Tag: martial-arts

FIST LOGIC

BEING OUR BEST AT THE WORST OF TIMES.

The "D" Man

Do you know your weaknesses, more importantly, do you know how to avoid them?

There is something that we should never forget, and that is…

why we are training?

We are learning to defend ourselves against a persons or persons that intends us serious physical harm.

Despite that training is fun and enjoyable, as I think it should be…

We are not playing.

We are not learning to dance.

Question? Do you know your weaknesses, and more importantly, do you know how to avoid them?

How can we plan for something that we do not even know is going to happen?

Let’s start with the worse thing we can think of, it will be different for all of us but be honest to yourself, there is no need for anyone else to know, we all have one darker fear and if we are ever slipping towards it, we will panic big time if we have not at least played it out in our minds a few times.

My favourite military maxim that should always be considered is …. ‘no battle plan survives contact with the enemy’.

This is not about being real, it is about being semi-prepared, engage your imagination, if in doubt about what would happen in a real situation pick the worst option you can think of.

I will use my worst fear as an example, but it is just the thought process that is important, develop, ask and answer your own questions.

My biggest worry is that I am on the floor!!!

Question #1. How did I get here?

Did the Bad Guy knock me down? Did he catch a kick I attempted and threw me? Did I trip over my own feet?

Most fights that end up on the floor are there because people fall over much more than someone does Ju-Jitsu.

Whatever caused this problem becomes an area for involvement in our training, develop a style that kicks less, stays out of reach of your partner, and develops a better, more well-balanced movement.

Question #2. Could I have prevented this?

If it was something the Bad Guy did what happened that allowed him to be in a position to do that?

Was it his skill and speed or was it a case of me being inattentive or late to respond?

Either way, this problem was caused by not being in control of my personal space and something I can take into training is the question “what does it mean to control my personal space”?

As a training exercise in Chi Sau get a friend to continuously press you and work on maintaining the same shape, position and distance from them at all times.

Ask yourself can I control my personal space by standing in one spot while my attacker is mobile, there is no correct or incorrect answer here, just a specific personal idea that we can train to be more natural.

Question #3. Was he fast or was I slow?

We can always work on our speed, especially the speed we think, our body only ever works at the speed of our thoughts, to a very large extent being quick is about having fewer choices to deliberate on.

Do not waste valuable mental processing time on trying to develop or use ‘Mind Force’, be deliberate and only think about things you can do that will actively help.

If we do not know how to transition from one situation or one position to another we will be stuck in both time and space and an easy target.

Again as a Chi Sau drill work on changing shapes, stances, and positions in space.

Create a drill in Chi Sau where one partner applies a strong forward drive, and the other partner tries to find a way to get behind the aggressor, do not be nice to each other, make it a win / lose game.

In training we usually tend to just do as we are told, often there is no genuine connection to what we as students think may happen, or what we may need, and very rarely is there any student input to reflect a personal worry or experience.

As Instructors we should encourage this type of engagement, as students, we should force ourselves to ask questions, even when we think they may be stupid.

Nearly everything we do in Wing Chun falls under the umbrella of simultaneous attack and defence, in so many street situations this is a practical impossibility. The IDEA is sound, but how close can we get to it?

In street situations the attacker has no time to try to find the best shot, there is no feinting, no dodging and weaving patiently seeking a better position, it is just a flurry of whatever and it is instantly in our face.

Most street violence that Wing Chun would engage with, the average mugging, for instance, is over in less time than it takes to read this sentence.

I am serious, if we lose control of the first 4 or 5 seconds it is ‘lights out and go home’.

If we do not see it coming we are not going to stop it from happening, this is an alarming thought, but it is what it is.

There is a saying in the Boxing World, “it is the punch you do not see that knocks you out”!

Question #4. Why was I unprepared?

No one can teach functional situational awareness because the situation changes from day to day and place to place, because of this most situations we find ourselves in will appear to be almost out of nowhere.

Unpreparedness is our default position, get used to it, train it.

If our regular training does not include ways to regain a good position from a bad position then the prognosis will be terminal, do not fall for the fantasy that Biu Gee teaches emergency techniques, find a way to make space and regain balance.

Question #5. How did this situation arise?

The only way to avoid potential problems is to see them as they evolve, and leave before conception.

Most people that fail in a violent situation do not fail because of a lack of skill or ability, it is usually a lack of trust, or a lack of confidence all made more destructive by the shock inherent in being attacked.

There are hundreds if not thousands of violently effective people who have no training at all in our world, but they are courageous to the level of foolhardiness, they will walk into our fists, we have a huge advantage if we can only bring it to the fore.

Think.

Plan ahead.

Survive.

This is what all training should be. Any other approach is leading to the wrong choice at the wrong time.

Work on your weaknesses, play to your strengths.

WHAT KIND OF DAY IS IT FOR YOU?
FIST LOGIC

HOW TO FIGHT LIKE AN OLD MAN.

The "D" Man

It is the “Holy Grail”…

… it is “Effortless Power”

The late great Hélio Gracie one quipped, “Learn to fight like an Old Man, because one day you will be”.

What does it mean to ‘Fight like an Old Man’?

Perhaps we should ask one.

As hard as it is for me to get my head around it, I am a 70 year OLD MAN.

Fighting like an OLD MAN boils down to not relying on all of the stuff that young men rely on.

Things like fitness, speed of motion, and strength, in short, brute force and effort.

Which is just as well for I am no longer fit, fast, or strong.

But despite this, in a ‘self-defence situation’ I would still back myself against anybody, be they 30, 40, or even 50 years younger than me.

However, in a Mano-a-Mano stand-up fight against someone 30, 40, or 50 years younger, even I would put my money on the other guy.

But self-defence is a different beast altogether, the opening minute is always up for grabs, first in best served.

I do not B.S. myself, even if it is a self-defence situation, every second after that opening minute my chances of success would sink dramatically.

An OLD MAN must rely on skill, luck, and old-fashioned Bastardry.

Old-fashioned Bastardry is the second aspect of “Fighting like an OLD MAN”.

The first aspect is using skill as opposed to effort, and of having enough trust in oneself and one’s skill set to stick to using skill and correct application even when things go south.

Trusting a skill set is a highly degradable commodity, if we do not keep up the training, and keep close company with the skill set, this trust vanishes as quick as V.B. turns to piss.

It goes without saying that an important component of fighting like an OLD MAN is to still be training when you are an OLD MAN.

The second aspect is to get the job done and dusted in under a minute.

To achieve this we need an element of deliberate brutality, or as I prefer to call it, ‘Old fashioned Bastardry’.

Whenever we make contact with an attacker, especially in defence, we must always hurt them, so the question becomes “How do we hurt people while we are trying to stop them from hurting us”?

We do it by developing a frame that hurts people who make contact with it, even when we are a little bit lost and do not exactly know what is going on.

An unbreakable exoskeleton that is appears hard, yet flexible, as if made of solid rubber.

The best place to start, the spot where the “rubber” meets the road so to speak…

… is Lan Sau.

Like so much if not all of Wing Chun, Lan Sau is presented as a single shape, or movement, but it is, in reality, the final rung of a long ladder.

The cosmologist  Carl Sagan had an Apple Pie recipe that went like this…

…step 1.  Create the Universe.

As humorous as this is without the Universe there will be no planets, no environments, no trees, no fruit and so on.

So when I talk of Lan Sau it is in the mode of Carl Sagan’s apple pie recipe.

For Lan Sau to even exist there is a chain of supporting structures that must be developed first.

For starters, we must engage Crazy Horse, which in itself is a grouping of concepts such as Head-up – Body down, Shaolin Archer, and the totality of  Y.G.K.Y.M.

The shape or posture that we train as Lan Sau is elementary stuff, as useful and effective as can be in a violent situation, in training it is just an exercise for us to isolate the concept so that we can explore it.

Lan Sau translates to the Bar Arm, or sometimes Obstructing Arm, and in its first showing it helps maintain or regain our distance from an attack, and if this is all you learn it will serve you well, but there is more, much more.

If we choose to retranslate Lan Sau into ‘the Unbending Arm’ and think of all the ways that having an arm that does not bend under force is useful, we can begin to see that unlocking this concept for use everywhere is an absolute game changer. 

In an earlier video I referred to moving as if we had a prosthetic arm to clear the way, this is how I see Lan Sau, as an unbending, somewhat neutral, but extremely sturdy, prosthetic arm.

As you all know, I do not think that striking ability is any kind of magic sauce, even without training we all know how to hit someone, and if we cannot hit very hard we will just hit multiple times.

But the potential to not be hit, surely that IS some kind of magic, developing an unbending arm gives us a major advantage in any violent situation.

Lan Sau may not be a ‘Magic Bullet’, but it is not far off.

It is worth noting that Lan Sau does not get introduced until Chum Kiu, certain fundamental IDEAS/Concepts such as ‘Do not fight force’ or “Do not cary your opponents weight’ need to be understood before working on Lan Sau, plus there exists some subtle differences between ‘Accepting Force and Issuing Force’ that we need to align with.

The following video is some footage from a one-on-one session I had with Sam, as always it was unplanned and as such it may jump around or be hard to follow, if this happens just observe how little either of us is disturbed as we experiment with Lan Sau against deliberate force.

You all know that while I never make it extremely difficult to achieve the training objective, you also know that I never make it easy, when Sam physically moves me, even when it appears that he is doing very little, he is really moving me and as such would move anyone.

There is one spot in the video where Sam gets it spot on and shunts me away with almost zero force, the look on his face was priceless.

What is “Fighting like and Old Man”?

It is the “Holy Grail”…

… it is “Effortless Power”

what moon?
FIST LOGIC

SIMULTANEOUS ATTACK AND DEFENCE, what is it?

The "D" Man

It is highly unlikely that the Bad Guy has a plan, so any plan we have is a step up from them.

The video footage with this post is of the senior guys working on developing an understanding of the ‘Concept’ of Simultaneous Attack and Defence.

Apart from ‘Simplicity’, it is this concept that is paramount to functionality.

The body text of this post is another way of ‘EXPLORING’ the ‘BIG PICTURE”.

Wing Chun, in its purest representation, has no techniques, no patterns, and no set strategies, to non Wing Chun people this is its biggest weakness, but to those of us that understand…

             … it is its greatest strength.

But like so much of Wing Chun’s Fist Logic, this is so counter intuitive that very few students give it enough time to sink in.

The above statement does not mean that we go in eyes closed and Brain on pause, it is more that we care little about what the Bad Guy wants to do, and focus mainly on what we want to do.

To start this thought experiment let’s open with two questions.

Q. 1.  Why is it that highly skilled, highly trained martial artists with many years of experience get their asses handed to them by “Punks in Pubs”?

Q. 2.  Why is it that completely untrained people can be so effective when it comes to fighting?

The majority of non-competetive martial artists tend to overthink the situation, underestimate their own ability, and go way to soft with their opening , while untrained people just do not know enough to be worried and so go in full bore without fear of reply.

The default position for Wing Chun is that we are being attacked, as a result we are always starting in second place, so we cannot afford to hesitate when it comes to ‘Go Time’, we need clear plan, and we need to implement it with extreme prejudice.

Now you may ask “How can we have a clear plan if we do not know what is happening”?

And that would appear to be a fair question, except we do know what is happening, we are being fronted by someone that wishes to hurt us, and we also have a plan, counter-attacking using simultaneous attack and defence.

This may sound like a vague even half baked plan, but it is enough.

Something many people struggle to understand is that no plan ever works, whatever we plan to do will need to be changed, on the fly, so we can go in with anything, and the simpler that anything is the better.

It is highly unlikely that the Bad Guy has a plan, so any plan we have is a step up from them.

If we have set ourselves up correctly, physically, mentally, and emotionally, our attackers options are far fewer than they think, and even though we may think we are starting in second place, if we have a correct Wing Chun set up, such as CRAZY HORSE, we are pretty much in pole position. 

I cannot express strongly enough how important our state of mind is when we are navigating a violent situation.

Something to be wary of is if we loose our ability to think on our feet we will rapidly become overwhelmed.

If we become overwhelmed we will at the very least hesitate, quite possibly just shut down, no more movement, then it is curtains.

If being overwhelmed prevents us from moving, then the reverse should also be true, that moving will prevent being overwhelmed.

A positive state of mind and a clear plan of action, and free and easay movement is all that is required to prevent ourselves being overwhelmed.

This is what our training should be focused on and what we want it to provide.

OVERTHINKING: THE ART OF CREATING PROBLEMS OUT OF SOMETHING THAT WAS NEVER THERE.

BATMAN.

WHAT KIND OF DAY IS IT?