At the age of seven, a Spartan boy is taken...

This is an interseting videoblog from Steven Morris NHB on the subject of Emergency Mindset, the mental and hormonal state prerequisite to handling an emergency or a violent encounter. Good stuff, but a lot of it. I'm still working my way through it. Among other things it deals with how to train a child to deal with violence without abusing them or doing the Spartan thing. Reminds me of a judo competitor who said he had to inoculate himself with the "your arm is your problem" mindset - sort of get rid of compassion for the other guy.

Aiki randori day

Aikido with Patrick M. and Kel

• warmup and ukemi emphasizing forward roll and slipping side fall
• tegatana emphasizing keeping fingers together, the pulling feeling in stepping (i.e. moonwalk), and not making extra arbitrary motions to correct for imperfections in stance.
• hanasu emphasiing releases #1 and #5
• chain #1 emphasizing the shortcut - chudan aigamae to tenkan to kotegaeshi-kotehineri loop. We talked about letting the step release instead of releasing then stepping.
• randori emphasizing slow, smooth, continuity, going with your reflexes to see if you win or lose.
• we saw a lot of different instantiations of the goofy-foot backwards turn from tegatana (the next-to-last move)

Jigoku variations

The following is a very nice pair of lectures on jigoku jime (lit. "hellchoke") which I like to translate loosely as "choking the hell out of the poor guy." The variations on the first video are not really what I'd call jigokujime but the rolling over the turtle variation on the second vid is the classic jigoku. I like all the other variants though. Watch out, Rob. You'd better study up on this because after failing to get you with the rolling jigoku in randori this past week you'd better bet we'll be working these things!

High-resolution jiu-jitsu and low-resolution judo

Martial arts randori or shiai or sparring is to a large degree a pattern recognition problem. You have to find the right opportunity to apply the tactics and techniques that your strategies and principles suggest will help your situation. This is the Observe-Orient-Decide part of the OODA loop - finding the pattern in the chaos of combat.

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Techniques are just named reference positions, labels that are placed on commonly-occurring motions just to have a shorthand way of talking about that type of motion or situation. Part of the pattern recognition problem involves the number of techniques in the system from which you have to choose, the number of categories you have to recognize.

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This is similar to the problem of resolution in a computer monitor. The greater the resolution, the greater the scan time required to keep all those pixels refreshed and lit up. In the olden days (10 years ago or so) this problem was solved by moving the gun farther back from the inside of the screen so that shorter gun motions described a wider arc on the screen. The problem was this led to much larger (deeper, heavier) monitors. It took a while to develop the technology to make fast, hi-res, flat panels.

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In the same way, you can increase the resolution of your martial art by labelling more and more of the motions that you find in randori/sparring/shiai. For example, the escape from the mount (tateshiho) in judo or BJJ. If you do some randori for a while you can probably come up with a dozen or more decent ways to get out of tateshiho. Keep doing randori and each of those dozen will recur at least once. So there you have it – recurring motion! Let’s name it and call it a technique and teach it as part of a high-resolution syllabus. Problem is, it takes time to learn a technique and it takes time to scan thru those techniques during a fight to choose the right one. Thus leading to a larger (deeper, heavier) jiujitsu.

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What you need in your martial arts system is sufficiently high resolution with minimal scan time. Technical resolution has to be great enough to solve many of the likely problems you will encounter but it needs to be small enough to minimize scan time. Scan time has to be minimized and your system has to be relatively light so that it is not too hard to pick up (to teach and learn).

Re-setting hyperactive reflexes

Aiki with Kel and Jill

• ukemi, including the sideturning and back-turning rolls
• tegatana emphasizing hipswitch and polish the mirror
• hanasu emphasizing centering on the active hand in the end of each move - especially #2 and #4
• chain #1 working on pinging and strolling. I am always amazed how the stuff that starts off clumsy in this exercise ends up smooth and powerful by the end of the session. It isn't so much like learning something as re-setting hyperactive reflexes or re-calibrating one's intention. These chains are amazing.
• aigameate and ushiroate at the end of class. Ushiroate was clumsy until I told them to think about brushing off or pushing themselves off of uke instead of trying to whip uke into the ground. Then all of a sudden it was ushiroate.

Strategy and tactics in the OODA loop

Are you one of the many folks who are at least a little bit confused about the difference between strategy and tactics? Well, the OODA loop provides a pretty good framework to put these issues into perspective.
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First a review of OODA: OODA stands for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act. The idea is that in order to do some action, you basically have to observe your conditions, orient yourself to your situation, decide how to act, then act. The orientation and the decision typically take most people the most time but every so often you come across a martial artist who seems to be able to process through this OODA loop much faster than others. How do they do it?

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They do it through Strategy. Strategy is a broad, general, big-picture plan of how to behave in a conflict in order to achieve a goal. Great martial artists are able to strategically shift some part of their orientation and decision time so that their general behaviors are pre-programmed and tied to specific observations. For instance, in aikido we spend much of our time training and refining a reflex to step off the line of attack anytime anyone passes within arm’s reach.

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Strategy takes place before the OODA loop starts in order to reduce Orientation and Decision time.

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Tactics take place within the OODA loop. The actions that you take based on oriented decisions are tactical.

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You have to have tactics, but tactical action is limited. When your situation becomes unique or chaotic then you are unable to act tactically and stay inside your opponent’s OODA loop. You have to start thinking and working strategically.

A short primer on the Art of Strategy

It's easy sometimes to talk about what is the difference between various martial arts. But what they all seem to have in common is that each one is a peculiar model of a subset of the Art of Strategy. This is the nearly-mystic field of study epitomized by Sun Tzu's Art of War and Musashi's Five Rings, as well as some modern texts like Greene's 48 Laws of Power. Most any martial art you can think of is really just a set of concrete examples of some subset of the Art of Strategy. A very good text that makes all this strategic talk more concrete in the context of martial arts is Morgan's Living the Martial Way.

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The following are some concepts that are useful to define and understand if you want to understand the Art of Strategy or whatever subset thereof that your particular martial art represents. I'm planning on talking some more in some upcoming posts on some topics surrounding these concepts.

• Objective - your goal or desired end result. This may be anything ranging from destruction of the enemy to subjugation and control to simple self-preservation.
• Doctrine (A.K.A. presuppositions, assumptions, worldview) – how you believe the world works. The way you believe things work affects your rational choice of strategy.
• Strategy – (A.K.A. grand tactics) broad, general, or long-term goals or action plans that support your objectives based on your doctrine.
• Principles – rules of thumb that govern which tactics are chosen to implement strategy.
• Tactics – what you do in the short term to move toward your strategy.
• Techniques – named models or examples of commonly-occurring tactical movements.
• Effectiveness (A.K.A. proficiency) – Your ability to use your techniques, tactics, and strategies to create or tend toward your objective. Effectiveness is typically an objective consideration of whether you do or do not achieve your objective.
• Efficiency - your ability to effect your objective with minimal expenditure of some chosen resources. Efficiency is often a subjective consideration.

Check out Chiron

Let me tell you, you are going to want to be in on this discussion at Chiron Trianing. Amazing stuff. Good points on both sides. Get over there and contribute...

Tuesday, December 04, 2007 Moving, Seeing, Training

Pizza trumps aiki

Judo with Rob

• warmup with ground cycle followed by several rounds of newaza randori. Rob beat me up pretty badly tonight.
• standing repetitions of ouchigari, working on the fundamental teaching variation as well as a couple of variants (wrong leg and wrong direction ouchi). We worked this into the ground, working on going to the ground with uke and smoothly passing from between the legs to a side position.

Aiki with Rob

• Sankata, several repetitions of all suwariwaza and hammihandachi moving into the first two standing waza. I really enjoyed kaitennage tonight.

Aiki with Kel

• tegatana emphasizing the goofy-foot half, especially hipswitch and polish the mirror.
• a couple of repetitions of hanasu, emphasizing starting out same-hand-same-foot.
• chain #10 playing with some things out of gokata.

Pizza and beer with Elise, Nikki, Rob, and Kel

Kata guruma

The above is one of the finest demonstrations of my least favorite throw of all the judo syllabus, kata guruma. And whats more, this awesome demonstration takes place in a competitive setting against a resistant opponent. And this thrower even makes it look easy!

The story goes that Kano invented this throw and actually was able to throw it in shiai (competitions of death-match type seriousness) but I sure wouldn't figure to ever actually see it tried - much less successfully. I could see doing some sacrifice variants, but this is pretty close to the standing kata form of the thing. This is outstanding (pun intended).

So, what is this ki thing, anyway

Several martial arts bloggers have weighed in on this topic lately in various forums. I wanted to throw my understanding of ki out there because if you're going to try to understand ai-ki-do then you need to understand what is supposedly at the center of it. I also recently re-published an article somewhat related to ki and I wanted to clarify that concept a little if I can.

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Ki is simply another word for Energy. I like the current wikipedia definition of energy:

In physics and other sciences, energy (from the Greek ενεργός, energos, "active, working")[1] is a scalar physical quantity that is a property of objects and systems which is conserved by nature. Several different forms, such as kinetic, potential, thermal, electromagnetic, chemical, nuclear, and mass have been defined to explain all known natural phenomena.

Notice, energy is a property of things - it is not a thing itself. Ki is the same. Just because things (like people) have ki (energy) does not mean that ki is a supernatural spirit that lives in the belly of people and circulates through meridians and can be made to perform magic tricks, etc... People, just like every other physical thing, have energy.

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Energy is the ability to do work (i.e. to make things move)

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So, how does this relate to ki in the context of aikido? If ki is energy (the ability to make things move) then aikido is an art (or skillful method) for getting into harmony with energy - specifically the ability of an attacker to move us. In aikido we talk a lot about kito, which is the theory that energy rises and falls and changes form all the time. We also talk about kimusubi, which literally means "binding ki" but which translates more practically to the idea of synchronizing the changes in your energy to the changes in your opponent's energy to obtain an objective (i.e. not getting hurt).

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One last point... As scientists, we have a pretty vast experience in watching energy change forms. We become accustomed to what energy transformation looks like. If you see something in aikido (or another martial art) that looks like magic. If it looks like energy changing form in some alien way (i.e. action at a distance) , something else is happening (like uke jumping).

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Harmonious energy transformation (i.e. aikido) works via natural processes and tends to look like it works through natural processes. Occasionally these natural processes are extremely efficient and skillful, but they are not spiritual ki magic.

Faking reactions in ukemi

A while back, Dave Chesser at Formosa Neijia posted a pair of videos that, as he put it, strain credulity. An old Chinese guy making a student flop around like a ragdoll without even touching him. I posted a short comment there but I wanted to expand on it a little here with some more to think about regarding the differences between voluntary and involuntary motion.
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The gist of my comment was that voluntary motion has a different character to it than involuntary motion and that the guy in the video seemed to have characteristically voluntary motion. In other words, it looks like he's faking the reaction. The official medical term for this is "F.O.S." Which acronym I won't expand upon in this family-friendly forum. But what did I mean by voluntary and involuntary motion having different qualities?

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• Involuntary motion, like a reflex or a spasm, occurs in one muscle group while voluntary motion recruits accessory muscle groups. As an example, voluntary motion blurs generalized, linked structures on x-ray, while involuntary motion (i.e. spasm) blurs individual structures. You can't make voluntary motion in a single part of your body without changing the muscle structure of the rest of your body. A couple of interesting demonstrations of this follow:
Look at the video below of ankle clonus. Try on your own to reproduce that quality of motion voluntarily. Alternately, get a doctor friend with a reflex hammer to tap your patellar tendon to elicit a knee-jerk. Then fake a knee-jerk and look for the difference in muscles other than the front of the thigh. It's usually pretty easy to tell a fake (voluntary)knee jerk reflex from a real, involuntary one.
As another interesting demo, get a partner to lie on his back and you sit at his feet. Hold his heels in your hands and lift them about a quarter inch. Then tell him to pick one of them up out of your hand. You will find that he cannot lift the leg without pressing down on the other heel to get support. Now, tell him to "fake" trying to lift it, as if he were trying to convince you that the leg was dead. If he is not really trying to lift the leg he will not be pressing down with the other leg.
Additionally, voluntary motion may be reversible – involuntary motion is ballistic. As an experiment, try throwing yourself out of a chair to standing position and alternate that with rising in a controlled fashion to standing. Compare your ability to reverse the rise and sit back down at some random place in the motion.

Saturday training log

Aikido with Patrick M. and Kel.

• We are entering into the cooler part of the year. That means more warmup time and fewer falls on cold mats.
• Tegatana with emphasis on the goofy foot heliopter pivot.
• Hanasu - miscellaneous pointers, including trying for that beautiful, pure release feeling in #1 and #3, sticking uke on both heels in #2 and #4 and hipswitching and stepping instead of pirouetting in #6 and #8.
• Chain #9 working on stepping inside and bumping the ovvbalance then continuing to the outside. This led us into working on the two fundamental types of motion (omote and ura) found in nijusan.
• The atemiwaza (the first five) of nujusan as examples of these two types of motion. Gedanate was working exceptionally well today. Udegaeshi and kotegaeshi as cool ninja techniques of the day.

Bloggy Award

Hey, check it out! Mokuren Dojo has been awarded a Silver-level Bloggy Award! The review and commentary that goes along with the award is entirely on-track and I appreciate the constructive criticism. The main gist of the commentary is that I write too-long articles and use too much jargon for a general readership but it might not be too awful for a narrow niche. Believe me I know! I have struggled with the technical jargon for a long time and have not yet found a good middle-ground between specific technical jargon and the thousands of extra words that it would take to explain each Japanese term.
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The reviewer also mentioned not wanting to have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to get to the archives and my profile. I think that is probably a good point and an easy fix.
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Anyway, I'll keep working on it annd improving it and maybe I'll earn a Gold award next year!