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.