Looks are Deceiving

One technique that I love is a spine manipulation movement from Seisan. You put one hand on the small of a person's back, you put one hand on the person's chin and you push and pull while stepping forward. Even if you're really strong it's incredibly hard to fight. You feel yourself being crumpled backwards, but the leverage is so great that you just fold and fall. If you want to be incredibly damaging you step on one of their feet and instead of pushing on their chin you palm heel it then push. There's a possibility that you will break their jaw, neck and ankle and depending on the surface they're falling on their skull. If you do the technique nicely, you just tip them over.
All of these parts can be separated into their own techniques, but together you can have someone lying in a broken heap in the time it takes to take a single step forward. This is karate. The really cool thing is that most people think the movement is blocking a punch and finishing with an arm grab.

The movement done in the air looks like a open handed double block.

Ippon ken, tsumasaki-geri and spear hand

These techniques had always kind of confused me when I first started practicing karate. I'll use the English terms for ease of understanding. I'm speaking of the single knuckle fist, the toe kick and the spear hand. All of which seemed like kind of a dangerous proposition. Wouldn't they just break? After a few years it dawned on my why these techniques were trained and why you wouldn't just break yourself. I'm sure many did.

First on the breaking part cause it's shorter. The answer is structure. With the toe kick and the spear hand the striking surface is supported by the phalanges around them. The bones are kept in line with the supporting structures of the large bones to which they are attached. The single knuckle fist is supported in a similar fashion, but different configurations depending on style. The trick is that you have to get the alignment perfect, or at least within acceptable parameters. Hence the conditioning exercises. I don't really believe that kicking wood or stabbing tires makes your fingers harder or toes harder, but I do think it tests your structure. If it's wrong you'll definitely know it, hence the slow build up of these techniques. The callouses and such are just by products of the training.

Now why would one want to do such a thing?

Simple. Smaller surface area. Imagine you have a staff. It's a pretty good all around tool. If you stab someone with it, it can get the job done through impact. Now if you put a point on that staff you have a spear. The smaller surface area at the top with the same force behind it allows it to penetrate and cause more damage. It's the same basic principle.

This has a couple of advantages. The first is if you can get all your energy behind one of these strikes like the toe kick or the single knuckle punch you're going to obliterate the point that it touches. Maximum damage. The second advantage is that because it does have a small surface area you can use less force and get the same effect as a punch, or a kick. Motobu Choki recommended the single knuckle punch for when you were too close to punch properly.

Like the spear hand, these are soft target strikes and do have their own limitations due to the skill required to use them effectively, but the thought of someone launching their entire body weight behind a single knuckle punch into your solar plexus is a scary thought, or worse a toe kick into your testicles. They might just rip apart.


 

Karate Programming: the hardware

I've spent a little bit of time writing about this in other posts, but I figured I dedicate a couple completely to this idea. The idea is that you can program yourself. Your body and your brain are adaptable. It's how we learn, it's how we get stronger and it's pretty easy to do if you know how to do it.

Training your body is very easy especially when it comes to physical attributes. We may not all have the genetics to look like Arnold in his hay day, but we can definitely make ourselves better. The answer is steady increase in intensity at planned intervals. It doesn't need to be much of an increase. We're not Olympic athletes for the most part. We can throw out much of what professional athletes do, because we're not training for a big game. We're training for an unforeseeable event that we hope will never happen.

All you need to know is how your body adapts to exercise. When you workout your body adapts by overcompensating the recovery of your muscles for future stress. This over compensation period occurs one to three days after you workout. It's important that you increase the intensity of your workout within this time frame, so that the pattern repeats itself. If you workout after this super recovery period your muscles will have reverted back to their previous state because you didn't stress them again during the appropriate time.

This is all you need to know about exercise. Pick some exercises you enjoy doing and go for it, and you can forget everything you ever read in the muscle rags.

It's important to recognize that professional athletes have huge amounts of resources behind them including constantly evolving manufactured performance enhancing drugs, which change the way you train. Steroids for example almost completely change the way you lift. When you take steroids, which I don't and never have, all you need to do is get your reps in. You've taken out your body's natural cycle of recovery, adaptation and hormone secretion. Basically the more you lift, the bigger you get.

The mental aspects of karate training is where careful planning and knowledge of how we build neural pathways for skills come into play. I'll elaborate on this more in the next post.

Bad Ass Babe Project

There are ups and downs to practicing karate with your wife. The upside is that you get to share a wonderful past time together and the downside is that it can be frustrating to have a person you outweigh by almost 80 pounds put you on your ass. In truth, she's also my student, and I've used her as kind of a guinea pig when it comes to training methodology. She had no martial arts training at all when we started this little experiment together, and really she's the reason I ever got back into studying karate. My opinion of traditional karate hasn't changed very much, but my opinion on whether you need a "qualified instructor" definitely has, so we decided to take it as a challenge and see what happens.

Over the years, I've used her to hone my teaching ability by figuring out the best way to try and transmit the techniques and concepts that I've been discovering in the kata. While everyone is different, it's very, very challenging to teach a woman who has had absolutely no exposure to this type of physical endeavor. Many boys at least have the experience of rough housing with other boys or their siblings and she's had neither. My rule has been that if a drill or exercise doesn't help her get better, or if she isn't able to apply a technique on me than I throw it out and look for something better. Techniques need to work on someone bigger, stronger and more skilled, otherwise, what's the point.

I've taken a different direction in our training recently by throwing out everything that is rigidly scripted. I group attacks with sections of kata, since many kata movements can be used for several different types of themed attacks, but I leave her to use her own judgment in how to use those movements. Sometimes her maneuvers work and sometimes they don't, but I leave room for her natural reactions and intuition. I've been taking this slow and working on each part of the kata individually.

The result so far has been very rapid improvement in both understanding and application. She's also enjoying it a lot more, because it makes our training sessions more of a game than just rote memorization. Infighting has become much more of a challenge for myself because her ability to adapt and find the weak points has become more natural leaving myself to adapt even faster.

I'm calling this new training experiment the Bad Ass Babe Project or BAB, and I'm going to use this as kind of a training journal for her.

So far, I may have created a monster.

There will be videos, at some time... maybe

Much of the stuff I'd like to talk about and explain requires video. The written word, as much as I love it, just isn't the best vehicle for this kind of stuff. It's like trying to teach someone how to walk through text.

Unfortunately one of the many drawbacks of being frugal and an independent practitioner is that you have to use what you have and take what you can get. Finding training partners and willing participants can be a challenge. Especially since I have to find them, convince them and usually teach them. All of this has to happen while leaving their ego intact to a certain degree. This is especially true if they're a karateka, because my general idea is that most of what people do is a complete waste of both time and money, under certain circumstances.

So my wonderful wife and training partner/ student will be assisting me at some point in making these videos. But I don't plan on demonstrating on her, I plan for her to demonstrate on me. I have about five inches and 70 pounds on her, so me demonstrating a technique on her doesn't really prove that much. I personally feel that techniques exist so that they can be used on someone bigger and stronger than you. Basically if it doesn't work on someone bigger and stronger than you, it's not the technique, it's just you being bigger and stronger.

She is definitely capable of breaking me if she felt so inclined, but getting her confidence to a satisfactory level to demonstrate is a different issue.

So hopefully, some time in the near future, there will be wonderful videos of her dropping me like a bag of rocks.

The Reactive Drill Fallacy

When watching demonstrations of bunkai, one usually sees a reactive drill. Actually most of the time when someone is demonstrating any type of martial or fighting technique it is reactive. The most common example is the defense against the punch. Someone tries to punch you, and you skillfully block, counter and then pummel. This is the usual order of these demonstrations. But this is wrong for a couple reasons.

The first problem is one of time. Action is faster than reaction. It takes more time to react to a person than the person who is acting upon you.

According to Rory Miller, a former corrections officer, tactical unit leader and all around intelligent guy, explains that you usually go through four steps to do basically any task. You need to observe, orient, decide and then act in order to do anything that isn't hardwired into you by operant conditioning.

First you must observe what is happening to you, orient to what is happening to you, decide what you're going to do about it and then act upon that decision. The other guy, the guy punching you, has already gone through the observe, orient and decide phases of this process and is already on the act portion by the time you start observing. The result is you get blasted in the face. If the punch is a complete surprise attack, the odds of you being fast enough to do something about it is very, very, very low. You basically need to know that it's coming before the punch is thrown, which is the second problem.

If you know that someone is going to punch you, why would you stand there and let them try? You should either do something to prevent them from punching or remove yourself from the vicinity by running away. Playing chicken with the person's fist is rather counter productive. If you react in time, you've only stopped that one attack, if you don't than you get injured, neither outcome prevents the person from attacking again.

You might be asking "If this is true, why do these applications work in the dojo and in the sporting arena?"

The reason is the same as the second example. You know it's coming. Most drills start out with someone saying something like "Defense against a high punch." You know what's coming, so you've observed, you've mentally prepared yourself for the attack so you've oriented to the situation, you're going to block, therefore you've decided. The only thing left to do is act. The situation becomes act versus act. Nevertheless, this is still wrong because in a truly defensive situation if you know it's coming you either escape or if escape isn't an option you preempt the attack and then escape. Very few drills start out with someone saying "Attack in a completely random and unpredictable fashion."

The same is true for the sporting arena. You might not know when your opponent is going to punch, but you have a pretty good idea that they will at some point punch. Your brain is already in red alert status, and you are reacting more to the telegraph or the tell than you are to the punch. If the person doesn't have a telegraph or tell than you get creamed. If you throw up the wrong block you might get creamed still. How many times have you seen someone throw up a hand by their head in response to a high kick only to have the energy transferred through the hand and into their skull despite the quick reaction time.

Within the insular environment of the dojo or gym, these reactive type drills seem like a good idea. People punch, I don't want to get punched, therefore I need a defense-against-the-punch technique. This ignores the circumstances of a self defense situation. The most important variable of a conflict that makes it self defense is that you didn't provoke or know the attack was coming. If you knew the attack was coming and didn't take steps to keep yourself safe by escape than it isn't self defense.

There is somewhat of a caveat to this, which is the defense against strangles, grabs and locks. While you are technically reacting to the above techniques, you are reacting to them after the fact. You are assuming that you did get surprised by the technique otherwise you never would have let the person get in position for them. They are rather counter measures or reversals to misfortune rather than the prevention of misfortune.

Unfortunately this is exactly how we get taught "defensive" techniques in many dojo and gyms.

Kata bunkai and confirmation bias

"In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias (or confirmatory bias) is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, leading to statistical errors."

This is the definition of the confirmation bias according to Science Daily, and it's the biggest mistake I see in kata interpretation.

The very foundation of the scientific method is to try and prove your conclusions wrong, not to try and prove them right. According to Nassim Taleb in his book The Black Swan, you can have a thousand days of positive results and never prove yourself correct, but you only need one day of negative results to prove yourself wrong. I'm paraphrasing, but the gist is basically that it's easier to know that something is definitely wrong than definitely right.

I see people make this mistake with kata bunkai. It's the easiest thing in the world to string together movements and call them bunkai if you never actually test them. Most of the time the reason these interpretations are wrong is because people have two hands, and they usually don't wait patiently for you to apply your super technique to one arm and do nothing with the other.

The point is there might not be any "correct" bunkai, but there definitely is incorrect bunkai.

A good technique should: protect you from harm, give you better positioning, disadvantage the opponent, prevent the opponent from attacking and most favorably end the conflict. This includes escape, evasion and deescalation.

At the very least the technique should protect you from harm and give you better positioning.

So the next time you're trying to decipher some kata movements, remember that you should try and prove them wrong, not try and prove them right.

Deeper than I thought

It's very hard to explain to normal martial artists what it's like to practice a single kata for years. I believe that they think they can imagine it, but I know that I never imagined that a kata could go so deep and yet be so simple at the same time. The closest I can come to explaining it is relating it to language.

A kata for the most part is almost like an alphabet. Kind of. Except some of the grammar is written into the alphabet itself. Almost like "i" before "e" except after "c." If it were written "A" "B" "Cei" "D" "iE" "F".

The steps for example in the Seisan kata I practice tell you how to power the hand movements, but also whether you are the one giving pressure or if you're receiving pressure. If you try and flip them around they don't work.

I'm digressing a little here.

Practicing a single kata is like being fluent in a language. You know it front and back, inside out and backwards. You can play with the words and structure to make jokes or whatever you want. It's also designed to work together.

The hard part is that for many martial artists, they feel that practicing the alphabet is speaking the language, and they assume that if something looks the same in two kata than it must be the same movement. Since there are no real hard and fast rules regarding kata analysis, I can't say this is wrong, but it would be foolish to make the same assumption about language. The English and Russian alphabets both have letters that look like a "b." If we assumed that they made the same sound we would be wrong. The "b" letter in Russian is pronounced like a "v" in English. Yet, they look exactly the same. It's only by comparing the letters around it and the words that they make that we see that they are different.

It's also hard to explain that the kata movements can be proactive and not necessarily reactive, and in Seisan at least the directions and movements have more to do with where you are in relation to the opponent and where you want them to be rather than a defense against any specific attack. This breaks the kata down into pretty easy to swallow chunks. It's really the only thing that we can know for sure about the opponent. They can either be in front, behind, on either side as well as inside and outside of the arms. It's rather simple, but the ramifications are rather large.

We can also assume that movements that are not done in a mirror fashion do not require the opponent to be in any specific orientation where as movements that are done with a focus on the right side and then practiced with a focus on the left side are for specific orientations because the left side needs to be trained equally as the right side. Like a left hand punch and a right hand punch, but grabbing someone's head and yanking it around doesn't require you to balance left with right. You'll get pretty much the same result no matter what.

This is just a little bit of the picture. When I first started practicing in this fashion, I couldn't imagine Seisan being more than just a simple collection of punch combinations and reactive drills to prescribed attacks, but the more I practice the deeper it goes.

Sport fighting versus Survival fighting

Due to the growing popularity of combat sports like the Ultimate Fighting Championship, there is a tendency to mistake these athletic competitions with survival fighting. It's a mistake that I encounter frequently. People mistake the artificial environment of the arena with violent encounters out in the real world.

The explanation for the difference between sport and survival usually has something to do with the rules. Sports have rules and survival is thought not to have rules, but this isn't entirely true. Self defense is a legal concept. It has to do with laws, statutes and evidence. One cannot use more force than is required to extract themselves from a dangerous situation. Therefore, if one is to survive after the violent encounter one must follow the rules of society.

The rules that specifically draw the line between sport and survival is that of targeting and striking surfaces. Almost all of the first response targeting areas in self defense are illegal under most sporting rules. The neck for example is off limits in the UFC. A solid blow to the side of the neck can knock a person out. A blow to the front can crush a person's windpipe. A blow to where the base of the skull meets the neck can kill. The eyes, groin, ears, kidneys, back, knees, joints and fingers are also illegal targets.

What can be used to strike is also limited. Open hand techniques are banned, as well as headbutts and dropping elbows. It is also illegal to kick a downed opponent.

These rules are good for the sporting arena. They encourage fighters to fight square on and pound on the strongest parts of the human body with some of the weakest. It prolongs the fights and ensures that participants won't end up permanently injured. It would be dangerous to assume that the same techniques used in the sporting arena would work in a violent confrontation.

In sport bringing someone to the ground and submitting them is a solid tactic. A single-leg takedown requires you to change levels and scoop up one of your opponent's legs. This requires you to present one of your most vulnerable targets to your opponent, the back of your neck. A dropping elbow could easily kill you.

Keep in mind that the rules of sport are not in place because they are not effective. They are in place to keep the participants safe. If you're fighting for your life, the last thing you want is for the other guy to be safe.

Magic in the martial arts

It doesn't come up very often, thankfully, but you do run into a fair amount of mysticism in the martial arts. Karate is not immune to this unfortunately.

I recently came across a person claiming that practicing kata would allow you to regulate your internal energy flow and double your strength. Something to do with a person's biofield and electromagnetic field.

This is nonsense.

Not only is is pseudo-scientific hokum, it's also incredibly dishonest. It's also very disturbing the number of people that buy into this type of quackery. Obviously, some people are taking 70's kung fu movies a bit too seriously.

The believers will claim that gaining superpowers. (It's almost too ludicrous to write.) Is the result of subtle energy fields that are not yet known to modern science. This might have been the case fifty years ago, but physicists today now have the capacity to detect some of the most minute sub-atomic particles in the universe, such as the higg's boson, which is what gives all things mass and is the cause of this wonderful thing that makes life possible, gravity. I'm sure that we'd be able to detect a phenomenon  that would cause a person to double their strength without regular exercise.

The United States government in the past has also funded research into such hokum as remote viewing and astral projection. This is supposedly when a person's consciousness leaves their body and travels to far and exotic places, not to be confused with spring break in Mexico. I'm sure that if the government feels fine with wasting its money on this than they wouldn't mind wasting it on biofields to double a soldier's strength.

Unfortunately the martial arts is filled with such scams and many other types of dishonesty. It's tempting to just let people practice as they wish and let the sheep get fleeced, but this is dishonest as well, but there is a simple solution. The next time someone tells you it's possible to gain  magical powers by manipulating imaginary forces you laugh at them and walk away.

The Never Ending School

My biggest beef with karate schools is that there is no ending. Don't get me wrong I love learning. I've made it an essential and enjoyable activity in my life, but if you're teaching a skill at some point the teaching needs to stop and people need to start thinking for themselves.

At any school, academy, college or university, there are classes and one takes them to learn a skill. Once the skill is learned, the classes stop. It's possible to carry this very far until one receives their PHD or equivalent degree, but then the formal instruction ends and self learning begins. This is reasonable.

A karate school on the other hand does not operate on this premise. A karate school is designed to make the students attend classes for as long as they are able. It's not uncommon for people that have been studying karate for 20-30 years to still attend classes on a weekly basis. All the kata have been learned and hopefully the applications have been learned but they keep showing up. In the context of a social activity this is awesome. In the context of learning a skill this is terrible.In any other skill if you've been taking classes for 20-30 years and still need to attend classes regularly than you suck. Have you ever heard of anyone taking piano lessons for 30 years? Probably not. They might study for 30 years, but they aren't paying their music teacher for that entire time.

It's possible for a karate student who has trained for a couple of decades to be more competent and more knowledgeable in karate than his instructors and still be paying those instructors for classes. I call this a scam. Like having your chakras realigned by a crystalagist every week to keep your chi flowing.

A person shouldn't have to practice karate for four years just to start learning. It takes five years to master a single kata and two years at the most to become competent in that kata.Why spend four years learning what amounts to dance routines and then spend the rest of your life trying to train out all the bad habits you picked up in those four years.

Karate is a concrete skill. It is physics, anatomy and movement combined to cause harm or prevent it. It is nothing more than that.

Designed for sport

When I first started training in karate, I studied at a very traditional dojo run by Doug Perry. We had two classes of kata per week, one weapons class and a kumite class. Basic 3K karate meaning kata, kihon and kumite. It's the basic template for most traditional dojo. Traditional dojo usually try and set themselves apart from "modern" karate, the type of freestyle martial arts, which is more about stunt choreography and showmanship than practical technique, by advertising as not being a sport. The focus is on personal development, or spiritual growth.

I accepted this to be the case, because my sensei said so. I didn't really have any reason to not trust this because I hadn't done the research. The more research I do however leads me to believe that classical karate was intentionally changed and made more superficial to fit into a sporting format for recreation. This I believe is what gave rise to what we usually refer to as traditional karate or post WWII karate.

For a martial skill to be useful or practical it needs to be simple, easily deploy-able and effective. This can be supplied fairly easily. Think of police or military training. It doesn't take twenty years to train a soldier or a policeman. It can take a few months at the very least.

Traditional karate fills none of these criteria. It's techniques can be simple, but because of the sheer number of named techniques knowing the correct circumstance to use any specific technique is almost impossible. It's why you see karateka windmilling and losing their technique when pressed. It's not that they don't know any techniques, it's because they know too many. It's not easily deploy-able because it takes years and years of training to even become competent. How long does it take to master traditional karate. Probably 50 years. If you start at 30 years old you'll be able to successfully defend yourself by age 80. The failure of these two criteria make it not very effective.

When looked at from a sporting perspective, traditional karate makes a lot of sense.

Kata is used as performance art. Only a very superficial understanding of the kata is necessary. It's possible to win kata tournaments and have no idea what any of the movements mean. The number of kata available to a person is firmly in the double digits. This allows for extended years of practice just learning the patterns of these kata. It also offers a handy way to separate people into subsequent rankings. Kata 1-5 are beginner kata, kata 6-10 are intermediate kata and kata 11-15 are advanced kata. This basically ensures that a person can't compete if they only know one kata, no matter how good or competent they may be at it.

Kihon then becomes the artificial links that supposedly bind all the kata together, but they more importantly serve as the watered down list of techniques allowed in competition. Notice all the dangerous techniques that are designed to end a violent confrontation immediately are not among the basics, even though putting down an opponent is the entire point of karate.

Kumite is obviously the most sport like of all the aspects, but it can be ignored in some traditional dojo as if not participating in one event makes them more practical even though they participate in the performance art.

We're left with a sport that can be enjoyed by young and old. This makes it rather wonderful for recreation. When you're young you play tag, when you get older you perform kata and when you get even older you enjoy karate in a more internal way, and there's a handy rank structure to keep everything tidy and organized (for the most part). There's nothing wrong with this.

This is perfect for sport, but terrible for practical application.

Bunkai Wizards

Two gi clad men face each other. One punches and the other unleashes a torrent of locks and strikes ending with a throw performed with a flourish.

I see it all the time on YouTube channels. Someone else coming out with their own interpretation of kata. There's nothing wrong with this. I love that people are thinking more about kata, but the applications still have to be good.

I call these people bunkai wizards. I call them this because they seem to pull techniques from thin air without regards to structure, physics or an uncooperative opponent. All while disregarding each kata's individual combat strategies. It always looks good in the video because the other person must stand still after the first jab and wait for the person demonstrating to rain down holy hell on them.

If the technique works than the person being demonstrated on shouldn't have to hold still. They should be actively trying to make the technique fail. If the technique still works than it's a good technique. Think of a simple punch. Does an opponent need to be ignorant of what a punch is for you to crack his head open? No, they just need to be open. It's even okay if they know you're going to punch as long as they can't stop you from connecting.

The applications I see usually have too many steps, have points of failure and rely on specific responses from the opponent. As a general rule one should strive to put a person down in three movements. Not three techniques, three movements. The best case scenario is not having to take action at all, but a close runner up is just one movement.

Every movement/ technique should end a conflict immediately if done correctly. This includes escape.

Offensive foot work

Seisan, like many kata, includes offensive footwork. Every step forward should send your shin, knee and foot into the leg of the opponent. This same movement also generates the power for the hand movements of the kata. These movements are used in conjunction to attack the opponent from above and below simultaneously.

Besides injuring your opponent, it also increases the chances of off balancing him and creating an opening for a strike, throw or trip that could end the confrontation.

Fighting distance

Seisan kata is an in-fighting system. It's techniques really start to shine when you're close enough to hug someone. I sometimes say it's the distance of your shoulder to your elbow or your hip to your kneecap when in sumo stance. Others might say that it's fighting within clinching range.

Outside of this range most of the techniques become worthless. It's because of this that one must intimately know their own fighting range and stick to a strategy that highlight's it's strengths. Seisan is not a passive kata. It charges in and grinds people up, so staying this close is in keeping with it's strategy and strengths.

By the numbers

The way most people are taught techniques is through memorizing applications to counter specific attacks. Someone punches and you block, someone grabs your lapel and you perform lapel break number 4, someone grabs your lapel with his little finger out and you perform lapel break number three, someone has their wrist bent at a 30 degree angle and you hold your mouth just right and then you can perform wrist lock number 47. This is basically a list and a list is not art. Art has to do with creativity.

Having a response plan for every little circumstance is like having a stack of paint-by-numbers kits. You can paint a lion or a landscape, but it doesn't make you an artist, because it doesn't teach you to be creative. It teaches you to fill in the boxes with the right colors.

An artist takes his brushes and his brush techniques and applies them to an empty canvas to create something new. Will it be wonderful the first time, probably not, but he's still flexing those creative muscles in his brain. This is how karate techniques should be used. They are not used to combat specific situations. They are used to combat general situations by the application of principles, but they need to be used creatively. This is achieved through creative practice.

Creative practice is allowing a person to experiment with the techniques. They are no longer answers to specific questions, they are tools used to accomplish a task just like the painter's brush. Instead of drawing a picture you're learning to take someone out.

A laundry list is not art, creative expression of ideas is art. Karate is an art, not a list.

Every action has a weakness

Every technique, movement, action has a weakness, an opening that is created because of its very nature and physics.

A choke for example usually requires a person to use both of their limbs leaving most of their body unprotected including the highly sensitive testicles. A crushing grip and a tug like you're starting a lawnmower will give many people incentive to let go.

Punches leave you unprotected on one side, kicks leave you standing on one leg, locks can be easily countered if they are unsupported by the ground, a car or a wall. Everything has a weakness. Guard the head and you leave the kidneys, liver, solar plexus and floating ribs vulnerable on the torso. Even the way you stand has weaknesses. Squat down low and you can stop a line backer from the side, but a baby to your front could tip you over without much effort.

It's important to be aware of the weaknesses of each type of technique and to use those weaknesses as the basis for your counter attack. The opponent will basically be telling you where to attack. He attacks high and you attack low, he moves left and you move right. This is sometimes called fighting the void or fighting emptiness. You go to where your opponent isn't.

One of the advantages of training in a set amount of techniques is that you can become very aware of your own openings and take advantage of them by having prepared responses to close those gaps. You'll know what the opponent is going to do because you give him no other option.


Know where the weaknesses are and you'll always have an opening.