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.

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: Part 2

After giving it some thought, I decided that this post needed a part two.

Another of the significant differences between sport and survival is the goal. Sport fighting is very much about domination. When you put someone in a choke or a lock you submit them. The ego is very much at play in the sporting arena. It's where people develop their ego. It gives them a sense of worth or meaning. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can grow wild. I think most martial arts boost ego rather than diminish it, but that's another post. This is the point of the sporting arena. It's about having fun of course, but it's also about proving that you're the best.

The goal of survival fighting is to end the conflict without injury, preferably to all parties involved. This does away with any legal entanglements or acts of retribution from those involved. Yes, if you have to injure a criminal you should expect violent retribution from them, their friends or even their family. It's something that is usually glossed over when talking about self defense. The easiest way to accomplish this is by running away. This is the real ego killer. Better to run and kill your ego than stay and kill yourself.

In the ring, fighters are matched by experience and weight. Unfortunately out in the real world your attacker will most likely be bigger, stronger and more comfortable with violence than you are. Just by being big and strong yourself can be a viable means of self defense on its own. A criminal doesn't want to fight, they want something. They're going to pick soft targets. If you were a criminal, would you rather mug the bodybuilder walking into the gym or the shaking elderly woman shuffling her way into the grocery store next door. It's just like in the wild, the old and sick are hunted down by the lions because they're easier prey.

In the last post I wrote a little about the difference in techniques and I'd like to expand on it a bit.

Submission fighting is very big in the sporting arena and it's very effective in this context, but for your average person who does not have a duty to act, like a policeman or security officer, they're pretty worthless. One exception possible being chokes, but only chokes performed from the front. (Because if they're performed from the rear you can just escape instead of choking them, so it's not self defense.)

Let me lay down a scenario. A person attacks you without provocation, so it's legitimate self defense at this point. You get dragged to the ground where you put him in a skillful arm bar. Now what? In legal terms force is only legal if the threat is still present. This does not mean the person is still present, but the threat. The arm bar neutralizes the threat, but now you are kidnapping, which is a felony. You can't break the arm legally speaking because you stopped the threat. To escape you'll have to let go and hope the guy doesn't become a threat again. See the problem. Locks not only immobilize the threat, but yourself as well and escape is the goal.

The fact is that you'll be most likely outmatched in size and strength, taken unawares and will most likely be injured. To survive this you might have to do some really brutal shit. The equivalent of shooting someone with a gun. There's a reason you don't see this in the sporting arena.

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.