Every now and then, students ask me why bother with the blog, some of the articles doesn’t seem to directly relate to combat and therefore doesn’t feel that it helping in martial arts.
Here are some of my explanations:
- How you respond physically is affected by who you are and how you define yourself. For example, if you get angry easily (for whatever reasons), you tend to fight back with emotions instead of trained responses – all strategies and mechanics goes right out the window. If you are indecisive, you will not be able to take risks which will result in lots of missed opportunities.
- Combat is an expression and an interaction. If you are still uncertain about the importance of the mental aspect in movements, look not too far at actors, dancers and other performers. There are lots of good technical dancers, but those that excel really ‘reached’ the audiences from deep within their soul. You may say we are not performers but martial artists, then why is this relevant? Well, the interaction between you and your opponent is a dialogue. Those that manage to ‘convince’ will influence the other better.
- Human has the ability to switch state of tension, to change lines and shapes, etc. The ability to change is an enormous source of power that is often missed. However, this ability is often delayed if your response set needs to go through an intellectual evaluation – ‘trained’ responses must be instinctive.
- Sport psychology has been regarded as a ‘secret weapon’ at one point in time but now standard in all high level coaches training. It was said that Ken Norton use hypnosis prior to his fight with Mohammad Ali and ending up breaking Ali’s jaw. While hypnosis can be done prior to a special event, most will have problem getting into that ‘state’ instantly in street situations.
- I differentiate stubbornness from perseverance in that stubbornness is the desire to say ‘my way is the only right way’. Those with perseverance concentrate more on the end-goal and less on ‘how to get there’. So they tend to listen more, observer better and constantly trying get to the end point. I treasure perseverance but not stubbornness. One of the goals of this blog is to allow you to see things from more than one angle. The participation of the discussion/response allow you get organize your thoughts and train you to express yourself.
I believe that just training the mind is just as important as training your muscles. To me, the mind is not something abstract but gets reflected in how your learn, train, respond to people and events around you. If you can accept that and truly understand what I mean, then suddenly, you are no longer training just during ‘training’ time but 24X7. Am I there, no but I feel that I am improving every year and having an idealistic target keeps me learning and absorbing all the time.
Exercise
Again, for those familiar with mathematics, ‘nil’ is a valid member of the universal set. How often did you read that detectives break a case because they are noticing things that are absent instead of focusing in on the obvious.
Even when I don’t explicitly ask a question, you should write your thoughts down. Maybe ask why you don’t see any question at the end. The drive to learn, communicate and improve has to come from within you. (Remember the warrior spirit article?)