Going down the rabbit hole

When you start looking for evidence, when no one is asking for any, you will be surprised at what you find. Your view of the world, and your ego will be lying in pieces on the ground by the end of it. I'm not talking about confirmation bias research where you ignore all evidence, which runs contrary to your opinion. The evidence of the effectiveness of karate is that it is terrible, but most martial arts are terrible. The evidence which suggests that it is effective is that it survived being passed down in Okinawa. If it's use got you killed then you're not around to pass on your crappy tradition. It's positively selected as opposed to negatively selected. It's survivor bias in a good way. The fact is that adrenal decay, lack of stress inoculation, and lack of experience in violent situations counts for more than your training. Training is the compromise between lack of preparation and being a violent jerk. Rory Miller says it's luck and instinct, which gets you through most violent encounters, until you've hit about 20 force encounters and then it's luck, instinct and training. We've all heard of the people who survive violence by doing X, Y and Z, but we don't hear about those who did X, Y, and Z who died screaming for someone to save them. Unfortunately, there is this thing called reality and it doesn't cooperate the way we wished it would. We as people tend to attribute our successes to skill, and our failures to bad luck. Hardly ever do we attribute success to luck, and failure to lack of skill, even though this is more likely.

I remember reading an article about UFC training, where the trainer was explaining that fighters could achieve the same results by training much less than what they currently were doing. The training had nothing to do with power, speed or skill. It might have even been slightly detrimental. It had to do with mental toughness, and anxiety management. Do you want to go into a fight confident that you did everything you possibly could to prepare, or do you want to go into a fight just as prepared, but with a mental nagging doubt? When you're only fighting pain and fatigue, mental toughness counts for a whole lot.

Here's where this can get you hurt. If you train to fight your anxiety and become less effective than you're not doing yourself any favors. You will be over confident, and less skilled, which is a bad combination.

What does this have to do with research?

It means we need to know the aim of research, and what people are trying to achieve. If you train like a UFC fighter who is trying to manage their anxiety, you might be less effective in a life or death confrontation. You might be over confident, because you did super hard training and die, rather than being under confident, running away and surviving. Research might be comparing very minute battlefield differences, which made a difference tactically, but not much of a difference to the individual. The Thompson-Legerde tests on caliber, which is usually dismissed, was testing the wounding capabilities of different cartridges not how lethal they were. They already knew that a bullet through your head, spine, or heart was lethal. They wanted to know what the differences were when the bullets hit non-essential organs and tissue. Their conclusions were based on certain rounds allowing a person to bleed out faster than others, but this time is counted in minutes not seconds, because regardless of the round our flesh is elastic and closes the wound and our body starts trying to repair itself and stop the bleeding. A wounded enemy soldier will be taken out of the fight eventually, but this doesn't help those in his immediate vicinity. It only means soldiers who show up minutes later won't have to worry about him. The person who gut shot him is probably just as dead. It doesn't help you individually, but it helps your comrades in arms later on down the line. It has a tactical advantage in war, but has no tactical advantage in self defense where a person needs to be taken out immediately. You don't have the ammunition, time nor backup to lay down suppressive fire while you wait for the wounded to bleed out.

It was also thought that non-jacketed lead projectiles would not function reliably in an auto-loader, which is false, but has nonetheless changed the trajectory of firearms development regardless of this being a more than 100 year old myth. I just fired some non jacketed lead rounds out of one of my rifles just a few months ago, and it worked just fine. They have been relegated to the dust bin of history without even a retest to see if the original reasons and conclusions still hold true.

In the Napoleonic war the British sabre caused horrific wounds, but seldom killed. The French sword killed, but did not produce grizzly wounds. The difference between cut and thrust. A thrust kills, a cut maims. The British sword was feared because of the terrible wounds, which is a huge psychological advantage in war. Great for warfare, but not that great for a duel against a determined foe. The British sword was thought to be more effective. Was it? Maybe for fear factor, but not for killing though fear counts for a whole lot.

In the world of the stock market, research has shown that actively managed portfolios do no better than broad market passively managed portfolios. Throwing a dart at the Wall Street Journal is about as effective as the most advanced stock market analysis, because regardless of method you can't predict the future. Regardless of this there are still many companies that advertise the virtues of their management, and people are happy to hand over their money in fees.

What does this all mean?

It means things are seldom how they appear, and if you want to get to the bottom of things you need to dig deep and prepare for your ego to be destroyed, your anxiety to hit the roof, and for no one to ever listen to you because you're going against what amounts to tradition. They use anecdotal evidence, research out of context and ignore conflicting information, because it makes their tummy feel funny to face reality. If you're tummy feels funny, it means you're learning something great. It doesn't mean it's true, or false it just means you're testing your assumptions.

If you want to succeed, you need to ignore that funny feeling and look at the hard real-world evidence. You need to be okay with the fact that luck might play a bigger factor in success or failure than you are comfortable with and that people might be selling you snake oil, so you can manage your anxiety. You also have to be okay with people vehemently and even violently disagreeing with you, because it calls their fantasy world into question. Even with all of this there is freedom in facing reality. It means you can keep your head down, train, prepare, plan and know that focusing on the aspects of life that you can control directly is the only thing that matters even if you are falling through the rabbit hole.

Technique is not the problem with kata

I'm writing a whole book about this so I'll be brief.

It is ludicrously easy to come up with a scenario for a particular kata movement to become a technique or series of techniques. I practice one kata and I probably had 30 different interpretations for the first movement set alone in Seisan. Think about that. One little movement with 30 different variations. I'm fairly convinced that there are infinite applications. It is easy to find technique, but when you use a technique based system of practice where you try to get to a point where you can ingrain an automatic response this becomes tricky.

Let's say you need a 1,000 repetitions to ingrain a technique. Thirty applications means 30,000 repetitions. Every different technique I discover is another 1,000. So if the interpretations are functionally infinite, how do you do 1,000 repetitions of infinite? It's impossible.

Technique is not the answer. It's a parlor trick for demonstration. Technique is the visible expression of the application of principles. The context changes, the technique changes, but the movement and the principles stay the same.

If you're trying to build a catalogue of techniques based on your kata practice, you are wasting your time.

Some More Videos

Some more Rory Miller.

Perspective

Noah Legel and the guys over at Karate Culture both put out some media on "fighting dirty." It's good stuff. There really isn't anything I disagree with in both their releases, but I think we all need a little bit of perspective. I kind of covered it in an earlier post, but I thought of a good example of what I'm talking about.

When I was in the Marines, there was a Wounded Warrior House on base, and I'd be assigned to cover events there. It was 2006 or 2007 and the house had just opened. There were two Marines there that had very traumatic brain injuries, so traumatic that they basically had half of their brain missing along with half of their skull. They walked and talked and were still basically functional though they needed some help. I also met those that lost limbs, were severely burned and blind.

I'm telling this story, because I've met several people that had very horrendous injuries in combat and survived. These are injuries where most people would have just died. This however isn't evidence against rifles, grenades and IEDs. These are highly effective and highly dangerous, but they don't work all the time. This is to say that if some people are so resilient that they can take a high powered round to the head and still live than what are the chances that your punches are going to work? It's not an argument against punches or any technique. It's just that some people are so tough that you're just screwed. It makes arguing about what's better having your hand open versus closed or whether hitting someone's skull is better than poking their neck rather moot, when you consider that even bombs don't work all the time.

Showing My Own Bias

I definitely showed my bias in an earlier post on guards in karate. I've taken down the post, and I'm going to provide a little bit of clarification on the subject. I unintentionally skipped an idea that might have made things a little clearer.

Karate as I see it is an infighting system. It has a very particular range where many of the movements work best. This is chest to chest. It's much, much closer than many people practice their karate. In infighting there is no real guard. This is because offense and defense are not separated. They can't be because the distance is so close that a conventional guard no longer works. To stop an attack you have to break the person's balance and structure with your own attack. It's not about intercepting attacks, it's more about preventing them in the first place. It's not fool proof by any means, but neither is a conventional guard.

Infighting I believe is a better option for self defense. It's the range for which many predatory attacks take place, and a person is able to put all of their tools and techniques to use. Striking, grappling, gouging, throwing and locking are all options. This is opposed to longer range ballistic attacks, which limit the techniques you can use effectively. If you're beyond arms length from an unarmed opponent than you're relatively safe and should work toward escape or diffusing the situation.

To sum up karate for me is an infighting system, so there is no guard. Self defense and infighting aren't really separated in my head, so it was unfair of me to make such a blanket statement. These are of course just my opinions. I'll try to do better in the future.

Pressure Point Knock Outs

To paraphrase Rory Miller, if these pressure point knock outs were real than no one would survive a good massage.

I know you've probably seen the same videos as me. Some guy taps someone on the neck or the chin and they collapse like a boned fish onto the mat, and this guru has to do some sort of back rub to get the guy conscious again. This is stupid. People believe this stuff because they want the martial arts to be like magic. They want to power up like Dragon Ball Z, and turn into some ultimate unstoppable thing with their chi. Maybe not this exactly, but it's pretty close. I used to be one of these people. I wanted the martial arts to be magical and mystical. Some dojo don't try to refute this type of stuff. In some ways they encourage it when they say "you'll be able to unlock the kata subconsciously when attacked." It's playing on people's insecurities that they need an ultimate weapon.

I put this kind of stuff in the same category as the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot, alien abductions, moon landing conspiracies and astral projection that is the utter crap category.

Edit: I'd also like to say that I don't care for pressure point fighting in general. Like I've said, I broke my arm riding my bike. Because of the adrenaline dump, I was able to pick the bike up, fix the chain and ride home. An hour later, I couldn't even lift it, so I find the idea of performing some type of vulcan nerve pinch rather dubious.

Kata = Movement + Transfer of Kinetic Energy

The above equation is the most useful way to think of kata. It allows it to be adaptable and versatile. It is just moving yourself in a way that leads to the most efficient transfer of kinetic energy. I'm not talking about ballistic attacks like punching and kicking, but throws, locks, chokes and all the other good stuff.

This is why bunkai is so important, by this I mean analysis, not application. The transfer of energy remains the same in the kata despite the size of the practitioners, but the size of the practitioners does have an effect on how they will be able to apply that transfer of energy. I'll explain. A 6' 7" person trains in head punching. Everyone they punch at will most likely be shorter than them, because they are so large. Their head punches are going to be different. Now a 4' 5" person might not want to throw head punches at all. They might not be able to effectively reach a Threat's head and would be better served by groin punching. They both can practice punching, but how they apply it will be different. Now apply that to every technique in a kata and every variation of a kata technique. The bottom line is some things will work for some people that won't work for others, but they can apply that transfer of kinetic energy in another way that serves them.

With this in mind, an interpretation of a kata movement for specific encounters becomes relatively useless. It already was for different reasons, but this is yet another.

Analysis brings on a whole new importance. It is self discovery. It is finding what works for you within a template of proven effectiveness. (Generally the fighting traditions that survive did so because the fighting traditions that taught crap got all their followers killed. They endure, because they worked.) It is the same as finding the best way for you to use a sword, or a gun. What works for you will be different especially when it comes to unarmed combat because our bodies are not the uniform products of an armorer.

With this in mind we can keep the emphasis on ourselves. We don't have to memorize something that might not work for us. We'll discover what works for us through patience, practice and play.

There are many paths up the mountain, but the view is the same, but first you have to climb a fucking mountain, so get climbing.

Bunkai is not Application

Contrary to the popular definition of bunkai it does not mean application. Bunkai means analysis. Thinking.

Webster Definition: A careful study of something to learn about its parts, what they do, and how they are related to each other.

Personally I think what trips most people up is careful study and that it's an independent activity outside of the classroom.

More on this later.

Rant: Bad Training ( I warned you)

Let me tell you a story.

When I was in the Marine Corps, we were encouraged to not raise our hand at the rifle range for help when we had a malfunction. You'd think it was to encourage you to clear your own weapon malfunctions, which is partly true, but not the reason they encouraged this. The reason was that people had gotten their hands shot off in combat because their weapon malfunctioned. They didn't know what to do, so their brain made them do what they had always done when they had a malfunction and didn't know what to do, they raised their hand. Goodbye fingers, hello having the nickname "Lefty."

I'm going to put this in a little bit of context. The average none infantryman in the Marine Corps, which is basically the entire Marine Corps, spends about one week on the shooting range to qualify with their service weapons and hopefully earn some points toward a promotion. Of that week, most of it is spent waiting, waiting to shoot, raising and lowering targets for other Marines in "the pits" and waiting. You might spend 30 minutes in all on the firing line a day, actually firing your weapon and most of that time is spent waiting. Waiting to shoot or waiting for everyone else to finish shooting. For the entire week it's only 2.5 hours of trigger time, maybe. Of that 2.5 hours, you might have three malfunctions or none. If your rifle is in really bad shape (they don't give the good ones to the desk jockeys), or you've decided to not spend any time cleaning your rifle, you might have a malfunction that makes your rifle completely inoperable and you can't fix it. Basically you might spend two minutes raising your hand, so someone can help you fix your rifle, usually a range coach.

This means that this insignificant amount of time in a fairly none stressful environment can cause you to injure yourself in an environment that has almost nothing in common with it besides being surrounded by other Marines and having a rifle. It takes a few minutes to ingrain this habit and it can cripple you when it counts. What do you think is going to happen when you do thousands of repetitions of a bad habit every month?



I hear all the time people say "this is for fighting not self defense, when we're defending ourselves we do X," but they never practice X. They also say "if you can't find a good school just pick out the good stuff from the ones you can find, or train at most decent school."

This isn't possible. You can't switch gears like that and you can't magically undo all the bad stuff you're practicing in class because you don't like it. If you're putting in the repetitions and the training than your brain doesn't care. It doesn't care what you "know."

Training has to be done carefully, it has to be done correctly and it has to be done in the correct context. Bad training can get you killed, crippled or send you to jail. Nothing is ever going to be perfect, but you shouldn't knowingly or unknowingly ingrain bad habits if you plan on staking your life on something, and you shouldn't tell other people to settle or give up when their life might one day be on the line.

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.

Those that think they practice

In karate, there's always a tendency to separate one's dojo from those other dojo that don't practice right. The mcdojo and the dojo, the modern and traditional, Japanese and Okinawan. All of them feel they are practicing the "correct" way. One big distinction I find is those that think they practice bunkai and those that don't. Take note that all of these schools usually accuse each other of basically being McDojo.

Those that don't practice bunkai are sometimes called Punch, Kick, Block, or PKB. It's pretty self explanatory in that they believe everything in kata is either a punch, a kick or it's a block to a punch or kick. It's just as ludicrous as most other explanations. These schools usually have as many kata or more as others and they practice all of them for rank testing. They usually call themselves traditional, just like every martial arts school in existence. Why they believe they'd need 20 different kata making up what they believe to be very different scenarios for what's essentially three techniques I'm not sure. This is usually the type of school that the "real" traditional schools hold their nose and point at. "They don't get it," the others say. I don't agree to this interpretation of karate either, but at least it's more consistent. Their training methods are clearly only focused on punching, kicking and blocking and while it doesn't match up to the kata, you can still be pretty effective with just punching, kicking and blocking.

The karate schools that usually poo poo the above type of school are the ones that think they practice bunkai. What's the difference between these schools? Almost nothing. They practice several different kata, usually around 20, and all their drills are focused on punching, kicking and blocking. The only real difference is their acknowledgement of different interpretations, sort of. This type of school will fawn over bunkai wizards, go to seminars and camps, and the grand master may at one time or another show the super secret meaning of one portion of the kata. Do they ever practice these interpretations? Almost never. The basic punches, kicks and blocks are the same as the above school. Even if a school recognizes a block as something better and greater, they still teach it the wrong way. The drills are still defenses against karate attacks and any different applications either don't work or are practiced so sporadically that they are of no use. Bunkai is usually just used as proof that karate works and that the kata aren't just meaningless dances. "See karate works because that other guy practices it that way. Now more air punching and high kicks," they say.

It's even worse when these schools save their garbage for the "advanced" ranks. They have to keep you coming through the door somehow. I've never understood the logic of spending four to five years teaching people the wrong thing, or in this case "the basics," just to turn around and basically say that what they've taught you isn't the real thing. You'll spend the next few years trying to train out all the bad habits you picked up. The high block you've been practicing at the wrong distance and for the wrong reason is really a limb clear and a strike, good luck retraining yourself.

The real amazing thing is that people are usually so brainwashed by this point that they don't even question it. If the same thing was done with any other subject, you'd just laugh.

Imagine if you were taught math the same way. You spend five years practicing how to write the numbers. They even teach you arithmetic, but 2+2=5 and 1x0= 10. Upon perfecting the "basics," you graduate to advanced arithmetic where you keep practicing as before except sometimes 2+2=4 and 1x0=0, but only sometimes. What would you learn? Basically nothing.

If a school is going to teach the application of kata, it should be done as the student learns, starting with fundamental concepts and building on them in a way that the student can use them creatively. All drills and exercises should tie back into those fundamentals and one should not have to learn one way and then unlearn it to learn the correct way.

Silent Evidence and the effectiveness of martial arts

I've been listening to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan, and in it he brings up some very interesting points about how we perceive evidence and our world. The book itself is about events that have far reaching implications and effects and how we can't predict them, but since I'm a martial arts and more specifically a karate nut, I see karate in everything.

One idea is that of silent evidence. I'll try and paraphrase the example given in the book. In the book a philosopher is shown tablets bearing the portraits of those that prayed to be saved from a shipwreck and lived. This is given as evidence that praying will save you from death by shipwreck. The philosopher asks "Where are the portraits of those that prayed and drowned?" So the idea is that the refuting evidence isn't around anymore to speak for itself.

Before I get into how this relates to the martial arts, I'm going to define what I mean as effective. When I say effective, I do not mean a martial art's effectiveness for fighting duels or the sporting arena. It can obviously be used for fighting with the effectiveness at about 50 percent. In a UFC bout, both participants are basically martial artists and there is one winner and one loser, so 50 percent, or a 100 percent success rate depending on how you look at it. I'm talking about effectiveness for self defense. This means keeping yourself safe from harm, or not dying.

Now you can almost always find evidence that (insert martial art) is good for self defense because Joe Martial Artist survived a violent mugging by using his super kung fu technique. I recently heard one of these stories except it was a street fight not a mugging, but it could have turned out really bad. You can find articles fitting this theme taped to most dojo walls. But, the idea of silent evidence tells us that the instances where Joe Martial Artist pulls out his super kung fu technique and gets stabbed to death will merely show up in the crime roll of our local newspaper as Joe Smith stabbed to death in robbery.

This means that we might never know whether any specific martial art, or martial arts in general, are effective or useful in a self defense situation.

This seems rather doom and gloom as if I'm bashing all martial arts. Well I am and I'm not at the same time. I feel that we should base the effectiveness of martial arts in the same way that we base the effectiveness of firearms. Mainly physics, and anatomy and physiology.

We know that a bullet has the capacity to kill someone especially if they are shot in the right place. The brain or heart. The kinetic energy of the bullet give it the power to damage. Martial arts should be viewed in the same way and just as seriously. With the correct movement a technique will generate the most physical force, or the force required, to damage anatomical weak points of the body or inhibit physiology. We can say with certainty that this has a very good probability of happening. What needs to be thought of as a gamble is the application of these techniques. We must therefore ruthlessly pursue those techniques that give us the best opportunity for minimal effort.

Martial arts for self defense should be viewed as a hedge against a bet that someone forces upon us.

Personally I think karate has an advantage in this regard because of the ambiguity of kata. It means we can do away with interpretations we find to be less optimal and adopt interpretations that are more optimal as we practice without changing the patterns of movement. Then all we have to do is retrain our frame of reference instead of retraining the movement patterns themselves. This allows for evolution, growth and creativity.