anerlich
05-22-2005, 09:23 PM
In the interests of further postponing the alleged "slow death of the forum" ...
As the Buddhists who frequent this forum might say, thus I have heard ...
A longtime MA instructor of my acquaintance began teaching knife and baton combatives to his students after being appointed as an instructor in that discipline. The style was fairly heavily FMA-based, with 12 angles of attack and 8 of defense (or mor accurately, counterattack). He was surprised at how rapidly the students picked up the techniques and how quickly they began to use them effectively, compared to the rate he was used to where students were trained in a traditional CMA the traditional way.
He began to research the pedagogy of combat through public resources and some access he had to special forces military personnel. According to him, the military elite had been working on similar number-based systems of teaching H2H combat and found that they were extremely effective in developing rapid proficiency in retaliatory response to attack. Apparently this had trickled down to elite police and other civil defense organisations, but was discontinued because the "killing by numbers" was manifestly too effective (after, apparently, some unfortunate events) to inflict on the civilian population.
The argument is that the student is initially emotionally resistant to learning self defense, because common teaching methods produce an emotional response in the student; e.g. "for our first lesson, we're going to learn to deal with SOMEONE TRYING TO PUNCH YOU IN THE FACE, rather than, "we're going to practice a response to a #5 attack".
The theory is that the use of language such as "punch in the face" or "slash to the neck" invoke a response from the mammalian, emotional brain, evoking long term memory of traumatic events and pain, say from being bullied as a child. This impedes the process of learning the physical skills. The use of "number 1 strike" or "number five strike", on the other hand, engage the left cortical brain with its functions of order and sequencing, and this allow more effective learning because the emotional response is bypassed.
This phenomenon has a dark side; short circuiting the emotional brain removes its inhibitions, leading to the "killing by numbers" phenomenon. We are left with an amoral approach to combat, raising questions of personal and teacher responsibility. The safety switch is off - the technique becomes a performance oriented (zone out, brush it past, #3 strike) than outcome oriented (block his punch with a pak sao, grab his throat, finger strike him in the eyes).
Cus d'Amato apparently trained an early Mike Tyson with a system of giving each punch an ordinal number, and calling out a sequence of numbers for various combinations - "1,2,3,5,3" instead of "jab, cross, lead hook, overhand right, lead hook", for example, though I can't say this is the exact system he used. While the numbers are obviously less of a mouthful when calling them out for immediate deployment on heavy bag or mitts, the instructor wondered whether the emotional detachment involved in their use contributed to Tyson's awesome effectiveness in his early bout,s before he got involved with Don King and Robyn Givens and it all went pear shaped. (Some) opponents spoke of his almost mechanical apparent attitude toward their destruction - though others said they found his relentless aggression the overwhelming memory.
I've heard of kickboxing trainers and JKD schools using similar approaches to training fighters.
The instructor said that he he trained a relative neophyte for a kickboxing match using the numerical approach, and the kid won easily. This is of course anecdotal evidence and not even close to a scientific trial.
So that's the use of the left brain to remove the emotional barriers to learning how to fight.
OTOH, he claimed that the right brain can also play a role, with its predilection for pictures, creativity, and free association. According to my source, 300 repetitions are required to gain proficiency with gross motor skills with the arms, 500 for the legs. Complex maneuvres like some of those in BJJ may take thousands of repetitions to master - I remember seeing a DVD of American competitive BJJer Mike Fowler demonstrating a complex transition to submission on a DVD - he said his teacher wanted him to perform the move 10,000 times in the gym before he tried it in competition.
However, according to my source, the use of the RIGHT phrase or mental picture can greatly accelerate the learning process. The head instructor of Machado BJJ here, John Will, continually impresses me with his ability to come up with short phrases which connote an EXACT mental picture of what is required - for example, instead of saying "forehead on the floor, twist your thumbs together, pull your elbows back and try to touch them together behind you" for finishing a collar choke from the mount, he's now started saying "head on the floor, chest through the hole" as this gives a much better picture of the movement required. "Zombie attack" is used to illustrate the WRONG way to clinch with someone (picture leering wide eyed zombie with arms outstretched coming for you, leaving all sorts of holes for arm drags, underhooks, leg attacks and the like), "Tyrannosaurus Rex arms" the right way (elbows close to the body). "Paintbrush armlock" is another great example of this - try explaining it to someone by saying move your hand here, lift the elbow so so, ..." is hard, but every time I say "pretend his hand is a painbrush and paint a line down the mat" the student gets it much more often.
As the Buddhists who frequent this forum might say, thus I have heard ...
A longtime MA instructor of my acquaintance began teaching knife and baton combatives to his students after being appointed as an instructor in that discipline. The style was fairly heavily FMA-based, with 12 angles of attack and 8 of defense (or mor accurately, counterattack). He was surprised at how rapidly the students picked up the techniques and how quickly they began to use them effectively, compared to the rate he was used to where students were trained in a traditional CMA the traditional way.
He began to research the pedagogy of combat through public resources and some access he had to special forces military personnel. According to him, the military elite had been working on similar number-based systems of teaching H2H combat and found that they were extremely effective in developing rapid proficiency in retaliatory response to attack. Apparently this had trickled down to elite police and other civil defense organisations, but was discontinued because the "killing by numbers" was manifestly too effective (after, apparently, some unfortunate events) to inflict on the civilian population.
The argument is that the student is initially emotionally resistant to learning self defense, because common teaching methods produce an emotional response in the student; e.g. "for our first lesson, we're going to learn to deal with SOMEONE TRYING TO PUNCH YOU IN THE FACE, rather than, "we're going to practice a response to a #5 attack".
The theory is that the use of language such as "punch in the face" or "slash to the neck" invoke a response from the mammalian, emotional brain, evoking long term memory of traumatic events and pain, say from being bullied as a child. This impedes the process of learning the physical skills. The use of "number 1 strike" or "number five strike", on the other hand, engage the left cortical brain with its functions of order and sequencing, and this allow more effective learning because the emotional response is bypassed.
This phenomenon has a dark side; short circuiting the emotional brain removes its inhibitions, leading to the "killing by numbers" phenomenon. We are left with an amoral approach to combat, raising questions of personal and teacher responsibility. The safety switch is off - the technique becomes a performance oriented (zone out, brush it past, #3 strike) than outcome oriented (block his punch with a pak sao, grab his throat, finger strike him in the eyes).
Cus d'Amato apparently trained an early Mike Tyson with a system of giving each punch an ordinal number, and calling out a sequence of numbers for various combinations - "1,2,3,5,3" instead of "jab, cross, lead hook, overhand right, lead hook", for example, though I can't say this is the exact system he used. While the numbers are obviously less of a mouthful when calling them out for immediate deployment on heavy bag or mitts, the instructor wondered whether the emotional detachment involved in their use contributed to Tyson's awesome effectiveness in his early bout,s before he got involved with Don King and Robyn Givens and it all went pear shaped. (Some) opponents spoke of his almost mechanical apparent attitude toward their destruction - though others said they found his relentless aggression the overwhelming memory.
I've heard of kickboxing trainers and JKD schools using similar approaches to training fighters.
The instructor said that he he trained a relative neophyte for a kickboxing match using the numerical approach, and the kid won easily. This is of course anecdotal evidence and not even close to a scientific trial.
So that's the use of the left brain to remove the emotional barriers to learning how to fight.
OTOH, he claimed that the right brain can also play a role, with its predilection for pictures, creativity, and free association. According to my source, 300 repetitions are required to gain proficiency with gross motor skills with the arms, 500 for the legs. Complex maneuvres like some of those in BJJ may take thousands of repetitions to master - I remember seeing a DVD of American competitive BJJer Mike Fowler demonstrating a complex transition to submission on a DVD - he said his teacher wanted him to perform the move 10,000 times in the gym before he tried it in competition.
However, according to my source, the use of the RIGHT phrase or mental picture can greatly accelerate the learning process. The head instructor of Machado BJJ here, John Will, continually impresses me with his ability to come up with short phrases which connote an EXACT mental picture of what is required - for example, instead of saying "forehead on the floor, twist your thumbs together, pull your elbows back and try to touch them together behind you" for finishing a collar choke from the mount, he's now started saying "head on the floor, chest through the hole" as this gives a much better picture of the movement required. "Zombie attack" is used to illustrate the WRONG way to clinch with someone (picture leering wide eyed zombie with arms outstretched coming for you, leaving all sorts of holes for arm drags, underhooks, leg attacks and the like), "Tyrannosaurus Rex arms" the right way (elbows close to the body). "Paintbrush armlock" is another great example of this - try explaining it to someone by saying move your hand here, lift the elbow so so, ..." is hard, but every time I say "pretend his hand is a painbrush and paint a line down the mat" the student gets it much more often.