Mako Knife with Arsen Melikjanyan

Arsen Melikjanyan demonstrating his system, called Mako Knife. I know little about this man aside from what I've written in the video comments, but he comes to me highly recommended by my friend Yury Ershov, a student of Master Yury Fedin of the eponymous Wave Systems of Combat.

Alexander Kisten, Legend of Spetsnaz

Economy of motion and purposeful flow personified.  I cut my Systema teeth on a lot of flashy stunts, not knowing any better at the time.  As my training progressed, however, and I received formal training at qualified hands, my view of the ideal crystallised and I realised that, no matter their affiliations, they all worked towards the same end result in combative movement.  Note Kisten's rock-solid structure, maintained all throughout each drill, which allows him to bring the full power of his body and the earth to bear in each and every movement.

Video and information courtesy of Coach Scott Sonnon.

New Video Archive

Our video archive has also been moved to a new YouTube site.  I am in the process of moving all the old videos over and will add more in the weeks to come.


Check us out here

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We are now live on Facebook! Hop on over and check us out!

(For those who haven't noticed, the above is a link.)

Reflections on Violence, part 2: Ethical Grounding as Compensation for Mental and Emotional Adaptations to Violence

It has been a while since my last article and I do apologise, but the sequel is finally here.

In this installment, we will examine some practical steps the student of combat can take to avoid the slippery slope into sociopathy, or 'aggressive psychopathy'[1], starting with acquiring a firm ethical grounding.

[You will also note that I have broken this sequel into multiple parts.  Much as I would like to keep it brief, killology is a subject that demands treatment in detail, so for the next four weeks, I will be writing an additional weekly chapter on this topic.]


Resolve Your Ethical Issues

 This may seem obvious, but the overwhelming majority of self-defence, combative and other purported 'real-world' martial arts studies gloss over - if not completely ignore - this incredibly important question.

Why are you fighting?  And, by extension, for whom or what?

Many people, whether or not they admit it to themselves, walk into a martial arts class wanting to learn how to become invincible Hollywood arsekickers at some level (I certainly did when I first took up the martial arts).  What they don't realise is that fighting isn't the way Hollywood portrays it - a glorified schoolyard brawl against the ultimate school bully, at the end of which the winner gets accolades and the girl and then the end credits roll.  Fighting, depending on where and why you do it, is either a sport and should be treated with all due respect and diligence as one, or else a deadly serious affair that begins long before the first blow is struck and continues long after the survivor flees the scene.

In 'On Killing', Boyd writes of the use of moral distance from the enemy as a means of legitimising killing in combat soldiers.  Simply, the fighter's cause is made to seem just and the enemy are universally painted as criminals, judged and proven guilty at the start of the conflict.  In this way, what may have originally begun as a morally ambiguous struggle over the sundry things nation-states fight over becomes a righteous crusade against injustice, and any violence done to the enemy just punishment for crimes committed.

At the level of individual self-defence, of course, I am not in any way, shape or form advocating that anyone mimic this process with self-propaganda.  Instead, what I am suggesting is that the aspiring student of combat use the following steps as a guide to developing a personal code to frame and rationalise violent actions one may have to undertake in the course of one's own life.  Absolution - from self or others - is an important part of the rationalisation process that follows acts of violence, and when this process fails, psychological trauma follows.


Step 1.) Determine What it is You Fight For

The first and most important question.  Do you live in a bad neighbourhood and have to fight to defend yourself, your friends and loved ones against unprovoked aggression?  Are you a professional who has to throw himself/herself in the face of human aggression - military, law enforcement - on a regular basis to defend others?  Or are you still lingering in Hollywood delusions and ready to take a swing at anyone who looks at your beer funny?

I make no (overt) moral judgements here, but whatever your cause, have a good, long and honest think about it and decide what your primary motivation to fight, when fight you must, is.


Step 2.) When is Avoidance Impossible?

As I always teach my students, the best fight is the one you didn't have.  Sun Zi likewise wrote that a strategist of the highest order wins battles without fighting.  Have you done everything in your power to avoid violent conflict?  Did you take a detour around the bad street to go home by brightly lit, crowded areas?  Did you attempt to redirect your attacker's aggression with verbal de-escalation and distractions like your decoy wallet (you do have one, don't you?)?  Did you tell your family to run back to the bright, crowded street as fast as their legs could carry them?  Did you apologise for knocking Pugnacious MacThugly's beer over and offer to buy him another (while keeping your fence up, of course)?  By the way, why were you drinking in the same pub as him?

I could go on and on with illustrative examples, but you get the idea by now - rangers are taught to 'box' or detour around enemies they have not been instructed to engage.  Keep your eyes and ears open for avoidable trouble and do likewise with it.

Note also that posturing and blustering to scare the bad guys into backing down is a valid tactic, and the oldest trick in the animal kingdom.  Just be sure to use it judiciously, study it well and have something to back it up when it fails.


Step 3.) Recognise the Triggers

Funakoshi once stated , "There is no first attack in karate-do."  Some karate instructors have interpreted this to a regrettable degree of literalness, declaring a complete moratorium on striking first for whatever reason on moral grounds.  Despite their good intentions, however, idealised morality must always bow to the reality of the art of war, that being that the party that lands the first effective attack generally comes out on top in any encounter.  Modern armies spend vast sums of money and training and planning time to achieve just that in a real conflict, and so should any student of combat that intends to survive an actual encounter.

The crux, then, is learning to recognise 'triggers' - cues that an encounter has already progressed past the stage of de-escalation.  In your typical faceoff, the party preparing for physical aggression will typically evince signs that include head-bobbing, deterioration of speech to repetitive single syllables, stalking (side-to-side or circular walking focused on the object of aggression),  forceful arm-waving and other gestures in an attempt to look larger and more intimidating.

Most importantly, however, they will be mostly likely be moving towards you.

I cannot emphasise that last point enough.  If someone is moving towards you while displaying aggression, they mean business.  If you do not clean their clock while you still have a chance, your blood be on your own head, and quite probably the blood of anyone you might be protecting as well.

If nothing else, someone running at you full-tilt brandishing a machete should be a pretty important clue that they mean you grievous bodily harm.  It isn't always this obvious, though.  Yes, I do have a sense of humour.

On the other hand, if someone is displaying aggression while moving away, they are attempting their own avoidance and shouldn't be a threat.  Even so, this would be a good time for you to practice some avoidance of your own, as your dance partner may get a serious case of sore loser's guilt and return shortly with a mob and/or weapons for a rematch.


4.) How Far are you Willing to Go?

 So now that blows are being exchanged and you are navigating the swirling currents of violence, seeking the safety of the opposite shore, how far are you prepared to go?  How much damage are you willing to do to your assailant(s)?  How much damage are you yourself prepared to endure to defend whatever it is you are defending?  What tactics are you willing to use in the process?  Are you prepared to endure the consequences that may follow - prosecution and revenge attacks on yourself and your friends and loved ones being the foremost amongst them?


Conclusion
 
Note that none of the above offer easy answers.  The purpose of this article is to encourage the student of combat to ask hard questions now, when at training in time of (relative) peace so they don't come to haunt him or her during the times in which his or her skills should be given free rein from doubt and fear.


Until our next installment, train smart, train hard.




References and Bibliography

   1. Grossman, Dave: On Killing - The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society

To-Do List: Future Article Matter

This post is a diary entry for future articles that I have elected to keep here rather than on my finicky electronic devices. I will edit it to include new ideas for projects as they occur to me and tick off ones that have been done so far.


- Reflections on Violence: series on mental and emotional compensations for martial arts training and surviving violence in general - part 3 pending


- Awakening the Dragon: killology article about rationalising necessary violence to disinhibit appropriate responses in combat and minimise psychiatric trauma from combat - pending


- Boyd's Loop: OODA cycling for hand-to-hand combat pending


- Effecting a Mechanical Solution:  Effective and reliable conclusions to combat encounters


- Optimal cycling for the development of mental and emtional skills pending


Books to get:

- Red Gold Peak Performance Techniques of the Russian and East German Olympic Victors;

- Consistent Winning: A Remarkable New Training System That Lets You Peak on Demand;

- The Inner Athlete: Realizing Your Fullest Potential

- The Geoff Thompson series

The Return

After a lengthy hiatus, we are active once again with regular saturday morning classes. Met Wei Xian and Daniel today - both great guys, one a rookie to Systema and combatives in general, the other already with some Systema and Krav Maga under his belt. An absolute pleasure to work with them both and looking forward to further classes every saturday.

I will also be following up on my blog articles - expect the long-delayed sequel to Reflections on Violence, as well as the article after that, which will explore my frequent exhortation to 'effect a mechanical solution' to a combat encounter.

It's great what a fresh start can do, isn't it?


Systema Training - Beginner Introductory Class

Training Objectives


- Introduction to Systema basics: building structure, basic breathwork, rolling and falling


- Applications of structure in evasion, absorption and power generation versus empty hand and blade


- Psychological implications of bladework in training for empty hand

- Basic step-sparring


Intu-Flow®

Beginner routine x 1

Master routine x 1 (after class)




Warmup and Conditioning


- Slow squat - 30s down and up


- Slow pushup - 30s down and up

- Basic rolling and falling


Structural Drills


- Basic partner pushing drill, progress to passing the wave


- Pushing drill with blade


- Basic structural breaks to takedown


Evasion Drills


- Zombie walk drill with empty hand

- Zombie walk to shadow

- Zombie walk to structural takedown


Slow Sparring


- One-step sparring - defend and counter versus single simple attack, with active use of upper body only

Reflections on Violence, Part 1: Classical Budo as a Mental/Emotional Compensation for Realistic Martial Arts Training

About a week ago, I was having yet another late-night angst-ridden conversation with an old friend and training partner of mine when the talk turned, as usual, to martial arts and fighting and the impact they have had on both our lives. After having spent over twenty years in the martial arts, we have both noticed that martial artists tend to be troubled, angry people and, lo and behold, we both realised that is exactly what we both are.


So what exactly makes them that way? Is it because the martial arts tend to attract such people in the first place, or does the process change them to become that way? A bit of chicken-and-egg, really.


Before I go on, my friend comes from a colorful background, to say the least - one that involved running with all the wrong sorts of people and more than a few close shaves on the streets. He's long since gone straight, of course, and done very well for himself, but the circumstances that first led him to practice martial arts of his own volition - fending off violent juvenile gangsters as young teenager in school - have always been uppermost in his mind, as have the circumstances that kept him in them for the years I'd known him in school, namely challenge fights and weaponed street brawls as a gangster himself later in his teenage years. A former national athlete as well as a street-tough fighter, he is about as far from the stereotype of a classical budoka as one can get and, for many years, this was the essential dichotomy between us as I had cut my martial teeth on karate - a classical budo - whereas he had started out in muay thai and then moved on to BJJ - both modernised martial arts with only one end in mind.


Yet, on the night of the conversation, he told me he had been giving a lot of thought to how his training and thinking on martial arts and combat has changed his personality, and not necessarily for the better. The fear that had led him to martial arts had sublimated into seething aggression just barely held in check, and apt to blow its lid at the slightest provocation. Considering how my friend works in the investment banking industry, where everyone is rude and aggressive by default, it is definitely causing him a lot of stress. The thought of someone like him carving a trail of carnage through his colleagues did cause me no small amusement (I have no sympathy for most investment bankers), but the thought of him going to jail for it did not.


As anyone who has studied Systema or any other realistic combat system for some time would understand, effective combat training is ultimately a process of psychological remodelling. The most destructive weapon in the world is only as dangerous as the operating system guiding it. Likewise, the most finely-honed body in the world is harmless in a fight if the mind behind it hasn't been trained to guide it rightly in combat. And, unfortunately, as countless studies and observations of individuals and groups - highly-operational military and law enforcement personnel, hardcore gangsters and jailbirds and even refugees - optimised for survival and function in the midst of violence have shown, being optimised for violence all too often leaves one unfit to function and reintegrate into peaceful society. Adaptation to survive violence and fight back entails not only psychological resistance but a willingness to be proactively aggressive - 'getting in your self-defence first', as the saying goes. Enough stimulus to adapt and this can graduate towards an uncontrollable tendency or even a taste for aggression. Without a suitable outlet for this surplus aggression, the individual can very quickly spiral into patterns of self-destruction and become a danger both to themselves and others - incidences of substance abuse, depression, suicide, domestic violence and violent crime among war veterans attest to this, as does the pathological need to engage in violence for its own sake amongst street thugs who have spent long periods of time in violent surroundings.


In Circular Strength Training (CST), the concept of compensation is of prime importance. This principle states that for every training impulse in a given direction, a training impulse must be applied to the functional opposite, and also tension in the primary training dimension must be released, all in the interest of fostering balance and health in the organism under training stress.


A simple physical example would be as follows:


Distance runners, because of their stride technique, tend to be tight and overly-strengthened in their inferior posterior chain, the network of muscles down the back of the body including the gluteals, hamstrings and hind calves and loose and insufficiently strong in the anterior chain, the functional opposite. My sister, who was a cross-country runner in school, had this syndrome with especial severity because her coaches had absolutely no concept of compensatory training and trained to performance only. Plus, as a carefree teenager, she spent her time hanging out with friends and doing absolutely stuff-all from a training perspective during the off-season. As a result, she had severe lower-back stiffness and all the attendant postural deficits arising therefrom. Had she worked, for instance, on the Downward Dog pose of yoga, which is a posterior lengthener and anterior strengthener, it might have gone a long way to alleviating her problems.


Again drawing from CST pedagoguy, the Training Hierarchy Pyramid progresses from General Physical Preparation to Specific Physical Preparation, Skill-Specific Preparation and, at its apex, Mental and Emotional Preparation. At each level of the pyramid, imbalance can occur and compensation must be applied to correct it. And so, just as musculoskeletal imbalances can be compensated for with appropriate training methodology, might not mental and emotional imbalance be likewise addressed?


To draw on a historical example, when the Warring States era ended with the ascension of Tokugawa Ieyasu to the Shogunate of a unified Japan in the mid-17th century, a lot of samurai - career soldiers born into a social class bred for war - found themselves out of work. Those who remained in their old jobs found that their job scope had changed. In a unified country (largely) at peace, practical martial skills came a distant second to skills in administration and the general exercise of sound judgement. Essentially, an entire social class had to find a new reason to exist. No surprise, then, that this was the time of the flowering of classical bushido - the mindful pursuit of any given task at hand with the diligence and discipline required of a martial art, both as an end in themselves as well as way to educate a career warrior with the broad-mindedness and tolerance necessary to administer a country.


Judging by the unity and relative peace Tokugawa-era Japan enjoyed for some 300 years, this method by which wartime soldiers transitioned to peacetime administrators must have had some value. Of course, Tokugawa isolationism played a role also, but that is a story for another time.


This shift of emphasis from simply developing fighting skill to developing character and inner equilibrium through martial arts training enjoyed a second renaissance during the late 1800s and early 1900s, during which it became known as classical budo. For the purposes of this discussion, I will use the two terms - bushido and budo - interchangeably.


So now that we have established that those who train for violence require a moderating influence to keep from destroying themselves emotionally, what practical steps can be taken in this regard? Good question. Tune in for the next installment of this article, in which I will discuss concrete methods by which the astute student of combat can ameliorate the potentially destructive effects of a psyche overdeveloped for violence.


Train smart, train hard.

Saturday Morning Systema goes live

Our YouTube Channel

Today's Group Training


Good work all round this morning, despite the inclement weather. I borrowed a HD camera to take videos of the class, but ran out of memory about three-quarters of the way through. Today's focus was on increasing progression of striking work to actual melee, plus the beginning of the standup grappling series. Lots of emphasis on structure versus muscle, plus flowing around resistance for escape and counter purposes. We're all still a little rough about the edges, but significant progress has been made since last week.

Saturday morning Systema

Saturday Morning - Iteration Two

Good training all round today.  Randell brought down his Australian friend Paul, who comes from a pretty interesting background of both formal combat sport and family tradition, by which I mean bareknuckle pugilism as well as all-out street brawling.  Good to know some folks out there are keeping the old ways alive ;-)

Training itself focused on the basics, as may be noted from my log, and everyone did good, honest work while keeping things light, lively and very funny, which is how a session should always be. 

Great work, all of you.  Let's keep the momentum going.