Ready Player 1
Some years ago when we were heavily involved in combat sports (well, one of our number still does like to roll around in the sea of yin energy), there was a notable change in culture both in grassroots gyms and professional sport. Whilst it was previously a rite of passage to take a beating several days a week, the emphasis changed to lighter sparring. Perhaps it was an influence from Muay Thai where they fight so often there was no doubt whether they can take a shot, and they need to mitigate the risk of injury in training. It is now widely recognised that when you are in that playful zone whilst sparring you do a lot more useful learning. There is a reason why kids can learn song lyrics from one listen but fail to retain dry academic facts that don’t interest them, play equals optimum neuroplasticity.
Back in August 2023 we wrote on this blog about our controversial take on martial arts and self-defence. It is worth going back and having a read but spoiler alert; the argument we were presenting is that for most people, training martial arts as self-defence will make them less able to defend themselves than if they relied on instinct and no training. We flesh out that argument rather well we think in the ‘Tai Chi & Self-Defence’ blog post so check it out and see what you think, we would love to hear your thoughts too.
So what do we do instead of teaching techniques? We teach quality of movement in the three planes of motion whether this is solo or with a partner. So when students do want to do some kind of free play i.e. sparring, what we encourage is something actually quite unrealistic with a view to preserving their ability to act instinctively if the occasion ever called for it. Fundamentally it is a slow exchange of feeding limbs in a configuration that is improvised, met with a parry or evasion and counter from the partner. It looks like an easily mockable kung fu fantasy but it develops accuracy, distance and timing whilst most importantly, not teaching techniques and therefore preserving spontaneity. Plus it’s a whole lot of fun!
Because of the playful nature of this “sparring” method it has a game like feel to it and you can be quite creative, which gives rise to a mental state that is almost like observing as a third person, like playing a video game. In fact you can get quite flamboyant and Matrix-esque with your moves. This has an additional benefit because we have found that when not using a technique-centric approach (not that we never do this, it depends on the student) so as to avoid the individual thinking too much and freezing when they need to act, this pseudo-third person perspective can create a healthy amount of dissociation in a self-defence scenario. Just enough dissociation to offset the fear but still be able to act.
This is similar to our ‘vlogger technique’ that we teach in our fear control lesson amongst lots of other highly effective fear control techniques. Get in touch for details or head straight to the store, select ‘Training Package’ and type ‘Fear Control’ on the form.
We were watching an interview with Mark Rasmus recently and he mentioned developing a positive addiction to training by making it a fun way of concentrating just like a video game. So even if you are doing something static like zhan zhuang and trying to get your alignment right you could think in terms of adjusting various joints until you get them in the right zone and earn those bonus points! We also recently saw an interview with a special forces operative who spoke about treating their much higher stakes combat as a video game to the extent it overcame fear and [no moral commentary here just repeating the anecdote] was actually enjoyable. We’re always very hesitant to even type the term special forces in any writing about martial arts, because of course in the pre-internet world many martial arts instructors had “worked with special forces” in that unverifiable pre-internet way.
A necessary caveat or clarification should it be needed for those people who seem to make a sport out of mocking very specific push-hands drills that make no claims to be anything close to combat…Despite the playful nature of the movements, of course awareness is needed around not being flippant about the risk of injury and the reality of combat in a sporting or non-sporting environment. This is purely learning high quality movement and embedding the fear control method elucidated above.