Boxing and aikido

Nathan at TDA Training has a lot of good info on boxing, including articles on boxing for self-defense, boxing combinations, and such… One of his more popular articles describes 3 C’s of boxing defense and 3 C’s of boxing offense – good rules of thumb that make things a lot better better during sparring. In this article, Nathan says that for defense, you should Circle, Cover, and Counter and that for offense, you should Close, Cover, and Clear. Read his article for details.

I’d say this is all mighty good advice but just as a thought exercise what if we change a thing or two …

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• The line between offense and defense is blurry at best most times, so, what if we combined the two groups into one?


• Cover appears twice. Maybe it is twice as important, but what if we replaced one Cover with a Clinch.

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...all of a sudden it becomes a general strategy that looks like this:

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• Cover – Keep your hands up between you and the opponent. Try to keep your hands on the plane between your centerline and his. Controlling the center of the conflict is extremely valuable.


• Circle – Get slippery. Evade, avoid, brush-off, refuse to engage, disengage.


• Close – If the opponent is putting enough energy into the thing to confound your avoidance strategy, close the gap as safely, quickly, and efficiently as possible and…


• Clinch – either in the standard head-elbow or side-bearhug or just place your hands on top of his hands or forearms to suppress his punches and keep him offbalance. (You sure wouldn't want to clinch much or for long in a situation like that pictured above!)


• Counter – bust him if/when you get a chance, and…


• Clear – get out of there!

Wow! All of a sudden Nathan’s boxing strategy is the same as our aikido self-defense strategy. Cool. Whoda thunk that boxing and aikido have that much in common?

More on aiki strategy

Aikido with Amanda, Robbie B, and Kel

• ROM, ukemi


• tegatana emphasizing balls of feet, tsugiashi, recovery steps


• hanasu #1-2 emphasizing getting out of the way, turning to face the attacker, putting your hands up, and getting behind him


• Chain #2, including kotetaoshi, maeotoshi, and gyakugamaeate or gedanate.

Today I really tried to emphasize the stuff I've been trying to explain here on the blog for a couple of weeks here and here and here and again, here - the difference between the aikido and jujitsu and karate strategies.

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While a practitioner of any of these arts may certainly choose to use any of these strategies, the three arts characteristically make use of common techniques in different ways. They don't necessarily have to - but they usually do things this way. Karate sets up a strong position from which to preempt or counterattack. Jujitsu flows until a position of superior leverage is attained, then sets up a strong position and attempts to apply superior leverage to defeat the opponent. Aikido is a kind of jujitsu applied with a different mindset. The aiki guy evades, flows, setting up a relationship of superior position and leverage, but then tends to hold that power in reserve in an attempt to keep evading and blending.

Aiki practice and a cool knife video

Aikido with Rob and Kel

• tegatana with emphasis on the goofy-foot pivots and turns in the second half of the exercise
• hanasu with emphasis on synchronization
• chain #1

We talked about aikido having about four major failsafes - strategies that you fall back on when something is not working. They include:

• disengage and move away
• move behind uke
• hit uke in the face
• synchronize with uke to limit his potential

Rob is having some cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile his knife-based knowledge (which is quite good and quite aiki - but just a different training methodology) with our aikido. He called it comparing apples to oranges. I called it getting stuck on the warmups to the point you never make progress. I don't know if we resolved it but I think it might be better. I don't think he isn't buyng into the aikido, but that he is having trouble reconciling how the two sysems seem to build up to the same thing through different paths.

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We also talked about an interesting knife method that seems pretty viable and pretty aiki-like to me. (Watch out for some foul language on the film.) Rob had some commentary and potential problems with it. I think what I see there is pretty interesting because this guy talks all the same principles that we do in aikido - i.e. don't fight with the guy, disengage and run, control his balance and you control his potential, etc... I don't know if this is the 'best' knife system - but it sure is interesting.

My Take on Colin's 'My Tekki...'

I hate to rub it in, but y’all missed out! A while back Colin Wee of the Traditional Taekwando Blog offered his readers a free copy of his kata DVD, “My Tekki On It.” (Here's the 1-minute teaser trailer) Unfortunately for y’all but fortunately for me, I was the only one who responded, so I got the free DVD and I have to say - it is outstanding.

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On his DVD, he shows a wide assortment of bunkai for Tekki, illustrating how this single kata could, as Choki Motobu put it, be an entire self-defense system. Tekki has always been my favorite of the Karate kata because of the variety of ultra-practical self-defense application – but what Colin illustrates on this DVD is the fact that Tekki by itself could be the core of an extremely good karate-do or jujitsu system.

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I enjoyed all of Colin’s applications that he demonstrated and he only scratched the surface of the potential of Tekki, but I also wanted to comment that I see the practice of Tekki perhaps a little bit differently than Colin illustrates on his DVD. I do not really see Tekki as a catalog of dozens of situational applications to specific attacks, but rather as a small set of the most common, most useful general-purpose motions for close-fighting. Look at the motions in Tekki:

• Lateral stepping with strong rotational hip motions
• An open-handed shuto, back-knuckle, or eye-flick
• A horizontal elbow smash
• A couple of conservative, low, snappy kicking motions
• Two or three sets of two-handed push-pull motions that can be applied in many ways

That’s it. You repeat those motions on both sides and you’re done with the exercise - but this handful of motions and skills are infinitely applicable to close-fighting and grappling situations. Personally, I don’t find it really helpful to try to visualize a specific application for each move during regular practice, because Tekki is a very general thing – the building blocks of in-fighting strategy. For instance.

• When overwhelmed or waylaid, lateral stepping and the stepping-in-front motion is the basis of most of the useful evasions and body displacements possible.
• The open-handed eye flick is a great distracter, separator, or delaying measure, as well as having the potential to end the fight right away.
• The elbow smash is the most powerful upper body infighting strike there is and the same motion is applicable as a block or a lock too.
• The kicking motions can decimate opponents’ legs or set up great off-balances making the rest of the grappling stuff work even better.

Anyway, you get the point. In my opinion you could study Tekki in a couple of productive ways.

• Dissect hundreds of specific applications out of it and practice them as bunkai.
• Practice the kata as a motor control exercise to improve body coordination in this handful of general motions and then use one-steps and randori to creatively look for application.

Both practice modes are probably good. Both may be necessary, but I lean toward the second training method. That way you only have to learn a handful of things and then you work in an “aliveness” type environment on creating application. But enough of what I think. Well, nearly enough…

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I think Tekki is awesome, and I think Colin’s DVD demo of Tekki bunkai is fantastic, and I think if you hop over to his blog and ask him nicely you might be able to get him to re-run his original offer, or at worst, he’ll probably only charge you a tiny fee for such a great demonstration DVD.

Intelligence, instinct, and efficiency

I have written in previous articles about the necessity of making use of reflex, instinct, and natural motion in self defense. The idea is that you have to be able to act effectively and decisively within the amount of time that the opponent needs to observe, orient, decide, and act (the OODA loop). The common approach to achieving this in martial arts is to build upon defensive instincts or low-level generalized habituated responses. But on the other hand, Chris Marshall recently noted the need for a higher-level of intelligence in conflicts and less animal instinct. With our recent interest in more creative, perhaps non-violent resolution of conflict, it seems like Chris’ call for a more highly evolved intelligence in combat may be a good thing.
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This brings up the pragmatic question, how is it possible to develop greater intelligence in combat but still stay within the attacker’s OODA loop? What exactly do you have to do to get the faster intelligence that Chris says we need? Well, really we can’t. From my understanding of the neuromuscular machine I don’t really think that you can make the brain/spine/muscle machine work faster than it already does. There is hardwired into us about a ¾ second delay (if not more) in the OODA loop.
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But we can make it SEEM like we are speeding up the higher brain functions by making ourselves a little more efficient in our motions and strategies.
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Example: Assuming that you see the attacker coming when they are at least outside of touching distance (about 3 feet), if the attacker has to move 3 feet to hit you and you only have to move 18 inches to evade him, then you are effectively about twice as fast as him (plus or minus a negligible amount). A speed differential of 2X is huge! This effectively gives the defender a really large reserve capacity to do things to help the situation. What can you do with this spare capacity? Wait longer to act, move slower and more precisely, watch for more precise timing windows, etc… Think - use your best weapon – your mind! You can use this reserve potential to act on a level higher than instinct.
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But – in order to achieve this reserve potential you have to diligently practice and you have to be ruthless in your self-evaluation of the efficiency of your own motion. Choose the things that happen most often during a conflict (e.g. footwork) and practice them relentlessly, looking for minute improvements in efficiency. Are there places in your footwork when you have to lean one way to move another way? Do you sometimes find that you have to shift a foot before you can move the direction you need to? Are you bending your knees (i.e. loading up some energy) so that you can jump out of the way fast? Do you take such large steps that your center falls and rises more than you can take up in the bend of your knees?
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Little things like this eat up your spare reserve of potential for intelligent action, leaving you at the mercy of instinct or habituated response, which is better than nothing, but still not all that you can be.

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Check out the following video of Gozo Shioda doing amazing things. Look how late he waits to move and what small motions he makes. This is what I'm talking about. Efficiency in motion leads to a great reserve that one can use to great effect.

SMART failure

So, we've been talking about SMART goals. What do we do about goals that you fail to make?

Failing to make a goal is frustrating and can be discouraging but having a strategy to deal with setbacks gives hope. If you have a strategy then you have a systematic way of making your situation better. What if we use the SMART goal, itself, as a strategy for dealing with set-backs.

When you miss your goal, try to figure out if your original goal was lacking in one or more of the SMART goal qualities.

• Could your goal have been more specific? Did you get into trouble because you didn’t define what you wanted to do specifically enough? Did you have trouble staying motivated because the goal was someone else’s and not yours?
• Was your goal measurable? If not then there’s no way to know if you made it or not. Pick some variable that you want to change and operationalize it – that is, write down how you plan to increase or decrease the variable (how you will operate on it) and how you will measure it.
• Was your goal challenging-but-attainable or was it simply too large a leap?
• Was your goal based in reality or in fantasy?
• Was your goal properly time-bound? If your goal was too long-term then you might try setting goals to make smaller changes in your operational variable over a shorter time period. If your goal was open-ended then go ahead and set yourself a finish line in time.

Re-set a SMARTer goal, and go again!
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Don't forget the Call for Submissions for Carnival #5. The theme for this month is related to non-violent resolution of conflict.

Making specific goals helps you 'know thyself'

I wrote about SMART goals a while back. Good goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound. What does it mean for a goal to be specific? It does not simply mean precisely stated and detailed, but it also means that the goal must be specific to you and your motivations – not someone else’s goal.

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Ask yourself, “Why do I want to achieve this?”

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Then ask yourself, “Why does that matter to me?”

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Then ask yourself, “So what?”

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Keep asking “why” or “so what,” drilling down into your motivations for your goals. When you get to the point that you can’t answer “why” or “so what” anymore because you just stammer around and can only come up with something like, “well… just because…” you have dug as deep as possible into your motivations. You are working at the level of worldview or presuppositions about how the world works. To know thy presuppositions is to know thyself. Take the following dialog as an example...

Socrates: What do you want to accomplish this year, dear friend Ursus?

Ursus: I want to get better at judo.

Socrates: What do you mean, “better?”

Ursus: Well, I want to get better at newaza.

Socrates: Why?

Ursus: Because Rhadi told me that more and more judo guys are studying BJJ to get better ground game.

Socrates: So what?

Ursus: So I want to be able to use Rhadi’s strategies that he taught me to take matches to the ground and win.

Socrates: Why?

Ursus: Because I want to win.

Socrates: Why?

Ursus: Because that makes me the best.

Socrates: So what?

Ursus: So I want to be a winner.

Socrates: Why?

Ursus: Well… because... I just like to win. I think it's fun.

Socrates: Well, it sounds like you know yourself, Ursus. You know, some Chinese guy I met at a philosophy convention told me “know thyself and know thy enemy and you won’t be defeated in a thousand battles,” or something like that…

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Don't forget the Call for Submissions for Carnival #5. The theme for this month is related to non-violent resolution of conflict.

Irresistible aiki

“Aikido is the principle of non-resistance. Because it is non-resistant, it is victorious from the beginning. Those with evil intentions or contentious thoughts are instantly vanquished. Aikido is invincible because it contends with nothing.”

The above quote from Ueshiba, like a lot of what he said, sounds like a lot of mystical woo-woo psychobabble nonsense. But I think a lot of what he was probably talking about is natural and rational - it's just that he spoke in a strange manner.

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A while back I talked about SWOT. Strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat only exist within the context of an objective. If tori does not have the objective of exerting his will upon uke, if tori does not want to execute his plans upon uke, then tori has no weakness relative to uke and uke presents no threat to tori. Tori has become irresistible because he has no plan of attack. You cannot resist something that is not occurring.

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But you have to have at least minimal objectives – you know that tori must remain alive and intact. That counts as an objective. In another recent article I talked about SMART goals and I mentioned that if you define your goals properly then you gain a lot of slack in how you execute your techniques. Specific goals (like “I will now do shihonage to make him fall just like this”) get tori into trouble. Broad, general goals (like “avoid, evade, do not engage, roll the ball, brushoff, disengage”), also called strategies, keep tori viable.

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Tori starts to get into trouble when he begins planning tactics more than about one moderate, conservative walking step in advance. Everything that happens more than about one step in the future has to be handled strategically - not tactically or technically.

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Ueshiba also said, "Free of weakness ignore the sharp attacks of your enemies: Step in and act!"

Resolution and the business of jiu-jitsu

To carry the metaphor from my previous post a touch further, selling big, heavy monitors for years actually created an increased demand for flat panels. Companies got to sell you two monitors – a big one and then a couple of years later, a flat panel. If they’d sold you a flat panel monitor first, you’d never buy the bigger, heavier monitor.

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In the same way, increased resolution of martial arts techniques gives folks something to teach to prolong the teacher-student relationship and it creates a scan-time problem for the students, requiring additional teaching on strategy to be able to solve that scan time problem. Increased resolution is good business in more than one way.

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At what point (number of techniques) does high resolution balance with minimal scan time. Kano’s Kodokan syllabus is an interesting example of this. There are 40 fundamental throws, several more habukaretawaza (techniques preserved from older syllabi), about 20 more shinmeishonowaza (new techniques like the leg-picks) for a total of around 70 throws. So, Judo has pretty high resolution in standing clinch work, takedowns, and throws.

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But look at the Kodokan ground syllabus. There are only a handful of named techniques. The katamenokata contains five holds, five chokes, and five jointlocks for a total of fifteen named techniques and it doesn’t really leave too many of the named things in judo. So, judo groundwork really has relatively low resolution. If you look at BJJ or amateur wrestling, these have much, much, much higher technical resolution than judo. These guys named and studied a lot more of the motions that occur in ground fighting.

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Does this mean that BJJ has a “more highly developed ground game?” (BTW, I’ve heard that phrase from so many sources so many times lately that I’ve started wondering where it originated. Who was the first guy to characterize BJJ as a “more highly developed ground game” than judo?)

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I’m not sure if BJJ is more highly developed or just differently developed. Judo has been demonstrated over the course of more than 100 years to have sufficient resolution on the ground to handle a great variety of ground situations. Judo has had tremendous staying-power despite fairly low resolution on the ground. Take a hi-res BJJ guy and put him against a low-res judo guy in a tourney with judo rules and the outcome will be a toss-up. Match the same two in a JJ tourney where increased resolution (leglocks, points system, greater variety of submissions, etc…) plays a role and the hi-res guy might have an advantage but the advantage of resolution might be offset by the improved scan time of the low-res guy.

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Funny thing, Kano reduced the resolution of jiujitsu when he created judo, but the early judo guys did exceptionally well against jiujitsu guys in competitions using jiujitsu rules. I have heard, though, that the Kodokan guys got their clocks cleaned by one particular school of grapplers (Fusen, maybe?) prompting Kodokan to implement a more diverse ground syllabus.

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Does this mean that I think that judo guys can’t learn anything from rolling with BJJ guys or vice versa? NO. Absolutely not. I do, however, think that BJJ and judo are just different perspectives on the same thing. Playing with someone who approaches the problem differently than you do can be extremely educational. I sure wish I had a couple of good BJJ guys around me to roll with and to teach me a few things.

High-resolution jiu-jitsu and low-resolution judo

Martial arts randori or shiai or sparring is to a large degree a pattern recognition problem. You have to find the right opportunity to apply the tactics and techniques that your strategies and principles suggest will help your situation. This is the Observe-Orient-Decide part of the OODA loop - finding the pattern in the chaos of combat.

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Techniques are just named reference positions, labels that are placed on commonly-occurring motions just to have a shorthand way of talking about that type of motion or situation. Part of the pattern recognition problem involves the number of techniques in the system from which you have to choose, the number of categories you have to recognize.

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This is similar to the problem of resolution in a computer monitor. The greater the resolution, the greater the scan time required to keep all those pixels refreshed and lit up. In the olden days (10 years ago or so) this problem was solved by moving the gun farther back from the inside of the screen so that shorter gun motions described a wider arc on the screen. The problem was this led to much larger (deeper, heavier) monitors. It took a while to develop the technology to make fast, hi-res, flat panels.

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In the same way, you can increase the resolution of your martial art by labelling more and more of the motions that you find in randori/sparring/shiai. For example, the escape from the mount (tateshiho) in judo or BJJ. If you do some randori for a while you can probably come up with a dozen or more decent ways to get out of tateshiho. Keep doing randori and each of those dozen will recur at least once. So there you have it – recurring motion! Let’s name it and call it a technique and teach it as part of a high-resolution syllabus. Problem is, it takes time to learn a technique and it takes time to scan thru those techniques during a fight to choose the right one. Thus leading to a larger (deeper, heavier) jiujitsu.

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What you need in your martial arts system is sufficiently high resolution with minimal scan time. Technical resolution has to be great enough to solve many of the likely problems you will encounter but it needs to be small enough to minimize scan time. Scan time has to be minimized and your system has to be relatively light so that it is not too hard to pick up (to teach and learn).

Strategy and tactics in the OODA loop

Are you one of the many folks who are at least a little bit confused about the difference between strategy and tactics? Well, the OODA loop provides a pretty good framework to put these issues into perspective.
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First a review of OODA: OODA stands for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act. The idea is that in order to do some action, you basically have to observe your conditions, orient yourself to your situation, decide how to act, then act. The orientation and the decision typically take most people the most time but every so often you come across a martial artist who seems to be able to process through this OODA loop much faster than others. How do they do it?

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They do it through Strategy. Strategy is a broad, general, big-picture plan of how to behave in a conflict in order to achieve a goal. Great martial artists are able to strategically shift some part of their orientation and decision time so that their general behaviors are pre-programmed and tied to specific observations. For instance, in aikido we spend much of our time training and refining a reflex to step off the line of attack anytime anyone passes within arm’s reach.

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Strategy takes place before the OODA loop starts in order to reduce Orientation and Decision time.

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Tactics take place within the OODA loop. The actions that you take based on oriented decisions are tactical.

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You have to have tactics, but tactical action is limited. When your situation becomes unique or chaotic then you are unable to act tactically and stay inside your opponent’s OODA loop. You have to start thinking and working strategically.

A short primer on the Art of Strategy

It's easy sometimes to talk about what is the difference between various martial arts. But what they all seem to have in common is that each one is a peculiar model of a subset of the Art of Strategy. This is the nearly-mystic field of study epitomized by Sun Tzu's Art of War and Musashi's Five Rings, as well as some modern texts like Greene's 48 Laws of Power. Most any martial art you can think of is really just a set of concrete examples of some subset of the Art of Strategy. A very good text that makes all this strategic talk more concrete in the context of martial arts is Morgan's Living the Martial Way.

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The following are some concepts that are useful to define and understand if you want to understand the Art of Strategy or whatever subset thereof that your particular martial art represents. I'm planning on talking some more in some upcoming posts on some topics surrounding these concepts.

• Objective - your goal or desired end result. This may be anything ranging from destruction of the enemy to subjugation and control to simple self-preservation.
• Doctrine (A.K.A. presuppositions, assumptions, worldview) – how you believe the world works. The way you believe things work affects your rational choice of strategy.
• Strategy – (A.K.A. grand tactics) broad, general, or long-term goals or action plans that support your objectives based on your doctrine.
• Principles – rules of thumb that govern which tactics are chosen to implement strategy.
• Tactics – what you do in the short term to move toward your strategy.
• Techniques – named models or examples of commonly-occurring tactical movements.
• Effectiveness (A.K.A. proficiency) – Your ability to use your techniques, tactics, and strategies to create or tend toward your objective. Effectiveness is typically an objective consideration of whether you do or do not achieve your objective.
• Efficiency - your ability to effect your objective with minimal expenditure of some chosen resources. Efficiency is often a subjective consideration.

Gaze angle in multiple attacker randori

A few weekends ago I taught a seminar at Starkville and we talked about and worked on the importance of metsuke (proper gaze control). We demonstrated and gave some exercises to work on how to slow down the speed of the conflict by keeping the gaze angle constant on a fixed place on uke. In order to be able to do this when uke is facing away from us and in order to be ale to get that “far mountain gaze,” I told tori to always look through the center of mass of uke’s head, as if burning a hole with laser-vision. (Bet you didn't know that turkeys were masters of metsuke, but anyway...)

Chops made the observation that this change in perceptual speed is likely part of why multiple opponent randori is so fatiguing. We’re forced to switch gaze angle from one attacker to the next to keep track of them. Good catch, Chops. Sure enough, we do tend to screw ourselves up and wear ourselves out by switching back and forth from one uke to the next. I’ve been thinking about how to minimize or at least reduce these gaze shifts.
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Consider this article from a while back about tenkan ura forms (turning backward movement like in most of nijusan) giving us a wider view of what is going on around us before we commit to smearing uke. What if we can make use of this to reduce shifts in perspective. Let’s try this…

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Everybody in class gets an uke and finds a place on the mat. Uke stands still while tori fixes his gaze on uke and then walks around uke outside ma-ai keeping eyes burning right through the center of uke’s head. Pay attention to what you can see in your peripheral vision without ever changing gaze angle. Now do some techniques from nijusan keeping your eyes focused on the center of his head but attending to what you can see in your peripheral vision. Now add a second uke at walking speed and see if you are able to keep track of the uke you are not dealing with by making these tenkan ura motions.

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I think you will find that your peripheral vision is actually enhanced by this strategy. You see, peripheral vision only picks up motion – not shape. So a relatively motionless uke in your peripheral vision would be invisible to you. But by turning in a circle with eyes fixed on a point, we’re moving our field of vision without ever changing gaze angle, thus making everything in our peripheral vision move with respect to us. So we can see the second uke even better when we are turning backward.

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Try that out, Chops (and everyone else), and let me know how your mileage varies.

Attention Martial Arts Bloggers

SWOT yo’ Blog

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Chris at Martial Development recently challenged us to examine ourselves and confess to a handful of personal weaknesses as a personal development-type thing. I think this is a great idea and something that I occasionally do (though I'm not really into publishing the results of my navel-gazing). In fact, this is such a good thing that I think perhaps Chris does not go far enough with this. Personal weaknesses are only part of the picture.

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One great tool for the sort of self-examination I’m talking about is called SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. SWOT is a structured way of doing a systematic overview of an operation for strategic planning purposes.

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I am challenging y’all to SWOT yo’ Blog! Here’s how:

• First you have to have an Objective. Some goal you want to accomplish. I recommend you use SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound).
• List a few of your Strengths. Things your blog has going for it that will help it toward your objective. Be honest. Sometimes it is harder to write down good things about yourself than to admit to weaknesses. I recommend listing roughly 3-5 strengths.
• List a few Weaknesses of your blog. Challenges that are internal to the way you are blogging that might hinder the attainment of your objective.
• List a few Opportunities that exist within the environment (not within your blog itself). Chances you might have or conditions that might exist for you to approach your objective.
• List a few Threats in the environment that might hinder your progress toward you objective.
• Brainstorm a few SO Strategies – think of several ways that you can use your blog’s Strengths to take advantage of an Opportunity in the environment.
• Brainstorm a few ST Strategies – think of several ways that you can use your blog’s Strengths to reduce the risk or potential impact of a Threat.
• Brainstorm a few WO Strategies – think of several ways that you can reduce or overcome your blog’s Weaknesses in order to take advantage of an Opportunity in the environment.
• Brainstorm a few WT Strategies – think of several ways that you can reduce or overcome your blog’s Weaknesses in order to reduce the risk or potential impact of a Threat.
• Now, you have a list of several strategies! Things you can do to move toward your objective. Directions you can go with your blog! You might pick the strategy that seems easiest or choose the one that seems most likely to succeed or pick the one that you think will have the biggest impact, but pick one and GO DO IT!

SWOT yo’ Blog!

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How about a little linklove to sweeten the deal? You don't have to publish all your dark weaknesses or tell the world all your secret strategies for blogospheric domination, but if you SWOT yo' blog and drop me a note telling me what you thought of the exercise and a little bit about what you learned, I'll post a link to your blog at the top of my blogroll - front-page above-the-fold linklove!

Controlling the encounter distance

In a couple of articles in the past few months I’ve written about perhaps the most fundamental rule of aikido – ma-ai. The basic gist of this idea is that you never let someone within arm’s reach of you without beginning to act. If you let them build a base of support within arm’s reach then they can attack faster than you can respond. I demonstrated this with the funny Trinity video as well as the Emil Boztepe video. Here is a video of a guy playing with some aikido throws and one of the things I was most impressed with was his skill at maintaining the encounter distance, forcing uke to leap at him. Before nearly every encounter there is at least a little retreat, forcing uke to commit.

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But in a book I was reading recently, Mastering Jujitsu by Renzo Gracie and John Danaher, the authors made the impressive point that in all the history of UFC, no fighter of any style had ever been able to control the encounter distance in order to remain standing and separated against an opponent intent on taking the conflict to the ground. In other words, if either fighter wants to go to the ground then that is where the conflict will take place regardless of the other fighter’s skill or intent to maintain ma-ai. To me, this further implies that no fighter has ever been able to prevent an opponent that intent on clinching, since a standing clinch is mostly prerequisite to a throw/takedown.

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But Gracie & Donaher’s observation works both ways in a self-defense situation. Consider Karl’s interview in which he talks about covering the hands and strategically retreating (two tactics that are commonly against the rules or simply impossible in ring-fighting). Gracie and Donaher suggests (albeit in a round-about way) that it is virtually impossible to stop an aikidoka from covering (a type of clinch) and retreating per Karl’s suggestion. Indeed, we have found covering and retreating (what I call aiki brush-off) to be a spectacularly effective strategy in randori against judoka, modern-arnis guys, and other aikidoka. In fact, one of my students told us a story just last night about reflexively brushing off an attacker on the street and sailing him 8-10 feet.

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The bottom line: you can’t engage the enemy and control the encounter distance both at the same time. In order to control the encounter distance you have to be actively and strategically retreating (i.e. aiki brush-off). If you can do this while covering hands to damp out the attacker’s potential to hurt you, you can learn to be very effective in self-defense very quickly.

If it isn't easy, re-think it

Rory at Chiron just published a great article about the attitudinal difference between amateur martial artists and professional use-of-force folks (Rambling About Amateurs; Tuesday, November 20, 2007).
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He makes the point that the professional and the amateur in any field think differently about their domain of practice. This reminds me of something the late, great, Mac McNeese told me, “If there is something in judo that isn’t easy for you to do then you’re not thinking about it correctly.” I thought that was profound and I still think it was perhaps the most profound lesson I ever received about Judo. It might even apply more in aikido than in judo.

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In aikido, if you disregard ukemi for the sake of argument, then there is nothing athletic about the system. If you are able to walk at a normal pace and push and pull with your hands hard enough to shut a heavy door then you are sufficiently athletic to do 100% of aikido. Virtually every adult on earth can do good aikido effectively, and if you can’t then you’re not thinking about it correctly.

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I’ve found over the years since that lesson from Mac and after I realized that there is nothing athletic about aikido, that it almost purely a mind game. Mental and attitudinal factors, as Rory puts it, are of primary importance - maybe even sole importance. All the magical aikido is simply a physical reflection of getting your attitude straight and getting your mind working right.

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So, if you are working on something and can’t do it, start re-thinking your goals and strategies. A lot of times you are working toward a faulty goal – something that is out of your control anyway. How are you applying the fundamental principles to your strategies to move toward your objectives? Is there one piece of the thing that is not working right? If so, work slower, break it into smaller and smaller pieces until you find something you can reproduce then start re-building it toward the whole thing. Is there a point in the process where the pieces don’t fit back together? If so, take it apart again and re-think it.

If it is not easy, you’re thinking about it wrong!

Re-think it.

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Stay tuned for a follow-up article about how to get your goals straightened out in aikido.

Jumpy jelly leg syndrome

In aikido we are always talking about relaxing and falling into our movements, but I think this can be taken too far at times and can lead to some stability problems that I'll call the jumpy jelly leg syndrome. This can lead to problems in your judo too. Let me give you some background.

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In order to take a step, you stand in an upright posture with knees slightly bent and feet under you. Disengage one leg - just turn it off - and your center of mass starts falling in that direction. Then you turn the leg back on under your hips and recover the leg that you left behind so that it is under your hips too. You have taken one sliding (tsugiashi) step.

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The problem comes right as the leading foot hits the ground. If you are only thinking to turn it on to keep your center vertically off the ground then your side-to-side and front-to-back muscles in your leg and hips and abs and back are left in an indeterminate state with your brain not really telling them to do anything at all. If you happen to be bumped right when the leading foot hits the ground then you can get this hyperactive reflex in these muscles that causes you to rock and bounce a few times before you can get your balance back. I'm sure you've encountered this if youve done randori with someone really good. They touch you and you either stand there bouncing spastically or you jump your own butt right out of the ground.

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How to fix the jumpy jelly leg syndrome? Give these otherwise-indeterminate muscles something to do. Doesn't especially matter what - just giving them a little tonus shuts down a lot of that bounce. For instance, you can:

• Think about pulling yourself forward with the front leg just as it hits the ground. This turns on all the muscles in the back of the leg.
• Think about tightening your thighs together to snap your recovery leg back under you. This turns on the thigh adductor (groin) muscles in the front leg.

Whatever scheme you use in your mind to get your legs to do this trick, your goal is to recover your rear leg back under you as quickly as possible and make your front leg active in the process. I often tell myself during walking kata to snap the recovery leg back under my hips.

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So how can you practice this? I say practice it in several different ways under different conditions. For instance...

• Concentrate on this phenomenon especially during the first three or so moves in the walking kata. When you get good at that, spread it out into the pushing moves in the walking kata and from there, apply it to the turns.
• Concentrate on this phenomenon when doing the nagenokata version of okuriashibarai. The side-to-side motion with a partner should be a great place to play with this. Have your partner bump you as the lead foot hits and see how different stepping strategies help or hurt.
• Do the foot-sweep-to-control drill with a partner walking together up and down the mat bumping and sweeping deashibarai every third step. Here uke gets to play with stepping strategies just like in the side-to-side motion, but tori also gets to concentrate on putting a little drag on the front foot right as it hits on the third step. This should make the ball of the foot drag back toward tori ever so slightly right as the foot hits.

Try it and let me know your mileage. Down with the jumpy jelly legs!

Brand differentiation and teaching to the test

As I was saying a couple of posts ago, Judo and BJJ appear to me to just be different brand names for the same thing, similar to how Xerox and Canon are both kinds of copiers or how Taco Bell and La Fiesta Brava both sell burritos. I posted that opinion to get some discussion going, and I thank Sensei Lori for biting that hook that I left dangling out there ;-) She responded…

I having trained in BJJ and worked with high-ranking Judo students, I think that though they have the same roots, there are important distinctions between the two arts. Brazilian Jiu-jitsu has evolved to create a more highly developed ground game. On the other hand, Judo, the rules of which keep competitors on their feet much more than that of BJJ, focuses much more on throwing and takedown strategies. Both are fairly similar arts though, and their competition rules reflect that focal points of the individual arts.

Good points, and she’s right, there are clear distinctions between the two. But I think that those distinctions are mostly just artifacts of the competition rulesets. A jiu-jitsu guy could compete in a judo tourney or vice versa (so long as everybody followed the rules) and nobody would be in alien territory. Either guy could have a decent chance of doing well in either tournament. What I wonder, is whether the rulesets reflect the foci of the arts (as Sensei Lori says) or whether the way the arts are commonly practiced reflects the rulesets. Here’s what I mean…
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Consider the example of an elementary school whose funding is tied to student scores on a standardized test. In essence, that school is competing with a lot of other schools for the same limited pool of dollars. In this sort of situation it is common to “teach to the test” by trying to give the students test-specific skills that really don’t have much to do with education in the broader sense. If teaching to the test gives the students an advantage on that particular test then that school gets a competitive advantage against other schools. A clever administrator could use that advantage to brand differentiate his school.

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Now, consider a jiu-jitsu school that is competing (in the business sense) against all the other grappling (wrestling, jiujitsu, judo, etc…) schools around for the same, limited pool of students/dollars. They create a ruleset that is fun and educational and exciting to watch and may be ‘better’ in some sense than the judo and wrestling rulesets. They can then claim to be the best school around to prepare students for competition in that particular ruleset. This is brand differentiation, which makes their school seem to have more value than the others. (Think UFC here).

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Also, consider the evolution of the judo rules over the years. It started out with a mostly ‘anything goes’ type ruleset so that the Kodokan could have their pissing contest with all the older jujitsu schools. The Kodokan guys won a couple of highly influential tournaments (i.e. the Metro Police tourney) and they began to get the prestige and the right to set the rules like they liked them. Kano wanted to get judo into the Olympics, so he began playing with more western rulesets similar to the wrestling rules that were already in use in the Olympics. As an example, the old kohaku shiai tournament structure gradually became less prevalent as the modern tournament structures became more prevalent.

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Once you have judo in the Olympics you have two grappling styles (judo and wrestling) competing for the same limited pool of viewers’ interest. How do you differentiate judo from wrestling? Cool uniforms, exotic terminology, and rules to limit ground play and encourage spectacular throws. Everything sails along smoothly until the Gracies come up with the idea of UFC (new ruleset, brand differentiation) and now Judoka are competing to a greater extent with Jiu-jitsu guys for interest, students, and dollars. How do you differentiate Judo? More rules evolution.

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Now, sure, my three-paragraph history is a simplistic coverage of a thing that you could write an encyclopedia about, but you can see a trend here. The way the game is practiced changes whenever the ruleset changes, but that change in practice does not change the whole of the art. You can’t really say that judoka in the 1950’s were practing a different art from the judoka of today just because the rules have changed. They were doing the same art in a different way.

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Players who are serious about competition limit the scope of what they practice toward the scope of the competition. This is not the ruleset highlighting the focus of the art but rather the players teaching to the test. Does the ruleset define the boundaries of the art or does the ruleset represent a subset of the art?

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Anyway, that was a long-winded way of getting around to this: BJJ as it is played competitively is a subset of the whole of jiu-jitsu. Olympic judo competition rules also define a subset of the whole of judo. These two competition rulesets are different but jiujitsu in the holistic sense and judo in the holistic sense are the same thing. The two sports are competitively differentiated brand names for the same overall grappling art.

Attack of the living dead

One common complaint about aikido as a system of self-defense is that it looks like the uke attacks like an idiot and then jumps onto the ground to make tori look good. Sure enough, if you check out aikido demos on Google or Youtube, uke is often either running blindly at tori or is lurching slowly forward like a monster in a 1950’s movie, giving an extended arm to tori to do with as he pleases. You even occasionally see videos of Doshu or of the various “old school” “hard style” aikido folks in which ukes attack like brainless zombies. Honestly, Doesn't it look like Frank is about to execute kotegaeshi in the picture?

What’s going on here? Surely this isn’t what the founder or his prewar disciples (i.e. Tomiki, Shioda, etc…) intended aikido to become. Well, there are several things going on here…

• These are just demonstrations and the ukes are understandably reluctant to ruin the demo or make the instructor look like a fool. (Not a very satisfying answer to the question or solution to the problem)