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Martial Arts as the path to invincibility.
Martial Arts as the path to invincibility.
Copyright Bill Dowding 2001 Update 2013
Have you ever seen advertising like this: “Train in xyz and you will be able to defeat your enemies, in just a few minutes a day”? How about movies where a guy gets beat up, trains for a while, and then beats everybody else up, all within 90 minutes? How many people hold up a single example of their style eg Bruce Lee, or whoever the current unbeatable person is supposed to be, and thereby imply that you, too, can be like him, but only if you train with so-and-so system, of which only the Chosen One holds the one true secret, which he will share for a measly US$179.99 per tape/seminar/book?
I’m sure you have, plenty of times. This is the myth – martial arts can make you into an invincible fighter, especially if you give this particular person this amount of money and train for this period of time, which is usually far, far too short. And this is something that bothers me greatly. Reality differs, and the poor guy forking out the money is in for a rude surprise, probably a lot of pain, up to and including the possibility of hospitalisation or even death.
How many times have you heard of instructors being dropped by an idiot thug with no training? Black belts forgetting everything they knew when it came down to it. How many times have you had doubts about handling a fight? This is the reality. (There is no shame in any of this. It is called being human – and most of us are human.
The problem is this: the expectation is that with whatever system, after training you will no longer be human.)
So why is there a difference? Most people join martial arts schools because of their own perceived inadequacies in personal physical conflict. They lose a fight, then they see a Bruce Lee movie and see the answer to their problem in the hero, then talk about it to a friend or see an advert, and join. This is probably why a lot of them leave again, when it takes longer than an hour and a half to become an expert. It didn’t look that difficult in the movie, or the advertisement. (There is a lesson to be learned here – give people other reasons to stay, so they might stay long enough to learn.)
Why can some people fight, and others cannot? It isn’t speed, size or strength. Many good fighters are average size or less, taking out people bigger and faster than they are. Often they have no training. People say its attitude. OK, maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t, but what does this word “attitude” actually mean? A word merely gives you a label. Understanding it gives you power to use it.
What these people can do is hurt someone else, often badly, regardless of his own injuries.
Attitude – the ability to hurt another human being, and to ignore being hurt by another human being. Interesting definition. Think about it.
When most people throw a punch, at impact they take all the force out of it as it lands, failing to harm the person.
When most people get a fat lip or bleeding nose, they quit, and say they have lost.
However, our attackers do not.
All the skill in the world becomes useless if you can’t use it. All the training in the world is futile, if you don’t follow through. Others just stand there in frustration, fail to attack or defend, then kick themselves for two weeks that they just stood there, doing nothing or being very ineffectual. Others forgot everything they knew, and simply were a punching bag.
Why?
The conventional answer is back to training – which is just throwing more effort after the last lot failed. This answer isn’t wrong, however, just inadequate and misdirected.
The real answer, and one you won’t like, is this – most people – including you – have an inbuilt reluctance to damage another human being. Being a bit simplistic: according to Lt Colonel (US Rangers, ret.) Professor David Grossman PhD in his book “On Killing” (read this book if you are in any way serious about martial arts), around 85% of untrained people hesitate to hurt someone long enough that they will get killed in a gunfight. A further 13% will reluctantly hurt someone and agonize about it afterwards, often to the point they need therapy, and the last two percent will not give a damn.
Three categories – remember them – 85% losers, 13% survivors, and 2% ruthless killers. The figures are from military statistics, in regards to killing people, but they pretty much follow for physical conflict in general, as is verified by substantial research. Details might vary, but the direction and approximate proportions will be the same.
Most fighters, psychopaths, war heroes, assassins, muggers and thugs come from the last category – and so will your attacker. You are not from this category, otherwise you have little to worry about, and probably never needed martial arts in the first place. These are the kind of guys going into MMA cage matches and the UFC etc. These are the people you are training to survive against – random attackers who probably enjoy violence. I’m writing this article for the defenders, those that do not normally fit in this category.
Are you ruthless?
People change from one category to another all the time, depending on training and conditioning, environment and circumstances, and whatever is happening at the time. Don’t even try to say that you are one of the ones that can do it – it will be too late to find out when it happens for real. Assume that you can’t, and that your opponent can, and you will probably live to find out. People always think they can – actually, they only hope – but the statistics say that they will not when it comes down to it. The reason we do martial arts is that we don’t want to take chances; we want to take charge, and control the situation. We must assume that we are not naturally ruthless, but we hope our training will make us so. We want to change.
OK, we are all well-trained heroes. So why do martial artists ever lose fights?
Do martial arts really work?
The answer, I’m sorry to say, is “No, they don’t”.
Don’t suddenly decry “but so-and-so did thus-and-such!” If only one or even a few examples succeed and everything else fails, then that isn’t much of a
recommendation. If only one famous person was saved, would that be enough for you to pay for it? Would you take a medicine that only worked a few times, for a mere ten percent of patients? Would you even go back to a doctor who prescribed this? I think not.
So how to solve this problem? Why don’t they work?
Martial arts don’t work as they are taught because of the way we teach them. For example, sports martial arts condition people incorrectly for survival by striking surfaces that are tough rather than fragile. Also, modern safe practices in training are removing conditioning and inoculation. Modern teachers haven’t any idea of real, life and death fights, and the ones that do rarely understand what happened (they did it instinctively, or they would have lost), so usually they can’t teach it – can’t even understand how others have difficulty being ruthless. What is worse in this age of the do-it-yourself martial artist, you can only rely on their half dozen tournament titles, perhaps a single knife fight in their whole life, their dozen or so scuffles, their one real life and death fight that they probably lost or broke even but tell a good story about, and their lengthy experience as security for a rock star or for a notorious hotel.
This is what they bring to you to teach you to survive, applicable or not. They can’t call upon the last three hundred years of traditions of masters and their fights, just their own – an advantage for teachers of traditional martial arts.
Most successful fighters come from the last 2% category anyway, and get frustrated when “my pathetic students” (I have heard teachers that say this) suddenly can’t injure someone without qualms, simply because it isn’t within them.
They are the ones who say “just hit them, it’s easy, they just fall down and bleed”. But you can’t, can you? Most people can’t.
That’s the bad news.
So can do we do anything about it? Yes, we can, several things.
You can do it the old way – throw away the pads and the rules and go for it, and risk crippling injury and law suits in this litigious age. Or you can do it the grappling way – it is easier to hurt someone if you grapple with them, rather than strike them, but you only get to fight one attacker at a time, and thugs run in packs. And anyway, many of the same principles apply – it is just a little easier to injure someone with grappling than strikes, emotionally anyway: Physically, strikers will do far more damage far faster than grapplers.
Or you can do it the smart way – embed a conditioned response so that you have no choice but to react, and hit as hard as you can automatically without hesitation.
This is what martial arts are supposed to do, but unfortunately usually fail to do so. This is what the promise of the advertising and the movies is: That with the right training you will be able to defend yourself.
What is involved, is three processes that, although described separately, are interrelated through correct training.
These are:
1. Physical conditioning – enabling your body to do the task.
2. Inoculation – enabling your mind (emotions) to do the task.
3. Operant conditioning – enabling your reflexes to do the task for you, regardless of your emotional reluctance (“Reluctance” is the technical name
for, obviously, the reluctance to damage another person), and to do it immediately without hesitation. This is very important.
Let’s have a look at them.
1. Physical conditioning – not just the necessary stretches, muscle, bone, tendon and ligament strengthening exercises and so on that you are probably familiar with, but the ability to hit really hard on a bag that has the resistance of a human head. No gloves, no mouthguards, no pads, nothing. Fill a leather ball with blue metal gravel, or a wall bag with aquarium gravel and punch that. Air punching and kicking with full force, so that you reflexively use all your force when you fight and fully extend through the impact. You need to be accelerating through the impact, not slowing down. (F=ma) Don’t pace yourself, but do it as hard as you can, for as many times as you can. If you feel like your strikes getting weaker – it will be around about thirty-to-fifty no matter how good you are – have a rest, and try again in a little while. Fighting a real fight needs no ability to run around the block or be able to lift weights. Fitness means able to do the task – in this case, survive about ten seconds, not ten rounds.
Getting used to being hit is a good idea as well – not while wearing pads or with gloves, either. This isn’t a game. You need to get used to real hits, but you can let them happen by accident through normal hard training. You don’t have to stand there and take a punch – the best way is to be hit while trying hard, moving fast while trying to stop them. Gor sau training, sparring without gloves.
2. Inoculation – the process of getting used to the circumstances. There are several elements – one is getting used to the idea that someone wants to hurt you,
hates you enough to damage or maybe kill you. Most people when attacked first think “why me?” They are more upset by the thought that someone hates them enough to want to hurt or kill them than the actual physical danger of being hurt. This is important.
Well, it isn’t you. It is actually his problem, and he is inflicting it on you. Once you get used to the animal behaviour of people, posturing and building themselves up for a fight (read any book on primate behaviour – it isn’t much different) you get amused instead of scared. Get used to the abuse and ignore it altogether. It is just part of the posturing. You should only care about physical survival, not a bruised ego. Another major element is getting used to striking a person – hard or sparring, hard drills, hard chi sau, whatever your style uses. You need to hit firmly (not full contact, or even close, but you have to hit solidly, and be in exactly the right range, position etc so you could drive right through should you choose – and then choose not to. Don’t pull up before the target – be on the target, as if a real strike, with a conscious pulling up – in a real fight you won’t try to pull up, and will follow through if you do the rest of your training right – that is, always punching hard with full extension. If you only do this, then you might pull up in a fight. Training is a constant war between these two points. Accidents will happen, that is part of inoculation. If they don’t, then perhaps you aren’t training hard enough. How often is up to you – some of my students practice so they get two or three fat lips a night, others about once a month. You work it out.)
Doing long forms or standing in stance far longer than you think you can, or training till you drop gets you used to pain, shaking legs, exhaustion, the inability to think
clearly, (all factors in a fight) and most importantly, stubbornness. Being stubborn will make up for a variety of other deficiencies. Just get up and do it again. It also is disheartening to the attacker. I have had them literally run away. They hit me with their best, and when I just ignored it and got up, they lost heart and fled.
Getting used to crowds, and strange environments, and so on should also be part of your “training” – on your own, not in class, obviously. Experience all imaginable conditions. Go to a really nasty pub and sing in the karaoke, get heckled. Do some public speaking. Competition sparring has some features that help here, despite other negative features.
3. Operant conditioning.
Probably the most important factor in a fight is time. You need to get in and solve the issue immediately – hesitation is what gets you beaten. Since our emotions are generally telling us to wait, it isn’t that bad yet, maybe he’ll go away etc, you need to have your body do it for you. (An aside: If you are ready to attack at all times, or you easily get into combat mode and can down your attacker even before he knows he is about to fight, then you are an aggressive paranoid fruit loop who needs help. You are the one causing the fights. Few heated arguments need to go to violence. This article is for those that are attacked by people like you. The idea that you need to sit with your back to a wall, scrutinize everyone that enters, and be ready at all times is another idiot myth that belongs in the dark ages. You only need to be that vigilant in dire environments, and only a complete fool would be spending his/her recreation hours in a place like that, and this article isn’t for you either.)
Those things that most people call “muscle memory” and “learned reflexes” are actually operant conditioning, and takes place in the brain (In the thalamus, a part of the limbic system, often variously miss-named the “mammalian” or “reptilian” brain, and other rot) and not in the muscles or the spinal cord. The latter is a different kind of reflex, not relevant for this discussion.
There are only three ways to get something into the thalamus – very slow movements, many thousands of repetitions, or successful use in a crisis. Touch and pain work the fastest, and watching and copying the slowest. The more you do in a short period, the faster, the longer between, or the shorter the session, the slower, with time going up geometrically the more barriers you put in.
A good thing is, though, that this part of your brain doesn’t appear to sleep, get tired, get drunk or forget. Once enabled, it is forever. Any martial art that is trained regularly for a couple of years but where everything is forgotten once training ceases as fast as it is learned doesn’t do this kind of conditioning – or does it badly. Stuff learned last is first to go, and that’s OK, since it would hardly be reflex yet, the way most people train. Chi sau (sticking hands) is particularly good at getting responses quickly into this part of your brain. Trained hard and correctly for a few hours each and every day, operant reflexes can be embedded within a few weeks to a couple of months instead of years. The length, if you train less, is not arithmetically greater, however. It is geometrically greater (Half as much takes four times longer, a third as much, nine times longer etc). To embed permanently takes considerably longer. The reverse applies if you train more. Doubling your training means it takes a quarter of the time.
All three of these elements (operant, physical and inoculation conditioning) can be done all together as a system – they are not isolate, but related.
Other myths needing deconstruction follow.
Reluctance is the imbedded psychological mechanism that tries to stop us from hurting our own species. It is the biggest single hurdle for most people to overcome to “enable” (Yes, enable is the technical term for this) the student to hurt their attacker. It is often the reason why well trained people can’t fight, because, lets face it, the person comes to a martial arts school probably because they have strong “reluctance” to fighting in the first place. Anyone who can’t hit hard when in a fight is exhibiting reluctance. It is similar to why dogs roll over and present their throats: it is a form of submission. However, people are not like dogs. People are more likely bite out the throats of those that roll over.
Fight and flight. This only occurs between species. Within species, there are two other alternatives – posturing (looking impressive, or shouting, or standing upright, etc) and submission (OK, mate, I’ll buy you a new beer – take the pool table). Once these become tools, you can dissolve many fights before they start, and see fights coming long before they happen so you get more ideas and opportunities on how to handle or avoid it. “Flight” is highly underrated as an option – you can always just leave, and the fight could evaporate. “Fight” is most definitely overrated, but unfortunately emphasized by martial arts culture – do you really want to act on
instinctive primate dominance behaviour, or would you rather make your own choices?
“Posturing” is not necessarily a real threat – no more than it is with cats or dogs that puff themselves up to make themselves look bigger, and make louder noises. Or people. It’s just a posture, and it probably will not go to a fight unless you respond inappropriately.
“Submission” doesn’t have to be subservient – you can just give the child his toy – a beer, a turn on the pool table or seat, stop bumping against him, etc.
Another thing - It isn’t your responsibility to correct people – it is the courts’; or more likely their parents should have done it twenty years ago. Just because some idiot acts like an asshole, you don’t have to teach him a lesson. What we do is about survival, not macho bullshit. Let someone else do the job. Martial arts ethics says protect the weak, not punish the idiot, much as we like to think so.
One other thing you can’t do is reason with ballistic attackers. They are angry, so their heart rate goes up. So does yours. As this happens, the forebrain is progressively disabled to enable the faster, more survival oriented part of the brain to control the body (limbic system). Making pacifying gestures and calming tones is more important than content of the words. This same process causes us to forget everything we know when we get into a fight. Learned skills that aren’t yet reflex are stored in the forebrain, as is rational behaviour and all kinds of advanced thinking such as problem solving. So you can’t remember learned things, (or understand complex concepts: there is no point arguing with someone in this
condition either. Reason isn’t going to work. The myth that you can talk your way out of a fight will not work with someone who is truly dangerous.)
This is also why drills don’t work very well. This part of your brain is not clever. It cannot generalize very well at all – so any drill is a waste of time if a person does something even slightly different. Randomised drills are better, and exercises like chi sau are even better at getting this – they also use touch and contact, which embeds reflexes faster than other methods (Pain is very fast at doing this).
Sometimes your friends say things like “You should’ve smashed him”, and perhaps you feel you should have – but if they wanted to do it, they could have, couldn’t they? They had their chance, but didn’t do anything. Well, why didn’t they? Primate behaviour again: they would like to but didn’t, and project this onto you. Ignore it. It’s a similar reason as to why you can’t expect your mates to back you up in a fight. Even if they are willing, they may not be able to gear up to combat mode fast enough even if they see it happening in time, which they probably won’t for the above reasons. They hesitate, and the fight is over. The time period is just too short. They aren’t cowards. They, like everyone, can react only by training, behaviour, and biology, and time. Fighting is the loneliest thing in the world. You are on your own. So remember, the only person you can count on in a fight is you.
If you are a teacher, ask yourself if you really can teach people how to survive. Can you really? Are you up to it? Be prepared to back that up. Sooner or later, someone must test it – a student will have to fight, and will pay for your arrogance
if you cannot. Just hope it isn’t with their life. Can you face that? Can you face those that walk in through the door who might ask?
And if you are a student: the answer to all your own problems is training – appropriate training.
Is yours?
Glossary
Attitude – the ability to hurt another human being, and to ignore being hurt by another human being
Reluctance – the inbuilt inhibition of violence between individuals of the same species, especially people.
Enable – to train so that a student can injure another human being.
Operant conditioning – training to the point that your body will do it for you. Muscle memory and reflexes are included. Very fast response time, hard to actually stop consciously once started.
Fight/Flight – the first two choices in a conflict. The only two between species. Within a species there are two more choices, often neglected.
Posture – the body language of conflict. It is a programmed message that “I am bigger than you” or something similar. Like cats puffing themselves up. Most posturing does not lead to fights.
Submit – Letting the other guy “win” through posturing. “OK, your banana is bigger than my banana.” Good strategy during a posturing phase of a fight. Unfortunately,
submitting will often not be successful if the attacker is already violent, but instead enrage them more.
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