Shutting up your Inner Coach

Today, on the 4th of May, I simply have no other choice than to write about using the Force.

Spirituality is a loaded word and something that gets thrown around more than me in a wrestling bout. The martial arts community is full of its various interpretations, most peddled by self-proclaimed grandmasters of different Asian-origin arts as profitable merchandise or an excuse for a lack of practicality. The mystical appeal of these arts has attracted many a westerner, but there are others who reject the magic and focus on the real and the practical. And wouldn´t you know it, it was one of the things that originally convinced me to hang up my Karate Gi and venture into the visceral, down-to-earth, no-nonsense European arts of gutting people. All of the tradition and ritual, pointless repetitive exercises and endless recitations got on my nerves. I knew I would learn nothing this way, and the only way to learn fighting was hands-on, practical violence.  

This worked out quite well for quite some time. As it turns out, it does help when you stop attacking air and begin attacking people who fight back and have no intention of letting you hit them. Soon you realize some of these people are bigger, stronger, faster, and overall better. You decide you won´t have any of that, so you train to become stronger and faster as well, and you learn more techniques and learn them better, so you can compensate for your lack of physical prowess. The advice many Masters seem to have for us puny little nuisances, is to make friends with the Nach. This seems to be in a direct contradiction to our worship of the Vor as the generally superior position to be in. But when you think of it, it does make sense - not to say that the weaker opponent should never try to take the Vor, but to make use of your hulking adversary´s inertia, he has to be in the process of moving, and he has to start moving before you do. This makes things quite a bit harder - instead of relying on the idea that your attack might get through, you have to learn to observe and react to your opponent´s moves before they even happen. So is that what it is all about - we have to train ourselves to become psychics, to close our eyes and trust in the Force? Afraid so.

There are a few things the Masters, especially the eastern ones, tell us on this topic. The most mainstream is probably the idea that you should not focus your attention on any individual part of the opponent, especially not the weapon which moves a lot too late and too fast, but to look through him so that his whole body is in your focus, and let your peripheral vision inform you about subtle cues in the way his body moves and prepares to attack. This also has the advantage of your eyes always being fixed on some point behind him, not giving away the targets of your attacks, but rather just looking really creepy. But is this all? There must be something more mystical, more profound, an ancient secret that will bestow upon us the power of seeing things before they happen.

As we go about our lives, we are very rarely fully aware of what is going on around us. Rather, our attention seems to cherry pick certain things that we subsequently hold endless inner dialogue - or monologue - about. Who are we really talking to when we talk to ourselves anyway, and who is doing the talking? Those may be some deep questions for another day. The experience itself is universal - walking down the street, seeing things and people, we all instantly make judgements, recall memories, and draw comparisons in result. Just seeing some random dude, your head might go "Oh look, he looks like my former classmate. But it can´t be him, he must be much older now. Damn, I must be much older too, huh? But I bet I make more money now than he does..." and so on. Smelling fresh bread when passing a bakery might sound a bit like "Mmm, bagels... This reminds me of our bakery back home, and how I would get sent there to pick up fresh bread by mom. I should probably call mom. Damn I´m hungry..." the examples are countless, and this process happens more or less every moment of our waking lives. Of the things and people we encounter, our attention picks something, and our mind goes on a rant about it. And while it does, and takes up our brain´s processing capacity, we are rendered more or less blind to everything else.      

The only times this endless chatter of the mind tends to slow or even shut down, is in situations that need our undivided attention. Normally, this only happens when we are in danger. If you are walking home alone, and you see a bunch of suspicious guys cross the street, you are more than likely to stop talking to yourself about how annoyingly straight this street is and how it drags on forever and you´d really rather be walking through the park and it´s slightly too hot for your taste in this jacket. Rather, your perception will suddenly sharpen and broaden - you will become aware of how many guys there are, whether one of them might be holding something, which way exactly they are going, where your escape routes are - and hopefully not start talking to yourself about in what awful trouble you are. People often say that when they were in great danger and they had no time to think, time seemed to slow down to a crawl, which gave them the option to act. Their memories of their surroundings at the time also seem to be very vivid and precise. This is because when push comes to shove, your mental focus will shift from internal dialogue to perception.

If this internal dialogue does so much to hinder us in our awareness and our ability to react, then why on Earth do we even do it? Or better, why have our minds evolved to do it? There must be some advantage to it, and indeed there are several. Forming judgements and recalling memories is crucial if we are to make the right decisions about things we encounter. How am I supposed to know what to do in a fight, if I do not make judgements and conclusions about my opponent and his appearance and behavior, or recall the memories of learned techniques? There must be this dialogue going on in my mind - right? "OK, we have a guy here, about 90 kilos probably, looks quite offensive - well, hopefully I can lure him into doing something I can do a good nachreisen against, or if he advances frontally, I could try a quick durchwechseln - I need to be careful not to let him get into ringen, and make sure to catch his weak with my strong, oh look he just switched into a pflug, he´ll probably attempt a thrust from bellow, time for that durchwechseln..." and so on and so forth, the whole time.

Well, this will take you so far, but no further.

Thing is, it is incredibly hard to be fast. And to be faster than someone a lot stronger, in particular. Why am I always giving myself these mental instructions? It is nothing but the mind using its incredible power of language to form a bridge between the current situation and experience. My inner, knowledgeable mind, which has trained for years and read many books, is talking to the beast experiencing its surroundings in order to inform it of the best course of action. But this comes at a price - the perceptive animal and the wise martial artist share the same processor. More thinking results in less awareness. Every moment spent forming judgements, recalling memories, making estimations, actively trying to predict what happens next... Is a moment of not being aware of all the subtle cues, little movements, changing breathing patterns - all the things that could bestow this mystical "precognition" power.  

Actually, this whole dialogue is nothing but a compensatory mechanism to substitute for a lack of training. This will be very easy to understand for anyone that regularly drives. Remember driving school, and how you had to talk to yourself about how the gear switching procedure goes in your head, often to the point of not really noticing what was happening on the road? How much you had to tell yourself to check all the mirrors in the right order? Now, years later, you can probably drive while listening to music, talking on the phone, and thinking about the weather forecast all at the same time, and you are likely completely unaware of the gear shifting process the whole way. Why? Because you have mastered that movement, and you don´t need your inner instructor telling you how to do it anymore. You can instead (hopefully) focus on the road, and probably have attention left to spare for some music or an ebook.

Fortunately, gear shifting is always about the same. Which can not really be said for fighting. There are almost endless possible situations - so how do you drill yourself for these movements to the point that they become so automatic you have no need for these instructions? And even if you do, how do you force your inner coach to shut up, and stop telling you things you already know?

I am afraid the answer is the same as the answer to everything else: Practice. But knowing what to practice is half the battle.

Matters of Size

The glaring innuendo of this topic dealt with in the title, I will try to be mature about it for the rest of this.

Like it or not, every human body comes with its mental and physical traits - it is a lot like in roleplaying games, where we assign different stats to our characters. Except in real life, you roll your character randomly, and nothing is balanced. As you get older, you do not, unfortunately, continue to level up and get stronger, tougher, quicker, and sexier. It is more like the old arcade games where everything keeps getting harder, and you always die in the end - all you can do is rank up your high score.

Write what you know, they say. So yes, fighting hugely larger, stronger and quite often also therefore faster people should be near the top of the list. I will reveal significant details about my tricks in this post, so if you want to learn them and beat me, feel free to read on. Also I will refer to all opponents as "him" because I normally fight guys, and if you get offended about it, you are free to come duel me. But needless to say, it applies to people of all 67 genders or however many we have nowadays.

There are quite a few reasons why size is a giant advantage in many kinds of fighting contexts. Most of it boils down to very simple physics. A longer lever makes for a stronger force. Every martial artist will tell you about the difficulty of fighting long-limbed, trollish types - not only do their spindly appendages reach impossibly far, a longer muscle fiber can contract over a greater distance, generating more force, like the string of a longbow. And since the bigger the person, the bigger the limbs, there come all the other advantages, like mass. Great for having momentum behind blows and manipulating the balance point in any grappling situation. The sheer mass of muscle for explosive force generation certainly doesn't hurt either, making blows hit both harder and faster. Unfortunately the idea that smaller people are faster is mostly a myth, even though we will get to the inertia and manouverability part.

Size is strength. Of course you can be huge, fat, and completely out of shape, but even those guys tend to be surprisingly strong just from hauling their own weight around. This is clear from weightlifting tables. The more muscle mass, the more force it can generate. A person´s strength is quite easy to determine by simply looking. If a guy is big, and at least reasonably fit, chances are he is strong as hell. The good news is, while there are significant strength differences between big and small guys, as well as between men and women, those differences account for about a factor of two or three at the most - so the average guy of average guy size is born with about twice the strength I was cursed with at birth. But what most people don´t realize is that with training, any individual can incrase their strength by a factor of 5 to 10 (for different muscle groups). This gives us incredible power to mitigate our biological disadvantages if we are just less lazy. Sure those upper strength limits that each of us has due to their size, age and gender come up in olympic sports - but at the amateur level so few of us ever even get near them, that they are more or less irrelevant. Complaining about the unfair disadvantages of bigger guys is therefore only justified when the night is late, you are very drunk and you categorically must bemoan your cruel fate.

If you can believe statistics, the size of my body actually falls in the average range. Either for females of my ethnicity and generation, or for the global population including those 70% of Asians. Either way, it does not even remotely fall into the average size of martial artists in my area, especially HEMAists. Or the average size of any fighting type, except the knight of the 15th century. But size certainly has not been on my side throughout the years. In fact, when I began to train longsword, I was not physically able to effectively handle the weapon, in spite of over a decade in martial arts. To be fair, my first sword was the old Regenyei Heavy feder that weighs over 1,8 kg. I was even told this sword was "too big/heavy for me". It took about two years of muscle aches to become effective with it. I won't even begin to describe how abysmal my performance in wrestling was - which brings us to the well known equalizing power of weapons.

There are some good reasons why all wrestling-based sports have pretty narrow weight categories. Wrestling people who are larger and stronger is hard - especially if they have some technique. Sure, technique can compensate for a lack of strength and momentum - but once people become similar in technique, the bigger guy has a clear upper hand. So, if there is a choice to wrestle or not, such as when someone is closing the distance in a weaponed fight, it is best to nope out. Preferably while stabbing. If you absolutely must wrestle, evasion is a big deal - slipping out of a grip and reversing it is much more plausible for a little person than trying to overpower.  

To win against a bigger and stronger opponent, you must embrace your inner hobbit. What do you see, when little guys fight giants? A lot of evasion mainly, jumping out of the way, then striking from an unexpected place. All Masters, from Lichtenauer to Musashi, teach us that striking first and striking hard, not letting your opponent recover, is the way to go. Around these parts, we call it the "Vor" and it is a good thing to be in, or so I heard. And it is completely true. But the same Masters also tell us that the way to beat a stronger opponent is to use his own weight and strength against him, and the only way to do that, is to master the Nach. This makes it inherently harder - instead of just learning a few techniques well and using them hard and fast before your opponent can respond, you must actually observe. Predict his actions, or fish the right actions out of him, then let him move whichever way he intends and helping him along. Onto his face. Now, keeping him there, that is another challenge...

If there is the option of staying out of your opponent´s grip, seizing it will make your day. And that is not the only reason why you want a longer weapon. Not only will a polearm, a longsword, a rapier, or any other long piece of pointy keep that hulking mountain of meat away from you so they can´t grab you and squish the lifeblood out of you, but it will help in the matters of reach. As already mentioned, long arms are a pain to deal with, and when the weapons involved are short, the much larger proportion of the reach is determined by the length of the arms. If we fight with one foot daggers, the weapon is a very small contributor to the reach compared to the arm. A four foot rapier is completely another story - sure the other guy may have longer arms, but now that difference is a much smaller proportion of the entire distance between the two of you. Two-handed weapons are even better - by using the leverage, it is easier for a weak and puny figher to handle them effectively, and having to hold a weapon with both hands additionally reduces the contribution of arm length to reach. And the longer the weapon, the further away you are from the guy you really don´t want to wrestle.

So is there anything good at all about being tiny? Not much, but there are a few things, and since your situation as the smaller combatant is anything but enviable, you should exploit the living daylights out of them. Big guys have mass, and they have intertia. So even though they may strike faster due to their greater strength, it is harder for them to stop. So letting them go whichever way they intend to go and simply not being there when they do is your best friend. I will not get into incredible detail about particular techniques that work better for or against shorter people, but there are certainly some attacks that are quite hard to defend from a shorter opponent, especially ones to lower targets. A smaller, lighter person will generally not hit quicker because of the importance of explosive strength in that matter - their advantage is instead in manouverability. Lower inertia makes it easier to change direction quickly, which increases the usefulness of feints, durchwechseln, nachreisen, and other techniques that rely on rapid changes of direction. It goes without saying that weapon geometry and a good control of the strong and the weak of both weapons is an absolute must and the mistakes you make against a stronger guy will definitely cost you. A lower center of gravity also helps with stability, especially when you carry a lot of weight in the lower body.

All that I described here is more or less related to martial arts contexts. I have not even scratched the surface of any other ones. Thankfully, I have very limited experience with fighting outside of the gym, so I will refrain from analyzing these situations too much. Let us just say that beside skill, strength, speed, resourcefulness and size, real life situations have another factor attached to it - viciousness. Simply being the person more willing to gouge the other one´s eyes out can decide the day much more readily than being larger or stronger. So let us let the big guys keep their advantage that follows from us all observing the rules of not really hurting each other - because we like the big guys. But also not forget that the best way to defend against a big guy, in case you really have to, is to seriously hurt him, and not to fight him fairly. Even though self defense should be about protecting yourself as well as your attacker, that is sadly often a luxury reserved for the big and strong. Here we could get into the discussion of overstepping self defense and "equal force" when dealing with people of unequal sizes, but perhaps another time...

Let me wrap up with a shout out to all my big guys who made it possible for us little shmucks to conspire against you like this and who are always a blast to fight!

The Meaning of Talent

Do you like autobiographical ramblings? I don't. Some of you might . Who am I to judge? But this is my bloody blog, which means that kind of thing comes wrapped in half-educated philosophical musings, tidbits of scientific facts and analyses of personal experiences way too many at this age. I will only cite anything if I really feel like it, in all other cases you are free to check your own facts. And in case you were wondering, "bloody blog" is meant metaphorically. Most of the time.

The idea that talent does not matter for much is not new and if I claimed that I invented it, I would be no better than the man who said: "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration". Say what you want about the greatest businessman among inventors, but T. A. Edison certainly had much experience with genius, firsthand or second.  

The power of practice is widely known. Problem is, not many of us puny humans ever truly experience it. Sure: after poking around aimlessly for 5 or 6 years, we go to school where they make us practice all kinds of boring skills: reading, writing, rudimentary math, impressive achievements of some people, and if you really go for it and throw away your entire youth on education, maybe swallowing a couple couple hefty tomes. In all this time, you might stop to wonder what all those impressive people did, that made them stand out and leave some kind of mark other than a corpse. Otherwise, you do mostly the same thing 8 hours a day for 40 years, followed by doing basically nothing for about as long after.

If you actually manage to speak with any of these impressive people, they will tell you roughly the same thing as Edison told us about a century ago and in second paragraph. They worked hard, they rehearsed relentlessly, they dedicated their life to their task. Sure, you will hear about some of them being born a genius. Those just began practicing earlier.

There are words such as "klutz", "fumbler", "blunderer", "botcher", "oaf", "brute", "bruiser" "bumpkin", "dolt" and "elephant in a china shop". They usually describe a person of deficient coordination without getting too medical. If there is "ambidextrous", there should be "ambisinister" – not menacing in every way, but having two left hands. It must be a thing, because the only reason I can use both hands about equally well, is because they are equally useless. The yearly damage costs of my accidental inanimate object destruction could probably cover a modest vacation.  

People always go on a well intended "Naww, you are not like that at all!" and proceed to use my physical skills as arguments. What none of them understand, bless their hearts, is that every single move I am even remotely able to perform has been carefully rehearsed, perfected and drilled since I entered martial arts about odd 20 years ago. Including things like not tripping over my own bag.

The inevitable question every martial artist must answer is "Why would you begin doing such a thing?". Most do it because they want to become badass, get fit, learn how to defend themselves or perform cool tricks, impress their preferred sex, or build up their character. A few even do it because they want to hurt people. I wanted to stop hurting people: I was endangering myself, my family, friends, pets, and not to mention all the innocent items just sitting around our home. All doomed to damage at my impossible to control hands, feet, or head (it's large, heavy, and packs a punch). Not to get good at anything, but to learn enough coordination not to accidentally kill myself or my family. The only saving grace in the whole deal was that I was weak and tiny and  did not usually deal as much accidental damage as someone more substantial would. All these years I have watched vastly more talented, coordinated, larger, stronger, faster people come and go, show up at class or not, learn in six months what I needed five years to get right, and in the end, they were gone. And I was still there, trying, failing, flailing, drilling, lifting, hitting, blocking, reading.

20 years later, here I am, writing. And there are about 10 guys who actually believe I can teach them martial arts to the point that they come to my class. No matter the weapon, I can kind of handle it, maintain balance, move to hit and not get hit, and do the cool twirly thing. I even manage to only give myself random brain concussions on my furniture only about once a week. I am still weak and tiny, but thanks to a few years of neverending muscle soreness, can now wave any weapon around for several hours without being crippled the next day. As well as cause much more damage to doorknobs, jars, shelves, and innocent bystanders. The only thing that made this difference is countless practice hours taken out of a finite existence. And this has a few implications you may or may not like:

* If you are, know and/or love an absolute motor retard: Worry not! It may seem like a losing fight, but ultimately any movement pattern can be learned. This is no guarantee that you won´t still trip over your own bag afterwards, however.

* If you meet me at a workshop, or try to teach me something at an event, do not be surprised if I am the last person in the room to get a hang of a new move. Again, worry not – I'll get it by the end of the week. Probably.

* If you really want to get good at something, the best way to go about it is to throw your life away on it, whether you are talented or not.

* If you think you are somehow genetically unable to handle any kind of weapon or perform any kind of fighting-related task, and do not have some kind of severe medical disorder, you are wrong.  It may seem impossible now, but after you suffer for a few months or years, it will work.

* If you are one of those talented bastards that come to a few classes and get lazy: Do not make me destroy you.

In short: If I can do it, so can you!

Talent can be a natural asset, but in most cases it is nothing but a mental construct of lazy people who use it to justify their mediocrity. Let us hope that I am not too lazy about writing this blog, because it will get better with a couple thousand hours of practice. You have my (s)word.