EVALUATING DRILLS

I’m not a big fan of most drills. There is a fine line, but conditioned reflexes are crucial in a fight, and habits will get you killed.

Conditioned reflexes are things you do without thinking. They are essentially trained flinch responses. If something suddenly comes at your eyes you will do something: block, move your head, or, at the very minimum, blink. The more you train, the more sophisticated the conditioned reflex can become.

Habits are also things you do without thinking. Ways of moving. Ways of approaching problems, and even ways of thinking and seeing. Habits can be ways of thinking without thinking. If you always problem-solve by breaking things down into bite-sized pieces, something that began as a strategy becomes a habit, and the second it becomes a habit, you forget to look at other ways.

Habits are especially pernicious in self-defense training. In the end, a martial artist is training to break another human being. The essence of martial arts is the manufacture of corpses and cripples. In every drill designed to break a bone, if no bone breaks, there is something wrong with the drill. Something deliberately flawed to make the drill safe. You must recognize the flaw. Because with every repetition you are instilling the flaw along with the technique.

Do you pull your punches? Then missing has become a habit. Do you use three-move defenses against single-move attacks? If so, congratulations. You are well trained to beat someone who is only a third of your speed.

When you analyze any force-on-force drill (any drill where you are simulating attacking or being attacked), you first have to examine why no one is being crippled or killed. Not merely hurt, because people are lazy and cunning and will decide that pain is “close enough” and use it as an excuse to look no deeper. Crippled or killed.

Most likely it will be one of four things (these, of course, are the four elements that need to be done properly to cripple or kill):

1. Powder-puffing. Power generation is absent. Sometimes the power is deliberately pulled, and you make only light contact. But there is another way, too, where the “chain of power” is deliberately broken. Power comes, in the end, from your feet. If you were floating weightless and struck someone, only half the power would transmit to his body. The other half would push you away as well … and any power that went to moving his body would also be lost, not contributing to damage.

   The power chain in a hand strike comes from the feet, then up the leg bones to the pelvis, spine, and shoulder, and out the arm bones to the hands. That probably sounds esoteric. Hit a heavy bag as hard as you can. Pay attention to where your feet, hips, spine, shoulder, and arms are at the instant of impact.

   If you are not using a similar alignment in the force-on-force drills, you are hitting weakly, you are hitting weakly on purpose, and you are training yourself to hit weakly under stress.

2. Targeting. If you do not use valid targets in training, you are practicing missing. Whether it is pulling strikes or using a worthless target near a good one (such as simulating eye pokes on the forehead or groin strikes on the thigh), it doesn’t matter. Missing becomes a habit.
3. Ranging. This third possibility disrupts both targeting and the fourth element, timing. You cannot hit something you cannot reach. When you practice from a distance that a bad guy will not choose (remember he wants to hurt you decisively early, so he will be close), you not only hamper your ability to do harm but throw off your own senses of safety, distance, and timing.

   Defensively, working out of range gives you more time than you will have in a real assault. Because you are safe, it lacks the intensity of the real thing. Years of practicing against feeds leave the practitioner totally unprepared for attacks.

   A feed may have a similar motion to a punch or stab, but it is designed and delivered specifically to be defeated. A little slow, on a known line, maybe slightly overextended or held out for just a second. No matter how much it looks like a punch, almost every element is different in a fight … and so people who have practiced against feeds are often completely blown away by the intensity, speed, ferocity, and pain of a “simple” attack.

4. Timing. This is the flaw I incorporate most often, because I have never seen anyone go slow motion in a real fight. Not move at all, completely frozen? Yes. I’ve seen that, but not slow motion.

It is still a serious flaw because it may set the expectation that there will be time to think.

Safety is not the only cause of flaws that creep into the drill. People want to win, they want to be dominant, especially if they are teaching from ego, and they want the techniques to work.

So in slow-motion drills, one speeds up so that he can win. Or the technique is taught against a slow thrust from too far away, giving the defender enough time to do the technique.

When Bo and I were going for our mokuroku certificates, our kata had gone through a progression until we were practicing full force and speed with bokken. We were told explicitly that to do it any other way would give tori, the defender, bad timing and bad skills. It was dangerous but very good training.

I was asked to be uke, the attacker, for a mokuroku test at another school. Same system, different instructor. First practice night I attacked the way I had been taught … and clocked the mokuroku candidate upside the head. The head sensei took me aside and chewed me out. He said, “At your rank, you should know that it is uke’s responsibility to make tori look good. You need to slow down and be sure to fall big. I don’t care if he misses completely. Making him look good is tori’s job.”

At my rank in my school, uke’s job was to give the most realistic attack possible.

Most damning is when the student must be taught, even brainwashed, for the techniques to work. We’ve all seen students throwing themselves. We’ve seen, in real life or in parody, instructors who insist on one type of attack, the type of attack that their defenses work against. Here are the clues to look for:

1. If the uke (I’ll use that term for “demonstration dummy” in this context) must be told what will happen, being told is likely part of the technique. People are largely suggestible, and if someone with sufficient authority tells you that slap at point X will cause the arm to go numb or a temporary loss of consciousness, many people will experience it. Strangely enough, it often doesn’t work without the explanation, and that’s something you can test.
2. If you see the technique fail on strangers, if the demonstrator must use his own students in order to demonstrate, it likely won’t work on attackers either.

Most techniques in martial arts are not practiced against attacks. They are practiced against feeds.

So, to recap:

When examining a drill, first look for the safety flaw.

Then ask yourself: If the attack came at full speed and intensity, would my response work? Does it require me to have super speed or to block a full-power thrust with a thumb?

Then the third question: If I were a criminal and not stupid, would I ever do an attack this way?

That’s important. Unless you plan on getting into duels, you will be attacked by a criminal, not a competitor. This is what the criminal does as a job. And he does it to maximize his safety, which means he will minimize your chances.

Enraged people do attack stupidly, and there is value in working defenses to rage attacks. Definitely practice for that … but if you look at an attack and just can’t see a bad guy doing it, you’re probably wasting your time.

The fourth question: Is this going to get me killed?

Not too long ago I was practicing hubud, a Filipino drill, with an advanced practitioner. Knife comes in, check, slash the arm, transition maintaining the check, slash at him …

He got irate. “You have to let my weapon hand go when it is my turn. That is how the drill works!”

“But that would be stupid.”

I get especially annoyed with weapons. Unarmed defense against a weapon sucks, and there is no room for filling one’s head with bullshit. Never, ever, ever practice dying and do not train to be killed. The stakes are too high to blindly imprint a habit, even a habit as simple as handing a weapon back once you have disarmed someone.

If the drill requires you to miss or to give up control of a weapon—or to give up a good position to transition to one that may or may not be better—or any other stupid thing that could get you killed … it is a bad drill.

Let me be clear. There is no way to exactly replicate breaking people without breaking them. In unarmed arts, with no weapon to “make safe,” the techniques themselves have been altered. Unless the students and teachers are very aware, this alteration becomes the “right” way to do the technique.

Look for these:

1) When the drill sets an unrealistic expectation of what an attack will be like, such as practicing against long-range, slow knife thrusts when we know that shankings happen close, quickly, and from the side.

2) When the drill allows techniques that would be unsafe or crippling for the person using them in real life. It used to be a common story in fencing that the lunge was a modern invention. It wasn’t that the old duelists hadn’t thought of lunging; it turns out that on wet grass, the lunge is a damn good way to tear out your groin muscles.

The MMA competitor who tries a shoot on concrete and breaks his patella.

3) Most damning, when the solution to the drill is based on the flaw, such as using medium-speed defenses to defeat slow-motion attacks.

Coming from a Western background for weapons arts (fencing, primarily), I was taught that Western students come to training with the three worst habits in weapon fighting: they stay out of range, they aim at the opposing weapon instead of the opponent, and their rhythms are predictable. I was taught that these were the absolute worst habits with a weapon. And we always blamed the choreographed sword fights on television for these flaws.

So I refuse to do sinawali (a Filipino figure-eight-pattern partner drill). Every last aspect of it is a bad habit.

It is practiced from out of range. If I can only hit his weapon, not him, I don’t swing. Striking a weapon is rarely a good idea unless you are sure you have a superior weapon … and if someone wants to swing while you are out of range, let him.

It works in long sweeps, high/low, when the impact in the middle could be ridden to give a harder, faster strike to a better target.

It is predictable and there are few surer ways to be destroyed than to be the most predictable one in a fight.

Even the vaunted rhythm training: So what? Rhythm is no advantage whatsoever in an assault. Assaults are brutal, staccato—the only place for flow is in the loser’s blood.

But the drill is safe. And entertaining. And makes some students feel like they are gaining a valuable skill. They are certainly ingraining something.

Instructors must know the difference between training and conditioning. I don’t use conditioning here to mean strength and endurance training. Conditioning in the sense that behavioral psychology uses the term.

Both are types of teaching, getting information into a brain with the goal of affecting and improving performance. Training is where most instructors spend most of their conscious time. When you are teaching students what to do for punches, or how to kick or how to scissor legs to roll to a mount, you are training.

Conditioning happens at a deeper level of the brain. It is rarely conscious for the instructor or the student. The hindbrain sees what works and what doesn’t and reinforces the habits that work. What you train may or may not come out in a fight. What you condition will, good or bad.

If you practice high-speed multiple-opponent scenarios, you are training some very good stuff: continuous movement, the geometry of multiple opponents, how to use people as environmental weapons, exploiting momentum, elements of timing, and tactical thinking.

But (unless you are using armor, and even then …) for safety, you are probably limiting contact. You are learning good things. You are conditioning not hitting. Conditioning goes deeper than learning.

Many good Japanese jujutsu schools practice free randori that is essentially no-holds-barred, but limited contact. They learn to integrate offense and defense, to use strikes, locks, gouges, takedowns, and grappling as extensions of each other.…

But the hindbrain notices that strikes (controlled contact) never end a match. Only submissions. Conditioning the students to favor grappling.

Last example: In noncontact schools, if someone makes face contact, everything stops and the student apologizes. The conditioning is that hitting people in the face is wrong. If hitting people in the head is a core of the system, conditioning comes into direct conflict with training. Almost always, under stress, conditioning, not training, rises to the surface.

Contrast that with a school that trains even a focus mitt drill where the partner tags the student and the student unleashes a flurry of aggressive, forward-pressure strikes. That conditioning is in line with training.

As an instructor, it is your responsibility to evaluate your drills and keep an eye out for any accidental conditioning.