Core Training

The main weakness for many exponents in the martial arts when facing multiple opponents is their body cannot hold together under acceleration, particularly when they encounter the resistance forces from members of the group. The result is they get stalled on the first opponent and this gives the rest of the group time to take them down.

You have to be able to keep the body together and acting as one unit, if you are going to be able to focus the energy generated by your bursts of acceleration. When you are in contact with an opponent you cannot split your energy.

The core or mid-region is an area that needs the correct kind of training. People train their core with exercises such as push ups, sit ups, yoga, pilates, etc. You need to distinguish however between training to strengthen your core and training to make a 'working core' that can function under accelerated movement.

A working core will ensure better coordination between the torso and the legs. This will enable you to develop better strategies for dealing with multiple attackers.

If you meet the Buddha, kill him

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. The Tao that cannot be named is not the eternal Tao. Whatever your concept of the Buddha or of the real Tao is, you can be assured that it is an image you need to kill, so keep practicing and move on.

You can apply the same principle to your martial arts. In a fight against multiple opponents, movies give students an idealized image of perfection. However, when the student tries their skills out against a group in the training hall, they can barely get past the first opponent. The solution for many instructors is to ensure the training is highly controlled so that students get a technical answer that somewhat lessens their fear of a group attack, but is never tested.

Many students are happy enough to scratch the itch of what to do against multiple attackers and put it safely back in the 'too hard' basket. Others practice the drills their system assures them will translate into battle.

I say 'if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him'. A higher functioning group will test whether your idealized solutions will actually work or not. My guess is that they won't.

The Resistance World

It’s what we do socially that entangles us in a world of barriers and resistance. This has shaped and developed traditional martial arts and has some major drawbacks when contemplating defense against multiple attackers. I think of it as the Resistance World and it is our personal struggle with resistance that defines how we approach our martial arts. The traditional methodologies of strikes, wrestling and ground fighting have a focus on either winning against or manipulating the presenting resistance, and while this may work against a single opponent, it lacks effectiveness when facing a group attack.

Multiple opponents require something extra, something that can be found when you can achieve full energisation of your system. This is similar in nature to a survival response; it’s where you fully energise and give everything you have for a few moments, with the end goal of getting rid of resistance and achieving safety.

The Energy World framework was developed to take an opponent through the complexities of a group attack. The development of these concepts was a way to understand what you have to do in a time strapped environment when facing a group attack. Time cannot be wasted, as time can either be your asset, or your enemy. A group of attackers can be a life and death affair; there is no time to indulge in endless technical solutions.

There is a free ebook called "Martial Arts against Multiple Opponents" that can be found on the web if you want to read more.

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.