The Five Rings

I won’t pretend that I fully understood everything that I read in The Five Rings. To truly understand Shinmen Musashi’s writings I think you would have to have walked in his shoes, living his life during his era and cultural times. His propensity for duelling in order to advance his art is something of a product of his times. Winning sixty encounters is no small feat, so we can infer that the skills he had worked at a high level.

What resonated with me was that he walked his own path, and came up with his own principles and conclusions. I like his phrase ‘thus with the virtue of strategy I practice many arts and abilities – all things with no teacher’.

I also like his thoughts on The Way of Strategy and how he expanded his vision beyond technique and the walls of the training hall. You can see a hint of disdain in his words. ‘Strategy is the craft of the warrior..... Recently there have been people getting on in the world as strategists, but they are usually just sword fencers..... The true value of sword fencing cannot be seen within the confines of sword fencing technique..... If we look at the world we see arts for sale. Men use equipment to sell their own selves. As if with the nut and flower, the nut has become less than the flower. In this kind of Way of Strategy, both those teaching and learning the Way are concerned with colouring and showing off their technique, trying to hasten the bloom of the flower. They speak of “This Dojo” and “That Dojo”. They are looking for profit. Someone once said “Immature strategy is the cause of grief”. That was a true saying.’

I read that the nut or bulb represents the student and the flower represents the technique. How many students of the arts over the centuries have become fixated on the movements and shapes of the techniques of their style? In truth it is the disease of the martial arts but the economic reality is that it attracts students likes moths to a flame.

Exponents of the arts tend to break everything down to static moments and some of the commentary people make on this book tends to do the same and focuses on the concepts related to his duelling against a single opponent. There is a point being missed. Here was a person who was famous for using two swords against multiple opponents. There is no time in that situation for assessing the finer points of swordsmanship; it is about moving and surviving, and I doubt whether he could ever truly assess what he did in those situations as the mind is extremely busy on other things at the time.

‘Everything can collapse. Houses, bodies, and enemies collapse when their rhythm becomes deranged..... In single combat, the enemy sometimes loses timing and collapses..... You must utterly cut the enemy down so that he does not recover his position’.  Here he describes what I call pressure. Against multiple attackers you look at pressure somewhat differently. It is the act of being fully energised and applying that to create effect, which creates the pressure on your opponents and which causes (hopefully) the collapse of their intentions towards you. In a multiple opponent situation your goal is to energise and get to an exit, not defeat your opponent.

‘In large scale strategy it is important to cause loss of balance. Attack without warning where the enemy is not expecting it, and while his spirit is undecided follow up your advantage and, having the lead, defeat him’.  This strategy will serve you well against multiple opponents. Why would you let the opponents know that the fight has actually begun. If you are outnumbered then it makes little sense to follow a social set of rules, waiting for each party to get its signals in sync so that the fight can now begin.

‘Whenever you cross swords with an enemy you must not think of cutting him either strongly or weakly; just think of cutting and killing him. Be intent on killing the enemy. Do not try to cut strongly and, of course, do not think of cutting weakly. You should only be concerned with killing the enemy’.  I guess this focus probably kept him alive in his environment so it was somewhat of a survival strategy for him. When I was a student of a senior level, my teacher taught me the concept of elimination, which I failed to grasp at the time. It was interesting that I eventually came to realise that I actually had to eliminate the problem in front of me, rather than the person, if I was to fit the concept within my philosophy of survival. Getting rid of the problem greatly expands the options available to you and you can stop focusing on the opponent in front of you. It is these kinds of realisations that can open a new world of strategies for defense against multiple attackers.

‘Some schools maintain that the eyes should be fixed on the enemy’s long sword. Some schools fix the eye on the hands. Some fix the eyes on the face, and some fix the eyes on the feet, and so on. If you fix the eyes on these places your spirit can become confused, and your strategy thwarted..... In the Way of strategy, when you have fought many times you will easily be able to appraise the speed and position of the enemy’s sword, and having mastery of the Way you will see the weight of his spirit. In strategy, fixing the eyes means gazing at the man’s heart’.  There are simple concepts being expressed here such as don’t get focused on the wrong things, use peripheral vision to avoid getting trapped by your central vision etc. There is also a more sophisticated understanding relating to the assessment of the person in front of you which will resonate with exponents who have a lot of battle experience.

If you set aside weapons for a moment, then fighting multiple opponents requires you to adjust your understanding of how vision can be used in the arts. The pursuit of full energisation requires the rapid transitioning between darkness and light as a moment of real time is experienced in darkness and then a moment of vision occurs in which to take a snapshot, and so on. I realise that fighting with a weapon requires a different approach, as a weapon creates and defines a limitation in your ability to move. When you have a weapon you simply cannot transition rapidly enough and therefore you cannot become fully energised. Of course if you are facing a skilled opponent with a sword and you are even more skilled with the same weapon then I imagine you are happy to have a sword of your own.

‘What is called the spirit of the void is where there is nothing. It is not included in man’s knowledge. Of course the void is nothingness. By knowing things that exist, you can know that which does not exist. That is the void. People in this world look at things mistakenly, and think that what they do not understand must be the void. This is not the true void. It is bewilderment..... Enact strategy broadly, correctly and openly. Then you will come to think of things in a wide sense and, taking the void as the Way, you will see the Way as void. In the void is virtue, and no evil. Wisdom has existence, principle has existence, the Way has existence, spirit is nothingness’.  As I said at the beginning - I won’t pretend that I fully understood everything that I read in The Five Rings. He had his own vision, which was his truth in the martial arts. Philosophy is an integral part of the martial arts and it expresses our truths as we believe them.

My own philosophy in the arts focuses on freedom and its relationship with survival. I realised many years ago that philosophically, life and death have to travel together, they are only separated by the thinnest of boundaries, and together you have good reason to fight for life. Even this relates to freedom – freedom from the fear of possible outcomes. I hate to think where my art would have ended up if I had somehow missed the concept of freedom. For certain I would have failed to grasp many of the concepts that can be successfully applied against multiple attackers.

The Art of War

What do the writings of Sun Tzu (and associated commentary) have to offer the average martial arts exponent?

In my formative years in the arts, a lot of my students and contemporaries were talking about The Art of War and people would ask me if I had read it. To be honest I had not even glanced at it until very recently. It’s a book about the handling of armies, stratagems of large scale warfare, etc.

One thing I admit it does have in terms of appeal – it has a brilliant title. 

Wedging

One of the keys to defending yourself against multiple attackers is freedom, and even students that are new to the martial arts can keep moving towards an exit as long as they do not get caught up resisting their opponent's actions.

When an individual struggles against one of the attackers resistance, the most common posture you see displayed is the wedge. You can think of a person in terms of being represented by an "E" where their spine is the vertical part of the "E" and the 3 horizontal lines are equal velocity lines from the arms, mid-region, and feet.

When all three velocity vectors are not maintained in alignment then your forward progression will stall and your available energy will decline. The ineffectual "E" is easily identified by a slowing of the foot work and the bending in the mid region, which indicates stalling. When the bending of the mid-region occurs, the body begins to look more like a wedge.

No matter how hard you have trained to strengthen the mid region on its own, it is still the weakest area if you bend. It is always the weakest link in the chain. If you lose mid region coordination it will weaken all other movements of the body.

In battle, the wedged person usually struggles with the opponent and stops moving altogether.  The wedging reaction in a group attack is disastrous, because your progress is slowing and so the rest of the group has gained time to focus on you. You are then easy pickings for the group.

This has implications for when you try to strike members of the group, which many exponents have never fully considered. Attempting to strike one of the attackers slows you down, which makes you more vulnerable to the rest of the groups actions. The body as the weapon is the solution to this dilemma but it requires full energisation.

Training Differently

To get improved results for your defense capability against multiple opponents you need to approach your training differently. The key to getting real improvements for your group encounter work is to ensure your weapons do not dominate your actions.

You have to reprogram your coordination so that your legwork drives your actions as this is the first step to achieving full energisation. You need to ensure your coordination and your mind does not revert to a focus on your strikes, kicks, etc. when you encounter resistance from your opponent/s.

The lower half and top half of the body have to be able to keep working effectively together under resistance and be able to transfer some of your mass effect to your opponent without locking up your body. Core training has two parts i.e. with resistance from an opponent and without resistance.

In terms of weapons you have your mass effect but you also have reflex actions and to sharpen your tools you should train the forearms and hands so that they will react when you are in real time.

The Mind and Body

Multiple attackers as compared to a single opponent can demonstrate how the mind and body coordination is different for ‘flight’ compared to ‘fight’.

A survival situation where you are running away from the danger as quickly as possible is commonly described as flight. Your legwork dominates the situation and the mind is focused on such things as keeping your balance, staying on your feet, maintaining the ability to move as quickly as possible, etc. You get a sense of it when you run down a steep hill.

Against a group attack you essentially want to imitate a ‘flight’ response and deal with obstacles using reflex behaviour that your training has made more effective. It is all about generating energy through accelerated behaviour and affecting the opponents using your mass effect. Your progression is always to the exit where safety can be found.

A battle against a single opponent is generally described as a fight but it is not the type of fight you have in a survival situation where you are acting in desperation to save your life. A typical fight is more of a socially driven encounter.

In a fight your mind switches between attack and defense. When you are in attack mode, your mind is on your weapons e.g. your hands, feet, elbows, knees etc. as well as the targets on your opponent e.g. their head, legs, etc. When you are in defense mode, your mind is your opponents weapons and on protecting the obvious targets on your own body.

One way of summarising the above is that in a fight against a single opponent your mind is on weapons, both yours and your opponents, whereas in a group attack your mind is on the exit to the situation. Against multiple attackers your mind and body coordination is focused on your accelerated system and the snapshots of where you are going.

The problem people face in a group attack is that as soon as they come up against the resistance of a group member, their mind switches to a single opponent mode where it focuses on weapons. Flight mode and the associated energisation is then lost to the individual.

What is needed is a reprogramming of the mind so that you don’t switch to behaviour that focuses on weapons whenever you encounter resistance from an opponent. This is one of the keys to mastering attacks by multiple opponents.

Free Your Mind

As they approach an opponent, many exponents are already consumed by anticipation of the fight. It is the social way of thinking - '"will I win", or "what happens if I lose"? As always, a fighter’s inner resistance is their weakest link.

If you are facing multiple opponents then you have time and energy limitations. Your mind does not have time to deal with distractions. It is important then to free your mind of the typical thoughts that consume fighters when they face a single opponent. One of the best ways to do this when facing a group is to accelerate and focus on exits.

Keeping Focused

Defending yourself against multiple opponents requires you to have a greater focus than when you are facing a single opponent. Importantly you cannot allow yourself to be distracted from the goal of your progression to safety.

You cannot indulge in actions that slow you down such that they split your intentions or split your energy. Most of these actions come from our desire to control what is going on around us. It is a hangover from our usual day to day interactions where we interact with other individuals as we try to get what we want.

If you focus on one opponent then you will lose sight of the rest of the attacking group and your survival response to get to safety becomes lost. Your intention has been split between the exit and the opponent you got stuck on.

As the attacking group becomes more dangerous, your physical actions have to be such that they don't impede your accelerated progression to an exit. A conscious defensive manoeuvre using an arm or leg action can slow you down just enough so that another attacker can get to you, and you can then find yourself fighting two or more opponents at the same time.

Making the art your own

As you progress in your journey in the arts you experience periods where you are excited, and full of enthusiasm for the progress you perceive you are making. Then you also have the periods of depression where you are not making the progress you think you should be, where things don’t work as you believe they should after all this time. It’s the peaks and troughs of the arts that everyone seems to go through, a roller coaster of emotions generated by our vision of where we should be at, verses our perception of where we are actually at.

This is of course unless you have delusions of grandeur; these people will always be on a high until someone brings them back down to earth.

At some point however you need to get into a different groove or you will experience these highs and lows until you leave the arts. What drives you to that next level in the arts where you get a sense of having achieved what you set out to accomplish? The focus on techniques and a technical approach makes it difficult to get off the roller coaster.

Energisation has a big advantage in terms of making the art your own as it builds its own momentum. Your technical training is all aimed at preparing the body to hold together under high acceleration for skills like reduction, etc. The footwork related to Longarm is focused on reduction, flight, acceleration, measuring and timing skills. The goal is to create a larger mass effect, a more efficient way of moving through opponents, with a footwork that enables you to rapidly switch between activation and loading to achieve full energisation. This will give you a focus for your art that a technical approach can never hope to match. It will also give you results and there is a tipping point where it really starts to shine.

Freedom is the philosophy of the Energy World and a part of it is freedom from the trap that nearly all martial artists fall into with the conditioned focus on technical ability. The expectation is that your technical ability should equate to a certain practical ability and when the two are not in sync in your mind then you get in a funk. In the Energy World the problem goes away as you move towards the ability to fully energise, but in the Resistance World of training you are just going to have to put up with it until you decide to go down a different path.

Full Energisation

Dealing with multiple opponents is a situation where you need something more than power, strength and technical solutions. Energy is the ingredient that is almost always missing when you watch people dealing with multiple attackers.

Defining what is meant by Full Energisation is somewhat of a challenge. It is not based on a set of techniques, it does not have a shape and it is not a technical solution. At its simplest, the following guiding principles have to be maintained at all times:

1. never get caught up fighting an opponent/s resistance,

2. always maintain freedom,

3. always maintain an accelerated system,

4. you need to fully activate,

5. always pressure the source of an opponent’s attack

6. always seek to get back into darkness and real time.

Full Energisation is about tapping into that something extra, call it vitality if you like. When you see it you will recognize it. Footwork becomes the dominant force, rapidly moving the whole body as a unit, always pressuring the opponent, and never getting caught up in their resistance.

Acceleration of the whole body does not stop during the encounter and that is why there is no technical approach when you use a Full Energisation strategy. This is quite different from what is typical in the martial arts where usually an exponent will slow to use power, strength, leverage, etc. via a technique.

Speed changes with strength and power usage i.e. as the person attempts to use more power, strength, leverage, etc. the speed of their whole body moving from one point / location to another, will slow down. Alternatively they cannot use strength and power if they wish to maintain their speed. One is occurring at the expense of the other.

For example a person might shoot their whole body forward to take the opponents legs but they then have to slow in order to grapple with their opponent and use power, strength, leverage etc. Exponents employing these strategies cannot be Fully Energized for the whole of the battle.

While strength, power, speed, leverage and technique will produce good outcomes against a single opponent, against multiple opponents the technical solutions start to fail. The greatest effect of Full Energisation comes through disrupting the opponent’s visual attention and their focus on you. This is one of the main reasons why Full Energisation is an option worth exploring, particularly for dealing with multiple opponents.

You got to have faith

For some the martial arts can be all-consuming; a constant in their life that they pursue without varying degrees of intensity over the course of a lifetime. It may be the closest that some people get to a religion, and like religion there is the expectation of reward for their dedication.

Exponents need to have some confidence in the martial art they are pursuing otherwise they would chose another system or find something else to occupy their time. Students are told to train hard and in time they will master their chosen art; they aspire to be just like their teacher. We have a social need to attach ourselves to something we see as having importance or kudos, so we like to think our instructor and our school is the best. Go down the road to the next martial arts school and their student’s have the same belief.

What I find interesting is the mind-set of the student who is still dedicated to their art after a decade or more but has not advanced to the stage where they can use their art as they believe they should be able to. They begin to question the promise that dedication would see its own rewards. They begin to wonder not only “am I good enough” but “will I ever be good enough”.

Whenever you see people in this situation, the question they always seem to ask is “how do you make it work”? In response my thoughts are ‘have they ever seen evidence that it does work’. Usually they then proceed to tell of the wondrous skills of their instructors, and that in their mind demonstrates that the potential of the art really exists but they have been unable to attain it.

Decades ago, my experience was that much of the art I was learning did not translate to battle. I remember my instructor going to a competition and seeing a guy from Asia who had a very simple strategy of a straight kick followed up by a straight punch and he took out most of the competitors, but he had obviously trained that combination so that it worked for him nine times out of ten.

The lesson was that you can get something to work if you really focus on it and make it a constant. The fancier the technique the less likely it will work in battle, especially when you are up against multiple opponents. Resistance tends to wreck the intended implementation of techniques. This however is not what people want to hear, as all those cool moves that their art has to offer is half the fun of pursuing it. The disease of the martial arts is the attraction to shapes found in techniques. It attracts a lot of people to the arts and it cons even more.

I find it interesting and annoying at the same time that my instructor essentially abandoned the art he had been taught and created something different without realising it. In the process he totally rebuilt his coordination so that everything flowed from his footwork which drove his accelerated mass. His interest in multiple attackers shaped his new art to the point where if it didn't work against a high functioning group of attackers, then it was discarded.

Unfortunately he thought he had just modified the art that he had learned, so he taught us part of his original art and part of his new art. Some enterprising young soul will hopefully reproduce his art one day, and at last there might be some decent you-tube videos on multiple attackers. Like I said, you got to have faith.

Attention and Focus

Some time ago I watched a National Geographic series called 'Test Your Brain'. One episode deals with Attention and it has some relevance to defense against multiple opponents.

Attention is what we focus on in our environment. It is limited, so we can really only focus on one thing at any given time and it is that one thing that we pay attention to in great detail. This means that most people cannot multi-task well. When you attempt to do tasks at the same time that use two different areas of your brain such as talking on a mobile phone while driving, then you will begin to perform poorly on the task you are not as engaged in, and not even realise it. This causes drivers to miss stop signs, pedestrians, red lights, etc.

Our brains are wired for us to be serial processors and we are good at switching back and forth between tasks. What this means is that your attention deactivates from one task and switches to performing the other task, and back again.

Every moment your brain is getting hit with millions of stimuli of images, sounds, smells, etc. Your brain has to decide which ones are important and process them to make them the subject of your focus. The brain filters out what it decides are distractions so we are only aware of what we notice and are unaware of what we miss.

The ‘attention filter’ can sometimes be over-ridden by the brain’s instincts in other areas. An example is a golf swing where your brain is trying to adjust the swing that your ‘muscle memory’ knows best how to perform.

If you focus on one opponent in a battle and then get hit from the side or from behind by another attacker, your brain was probably filtering out information from the world around you, making you vulnerable to the second attacker. We are not good at multi-tasking so we cannot effectively fight two people at the same time.

Whether you face a single opponent or multiple opponents, you cannot split your attention, as you can only focus on and do well, one thing at a time. Therefore you cannot worry about the opponent’s strikes and also deliver your own strategy. You can only fully energise if you focus on your own strategy and do not get involved in the opponent’s resistance as sensory input will take your mind away from its focus on freedom.

The brain normally focuses in on what counts, but Full Energisation requires you to seek darkness and so the brain has to focus in on freedom and ignore a lot of stimuli that would normally distract you.

Full energisation is achieved by your acceleration to the source of the attacker’s resistance, which drives you into real time where your perceptions turn to darkness for a moment. Darkness will limit the processing of visual stimuli, which will help stop your brain trying to react to the opponent’s actions. This allows you to keep accelerating and maintaining a highly energised state.

Getting into real time will force your brain to switch off its thinking side and you are then relying more on your reactive abilities. When you are accelerating through the attackers it is all you will have time for.

Snapshots

Against multiple opponents it is natural to want to see what is happening so that you can judge the right timing of your reactions, but the idea is flawed because the situation has changed before you get there and you cannot process information fast enough to keep up – you are always behind time. Real time means you have no time to consolidate information. Snapshots aim to find the change in content in your current internal world view.

A snap shot filters out what is important and it these ‘still moments’, which piece together a picture of the real world as you move. Instead of focusing on punches, kicks, grabs and weapons, your interest is in finding where you need to be. Snap shots in group attacks are selected for the best path ahead to find safety; they are very effective in finding the next safe zone. The survival mind takes good advantage of the fight for freedom, never letting the body stop accelerating.

The reality of Full Energisation in a group attack is that you pass through an attacker’s resistance in real time and therefore in darkness (a blank moment). It is the acceleration to the source of the attacker’s resistance that drives you into real time where your perceptions turn to darkness for a moment. It is important to realise that during acceleration it is far easier to identify attackers than the gaps between them. The world around you moves too fast when you are accelerating.

As you move through the opponent and pass the resistance, a period of light returns, and a snap shot of the surroundings is taken. The brain identifies the next safe zone for you to progress to, for another moment of safety and you accelerate to force yourself back into real time as you approach that next attacker. Your sensation of the battle becomes a series of blank moments, snapshots and accelerations.

When in darkness you are free from distractions, and when you see light you are taking snap shots. Freedom is more easily maintained when you are not caught up in distractions, so in a sense it is darkness that helps you maintain a fully energised state.

The reason you pulse between light and dark is that you always want to get back to darkness, into real time where you can handle resistance without getting entangled in it. Of course you need to see where you are going to maintain your progression to safety, and that requires a snapshot.

Full Energisation operates between the borders of minimum light required for a snapshot and darkness or real time where the senses including conscious thought are minimised. To stay in the zone you have to get to that instinctual reaction level where the battle is all about acceleration of your total body mass and a clear motivation reflecting your sense of freedom.

Stuck in the Past? Get into Real Time

What is real time and why is it important when fighting multiple opponents?

You typically only enter into real time during a life-threatening event where your fight/flight response is activated.

It’s no coincidence that ‘running for your life’ when your flight response is triggered, reduces the processing of the sensory inputs from vision, hearing, touch, etc. The logic for this is simple enough; the normal input and processing of sensory information that could distract you and slow down your headlong rush to safety is reduced. The result is that people experience a period of blankness.

In comparison, past time is where your thoughts are always lagging in relation to what is happening in the ‘now’. The more time you spend on waiting for your vision etc. to pick up information and for your brain to process that information, the more you are working in past-time. Past time is where we typically spend our time assessing the opponent's actions and making plans to defeat them.

Why are we stuck in the past? Well, we usually want the world to slow down so that we can see what is happening. We like to take control of the situation and implement our plans and strategies with confidence. The problem with measuring and thinking is that you hesitate before you act.

Hesitation is dangerous when you face a group of attackers. If you can measure your opponent, then they can measure you and the last thing you want when facing multiple opponents is for the group to be successfully measuring and targeting your progression.

When playing the part of a member of the 'attacking group' during training, you are always hoping the individual makes the mistake of wanting to battle one of the attackers. For an active group, this should be a signal to double their efforts and take the individual to ground.

As for the individual, acceleration is one of the key elements that enables you to get into real-time where you force your mind to suspend the processing of sensory information and therefore experience a moment of darkness. If you accelerate at an opponent then it is likely you will take that person into real time and darkness as well.

Taking your opponent into darkness will effectively nullify them for the rest of the encounter as you are accelerating onto the next attacker in a line of progression to an exit, and they cannot recover in time. Accelerating through opponent's rather than going around them will disrupt the rest of the group member's measuring and targeting of you.

So the key to dealing with multiple opponents is to disrupt the group's focus on you. If you can do that, then your chances of success start to improve dramatically. Real time is one of the concepts to help you achieve this.

A self-defence technique is born

The question you should ask yourself when training how to fight multiple opponents is ‘will my strategy work against an activated group of attackers’? A lot of self-defense strategies are born out of half-activated training, which means they have a high failure rate when the pressure from the group increases. Shielding is a good example of this.

I can remember a particular group attack training session in my days as a student of the arts. Someone figured out that they could use their opponents to change direction and cause a lot of disruption within the group at the same time. As they were going past the opponent they would hook a wrist or a forearm on someone’s neck while using their other hand to stabilise themselves, and move off in a direction that would spin that opponent into on-coming attackers. They did this in a way that still enabled them to move with a reasonable speed within the group. As onlookers, we thought it was fantastic to watch, what a great strategy, members of the group we going everywhere.

However, when the individual in question attempted their strategy against a group of seniors playing the part of the attackers, he got taken to the ground in seconds. We quickly realised it was delusional, and once again the technical solutions failed once the pressure from the group became high enough.

Basically, the attempts at manipulating people worked on the weaker group members but the seniors knew how to absorb people and they weren’t going to be manipulated by anyone; they had real determination and intent to stop the individual from escaping the group. It was a loss of face to allow the individual to get to safety.

The lesson we learned at the time was, just because something works for you once or twice, does not mean it is a good strategy. You need something that gives you the highest chance of success regardless of the situation, as you don’t know what kind of opposition you might have to face. As the opposition gets tougher, the fancier strategies will fail, as will your chances of getting safely out of the situation.

Some of the things you see put forward as a practical self-defence strategy will work to a degree, but that is mainly because a lot of fights are half-hearted affairs. However if the group truly activates, then expect it to quickly fall apart.

As always with group work, train safely and under the supervision of a qualified instructor

Getting to the Source of the Attack

Some exponents have a strategy for a single opponent fight where they just rush the person and give them no time to measure and time their favourite strikes, etc. Dealing with multiple attackers is a bit like this but you have to take your effort to another level. The opponent can be thought of as a bomb that can go off. If the opponent explodes into action with kicks, punches, etc. then you were too slow in your approach. Time is limited, the bomb will go off if you let it, so hesitating is a bad idea. It is best to deactivate the threat as soon as possible at the source. The real danger is the person behind the attack. The kicks, punches, grabs, etc. are the secondary problem.

You have to get to the source of the attack, right up close to the attacker in order to cut the opponent’s intentions off. In a group attack you have only a moment to achieve this. Accelerating at an opponent is no easy feat, and acceleration has to be maintained up to and beyond the encounter. Rushing into the danger zone without hesitation requires a lot of trust in your reactive process.

What will your reactive process consist of when you reach the attacker? I have no idea and neither will anyone else. Acceleration means you have only a single moment in your encounter with an opponent. You simply won’t have time to think about the opponent or what you should do to them. Your reactive process will be whatever comes out in that single moment. Some of your response will be part of your natural reflex actions and a part of it will be a result of your training.

One thing you cannot afford to do is ask yourself ‘what technique do I use’ once you get to the source of the threat. To spend time on hitting, pushing or grabbing in a group attack would be the end of your progress to safety. Any technical strategy will need a degree of stabilisation of your lower body, which translates to a decrease in acceleration, and that just gives the group the extra time they need to take you down.

The strategy of getting to the source of an attack is designed to give you a constant in your approach to each attacker. It does not give you time to worry about their kicks, strikes, grabs, etc. There is good reasoning for this approach. A survival situation does not give you the luxury to practice your interpersonal skills, or the time to try out your self-defense tricks to win the day. When it comes to survival there is not enough time to prepare solutions that take time to sort out and execute, hence you look for time savers i.e. constants.

As always with group work, train safely and under the supervision of a qualified instructor.

Where once I was lost – the Flak Zone

The Flak Zone is the zone where you are in range of your opponent’s weaponry, where you can strike them and they can strike you. Martial arts is obsessed with this zone. 

Just about every technique ever developed for the stand up fight was focused on the flak zone. There are a lot of good technical solutions that work in this zone but there is equally a lot of stuff being pedaled that doesn't work.

Fighters rush through this zone, or move in and out of it, as they attempt to measure and deliver strikes to their opponent. Unless you are going to take the fight to the ground, your thinking is likely to be trapped into focusing on the flak zone as the most important element of the fight to solve.

What happens then when you face multiple opponents?  It’s a mistake to assume that you have time to measure and assess each attacker, as that is the time the group will take you to ground and acquaint you with their footwear. In a battle against a single attacker, the flak zone is seen as a problem that you have to spend your time solving. For multiple opponents this is not the case.

You may not like to hear it but the flak zone is really the least important part of a group encounter. Your safety is found in your ability to accelerate straight through the flak to the source of the attack, and then on to the next opponent. This can only occur if you are not distracted by the ‘flak’. There is no time to prove a point.

Mirror Mirror on the Wall

I read an article the other day where someone had rated the top 10 martial arts. It made me think about which art I would put at the bottom of such a list. A particular genre of the arts popped into my head and it left me somewhat perplexed, as 25 years ago I would have rated it higher. It sparked my thinking as to why.

Whether you like it or not, there has been something of a major shift in the arts that continues to gain momentum. MMA is changing the martial arts landscape. In my time as a student of the arts a few decades ago, those exponents who had learned several different arts never integrated them to any real degree, certainly nothing like they are doing now. Back then people who had a couple of black belts from different styles were looking for the kudos that went with it but now you get the impression exponents who are multi-disciplined are much more interested in fixing weaknesses in approach.

Who cares whether MMA is really a martial art in its own right. You occasionally see claims that ‘it is mainly a sport and doesn’t really translate to the street’ etc. but you can’t help feeling that this position is hard to justify and it’s more about the TMA’s trying to stake out their turf. The thing I like about MMA is that it is forcing a shift in exponents thinking to a greater focus on getting the job done.

This seems to be having an ever-increasing effect on the traditional martial arts (TMA) systems. We are seeing martial arts schools opening up that teach a combination of arts and students of the arts that look to improve stand up and ground games. What does this mean for the TMA systems over the next few decades? That is not an easy one to predict.

Take for example one of the major TMA’s such as Karate (no, it’s not the one in my list above) where there are tens of millions of people around the world involved in some form or another. You cannot see something like Karate disappearing any time soon. Whether it’s Karate or another TMA, people’s participation in the arts is not all about fighting; for a lot of people the passion for their art plays a big part.

That said, you can be forgiven for having the impression that the reputations of the TMA’s are being squeezed, some more so than others. The problem the TMA’s have in terms of reputation relate to the whether students of a particular style are easy meat for multi-disciplined exponents. If they are, then at some point those students are going to have a crisis of confidence in their system. For instance, those TMA’s that are traditionally ‘stand-up’ in approach have an obvious weakness if someone takes them to ground to fight the battle on those terms. You see some traditional arts trying to incorporate takedown avoidance techniques in their training, and you see terms like grappling and ground fighting in their literature where it never was previously, but you wonder if these ‘patches’ will ultimately be successful.

MMA seems to be providing a reality check to the martial arts systems that have lost the focus on getting the job done.  A basic strategy of ‘ground and pound’ has the potential to pull the rug out from under a lot of martial arts and they are still struggling to come to terms with it. You are now see video of fights where people with only a basic skill level of controlling the opponent on the ground, are pounding their opponent into submission.

You read forums where students of a style expound the virtue of their art’s rapid handwork or their short powerful strikes. Then you see a post where someone asks what they will do when someone ‘shoots’ for their legs, takes them to ground and starts going to work on them. The outcry this generates is somewhat amusing, as the person asking the question was obviously trolling, but their question is rarely answered to anyone’s satisfaction.

It’s an unfortunate part of the human condition that we don’t want to hear things that conflict with what we want to believe. We don’t want to hear that the art we are invested in has failings. Of course you can never underestimate the illusions that people will hold onto for dear life, but those niggling thoughts probably remain at the back of those student’s minds.

We might dream of being great fighters but in reality we don't need to be one. It’s just our egos and it's the same with the art we chose to follow; we need to believe it is the real thing and we don't want to hear any criticism it might not be. However, that is no excuse to ignore weaknesses in approach that are more of an inconvenient truth than anything else, and which we are happier not acknowledging. Ignorance may be bliss, but there is a pointy end to the equation when reality comes calling.

I think some arts suspect they are looking relatively weaker when it comes to usefulness in battle. It makes you wonder if, in the future, the pressure is just going to keep steadily climbing for them to make their art work as the alternative may be they will start losing students to the MMA school down the road. Will weaknesses in approach need to be addressed if there is to be any hope of salvaging a styles reputation in the future? The momentum at the moment seems to be towards a multi-disciplined approach and it will be interesting to see what the martial arts landscape looks like in a decade when the numbers of these exponents will be a lot larger as MMA continues to gain traction.

Am I proposing that everyone should just take up MMA? No I’m not, as while MMA will turn out lots of good martial artists, it is ultimately a branch of the arts that is a cul-de-sac. Exponents will combine different arts but they are generally locked into a similar approach and a similar philosophy. One thing that some of the TMA’s have is the possibility that the arts can transcend the technical approach, although not without a large divergence from the original art.

‘What does all this have to do with fighting multiple attackers’, you ask. Basically it all comes back to the ability to get the job done. Does your art have any good strategies for dealing with multiple opponents or are they just hoping the students will not ask too many questions. You probably don’t want to hear that grappling, wrestling, submissions, fast handwork, short powerful strikes, etc. has little relevance to a multiple opponent attack.

The faster you move your hands the slower you move your feet. Grappling, wrestling, submissions, and similar strategies will likely result in being taken to ground by the group. Your short powerful strikes won’t do you any good when someone dive-tackles you to the ground and the rest of the group piles in. I get the same feeling of warmth when I see a good group take out an individual who thinks their techniques will work under pressure, as when I see someone shoot for the legs of a traditional martial artist and start to work them over on the ground. The lesson to beware delusions of grandeur is not pleasant but it can be an instructive one to learn.

Pressure is the great leveller in the multiple attacker arena. When you are comfortable in the group attack training environment it is a real buzz to be one of the group. You can actually watch people go internal as the pressure reaches a point where they cannot handle it. It was a real eye opener for me the first time a black belt from another system tried a group encounter where I was part of the group. He was outwardly confident and he tried to strike the closest attacker. Tried and failed, we swarmed him and I remember that I could see him going internal where he stopped seeing us, and a few seconds later he was taken to ground. We destroyed his vision that day of how he thought he could defend himself against a group.

It probably was a bit harsh for that person as he would never expect to come up against a relatively high functioning group as he did that day. It probably explains why he folded so quickly when he met the level of pressure he did from the group. It does highlight to those who want to be better at defending themselves against multiple opponents to ensure the group they train with is giving them sufficient pressure. The last thing you would want to happen is to go internal in a real situation because it was too much for you.

As always with group work, train safely and under the supervision of a qualified instructor.

MMA for kids

I was watching Dateline on TV a few weeks ago and saw a program on Cage Fighting Kids. They called it youth Pankration, probably in an attempt to smooth over some parents fears and associated brutal images whenever MMA or cage fighting is mentioned.

What struck me was the skill of these young kids and that they could perform at a reasonable level. An equivalent kid doing a traditional martial art would not be up to their capability. If they really have 3 million kids under the age of 13 taking part in some form of MMA and 30,000 MMA schools across the US, then TMA's have a big problem coming their way in the next ten years.

New appreciation for Judo

Have a look at this video of Ronda Rousey and the commentary on her strategy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqBoyekp_ZY

The first thing that impressed me was how she brings her strengths into play. She goes straight through the Flak Zone and gets head control on her opponents. This enables her to use her Judo skills and her opponents invariably end up on the ground with her on top and from what I've seen of her other videos, she seems to really like arm bars. The octagon also works in her favor by creating a barrier to help her round-up her opponent, it certainly helps prevent an opponent circling out.

Her opponents have attempted to overcome her strategy by using straight punches to try and keep her outside of grappling range but punching has the effect of slowing their footwork which makes it easier for her to round them up and complete her strategy.

You can also see that she has plenty of 'will' and she intends to get her target and is not bothered if she takes a few strikes in the process. You can see that the opponents are worried by it. It reminds me a bit of John Smith who would get his single leg takedown no matter what.

For the record I don't pretend to know anything about Judo. My only experience with it was sharing a training hall with a Judo club a few decades ago. Occasionally a few of us would sit down with some of the Judo guys and talk about what we were trying to achieve with our respective arts and have the odd friendly encounter to experience some of what was being said.

Seeing this video makes me glad that none of them ever thought much of the dragon tail footwork we trained. It was designed to teach the skill of moving rapidly and safely through the flak zone (the zone where you and your opponent are in striking distance). If they had been proficient in something like that then the Judo guys would have had it all over us.

In a way the video shows what can happen when you begin to take on a battle mindset.

Going through an Attacker (Part 2) – Flight

Flight can teach you a lot about what is required when facing multiple opponents. It will give you insights into such things as: the level of acceleration required, the benefits of no-choice training, the need to keep the body together and compact, how to create a shield to hide behind, the level of commitment required, the need to centre your attack directly at the opponent, and what types of reactions you can get when you give your opponents a sufficient mass effect.

Dealing with a group of attackers is about getting rid of distractions, which requires a 100% commitment. Flight requires you to leap at the danger with full commitment. Since your feet are not touching the ground, your commitment is total until you land. In flight you have no time for anticipation, or hesitation, or to change the speed of your advancement. You have no choice but to deal with what is coming. Some students can find it a bit disconcerting at first but it can be lots of fun to learn.

The problem to avoid when learning flight is not centering on the attacker; it is all too easy to attack the side and if you do that then you won’t affect the opponent enough. To truly activate flight you need to be aiming directly at your opponent with full acceleration. You need to produce enough anxiety in their mind about the anticipated impact that they move out of the way. Of course if they are big and skilled at absorbing energy, then you might have a problem.

In practical terms you cannot do this half-heartedly. You have to affect the opponent’s ability to measure your actions. The more speed you gain for your progression, the less time your opponent has to measure and prepare to resist you. You want them to have only a split second to decide that they cannot handle your mass effect so you are in effect forcing an instinctual response from them.

Every attacker in the group will have a different threshold to absorbing energy from your approach. For your survival in a group attack you will need a consistency of acceleration and forward energy that will exceed the toughest attacker. All you can do is give your all, accelerate your system to its maximum and ensure your energy is directed effectively to the attacker.

As always with group work, train safely and under the supervision of a qualified instructor

Going through an Attacker (Part 1) - Reduction

If you think you are going to be able to defeat all of the attackers in front of you, then you have just found the necessary ingredient to experience a world of hurt. What you should be trying to do is ensure that you don’t get overwhelmed by the group. A lot of people get lost in the futility of trying to defeat some or all of the group members and don’t give enough consideration to the possibilities that spring forth from the ability to accelerate through the group.

The ability to accelerate through multiple opponents will enable the individual to get to the exit in the shortest amount of time. When it’s done well it can shred the group’s intentions, even high functioning groups. Most people never experience what they can do when fully energised because they never move fast enough, their body cannot hold together under  resistance encountered while they are accelerating, or they want to slow down and battle it out with one of the attackers. You spend only one moment on an attacker because that is how fast you are moving, but you need a particular skill-set to stop you getting stalled on the resistance from the group.

One of the rules of fighting multiple attackers is you don’t try to go around attackers or in between two attackers as this allows the rest of the group to measure your actions more effectively. By accelerating through an opponent you become ‘invisible’ for that moment to the rest of the group. To their eyes you merge for a moment with one of their fellow attacker’s and this makes it more difficult for them to either measure your speed, track you, or anticipate your progression, especially with the limited time spent per opponent. If you try to run around people or get stuck on one attacker, you will be a clear target and your chosen direction readily identified by the rest of the attackers. By moving through attackers you also leave them in your wake as human debris that helps prevent other attackers getting you from behind.

If you attempt to strike an opponent, you do so at the expense of your acceleration. If you lose acceleration then your chances of being taken down by the group will increase. Do you think you are going to move through the attackers, taking them out one by one with strikes or something similar? To be honest I have heard it all before and the only response I have is to tell people to test it in a higher functioning group and prepare for some pain and disappointment.

In order to maintain acceleration you have to be good at moving through an opponent. One of the strategies you can develop to achieve this, is called reduction. Reduction is not meant to defeat the opponent; it is more a way to reduce the attacker’s resistance by delaying their defensive reaction and to also affect their intentions. This is a small target approach that reduces the options for the attacker to resist and find solutions. Your approaching height will be below the opponent’s chest, bending the attacker’s vision downward.

Reduction is a combination of skills and not a technique so you cannot just copy a shape. The trap for anyone trying to describe it in detail is that it’s not technical and since it takes place under accelerated movement, the exponent is in real time and ‘darkness’ so you don’t really know exactly what you did. The effect on the opponent and freedom from resistance are the key elements to focus on.

Reduction needs to be executed with the intention to accelerate fully. Any hesitation will put you in direct confrontation with resistance. To stop and fight resistance splits your attention and your survival relies on how fast you can affect not only one opponent, but all opponents in a progressive way.

The size of the effect depends on how small the target appears to the opponent and how fast you approached. The opponent is driven to a reaction unwillingly in preparation of a large impact i.e. they stiffen or “panel” their body for the anticipated impact. The opponent’s defences are now at their lowest when their body is fully panelled where the muscle systems lock up.

The panel is really the last bastion of resistance put up by the opponent. As seen in the diagram below, the opponent could be seen as a triangular panel standing on end. It is wide on the top and narrows to a point near the ground, the zone of lowest resistance.

The grey regions are representations of low resistance areas or holes in an opponent’s panel. The frontal view indicates that the lower half of the panel is an area of low resistance or a gap that allows you to move through the person in an accelerated state. The diagram also breaks the vertical plan into three levels of attack ranging from high resistance (top) to low resistance (bottom). The top of the triangle is the area of highest reactivity which produces the greatest chances of resistance.

Logically there is another zone of low resistance directly behind the opponent, so it stands to reason that you don’t want to get stuck in front of them. You need to get past the opponent in a moment of time to get to the low resistance areas. Reduction is not a half hearted process; you have to create a large effect on your opponent so that you can remain free to move forward.
 
As always with group work, train safely and under the supervision of a qualified instructor

Swarming

Not all attacks by multiple opponents are the same. Some groups are more dangerous than others. Every now and then the conditions are right for the group to swarm the individual. Sometimes this happens when the individual has copped a few knocks, gets a bit disorientated, and the rest of the group can see an easy target. It’s not always the case though; some groups just attack harder than others.

If you are serious about training multiple attacker defence then you need to have an answer for these ‘higher functioning’ groups that can swarm the individual. The only way you can train for these types of groups is to spend some time getting the ‘attacking’ group up to standard, so that they can give the individual a much more challenging training experience.

Swarming by the group will pretty well destroy any technical approach the individual has to offer. Yes, I see more than a few martial arts touting their solutions for multiple attackers but against a higher functioning group, none of it is going to work. Technique is garbage at this level and your attackers manoeuvre faster than you do and come at you from different angles simultaneously. One or two of the attackers are sure to be hanging off you, slowing you down. Some gangs are actually proficient in working together to get the outcome they desire; they have had plenty of practice.

Every art usually has some multiple attacker curriculums, but most exponents cannot even get out of a corner when the group is only mildly dangerous. The Corner Trap is an exercise that gives you a reasonable indication of whether your skills for defending against multiple people are up to scratch. It will also inform you as to whether your group of attackers needs more training. You can find more about this exercise on the following link.

http://www.endofmartialarts.com/the-corner-trap-exercise/

There is lots of fun to be had in wrecking the delusions of students of the arts who believe they can effectively deal with multiple attackers. If your training group is good enough then it’s not a matter of if you can make the individual go internal (mentally) but how long it takes you. Still, it’s all in a good cause.

As always with group work, train safely and under the supervision of a qualified instructor

Lineage and Other Bedtime Stories

A few decades ago someone told me about how the structure of his martial art came about. There were some basic techniques, strikes and drills until one of the main exponents went to Hong Kong in the 1960's, saw that the head of the style didn't have anything else much to offer, and so decided to fill out the framework of the art himself. It seems he didn't get any credit for his actions but I saw a few years ago that the style was welcomed back into the Shaolin temple after being 'lost' for the last couple of hundred years. You can trace one of the originators of this style back to the early 1900's in Hong Kong and then the monks of Shaolin start appearing in the narrative as you go back further in time, which is a red flag. It sort of indicates to me that the art might be of a similar age to Judo, which was created in the 1880's.

Just recently the same person told me about a book he read on the origins of Tae Kwon Do. The founders were a group of young Koreans who studied Japanese Karate before the start of World War II and continued to borrow from it in the 1950's. No doubt there was a bit of borrowing from other systems as well as some original stuff. The history and origins of the art were manipulated by the North and South Korean governments over the years in the name of nationalism.

I never would have guessed that Tae Kwon Do and Krav Maga are about the same age. Aikido came about in the late 1920's. By now my interest is piqued so I did a bit of reading. Most of the Chinese martial arts today may not be much older than Judo.

Shaolin temple seems to have a similar problem that the monasteries  in England in the 1500's faced. Buddhist temples controlled large agricultural tracts and were economically important in their local area, which meant they were collecting revenue and amassing assets that government thought was diluting the tax base. Economic influence also means political influence. Burn a temple out and some of the tax revenue might flow again. If you are a temple then you might want a few warrior monks to head off the local bandits and give the local government types something to consider.

It's in the 16th century (1501 to 1600), after their temple getting burnt down, that the Shaolin Temple had a bit of a reputation for pole fighting which was your basic training for the average soldier carrying a spear. The spear was the primary infantry weapon at the time. The temple is a bit of a hub for military people, other warrior monks, etc. Unarmed combat was not all that popular; it was mostly about training weapons, but there is always some form of unarmed combat training for any soldier.

Unarmed martial arts suddenly got popular between 1580 and 1640 and the area around Shaolin had a bit of a renaissance in unarmed combat arts which the monks picked up on. Shaolin was sacked in the 1640's, the temple fell into ruin and had a few monks wandering around in it for the next 100 years.

So where does the Shaolin legend probably come from? Well, in the west there was a TV show in the early 1970's called 'Kung Fu' starring David Carradine and a movie in 1977 called Shaolin Temple where I seem to remember the final fight scene going on forever. In China a young Jet Li starred in a movie called "The Shaolin Temple", which revitalised the Shaolin temple's fortunes after the hardships during the cultural revolution from 1966 to 1976. Imagine tens of thousands of kids across China running away from home to become kung fu masters at Shaolin temple, all because of a movie.

China in the early 1800's had a huge number of fighting styles, most of them being village or family affairs. Over the next 100 years they were transformed and melded into popular brands or they disappeared. Of course if you need to compete with a style that is much more popular then it doesn't hurt to have a great lineage - it's all about marketing and money making - nothing too different to modern times. Nor were they above just declaring themselves to be a particular popular style. In that case it helped to have a lost lineage story when the local school heavies came to pay a visit to see why you thought you could get a free ride on their reputation.

The creation of modern Wing Chun is probably from around the time of Judo's beginnings or a bit before. Of course the creation story starts with the burning of the Shaolin temple. Surprise, surprise. There were plenty of cheap martial arts novels floating around in the early 1900's in China, much like the cheap "dime novels' in the US. It seems that characters from these martial art novels were borrowed for the creation stories in some of the Chinese arts.

The lesson seems to be that martial arts need to continually reinvent themselves to keep attracting a sufficient market share of students that will enable them to survive. Lineage is just another part of the marketing aspect of this.

Measuring - I got my eye on you

Whether you are dealing with a single opponent or multiple opponents, they still need to measure your movements in order to get their way. When the attackers in a group want to execute a tackle or a take-down strategy, they still need good timing to be able to disrupt the individual’s stability. If the measurement and timing of the group members is incorrect, it gives the individual more of a chance to escape.

The effective use of measurement and timing is all about improving power and energy transference. Importantly, you can only time the event if you can measure it. One of the reasons you use acceleration to affect your opponent is that it affects their measuring ability, which also affects their timing.

The more you force your opponent to re-measure, the more their progress stalls.  This means you are messing with their targeting system. A strategy that does this well is reduction, where you force a change in the opponent’s vision while making your head the only viable target. Flight is another strategy that makes it difficult for the opponent to determine how fast you are coming in, allowing your mass to invade the attacker’s space with less resistance.

The harder you accelerate directly at the attacker, the more you force them to re-measure your actions, the more you affect their timing. What you cannot afford to happen is to allow the group to force you to re-measure your own actions and end up hesitating as a result.

Weapons always provide a clear example of how you can be suckered into re-measuring your actions. If one of the attackers was waving a weapon around as a part of a group attack, then what do you do (apart from wondering why you aren’t already running away as fast as you can)? You don’t have time to back off while other attackers are bearing down on your position. Going back to first principles, the attackers will use a weapon to stall your progress, to make you re-measure the situation. Weapons are displayed to grab the individual’s attention and the role of each attacker in a group is to slow your progress to make the job for other group members easier and this builds group cohesion.

The important lesson here is that you don’t wait to be distracted by attackers; just accelerate, aiming to change the attacker’s vision. The more you force them to re-measure, the more you force them into a defensive action, which hopefully gives you the time needed to escape the situation.

As always with group work, train safely and under the supervision of a qualified instructor.

How Narrow Vision Can Hold You Back in the Arts

I was a student of the arts prior to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and MMA coming on the scene. At that time you didn't have to worry about getting taken to ground and you weren't even worried by the possibility. I never even imagined a ground fighting system of any value. It is a pity in a way as it would have focused me more on things that would have improved my martial arts no end.

The system I studied didn't have takedown defences as such, at least there were no techniques. It did however have some good strategies for avoiding getting taken to ground, although I think these were modifications added in by my instructor because I don't see them anywhere now. A low, fast moving footwork that produced a significant mass effect, in combination with tenets of protecting the waist and non grab seemed to stop you from being dive tackled in group attack training. If I really had to worry about the current generation of fighters though, then I probably would have got closer to the Energy World solutions that my instructor had developed (but hadn't articulated at that time.)

I'd like to think that I would have avoided taking the obvious path of incorporating a few takedown techniques and learning a bit of ground fighting in the hope it would help me get to my feet again. When you look at MMA they seem to be using the cage a lot of the time to try and prevent takedowns but a lot of the matches I see still end up on the ground a large percentage of the time. I cannot see anything to indicate that an aggressive opponent can't take you to ground if they are serious about it, especially if you are relying on technical approaches to prevent it.

Part of the commentary I see in the ongoing drama of MMA verses TMA is the idea that because someone participates in and focuses on competition then they have a lack of orientation towards self defence. Having such a narrow vision of other fighters is not going to push TMA exponents in the direction they need to go. It is a fabulous delusion to think that an MMA exponent is forever constrained to operating by the competition rules of the ring. I'm pretty sure they are like everyone else and can fight dirty if they want to, but it obviously just gets you disqualified in an actual competition. Certainly if you are spruiking self defence then you shouldn't demean MMA in one breath and then demonstrate something likely to fail as a solution in the next.

Self defence is a poor driver in any case when you are facing multiple opponents. Some arts talk about survival but that is not a real driver, it's more a desired outcome. Freedom taken to an extreme is the best driver that I have come across for group attack. People who understand this basic philosophy know they cannot allow themselves to be grabbed, or go to ground, and it starts to broaden your thinking as to how you have to move. Accelerating your whole system and creating a mass effect seemed so obvious once I got my mind around freedom. After a while you look back at the technical solutions you used to rely upon and wonder how you could be so narrow of vision.

Rolling Rolling Rolling

Sometimes our impression of a particular martial art can be skewed, particularly when we are unfamiliar with it. When I first saw Brazilian Jiu Jitsu it reminded me of a boa constrictor going to work. Now that I think back to it, the Gracie in question knew that he owned his opponents once he got them to the ground and he had no time limits that he had to worry about. This meant he could take his time and not take too many risks.

Yet when I see practitioners of BJJ who have an aggressive approach, I'm amazed at how fast they transition. I realised my earlier impressions were quite limited in scope and I also wondered if the same applied to some of the commentators on self defence.

It all comes back to time. Some of the TMA exponents believe that they are going to pull off elimination moves like eye gouges, strikes to the throat, neck, etc. before they get wrapped up and choked unconscious or get a limb extended in a direction it is not meant to go. I remember going through a brief phase of considering elimination techniques before I finally grasped the issue of limited time. In battle you never have the time you imagined you would, especially when you have to defend against multiple opponents.

I wonder how many other students of the arts have the same misconception in regards to the time available to you, as it has a big impact on your ideas. Training is usually done at a speed where the exercise works, that is, at a pace where it doesn't break down. Demonstrations of techniques are usually static, so even if the handwork is fast, the overall motion of the system is slow.

We create solutions for battle in an environment where everything is slowed down for everyone to see what is happening. When you add a lack of resistance into the equation then you get a recipe for creating delusional garbage. It doesn't help the process that people love the movements and shapes of their martial art as much as anything else it has to offer.

It also explains why a lot of technical solutions start to fail when they meet the pressure and resistance of battle. They weren't really designed for it in the first place. Strategies have to be pressure tested to ensure they will hold up. You have to go beyond sparring and drills to achieve this. A lot of TMA exponents unfortunately get suckered into the belief that 'it will be alright on the night'. Like being fascinated by the movements in the arts, people also like to think they are a little bit dangerous and they don't want reality interfering with that vision.

Battle always looks scrappy because of that pesky resistance from your opponent interfering with your plans and movements, sometimes to the point where any particular martial art is hard to recognise. It's not a coincidence that simpler solutions are more likely to work - it's all you usually have time for. So forget about the illusions of elimination concepts as they are a trap; pressure will likely deny you time and opportunity, especially for multiple attackers. Self defence is sometimes hijacked in the arts by the practitioners pushing the idea of being deadly. The more you think in battle, the more you are wasting time, and aggressive opponents will make you pay for those types of lapses.

Time and pressure are key elements in battle and against multiple attackers they are vital. The time is not available for using the opponent as a shield or lining attackers up. Time and pressure are generally your enemy if you are static. The more accelerated the movement of your whole system, the more time and pressure work in your favour to dismantle the group.

As always with group work, train safely and under the supervision of a qualified instructor

You’re the expert - solve my problems

A few years ago I was talking to someone from a TMA school who told me that his instructors basically ignored the possibility of getting taken to ground. The first rule of takedown defence was they don't talk about getting taken to ground. To counter this point of weakness they fill the students heads with ideas of lethal strikes - yes, keep training and one day all this deadly knowledge will be yours grasshopper.

This got me thinking about how sometimes instructors of all levels can create poor solutions for their students. It can be a difficult thing to teach martial arts. You are in front of students who are willing to give you a fair degree of respect for your knowledge and they want someone to solve the problems they are experiencing. As the instructor you start to believe that you can solve every problem put in front of you, a delusion in its own right. It's a trap that most instructors have fallen into at one time or another. Basically you are put on the spot and feel obliged to come up with an answer, after all, you are the expert.

How do instructors get caught out? Simple really, the student gives you a very particular scenario which focuses you on a single issue. Take for example the issue mentioned above of getting taken to ground. If you train a martial art that does not consider this problem in the context of an opponent who is skilled in submission grappling, then you will not have extensively trained any solutions. Your instructors aren't trained to handle the problem so what sort of answers will they give you? The answer is, they will make something up that probably won't work.

Instructors are far more susceptible to doing this than you might think. Some of the error on the instructors part is allowing themselves to be narrowly focused on a particular scenario and then trying to come up with a technical solution to beat the problem put forward. Everything is performed in slow motion with students acting the part of willing dummies, so the flaws are not obvious to all and sundry and it doesn't fall apart on the spot. I have seen someone get trapped by this process for more than six months and everything created was completely impractical.

As I said, anyone can fall into the trap. Have a look at this link to a you-tube video of a famous Wing Chun master, titled "William Cheung against grappling" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G-occarX0w  I think he got caught out exactly as I have described above and it's probably not something he would have ever considered doing in battle. The most balanced comment for the video was as follows: "I expect most people who understand anything about mma or wrestling/jiu-jitsu know this is a poor defense. Mr Cheung has too much ego and not enough knowledge of take down defense...and embarrasses himself a bit here. Doesn't make him a bad kung-fu guy but stick with what you know."

Multiple attacker training can be a great help in orientating exponents to avoid the creation of solutions that don't work. You just need to ensure the group of 'attackers' is up to scratch as they will ensure your testing ground is appropriate and any flaws in your strategy are immediately apparent.

Testing

Did you know that MMA is a sport and has no value for self defence on the street? If you are a traditional martial artist (TMA) then keep repeating this mantra to yourself, as maintaining this fiction will help you feel better about your art for a bit longer. I love the logic of it all. MMA has wrestling, boxing, Muay Thai, BJJ, and a few other martial arts but it's a sport with no street value. Krav Maga was put together by a guy with boxing and wrestling skills and bits of other systems were added over time with the odd original technique or two and it is heavily marketed as a self defence for the street.

The TMA's that are desperate to differentiate themselves from MMA always talk about the sport verses the street. They forget one tiny little detail and that is the martial arts world is filled with garbage. You need to test your strategies and your skills to ensure you aren't being delusional.

You might sneer at competition but TMA's got right into competition a few decades ago and the rules made it a pretty poor spectator experience. The issue for them now is that MMA does it so much better. These cross trainers have built themselves a testing ground where they regularly see if their skills are any good. It might not be the greatest testing ground ever devised but it is one never-the-less. A lot of TMA's on the other hand are rarely going outside of their individual clubs. I saw someone in a blog describe it as 'inbreeding grounds' where they train against the same people doing similar things.

You need a testing environment to see if you really have the skills that can handle the reality of a serious battle with a serious opponent; something you cannot fake. You need something that will get rid of any illusions you are holding onto.

MMA has come up with their version of a testing ground where it is hard to fake the outcome. Sparring in a TMA environment will produce a fake outcome almost all the time. So which system is training for reality?

Another test that cannot be easily faked is multiple attacker training particularly when the group is half decent. You either get taken down or you make it to safety. Dealing with multiple attackers is another area where TMA is desperate to point out their advantages over MMA. They should be careful about making any claims to greatness in the area, as from what I have seen they would not enjoy going up against a decent group.