One method for optimizing learning

[Darthwing Teorist]

Thanks for the answer Chris. My observation is from my traditional MA days. My current instructor teaches among these lines. My problem is that most of our drills are partner based and I only have an evening per week during which I can attend class. I try to do solo drills as best as I can, but here is where I have to work on motivation, intent and intensity. I prefer partner work but unless I take on sparring with my 2 years old daughter, there's not much I can do.

[Chris McKinley]

Visualization along with slow, careful, precise movement practice is about the best tool you have if you're forced to work without a partner. Sometimes it's tough, I know. That's why I think that it's a better investment of energy not so much to be concerned with solo practice so much as increasing the efficiency of the time you do have in partner work. This is why rou shou, variable cooperation/resistance work, and full-contact scenario training are such powerful tools in creating truly functional individuals, especially in shorter time frames.

[Adam S]

IME, contextualizing combat skills is characterized almost exclusively by partner work, and you simply cannot realistically or appreciably contextualize those skills without it.

IOW, yes, a skill can be contextualized far more quickly than any traditional IMA doctrine might allow. However, that won't happen to any significant degree without the partner work, at least IME.

Ditto!!

[Darthwing Teorist]

Thanks. What is very important, is to learn how to learn, IMO.

[cdobe]

Hi Brian,
I'm not exactly sure, whom this method is for. Do you use this for yourself or for your student's solo training, or both?

I have a couple of comments from my own experience of learning and teaching.

My criteria are:
-It has to be based on feeling, so it doesn't require special training to engage in the process

I have found that people are not able to feel certain things at early stages of their training. I have experimented a lot to give students shortcuts to certain body methods, but it is a fruitless endeavor for the most part. At different stages students have to learn to get a feel for certain things until they can move on. It's a progression, and I feel that it needs guidance by a teacher. At least, when your goal is to learn and master a specific method. And I don't believe, that in the end all IMA methods of using your body are the same. So chances are low, that you will eventually come up with the desired body method on your own.

-It has to be based in concrete function on some level, be it push hands, sparring, semi-cooperative partner work, or anything on the spectrum of training for an intended usage

When you're learning something, you often can't see how certain exercises are helpful to achieve your goal. It reveals to you much later, when the dots connect. IOW not all methods have an instant gratification for a practitioner. So methods can have a very concrete function, which you are not able to see.

[Chris McKinley]

Very interesting point, cdobe. I, too, would like to read Brian's response. That said, I'd like to add my own two cents on your point here. RE: "I have found that people are not able to feel certain things at early stages of their training. I have experimented a lot to give students shortcuts to certain body methods, but it is a fruitless endeavor for the most part.". I agree......IF you're talking about the subtler body methods found in IMA shen fa. However, these methods are in no way necessary to the provision of real fighting/self-defense skills, and since the latter is what Brian is primarily referencing, the difficulty you mention is not really germaine to the sector of training Brian is concerned with for the purposes of this thread.

There are degrees of body control that do take significant time to develop, especially for use in actual self-defense, that can only be "sped up" to a very limited degree. Thankfully, exactly none of them are necessary for real self-defense skill. It all really depends on whether Brian is trying to elicit functional skills in the short term as the main priority, or whether he's also wanting to develop the full panoply of IMA subtleties in that same short term as well.

[Bhassler]

So this is not really about solo vs. partner practice. Most people who are not professionals go through periods much like Darthwing Teorist outlined, where they get maybe one time a week where they have the luxury of partner work. If you're a professional or a wanna-be sport fighter (or whatever) then saying "I don't have partners" is just an excuse, but if your priorities are work and family and an assortment of other things, then there's nothing wrong with limiting your hobbies to one night a week away from the family. At the same time, there's no reason not to get as much out of that one night as humanly (humanely?) possible.

Really I'm looking at solo practice in this instance not as an alternative to partner work, but as an extension of it. My motivation is to take a process that I had begun to develop for myself that seems to work REALLY well and articulate it. By articulating it I can discuss it places like RSF and hopefully improve it, and also I can share it with my friends, fellow students, or students of my own. So that's where I'm coming from-- just taking circumstances as they already exist for a lot of people and trying to squeeze more juice out of it.

As far as the ability of people to sense things, I partially agree with cdobe. I would reframe it to say that most people feel just about everything all the time, although they may not be able to process it efficiently. This is significant because the information is already there; it then becomes a question of bringing it into focus and helping people find a way to interpret it. It's still a process, but it can be facilitated better by recognizing what really needs to happen. Individual belief systems (You're the smart one, I'm just a regular person-- I can't do this!) are generally a far bigger obstacle than any physical limitation to learning how to sense/feel oneself or others (aka tingjin).

That said, it doesn't really matter for this particular topic-- the goal is to come up with a process that people can engage in on their own terms. So while my freakish kinesthetic acuity and sense memory are definitely an advantage, anyone can follow the steps at their own level and in the process develop their own context for movement skills and sensory acuity. The process is meant to be style and skill agnostic.

As far as IMA shenfa and IP (which we've already established are not really the point), I have found that they're not particularly necessary for sweet combat skillz and doing a lot of the things that are associated with IMA (softness, borrowing, yielding, etc.) That said, if you have the tools they can add a whole big pile of nasty WTF-just-happened-and-why-is-my-liver-leaking-out-of-my-assedness to one's fighting skills. (The caveat to that statement is that what I'm learning eschews most anything resembling sport or social fighting and is all about fuck 'em up and get out the door.)

[Chris McKinley]

Cool. Nice position statement.

I've got a question for you regarding your use of the proprioceptive/kinesthetic sense to determine if a new movement "feels right", so to speak. My question is what is the empirical or objective criterion that you're using to make that determination? If you are practicing solo at a given moment, it would seem impossible to determine by feel if a given movement would be optimally combatively viable. IOW, something might feel fantastic, but then be proved to be tactically unworkable once you tested it with a partner. How are you avoiding this discrepancy?

[marqs]

I like this topic. Haven't tried verbalizing this enough, but here's some ideas i've had...

IME learning is accelerated when at least these conditions are met:
- The drill/movement is not too easy or too difficult. Meaning it's not se easy it could be done very well without total concentration, or so difficult it couldn't be partially correct with perfect concentration, atleast every now and then.
- The trainee can make a distinction between relative failure and relative success. Meaning if relaxation is needed, they can recognize their degree of relaxation. If alignment, they can recognize when alignment is bad and when it's good.
- The drill can be made easier and more difficult at will (eg. faster/slower movement, bigger/smaller, more/less strength, more difficult directions, concentrating on just one body part, a larger area or the whole body...) to facilitate experimentation with different levels of difficulty. This enables the adjustment of optimal levels of difficulty. And I mean plural, as IME more benefit is gained from approaching a simple thing from multiple perspectives. This seems to enable perception of mistakes, understanding and correcting them, as the same problem might come up in different contexts.

Playing around with these gives a lot of info about how to optimize drilling, which can be used as well in partner work.

The recognition of success/failure is somewhat related to Chris McKinley's comment above, even though he seems to make it about real-life functionality, I'm thinking more just biomechanics, where I think it's also a valid question:

I've got a question for you regarding your use of the proprioceptive/kinesthetic sense to determine if a new movement "feels right", so to speak. My question is what is the empirical or objective criterion that you're using to make that determination?

[Bhassler]

Cool. Nice position statement.

I've got a question for you regarding your use of the proprioceptive/kinesthetic sense to determine if a new movement "feels right", so to speak. My question is what is the empirical or objective criterion that you're using to make that determination? If you are practicing solo at a given moment, it would seem impossible to determine by feel if a given movement would be optimally combatively viable. IOW, something might feel fantastic, but then be proved to be tactically unworkable once you tested it with a partner. How are you avoiding this discrepancy?

The short answer is that the initial testing comes first. It's not a question of finding what feels good solo and then applying it in relation to someone else, it's a matter of noticing what feels good in partner work and then applying that kinesthetic sense to make the solo work more like what happens with an opponent. This can happen in a more literal outward orientation (like Hong Junsheng's version of Chen taiji) or in a more representational form (like Feng's version). The merits of either method are probably more dependent upon the understanding and personality of the individual practitioner than on one method being empirically superior.

I can elaborate more later....

[Chris McKinley]

Gotcha, thanks for the clarification. What do you do when you first discover one of these aha's? Do you stop the interaction with the partner (of whatever type) immediately or do you wait and try to make a mental note of what it felt like for later?

[Bhassler]

In my case, the tape recorder is running all the time. The ideal situation is I get an "aha" where something is just really clear and precise, and I can stop everything and go back and do it again as many times as it takes until I understand what happened. Probably more often what happens is I get something that's not right but reminds me of something else that I did right before, and I have to puzzle it out until I find the neurological groove and/or point of balance for that particular technique or idea. It may take seconds, minutes, or weeks. In one extreme case I was walking down the street and something popped into my head from probably two years before. Over time they get easier and easier to find, because my nervous system starts to generalize "right" and gravitate towards that on it's own. That's where I believe movement exploration is so important, in that you have a more intelligent/experienced nervous system to work with from the outset.

This also ties into what a couple of people have brought up about not knowing something is useful until much later. The ability to feel a thing, or even a part of a thing, and note it, isolate it, then recreate and generalize it appears to be a fairly advanced skill, but it's the same process that's used to learn even the most basic movement skills, and really most MA teachers are pretty good at coming up with these. One of the most basic ones is to have a student make a fist, stick their arm out, and lean on the wall supporting themselves with their fist. It's a pretty simple way to introduce the idea of a basic structure. If you have a student imagine that feeling while doing their forms/drills/etc. (or even imagine pushing a car), then they've already engaged in this sense of developing a somatic guide for their practice. From there it's just developing and refining it. Usually when I get something new and bring it into my solo practice, I don't try to replicate it exactly-- I just hold on to the feeling and see where the movement or similar movements show up. That way I end up with variations of the movement, so it generalizes better into my overall sense of how to move and is not associated with a specific set of circumstances that have to align perfectly to generate a technique.

As an anecdotal note, it seems that since the original feeling was generated in conjunction with a partner, subsequent variations are also "partner ready"--- the original information is not lost, just expanded upon. I have theories about why this is, but that's a whole other bag of worms.

[Chris McKinley]

Okay, thanks for the explanation. I agree with you when you state, "Over time they get easier and easier to find, because my nervous system starts to generalize "right" and gravitate towards that on it's own. That's where I believe movement exploration is so important, in that you have a more intelligent/experienced nervous system to work with from the outset.". This is another reason why it's important to have students working their material with a partner as soon as possible because the guage they develop will be far more accurate in the long run than someone who tries to work nothing but solo shen fa for years before really callibrating their material with a partner in any meaningful way.

[BruceP]

Brian, been following this thread with interest since you started it but haven't had much online time lately to do anything but read a few choice threads. It's been a very busy time over here. Anyway, hope you don't mind if I sway toward the same boring old slant I take on learning but I believe intuitive learning has great value in the training of one's personal combat.

Intuitive learning occurs when the individual is in a neutral state of being. That is, when there are no expectations and the individual is impartial to the material/method/exercise/drill. Understanding the process by which each individual learns intuitively can be quite challenging. The quality of that learning can be readily observed, though, in the instant evolution of the person's movement along specific lines, and in response to stimulae which are predetermined by the facilitator. The trick on the part of the facilitator is to get the trainee's inner being to the front of their learning and to have their cognitive/active self disengaged. I have no scientific proof of that notion. Just my biased, experiential understanding.

Here's a simple exercise I use to create a climate conducive to intuitive learning on a very basic, yet observable level;
Have the person stand naturally and relaxed. They extend their favored arm (right-handed/left-handed) out front, 90 degrees to their chest. With no pretext or explanation, twist it clockwise relative to yourself (inward relative to them) to elicit whatever response follows. Reset and twist it the other way. What happens when you ask them to yield to the twist? What happens when you ask them to resist? What happens when you switch to their other arm? Sometimes I start this exercise with them blindfolded and then not. Everyone learns differently and this gives a pretty good indication of the individual's capacity and affinities to intuitive learning as their movement evolves almost instantly with each variation on the exercise.

There's plenty more I want to say but I'm not sure if this is the thread for it. Anyway, cool topic with some very good info being shared by everybody.

[cdobe]

Here's a simple exercise I use to create a climate conducive to intuitive learning on a very basic, yet observable level;
Have the person stand naturally and relaxed. They extend their favored arm (right-handed/left-handed) out front, 90 degrees to their chest. With no pretext or explanation, twist it clockwise relative to yourself (inward relative to them) to elicit whatever response follows. Reset and twist it the other way. What happens when you ask them to yield to the twist? What happens when you ask them to resist? What happens when you switch to their other arm? Sometimes I start this exercise with them blindfolded and then not. Everyone learns differently and this gives a pretty good indication of the individual's capacity and affinities to intuitive learning as their movement evolves almost instantly with each variation on the exercise.

There's plenty more I want to say but I'm not sure if this is the thread for it. Anyway, cool topic with some very good info being shared by everybody.

That's more than interesting, Bruce. I have developed something incredibly similar, but I use a "holding the ball" type of shape in the arm. Basically the palm outward turn with the right arm, turns you to the right and the palm up turn to the left.