Chris McKinley wrote:Deus,
RE: "This is an interesting thread because how do you know something is appropriately contextualized for a life and death encounter without getting in one?". Aha! I was wondering when somebody would pick up on that. You don't. This is one of the main reasons that, in my own personal beliefs, I'm so adamant about combat instruction being given by someone who's actually "been there", in whatever various way that means. There are far too many schools for martial arts out there, and far too many of them being instructed by people with no actual experience with fighting themselves, and I'm not even talking about life-or-death combat.
The simple answer is that there is no single standardized threshold for sufficient contextualization. Not only would it be a lost cause to try and find unanimous agreement about where that threshold is and how it would be measured, but creating a single standard would likely be pointless anyway. Individuals vary in where that threshold is for them, and not only from person to person, but also from tactic to tactic. Tom might find it easy to work up the jab, but the hook takes him a lot longer to really get down to the point where he can use it for real. Dick might find the hook easier, but the jab gives him trouble for some reason. Harry can also do the jab a little easier, but he's a Tong Bei stylist, so he doesn't care. He's got other challenges.
There will always be subjectivity inherent in the process. Not only is that unavoidable, it can actually be preferable. There's already far too much of the one-size-fits-all mentality in martial arts, especially in those martial arts most influenced by collectivist cultural beliefs. What's needed isn't a single standard that allows people to abdicate their individual judgment in favor of a policy, and also allows people with no fight experience to resume teaching, since all they would have to do is recognize the threshold.
What's truly needed is to find someone with real experience whose teaching style works for you and whose teaching you trust. Yes, that evaluation would have to be made subjectively, and you will know less about the material and teaching you are evaluating at first than after you've been around awhile. Eventually though, you'll know from your own personal experience as you begin to test the material yourself. You'll begin to learn what works for you, and that will inform your ability to evaluate not only your current instruction but also any future training situations.
It's a lot like choosing a family doctor. Yeah, sure, you want all doctors to be held to a standard that is, at minimum, sufficient for treating people, but even with standards like that in place, not all doctors are equal by any means. Ultimately, only you can determine who your physician ought to be, and at least parts of that decision are subjective.
The instructor you choose for combat instruction should always be accountable to you, the student, even though of necessity, you will be placing a certain amount of trust in his/her instruction. No one instantly and automatically gives absolute loyalty, social deference, and unquestioning trust to a garage mechanic when you need him to fix your car. Neither should you give your physician those things automatically. And you certainly shouldn't blindly give those things to someone claiming to be able to teach you how to fight.
A good, qualified instructor will be able to guide you toward real functionality, and at the pace your needs require. He/she will also be able to evaluate your progress and current abilities, and determine whether or not you are truly becoming contextually functional, or whether you are just developing refined abilities out of context. He'll know the difference, and he'll keep you from bullshitting yourself and future generations of practitioners that you might teach. He'll be tough but fair, and his guidance, however bitter, will be trustworthy. He'll also know how to help you contextualize your skills gradually, at the appropriate pace for you, to keep you from either languishing in mediocrity or from moving too quickly for a given skill.
source: http://semiorganized.com/articles/other ... ience.htmlEach generation that discovers something from its experience must pass that on, but it must pass that on with a delicate balance of respect and disrespect, so that the [human] race — now that it is aware of the disease to which it is liable — does not inflict its errors too rigidly on its youth, but it does pass on the accumulated wisdom, plus the wisdom that it may not be wisdom.
It is necessary to teach both to accept and to reject the past with a kind of balance that takes considerable skill. Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.
RE: "So then the question becomes "can we benefit by training fighting skills in a MORE rather than less abstract manner?". A qualified yes, but never at the expense of 'least abstract' training, and only if that training yields concrete beneficial results. I would submit my own research and development into trance work related to combat training as a perfectly illustrative example. By my own standards, I can include such training, but never at the expense of more essential 'less abstract' training. Further, even if the scheduling doesn't conflict, so to speak, I am still limited to providing such abstract training only if it produces concrete results in the native context. IOW, does it make me or my trainee a more effective fighter in real combat? If not, it has to go, regardless of cultural or personal sentiment. If it does, then it can stay. In fact, I may even find that I want to increase it to some degree, but always with concrete results as the yardstick.
I think one important thing is for the attacks used in drills to be real. By real I don't mean real intent, but the attack should be real in that its being thrown at a realistic target in a realistic way and eventually with realistic power and speed.
While I have to agree with the honesty of that argument it does not leave many options for people who want to learn a bit of Martial Arts.
Great care must be taken by the instructor in determining if, when and how much of this is included. Inocculating against trauma is the goal, not creating more of it.
Chris McKinley wrote:Excellent points about why contextualizing isn't the only kind of training one should spend time with. Being able to succeed under the appropriate conditions is just as important as the need to experience failure there. I don't often talk about it here, but one of the objectives of my training model is to purposefully create a meta-program at the level of the trainee's unconscious mind when their conscious mind gets overwhelmed by the duress of the situation.to guide them away from the pain of experienced failure and toward the pleasure of experienced success. Without actual experience of both, that "software" won't run correctly.
Experience with failure is necessary to demonstrate to the student that all is not lost and that even resounding success can still be achieved. It's also necessary for the fact that, as I've droned on many times on this forum, in a real assault on people who don't look for fights, it is likely to begin with a surprise attack. It's also necessary to experience failure in order to create the pain of that condition and associate it with remaining in that condition rather than taking action. To achieve that association, my training at the highest levels of intensity of contextualization can sometimes including continuing to attack someone who won't take action. This level of intensity would utterly overwhelm most IMA practitioners emotionally for the apparent visciousness and cruelty of it. That level is not for everybody and it's not to be used frequently.
Experience with success is necessary in order to create and establish the unconscious "program" to move toward the pleasure of taking action to ensure your survival rather than going fetal or freezing and getting killed. It's also IME absolutely vital in order to provide the trainee with the belief based on actual real experience that he actually can succeed. This unconscious belief absolutely, non-negotiably must be there if the person is to survive the most intense, life-threatening types of combat. It doesn't matter whether that person is the most high-speed SpecOps operator, the most highly touted well-known lineage-holding martial arts grandmaster, the most successful undefeated tournament fighter, the most average family guy, or the sweetest little old lady. All of them can fail when faced with real threat to life if they don't believe they can survive that kind of assault.
Chris McKinley wrote:Deus,
RE: "If I truly had intent to harm my training partners, we would constantly be getting hurt, and not much training would get done.". Not if you had the actual skill to handle it. Yes, there are occasional injuries; it would be dishonest and dangerous to state otherwise. That's why I had the two separated shoulders in one year a couple of years ago. I regularly claim that, in realistic training courses, nobody gets beat up more than the teacher. Keep in mind though that this represents the more dangerous end of the training spectrum. In my case, these guys are specialized LEO's, and the training is correspondingly more intense.
Additionally, this level of contextualization isn't the majority of the time spent in training; it's occasional. Also, you don't toss people who aren't ready into that level of intensity either, or you do indeed risk injury or even death depending on what's being trained. That's another reason why it's so important to have an experienced instructor to guide you. Someone without any experience might have good material content to teach, but they are very likely not to have a reliable guage on callibrating the level of intensity in contextualization so that the training achieves the sometimes delicate balance between realism and safety.
Excellent points about why contextualizing isn't the only kind of training one should spend time with. Being able to succeed under the appropriate conditions is just as important as the need to experience failure there. I don't often talk about it here, but one of the objectives of my training model is to purposefully create a meta-program at the level of the trainee's unconscious mind when their conscious mind gets overwhelmed by the duress of the situation.to guide them away from the pain of experienced failure and toward the pleasure of experienced success. Without actual experience of both, that "software" won't run correctly.
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