Many people are in a rush to both “test” a technique whilst at the same time and in the same process master it. Firstly, no technique is perfect and every technique has a supposed Achilles heel e.g. it is easy enough to argue that punching isn’t very effective against an opponent who is able to move out of the way every time someone tries to strike them – one of the things that makes a punch effective is the element of surprise and the accompanying speed with which it is delivered. If my partner knows I am going to put a particular wrist-lock on them, they are only required to move and tense in a particular way to prevent me being successful; something I can easily rectify by repeatedly slamming my thumb into their eye socket. If I mimic this action in a training environment by lightly placing my thumb on a person’s eyebrow, I would hope that in 95% of all scenarios they’d act as if the eye-strike had been made to the actual target and respond accordingly: for the most part training involves playing the game and drilling/practice requires a necessary level of compliance for an individual to discover how a technique works. The phrase “learn before you load” comes to mind.

In a real life altercation I never press home a technique, if somebody is able to resist what I’m doing, I’ll simply move on to another technique and so on etc. This is a great way of training to deal with non-compliance etc but is totally useless if you want to learn and practice a particular technique i.e. you never get to practice that technique, which means you are limiting your progression. In a training environment, where somebody who knows the technique you are practicing resists, they are loading before you learn. There are times to offer resistance etc but normal practice isn’t really one of them. This is why we have sessions like “Animal Day”

I had a student who was 210 lbs, a phenomenal athlete, and whose roundhouse kick rocked the world. The problem was that his roundhouse kick was technically terrible. If he could have applied some basic principles to his kick, it would have been phenomenal, but the instant reward of hearing the pad crack when he kicked it, would’ve been temporarily lost if he’d tried to alter and work on his kick properly – his ego wouldn’t allow him to take the necessary step back, and kick with less power, that would have seen him have to learn a “new” way to do his kick. He was much happier to continue on the way he was and in doing so “limit” his own improvement. Oftentimes we can believe we’ve reached our goal/end because we’ve surpassed the ability of those around us, rather than going on to modify/improve what we are doing. Our job should be to be the best individuals and practitioners we can; if we should be able to kick double what the person next to us is able to, then we shouldn’t be satisfied with our current effort and do everything we can to take the time to improve on what we have – we should learn before we load.

Turning every training session into a “test” of techniques, and your ability to perform them, is like continually walking into an exam room without having done any revision, having opened the books and studied. Training all the time in a state of duress is not the method for learning how to succeed. Real life violence, and an aggressor’s exact movements can be hard to replicate in the training environment (especially if you want to train safely), and non-compliance doesn’t always just come in the form of physical resistance, it can come in the form of your assailant moving away, or moving to a different attack/assault (just as you would do in a real-life situation if met with a “non-compliant aggressor” who was thwarting your attempts to finish a particular technique). Non-compliance can be broken down and trained, we do this when we look at the different ways an aggressor can retain their weapon if a disarm is attempted. We can then build these into drills, that train and practice counters to all of the different ways/methods and then we can practice under duress and test what we have learnt. This is the progression and all need to be trained.

On Saturday we will look at the different ways an assailant can counter what we do and how it is often necessary to forget “pure” technique and distill everything down to the bare bone principles and work off them – this is not the starting point for our self-defense but something we may be required to do depending on the assailants we may end up meeting. This is about thinking (or not thinking as it were) on your feet; this is the time we apply the load to what you\'ve learnt.