I had another long conversation with Adrian today on where I want to take the martial arts classes. For those of you who don't know Adrian, he's my long-time friend, training partner and research collaborator, as well as a guest instructor here at VTS, who will soon have his own profile on the website.
The VTS combatives syllabus, while ostensibly based on RMA - and delivered via RMA pedagoguy - is very much our brainchild and the result of our cumulative training and experiences. Recently, things have come to a head and we have had to take a stand regarding the focus of the syllabus and the direction in which we want to evolve the system.
Line Up and Snipe, or Engage and Control?
At the heart of our dilemma lay the central ethos that was to guide the evolution of our system. Did we want to focus on developing a system optimised for those critical initial three seconds of combat, which would enable to a student unload a series of devastatingly accurate strikes from any orientation in the blink of an eye? Or did we want to develop a system that would emphasise entering into and maintaining a position of control from any engagement scenario?
Either way, focusing on one end of the spectrum would perforce cause us to neglect the other end to some degree, simply due to the finite amount of time available for training and planning.
Confounding Factors
At first glance, optimising to dominate the initial three seconds of combat seems to be the way to go. The most respected reality defence authorities today tell us that this is the the space of time in which actual combat happens on the streets, and I strongly agree that it is critical. However, experience - both ours and other people's - tells us that if there's one direction a fight tends to go, it's south. It's all well and good lining up a partner round about your own size for a straight blast that sends him sprawling on his arse. It's another thing entirely facing down a charging rugby forward with an iron jaw who's been getting his beer and aggro on or a junkie so hopped up on PCP he's numb to everything except the urge to kill the evil out of you* until you die from it.**
Landing a solid punch at range on a bag is already no easy proposition - it takes a lot of good coaching and diligent practice over a goodly period of time to do right. In a brightly-lit ring, in which you can afford to devote all your attentional resources to just one task (knocking the living daylights out of your opponent), this gets even harder with a live opponent doing everything he can - within the rules - to mess up your plan. Now imagine doing it at the start of a three-second fight, when the realisation that things have just gotten very, very real has sunk home and the adrenaline starts flowing. Now imagine you're past the intial three seconds, during which your engagement plan went south, and are trying to land a solid punch while being manhandled by someone significantly larger and stronger than you.
Not so easy, is it?
(If you have difficulty picturing this scenario, I suggest you find a large, strong friend who doesn't mind getting hit to try this out with. For best effect, enact the scene in a poorly lit, confined space filled with dangerous obstructions like metal support beams, sharp debris on the floor and furniture with sharp corners.)
Engagement and Support System versus Integrated System
Quite simply, you have to have a support system behind your three-second engagement plan, a concept espoused by our above-mentioned reality defence authority (Geoff's personal choices are boxing and judo). We wanted to take it a step further past the technical aspect of engagement methods versus recovery methods and create a system that enables the student to seamlessly move into and maintain positions of control from the initial engagement. Coming as we both do from martial arts backgrounds that emphasise continuous control of an opponent - Goju karate, taijiquan and Systema on my end, Wing Chun and muay thai on Adrian's plus a shared background in wrestling and submission grappling on both our parts - this is something we have always been conscious at an intuitive level, even if our explorations into longer-range striking arts took us in a different direction.
Control and Effecting a Mechanical Solution
Quite simply, control is everything, in combat and out of it. If you can control your opponent, you have the option to strike, restrain or reposition him as you please. More importantly, you can devote a much higher portion of your own total resources to doing so than he can to resist you. This is what I refer to as effecting a mechanical solution to a combat encounter, and it has also been the single most important lesson drilled into me by round about 24 years of martial arts training.
Being as I am the most unathletic person I know who isn't actually crippled in some way, I learned rather early on that I will never in this lifetime float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. A lesson reinforced when, while training under Coach Syed Abdul Kadir, I got the chance to observe some of our national boxers at work. Above and beyond even diligent training, it takes talent to effectively hit someone using a paradigm like that, which puts it out of reach of a good 90% of the human race. Not that boxing and similar arts aren't good to do. Quite the contrary - it is an excellent foundational and supplementary training to have under your belt. My point is that you cannot base a paradigm for broad-spectrum combat on something like that, simply because you are leaving the spaces in between exchanges of blows to sheer athleticism and, dare I say it, luck. In such an exchange, the younger, faster, stronger man inevitably wins.
Not quite the point of training in martial arts in the first place, is it?
Again, nothing wrong with being stronger and faster - we are after all in the business of making people so. But above and beyond that, we want to them better.
Systems that emphasise control as their base get around this problem by fixing down an opponent and making it far more energy-inefficient for him to defend himself or otherwise resist your efforts to subdue him.
Once in a position of control, you are free to cycle the above cascade from observation to action - coined by John Boyd - at a much faster rate than your opponent. As first postulated in the Thirty-Six Strategems, observations engender analysis which engenders tactics which in turn results in more observations. The further ahead you are in this cycle in a given encounter, the more highly evolved and therefore effective your tactics will be. Likewise, by reducing the attentional resources your opponent has available to devote to this process, the less evolved and therefore effective his tactics will be against you.
Conclusion
I will continue to blog significant paradigm shifts to our system as it continues to evolve. In the meantime, you know what to expect from future classes. Train well and stay tuned.
* - I'm not saying you're evil. Just that he thinks you are.
** - Yes, that was a Hotshots 2 reference.
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