought and awareness, where you consciously decide on a goal and the steps to achieve it. 

They recognise that Unconscious Intentions stem from deeply ingrained habits, unconscious desires, or past experiences, influencing behaviour without conscious awareness.  In other words, how we train.

Advances in neurological medical scanners have allowed scientists to observe brain activity, which leads to movement before conscious thought.

Intention happens before we think about doing things.

“This is not exactly keeping things REAL is it”?

THE DARK SIDE OF “LET ME GET MY HEAD AROUND IT”

Have you ever heard the term… “I just could not get my head around it”?

What do you think it means?

We have spoke about this many times, essentially it is only what is in our Heads that can come out of our Hands, and of course, this is training.

But what are we putting in our heads? There is a dark side that is always present and often unseen.

I was recently watching a T.V. Show that was set in the late 70s England, at one point a young man was in a situation with three skinheads that turned on him and gave him a sound beating, nothing new there, back then that was pretty normal. But the young man on the wrong end of this thing did nothing to protect or defend himself, he did not even attempt to flee the scene, he just got the shit kicked out of him.

This triggered a memory from my Sifu’s school about 15 or 20 years ago, bear with me on this, it needs a bit of a back story for context. 

My Sifu had a very large school, in Sydney alone there were 14 sub-schools, with approximately 50 teaching personnel of varying levels from Branch [Sub-school] leaders, Branch Instructors down to assistant Instructors, even my Sub-School, which averaged around 15 students, had 4 teaching members.

To prevent the school from turning into a complete MacDojo all Instructors needed to attend Wednesday evening training under Sifu’s supervision, and as a Senior Instructor in the School one of my duties was to mentor a certain group of these Instructors on these Wednesday evenings, usually Non-Asians from the branches in the Western Suburbs, which was and is the working class part of Sydney.

Yes, this was racist, but it was not meant to be disrespectful, Sifu had always thought that Westerners thought and processed information differently than Asians, that Westerners preferred hitting things to doing FORMS, and on top of this that people from Western Sydney were an individual sub-set to the rest of Sydney.

In practice, what I did amounted to no more than translating Sifu’s polite words into ‘MACHO’ language and roughening up the edges of Sifu’s descriptions.

This one evening I noticed a small group of guys not exactly getting enjoyment out of the training, so I went and asked if I could help, there was a little bit of indecision, and then one of them piped up “This is not exactly keeping things REAL is it”?

My attempt to persuade them that Forms, especially Chum Kiu, were important fell flat so I asked what they would like to do instead.

Long story short they said they did not know what to do because all we taught them was “Limp Shit that does not work on the street”.

I said “O.K. let’s fix that, attack me and then we will start from there”.

They declined and said it was pointless because as a Senior Instructor I would know what to do and do it easily.

I was a bit lost with this comment, and in hindsight did not make the best choice, I said, fine, I will attack you, and if it fails, we can work from there.

There was a bit of indecision and looking from one to the other, and then one said “Let’s do it, but do what a street thug would do, just do not hurt me”, we all laughed, and I agreed.

I realised I was potentially setting myself up to get ‘regally’ embarrassed and punched in the head, but I had painted myself into a corner.

I decided on starting with a distraction, so I told the guys how I thought I could be biting off more than I could chew, to which they all laughed, and while they were laughing I gave the volunteer a huge double handed push in the chest that sent him flying into the wall, I immediately followed up by grabbing him by the throat and pinning him to the wall while posing a hammer fist with the other hand.

As soon as I grabbed his throat I knew things had gone to shit, the guy just went limp, the colour drained from his face, his eyes became glassy and he offered no defence.

I immediately let go of him and turned to the other guys, asking what had gone wrong, luckily no-one appeared to notice what I had noticed, and the conversation was about how fast it had been and how they had not even seen me move.

I was in my early 50s at the time and told them that it was not that I was fast, this allowed us to steer the conversation into preparedness, distances and awareness.

If it had been a real situation, that young Instructor would have just stood there while I pummelled him unconscious.

I told them that “KEEPING IT REAL’ was more about thinking fast and paying attention, about understanding that this guy you are now talking to is not interested in talking to you, he is trying to slow your mind down, that “KEEPING IT REAL”  was to understand that this guy wants to hit you, and if you are close enough he will hit you, and that you may not even see it coming.

Things settled down and we did a bit of work on entering and exiting, on transitioning from defence to attack, and hopefully I demonstrated how the Chum Kiu Form helps us control the distance between the two protagonists.

But what did alarm me was that in the conversation they implied that by teaching advanced defences against complex attacks all we did was paint a picture that the attacker was a skilled and difficult opponent.

I could hear the ‘Dark Side’ softly breathing in the background.

Are we teaching ourselves to be scared, are we failing to see that the Bad Guy never gets any better than he was on our first day of training.

If we do not remind ourselves that we are the ones getting better, we are the ones training and preparing it is so easy to slip towards the DARK SIDE and not even know it.

The BAD GUY will not be getting better because, they are just Arseholes looking for an easy win, they will try to distract and then hit when you are not looking.

Just as I had done to them.

Before they left, they came and thanked me again for the help, I just hope it stuck.

Even JEDI can fall.

Toughen the fuck up Padawan.

quote

I am currently reading a book titled “Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit”, it is a collaboration by the ex C.E.O. of Google Eric Schmidt, Henry Kissinger, and ex Microsoft C.E.O. Craig Mundie.

It challenges a lot of my preconceptions about A.I.

although I am not far into it, one thing I am getting is that original, ground-breaking IDEAS are more likely to come from random, almost rambling thinking than deep thinking and the scientific model.

The future may not lay in the past.

Training Large Language Models appears to me to be an advanced form of posing a “thought exercise”.

I am a big fan and participant in Thought Exercises, and they have always been part of my teaching for many years.

They are a form of training we can practice anywhere, any time, and once we get the habit, it is so easy to do.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT.

How many ways can an attacker hit us?

After all being able to defeat this action is the core of what we do.

About 20 years ago I had 3 brothers as students, for a few years they were deep into the work.

Thought exercise allowed them to compete with each other and often getting one up on a brother was more important than coming up with a great IDEA.

I asked these boys “How many ways can an attacker hit us”?

One common thing in these exchanges was that if one brother could not get one up with an informed answer he would use a frivolous, almost smart arse answer.

After a few of the usual answers, one of them said “Unseen”.

I asked them to expand on this, to be expected comments around awareness and surprise were offered up, even being blind drunk, then one of them said that we could be in a dark place.

This was a complete side step, a leap of intuition if you wish, which lead us to training Blindfold Chi Sau and even Blindfold free play trying to place people in space by sound.

Thought exercises are not posed with any intention of finding an answer, correct or incorrect, the aim is more about creating more questions and in doing so exploring our thinking.

If we do come up with a final answer, lets say 27 ways to hit us, then the next exercise is how many defences do we need to nullify this?

Think about it, we can explore what you come up with on Thursday.