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.