“That’s not fair!”
I can remember my friend’s words echoing in my ears. We had been sparring, full contact. No matter how we started, we tended to get in a clinch and I felt him pushing me back. My body told me, intuitively, to pull back, to go with that flow, and I managed to put him on the ground twice with this strategy. However, that was not something we had trained in the school. At least explicitly. So what was going on? Was I doing anything wrong?
The above scene is from my teenage years. Even at that early age I understood intuitively that Martial Art was a practical endeavor. Martial Art was there to help me, not to limit me.
Fast forward many years and I find myself sparring with my Teacher, again. He puts his hands on my torso over my arms. He immediately nullifies the use of our traditional straight strikes. Yes, I train in a system fairly well known for emphasizing straight strikes, usually under the rule of thumb that straight lines are faster and more efficient. But in this case, what am I to do? At that particular moment, I freeze. I don’t know what to do, but in trying to execute my traditional straight punch from under his arms, I am effectively muscling against him.
“That’s ok – if you can get through – but I am open on the side.”
My teacher has no conception of Martial Art as a catalog of poses and techniques we do to show our allegiance to a particular style. He’s trying to help me learn to overcome my own limitations. In this case, his side was completely open. He was holding me forcibly so I couldn’t move my body to take an angle, but it would have been very easy to shoot a ‘hook-like’ punch to the side of his head. Conclusion: do exactly that. Then my Teacher shows me something that shocks me, even though this truth has been in front of me for many years.
Our forms are full of movements just like that. In other words, the belief that our System ‘doesn’t have hook-like punches,’ to mention a common example, is not only not true from the standpoint of practicality, but even the forms teach us circular attacks like that, or anything needed for survival for that matter, if we pay close attention to them. These kinds of lessons are embedded in our forms, and it is a wonder to realize this even after many years of doing them.
Think of this like learning to lift a heavy object. Back in 1999 I moved to Northern Africa to work. The conditions were not anything close to what I was expecting. I had to help clean the high voltage lines and my work was 95% physical, which I had never done before. Everyone there was big and strong and I was completely out of my element. I was a skinny man that had never done physical labor for a living. And boy, was I in for a rude awakening! It was, however, a time of tremendous learning and development. One that would teach me many lessons and for which I am very thankful, though it was so difficult that I would never willingly put myself in that situation again.
My duties included lifting and carrying this enormous electric insulator. Yes, that was my job! I had to lift gigantic ceramic plates from the ground. Some of the specialized team members actually climbed up the high voltage towers and detached the insulators and put them on the ground, so I had to load them in my pick up truck, take them to the cleaning barrack, clean them well (they got tremendous amounts of sand stuck to them due to the common sand storms in the area and stopped functioning properly) and take them back to the location where I picked them up.
So here I was trying to lift something I thought I wasn’t strong enough to. It’s not that it was heavy requiring a great effort. It was that I simply believed I couldn’t do it. Still, nobody was going to do my work for me. If I didn’t do my part, production stopped and the line would be out of power for longer than needed. That’s millions of dollars of loss in a day, since production meant extracting oil from the desert to sell to other countries. Simply put, it couldn’t be allowed. So I had to figure something out, and quick. Eventually I figured out a way to bend my back so that I could, with strenuous effort, lift the ceramic plates. But I paid a heavy price for this ‘technique.
In a matter of days my back was hurting, my hands ached perpetually, one of my legs had great pain, and I was limping heavily. That was from three days out of three months that I was supposed to be doing non-stop, seven days a week, until the company gave me my next break.
I went to the doctor on camp and all I got was a strong painkiller. Thankfully I had made a friend there. A kind hearted man who taught me to bend the knees in a different way, a new strategy. It was still really hard, but it didn’t leave me broken, plus with practice I started getting stronger. The combination of developed strength and improved body mechanics did the trick. The rest of the weeks went by without any more unbearable pain and I didn’t stop the production chain.
So, what happened there? First of all, I had a challenge for which my sheer physical strength was not enough. If, God forbid, I needed to use my Martial Arts training to defend my family (and the goal is never to have to do this) the last thing in your mind should be ‘how to look’ or ‘what techniques to use’ but to get the encounter over as fast as possible, by any means that you are able to, and to get your family to safety as soon as it’s possible. In a self-defense scenario it’s never about ‘how you look. But rather about giving you more freedom, ways to move, and useful strategies.
Originally many of these Arts were born to help people exactly in scenarios like that. Someone had to travel between two villages and couldn’t count on law enforcement to keep them or their families safe. They had to learn to defend their loved ones and themselves. They had to.
Now put yourself in that situation. If you are crossing some desolate area to get to another village and some bandits attack you and your group, the only goal is to get out of there alive and ideally with your possessions (though defending life comes first). It’s not about looking in a particular way, or using particular techniques, at all. Martial Arts would be about survival and the thought of loyalty to ‘styles’ would not even occur to them. If you survived that encounter and got your family and yourself, and ideally your things, to the safety of the other village, you won. Period.
But how did the bandits attack? For them, too, this was not about competition. They would have to overwhelm their victims. This would be done through the use of weapons and also through the use of numbers. They would have been groups of many strong people using weapons. So the average traveller did not have the strength and the skills to keep them at bay.
Enter the Martial Arts. Like a set of best practices that can give you an edge, when you need it, they came to the aid of some of those merchants who traveled in between villages. SOME, and only some, happened to survive. Eventually others gathered around these survivors, probably when they were older and had survived many encounters, to ‘learn how they managed to survive.’
If you have to lift a heavy box one time and you simply can do it and move on, you do it. If the box is too heavy or you have to do it many times and you need to gain leverage to get the job done and also not hurt yourself, you apply science, leverage, but also your physical strength combined.
This is a Martial Art System. It’s there to help you survive, gain leverage, maximize what you can do. Strength matters, too. Always does in a real situation. But the Art allows us to do more with what we have.
I was told once that when Wong Shun Leung was mentoring Bruce Lee in Martial Arts he took him to a rooftop fight to test his skills. Bruce Lee ended the first round very badly, and frankly speaking, he was losing. He was worried about what his dad would say if he saw him with a black eye. He was worried about looking nice to the few witnesses, so they would talk about how stylish Bruce Lee looked. Wong Shun Leung told him to forget about all that, and just attack. Fight one more round and overpower your opponent. Bruce Lee did this and won. And I always suspected this had a huge influence in building the confidence of that force of nature we later knew as Bruce Lee. The Bruce Lee who just a few years later changed everything the world knew about Martial Arts training.
I do not believe in styles. When I heard Bruce Lee tell Pierre Berton in the ‘lost interview’ that he didn’t believe in styles, I had already reached that conclusion and connected with his message. Martial Art, to me, and I think to many of the founders of today’s systems, is a program for the development of skill. It’s a way to develop yourself and improve, at whatever your goals are! Maybe your goal is performance, self-defense, sport combat, or self-knowledge. Martial Art is a program that will become your best ally in doing just whatever happens to be your goal. It will help you develop skill. When that skill expresses itself, don’t limit it. If and when you have to fight, or spar, the Martial Art is there to help you, not to limit you. Not to make you feel crystalized, but to allow you to express yourself honestly.
To know more about how to use Martial Arts as a way of overcoming limitations, you can view my Vlog and Podcast as well as these Martial Journal related articles: our thoughts on Training for Reality Part 3: Techniques by James McCann and Self-Doubt: Our Fiercest Opponent by Valéry Brosseau!
Francis can be contacted at francis.cordon@gmail.com, he is also an active Martial Arts YouTube Vlogger as well as the co-host of the Martial Arts Podcast ‘A Thousand Exits.’
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Another nicely written piece. Your words challenge me to think critically and beyond what lays on the surface.
A style or discipline should serve to unleash the best version of yourself… to guide and train you to take the appropriate and most effective actions thoughtfully yet instinctually… not confine you to rules that could potentially be detrimental to you.
Thank you so much my great and inspiring Friend 🙏🏽