Contextualization: the Make-or-Break of Martial Arts

[Chris McKinley]

Hey all,

I'm starting this thread as a conceptual carry-over from the theme of my Fundamental Flaw thread, though really I believe the subject matter is deserving of a stand-alone thread in its own right. For those that haven't read the Fundamental Flaw thread, this thread, too, starts with the identical assumption of a two-fold problem endemic if not inherent to almost all current-day practice of martial arts, regardless of style, teacher, country of origin, or chronological/historical time of origin. To recap, that problem has essentially two aspects:

1) 1) Too much emphasis on precision at the expense of (and that's the real problem, not the precision itself) material which has the flexibility and versatility to be used in actual combat. And...

2) An almost complete lack (to varying degrees, depending on style, particular instructor, etc.) of training to create the contextualization of the skill sets, regardless of their relative quality or suitability to combat.

As with the other thread, this one will build off of those same assumptions as the starting point for discussion. Therefore, just as with the other thread, posts which deny or challenge the existence of the problem as the original starting premise for discussion will not be addressed.

Also like the other thread, this one will not focus predominantly on whether or not the content of material trained is realistically viable for use in real life-or-death combat. That issue is certainly a factor, and to be certain, not all martial arts even approach universal equality in that regard. However, with this thread I hope to illustrate and clarify the crucial and pivotal role that contextualization of skills obtained in practice plays with regard to whether or not any given approach to combat, no matter how new and modern nor how "proven" and traditional, will produce results that are viable and functional under the conditions of a real surprise life-threatening assault.

To kick things off, I'll present the defining concept of this thread for discussion:

Contextualizing the skills obtained in martial arts training is non-negotiably essential to making those skills functional and reliable under the conditions of a surprise life-threatening assault.

This is without regard to who has trained those skills, who has taught the skills, what those skills are, how they are obtained, how long they have been trained, or to what degree of proficiency they have been developed. Regardless of all other factors, without contextualization to sufficient degree, those skills cannot be considered either accessible nor viable for the native context of real combat.

In the Fundamental Flaw thread, much of the discussion seemed to revolve around the issue of precision in forms training, addressing the first aspect of the problem as listed previously above. For this thread, I'd like to get from the forum's posters their input, insights, suggestions, and especially tested training methods which may or have helped to correct the problem of a lack of proper contextualization of martial arts skills as they are trained today. As with the other thread, I will generally refrain from providing all of my own suggestions, methods, etc., since I have already done so in long-winded detail over the years in various threads. Besides, it's not really polite to ask a question of the forum and then spend all my time answering it myself.

Thanks in advance to all who contribute constructively to this thread and to the information pool it might help to create for the forum readership.

[Bhassler]

Hi Chris,

Meditation, visualization, etc. are a big part of most internal systems, and I believe this issue of contextualization is a big part of why they are included and effective parts of the training. It's been discussed at length here and elsewhere, and quite frankly you're far more qualified to explain the mechanism of why it is effective than I would be, so I will just say that I have found it to extremely helpful to my own practice, for both martial and health applications, and leave it at that. I will say that I have had several life-threatening experiences in my time and feel fairly comfortable saying that when the chips are down I'm about as excitable as a three-towed sloth on heroin. I attribute this primarily to the fact that at some point in my life I came to the realization on a very deep level that panic doesn't help anything-- so I don't. It's not a conscious decision on my part, it's more that my so-called lizard brain at some point compared two relative states and determined that a calm state was more advantageous, so that is the default under extreme stress. Interestingly, this response has never been evoked in training, probably because I don't regularly train to the level where I actually fear for my safety.

A less obvious method goes back to what I said above about the lizard brain comparing states and choosing the more comfortable/efficient. Again, I'm not able to speak about this very scientifically (although anecdotally I am 100% positive it works). Basically, if a person were to direct their training to creating many, many options for movement/response rather than simply trying to habituate a response (or set of responses) that was perceived as more desirable than another, the nervous system could default to whichever of those responses was most appropriate for whatever situation presented itself. This has obvious advantages when training for unusual/surprise attacks or other unforeseeable situations. The best example of this in our common lexicon would be Shooter's experiment with teaching all the little old ladies how to play with batons and then coming back several weeks later to find he could not apply chin-na to them. Elements of this sort of learning appear throughout many of Shooter's methods (as I understand them-- I won't presume to speak for him), so I'm not presenting anything new other than to say that what I've seen Shooter talk about here over the past several years is focused towards fighting/martial art, but the process itself can be generalized even more and applied to anything and everything. In it's most generalized format the learning would appear not to relate to anything (by design), and would emerge when appropriate.

[Chris McKinley]

Bhassler,

Interesting contribution, thanks. It might be fun to pick your brain and determine what cognitive processes you went through to get to that place, especially if it's been tested since then. What I'd be most curious about is what it is you do that prevents the amygdala from becoming dominant under such circumstances and dumping that annoying chemical cocktail into your system.

You referenced meditation and visualization...I can attest from vast personal experience with them that they can most definitely help with contextualization if trance work is involved. Without trance, some contextualization can occur, but mostly in the form of association of specific behaviors with specific visual cues. Unfortunately, this is not quite the same as bringing the entire arsenal to bear as a response to a psycho-emotional stimulus, which is what we're ultimately after. Performing the same kinds of hyper-realistic visualizations under trance makes a huge difference with respect to this.

[velalavela]

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[DeusTrismegistus]

Chris, could you define contextualization better?

Also you said contextualization of skills. To me skills are things like listening, following, vision, timing, precision, distance, power, quickness. This is different from techniques like blocks, parries, strikes, locks and throws. Which are you referring to?

[lazyboxer]

Nice questions, Chris, although I'm also not sure what you mean by contextualization. Perhaps you could expand on it a little.

With regard to your first point, the emphasis on precision found in Asian martial art traditions is a requirement only in the initial to intermediate learning stages. Acquisition of the deceptively simple natural and 'shapeless' movement which characterizes advanced practice only comes after one has internalized the principles embedded in the foundation work. Martial art training isn't like working on an assembly line, unless you're a soldier or other professional, where only a minimum skill set is required - the effectiveness of which is largely a function of its simplicity and directness.

I assume the absence of your second requirement is why so few people get to that stage. Classical MA training has a far broader context than soldiering requires, and should really be seen as training for life, in which the moral basis, or 'wu de', is all important. That, in my view, should also be a requirement for professional defence work, though you won't hear people talking about it much, apart from politicians!

Finally, like Bassler, I have also found myself strangely calm in the few life-and-death situations I have had to face. I'm not sure why, but I did do a few years of of deep meditation work in the 1970s (I don't know what you mean by trance work), started my MA training in Zheng Manqing taijiquan where relaxation is a mantra - and also had my hand laid open to the bone at age 6 in a fight over a red plastic waterpistol, which may have taught me to keep cool in tight spots. Pain can be a good learning tool.

Another thing that comes to mind is that inculcation of the disinhibitory reflex that so-called reality based training claims to foster may be based on false assumptions. No-one knows how they will react until the chips are down, and unless you go out looking for trouble you'll never know till it happens. People with no martial art training are often surprised at the ferocity of their defensive (and effective) responses under attack.

[Chris McKinley]

Good, fair questions. Thanks guys.

Deus,

RE: "Chris, could you define contextualization better?". I don't know, but I'll sure give it a shot. For perspective and to realize where I'm coming from, I'll give a very brief summary of my background with regard to this topic. I've been a very long time martial artist. Started when I was 6 and now I'm 40. When I was younger, I competed full-contact and lost only once out of several dozen fights...my last fight, after which I basically threw a tantrum like the little bitch that I was and quit competing. After that is when I consider myself to have started getting serious about martial arts.

I started training not for competition, but for real combat. I pursued a career where the requirements of the profession included consistently functional and viable combat skills. I eventually changed course and decided to go a more academic route as a neurophysiologist, but maintained my contacts in both the martial arts and professional military/LEO worlds and continued some of that kind of work as a consultant. I participated in, and in some cases created, studies having to do with combat psychology, physiology, tactics, strategies, etc. I also got heavily into the world of accelerated learning and learning theory. As a practitioner and trainer of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, I developed some of NLP's earlier applications to the world of combat training, building off of John Grinder's earlier but less comprehensive work.

Eventually, I coalesced my information from various sources and from personal experimentation into a specific model of training that I still use and am still improving today. Part of that method recognizes that learning of this type of material, i.e., combat skills, happens optimally in three distinct and complementary phases.

1) Learning. This is where you identify and acquire the skill. This phase isn't complete until you can perform the skill functionally. The challenge in this phase for combat training is that learning is state-dependent, and initial learning happens most optimally in an environment that includes a positive emotional state. For material that is ostensibly capable of being used for lethal purposes, creating a balance between healthy respect for the inherent seriousness of the material and an emotionally positive learning environment is not always obvious and easy to do.

2) Practicing. This phase is where skills that have already been learned are then developed and refined beyond the rudimentarily functional level. It's possible, within IMA as an example, to learn something relatively quickly and then spend years, even a lifetime, practicing and refining it. This phase corresponds to the "eating bitter" and "gung fu" phases of training. In terms of its state dependence, practicing produces optimal results when the emotional state is neutral, objective and dissociated. Think of scientists or engineers in white lab coats with clipboards taking unbiased test results from an experiment.

3) Contextualizing. The dictionary definition is "to place (as a word or activity) in a context", and I can't really improve on that definition. What it means for combat skills, or for any physical activity or behavior that has a specific and identifiable context, is that once learned, the skills must be practiced in order to achieve consistent reliable performance. However, those same skills must then be placed into the appropriate native context for their proper use. Simply having the skills, even to a refined degree, is not enough. As mentioned, this is true for any behavior which has a specific native context, and the more rare or even unique that context is, the more contextualization is required.

For instance, walking is a non-context-dependent behavior. We use the skill of walking in almost every physical endeavor in which we engage, and even as a required subset skill for those behaviors in which we can engage while seated. Learning to walk as a baby is positively reinforcing, allowing new interaction with and control over one's environment. Practicing that skill includes cruising and eventually plenty of falling down in repeated attempts to develop consistent ability. However, once that consistency is achieved, further effort to contextualize that newly developed skill is not consciously necessary, since the skill is used in pretty much every context and every activity in which we engage from that point onward. It could be said to be a somewhat universal skill for that reason.

In contrast, skills for surviving a real, surprise, life-or-death assault belong exclusively to that rather narrow, hopefully rare, and emotionally atypical context. It is simply inappropriate to apply such skills outside of that context for moral, ethical and legal reasons for well-adjusted, law-abiding citizens who are men and women of goodwill. Further, in addition to the native context being exceedingly rare in occurrence, it also involves some of the most intense emotional duress under which a person will ever find themselves throughout their lifetime. It is possible, for instance, for a person to be literally frightened to death as a worst-case example of such duress.

Under such conditions, one of the most common and ironically tragic things that can happen to a person is to become amnesic for any and all of the fighting skills obtained in the relative quiet and safety of the training hall, even if those skills have been developed over decades of dedicated and productive refinement. Put a bit oversimply, without contextualization, the neural pathways in the brain involved in the storage, access and utilization of those skills aren't connected to or associated with the pathways which are currently overriding all others temporarily while under that kind of duress. You literally don't have access to all that highly developed and refined skill at that moment, however many years you might have been practicing it.

Also a bit oversimply but sufficient for this discussion, the process of contextualization involves the creation of neural associations between your hard-won fighting skills and the neural pathways to which you will be limited under the emotional environment of extreme duress which is inherent to the native context of those skills. Learning and practicing aren't enough. Without contextualizing that skill, you have the equivalent of creating and developing a really killer website with all sorts of the latest features and functionality, and then never connecting it to the internet. Without that last crucial step, all that came before it is completely useless, and all the energy expended in the development of the website is completely wasted. The difference is, with an unconnected website, all you lose is time and maybe some money. With uncontextualized combat skills, what you lose may be your life or the life of a loved one.

RE: "To me skills are things like listening, following, vision, timing, precision, distance, power, quickness. This is different from techniques like blocks, parries, strikes, locks and throws. Which are you referring to?". Both. For the purposes of how they function in the learning process, those are all identical. They are all behaviors which must be learned, developed/practiced, then contextualized into their native context if they are to be accessible and functional in that context.

[johnwang]

1) Too much emphasis on precision at the expense of (and that's the real problem, not the precision itself) material which has the flexibility and versatility to be used in actual combat. And....

This does not apply to the Chinese throwing art of SC. In SC:

- moves have no standard.
- name of the moves are not important.

You can use leg bite or leg scoop for your leg seize. You can use your leg hook or body forward momentum for your front cut. You can call your move as front cut or chop, hip throw or waist life. As long as you can use your move on your opponent, nobody will argue with you.

I find it very strange to argue whether in certain style that your upper body should lean and in other style that your upper body should not lean. No matter what style that you train, when you see a $100 bill on the ground, your body will lean.

[Chris McKinley]

lazyboxer,

RE: "...the emphasis on precision found in Asian martial art traditions is a requirement only in the initial to intermediate learning stages.". And yet that's not at all what we typically find in actual practice in martial arts classes. The "emphasis", as you put it, on precision not only continues, it becomes even more stringent, and the instructor less forgiving with regard to it, the longer the student remains involved in the practice.

RE: "Acquisition of the deceptively simple natural and 'shapeless' movement which characterizes advanced practice only comes after one has internalized the principles embedded in the foundation work.". I most whole-heartedly agree. However, as a result of the rarity of such practice, we see a correspondingly rarity of occurrence of the genuine article of that kind of movement, and only among only the very best standout practitioners, never among the average long-term student.

RE: "I assume the absence of your second requirement is why so few people get to that stage.". No. The kind of skill you describe is acquired in the practicing phase, and is a function of a high degree of refinement. It is not linked to contextualization. One can have functionally contextualized skill and be unable to manifest the level of skill you describe. Likewise, one can develop that particularly high degree of skill and yet not be able to use the slightest bit of it in the native context of real combat. Again, that kind of skill is a function of refinement, not contextualization.

RE: "Classical MA training has a far broader context than soldiering requires, and should really be seen as training for life, in which the moral basis, or 'wu de', is all important.". This is technically inaccurate. All combat training, predating the formation of codified, culturally-influenced martial arts, has as its raison d'etre (its primary reason for being) the ability to defend oneself against life-threatening physical attack, whether on the organized battlefied or in individual encounters. That is the native context of combat skill, i.e., and curiously not very trickily.....combat. All the rest that you describe....life in general, moral overlay, etc....are all part of the ancillary adjuncts that various cultures have placed onto the basic skill set. Any or all of these can be acceptable, even very desireable, but none of them have the ability to alter the primary purpose and native context of the essential skills themselves.

Your reference to prior meditation work and the significantly emotional learning event of the hand laceration are both interesting points and each can represent possible ways to affect and alter the default setting of emotional duress in combat.

RE: "No-one knows how they will react until the chips are down, and unless you go out looking for trouble you'll never know till it happens.". While that's true in regard to how one will specifically react, it is not true in regard to the well-known, well-researched and well-documented general reactions one will have as a result of a shared neurology to conditions of extreme arousal, for which real combat certainly qualifies.

RE: "People with no martial art training are often surprised at the ferocity of their defensive (and effective) responses under attack.". Far, far, FAR more often, even people with martial art training are surprised at the speed and ferocity of a genuine life-threatening assault, and the profoundly underwhelming effectiveness of their response to it.

[Chris McKinley]

John,

I'm glad to hear that that is true of SC as an art. RE: "I find it very strange to argue whether in certain style that your upper body should lean and in other style that your upper body should not lean. No matter what style that you train, when you see a $100 bill on the ground, your body will lean.". That's hysterical. Perhaps that should be added to the Taiji Classics as a parable.

[chimerical tortoise]

Hope I'm not regurgitating the obvious.

A Russian gentleman (I've forgotten his name) once demonstrated to me the problems of set patterns. We were doing short handwork and I was starting to anticipate the punches, so he stopped for a second, looked at his ring, fiddled with it, I looked at it, and he hit me. It struck me as a very good example of not getting stuck into a fixed pattern and of anticipation.

Also, if you train mostly in a formal setting, I find that sometimes it's good to go to somewhere informal, wearing informal day-to-day clothes, sometimes grab a few beers and food, and practice in a variety of settings, e.g.

Car parks (concrete floor is a little less-than-childsafe)
Nighttime (different types of light, i.e. flourescent tubing)
Toilets (the closed spaces and lack of manouvrability)
on public transport (treehugging)

It kind of gets the idea out of your head that the art you learn has to be pure and perfect and bound by principle. You also gain comfort working with whatever environment you're in (and people can point out painful environmental concerns), and you get familiar with taking what you learn formally and applying it somewhere outside of that spatial bounding. I also really did mean the beers/food/whatever poisons you choose; if for a pasttime you get unsober then you probably aren't going to have time to sober up before it's past time to act.

I guess toilet-fu is gonna get a little flack, but I heard an interesting story from a guy that used to do cailifo awhile ago... one of his friends, who did ving tsun, took him into a toilet stall to spar (and show that some long range techniques couldn't be used in close space). Left an impression. *cue jokes*

[lazyboxer]

Chris,

Thanks for your response. I accept your point about the native context of combat skill, but always use the term 'Martial Art' to refer to the systematized cultural accretions that crystallize around the development of the raw essentials of self defence. Non-militaristic societies have always had an ambivalent relationship with battle veterans, and need a culturally acceptable rationale to justify the maintenance of combat readiness when external conditions seem not to require it. The abstract codification and ritual aspects of military training, whether expressed through official national public parades, form training, or the philosophical and moral justification of warfare, go some way towards doing this.

You are right to emphasize the corollary to my point about the latent human capacity for violence under stress - is it possible, even, that a lot of what passes for martial art training has precisely the opposite effect to what is intended - i.e. that developing skill sets perhaps better suited to public display than actual combat may induce a sense of complacency leading to potentially fatal 'freeze-ups' when reality bites? I certainly know of instances of the latter.

[Ian]

1) Too much emphasis on precision at the expense of... material which has the flexibility and versatility to be used in actual combat...

2) An almost complete lack... of training to create the contextualization of the skill sets, regardless of their relative quality or suitability to combat.

That's why I practice systema* - because the starting goal is combat efficacy and developing open, flexible minds. This is achieved, in part, with a heavy emphasis on contextualisation, in varying degrees of complexity.

Other styles produce diverse and interesting results when it comes to empty-hand, one-on-one fighting, but I like that the reality of modern altercations forms the core of and is thoroughly addressed in our training.

Put another way, I'm not so much interested in being able to make The Decision and deliver 1000 years of power (although this can obviously be achieved through the training as well). I'm more interested in learning about crowds, orchestrated mass attacks, the use of firearms, knives, short sticks etc.

Further related to the question of survival (not just combat efficacy), it should be noted that the way systema is structured, i.e. as a training methodology and a mindset rather than a style, lends itself to a much higher degree of initiative, resourcefulness, mental drive and physical fitness.

*Caveat:
-I don't consider what I practice to be the be-all, end-all of self-defense, obviously, and I'm not big on telling anyone how they should train.
-Even though I do systema, I don't represent anyone else's training. Some of the stuff I've seen of systema I find completely disagreeable.

No matter what style that you train, when you see a $100 bill on the ground, your body will lean.

[DeusTrismegistus]

This is an interesting thread because how do you know something is appropriately contextualized for a life and death encounter without getting in one? I have avoided so far any life or death physical altercations and would like to continue that way.

To properly contextualize 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.

For example if you are doing a drill to practice a specific block followed by a upward palm strike to the chin with pads, you want your partner to throw the strike so that if you don't block it that it will hit you in the head. If the punch (or simulated punch if using pads) is too low then that will create a habit of blocking too low and not learning to recognize the true trajectory if you are beginner. As skill increases then the power and speed can increase until being a level that is consistent with the average persons full out attack.

[Chris McKinley]

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.