Is physical effort enough?

Here's some valuable training advice by Matt Thornton, Brazilian JuJitsu and MMA coach and head of the Straight Blast Gym worldwide matial arts organization. I found it in an interview of his, included in the Functional JKD instructional DVD series. Check it out and see if it applies to you (the stranscription was done by me so there might be a few small errors, but the general content is there):

"I hear that sometimes, my students will complain that some people are natural athletes. It is true, there are definitely people that pick up things quicker, they do BJJ for a year or two and they're really good. But alot of it also has to do with the way you think: a lot of the people that complain about learning slowly are just lazy. They may work hard physically, but they lack the most important element you must have in order to learn anything, which is imagination. When they see me learning something new and a day later they see me doing it in sparring, what they don't realize is that between the moment I learned the technique and the moment I came out and used, I have been thinking about it. I go to bed at night thinking about it, I visualize it, I wonder where it would fit in the context of the whole game, how it could be used from different positions, so I can see it in my mind and then I can use it. It's not just the physical training, there's also the mental part and I think a lot of people are just lazy, they just don't do it. 'Oh, that's the move? OK, show where else you can use it', they say, instead of 'Hmmm, I wonder where else you can use that move, let me think about it for a minute and let me use my powers of deduction'. You can't possibly learn this way. It's too complicated, so you really need that imagination. The people I'm talking about usually don't listen to music and they don't read a lot. If they exercised their brain muscle, they'd learn a lot faster too'.

Here's something for you to keep in mind: if you thought that training in martial arts is something that happens exclussively in the gym, and after you exit the door it is all over, you're going to have a hard time to get really good at your game. Visualization and mental rehersal can give you a serious edge: according to football coach Andrew Caruso, "virtually all recent research has shown that five hours of physical practice and one hour of visualization is consistently better than six hours of physical practice!" [1] All you have to do, is use your imagination. Elite professional athletes all over the world reap great benefits for this. Why wouldn't you?

[1] Caruso, A. Sports Psychology Basics. Reedswain, 2004.

You can find out more about Matt Thornton and the Straight Blast Gym here. You can also find some very interesting articles about training on his "Aliveness 101 blog":

Why on earth do these guys train slow???

What I would like to discuss in this article is the importance of this particular method of drilling we use in Systema, known as "Soft Work" (the original Russian term, copyrighted in Russia by General Alexander Retuinskih of the ROSS System, was translated in English as "Softwork" and subsequently copyrighted by Scott Sonnon, Retuinskih's representative in USA till a few years ago, so I prefer to use the non copyrighted "Soft Work":-). In Soft Work what we do is simulate combat situations using slow time framing (low speed, that is) while trying to keep the energy of our attacks real. This training method of Russian Martial Art has been highly publicised, mainly through videos available all over the Internet and it is because of this training method that Systema has been accused by practitioners of other combat arts as "unrealistic", "flowery", "girly" and various other reeeally cool adjectives!

Before going deeper on the specific reasons of using Soft Work as part of our training, I would like to state something that for Systema practitioner is already well known: we do not ONLY train soft in Systema - on the contrary, we use both soft and hard methods and each of those plays its own distinct role in our fighting preparation.

Now, in order to analyse the scientific basis behind Soft Work, we must first take a deeper look in the most common emotion we experience during combat, which is fear. Extensive research on the human emotions in general and especially fear has been conducted in the last 30-40 years and one of the most prominent scientists in this field is Joseph LeDoux, Professor of Science in the Center for Neural Science at New York University. Referring to the fear system in the brain, LeDoux writes that "it is a system that detects danger and produces responses that maximize the probability of surviving a dangerous situation in the most beneficial way. It is, in other words, a system of defensive behaviour".

Basically, what this means is that we are designed to survive. The millenia of evolution have hard-wired us with a personal protection system, which roughly functions like this: a potential threat is perceived by our senses (sight, hearing, touch taste and smell) and then sent for processing by a structure in the brain which is called the sensory thalamus. Subsequently, the info follows this route:
a) it goes to your "thinking" brain (cortex), which, based on your memories, previous life experiences, skills etc, will assess the situation and prompt you to an appropriate response, and also follows a parallel route to
b) your amygdala, another structure in your brain, which is not wired for thought but for direct action.
c) The info which has been processed by the cortex also goes to the amygdala, but it gets there a few milliseconds later than the info sent directly by the thalamus.

What's also interesting is that the info that goes into your thinking brain is as accurate as possible, while the info that goes to the amygdala is crude and almost archetypal (something like what you hear when you speak to your mobile phone in an area where the signal is weak). The results of this process are described in this example given by LeDoux: "Imagine walking in the woods. A crackling sound occurs. It goes straight to the amygdala through the thalamus. The sound also goes from the thalamus to the cortex, which recognizes the sound to be either a dry twig that snapped under the weight of our boot, or that of a rattlesnake shaking its tail. But by the time the cortex has figured this out, the amygdala is already starting to defend against the snake. [...] Only the cortex distinguishes a coiled up snake from a curved stick. If it is a snake, the [response evoked by] the amygdala is ahead of the game. From the point of view of survival, it is better to respond to potentially dangerous events as if they were the real thing, than to fail to respond. The cost of treating a stick as a snake is less, in the long run, than the cost of treating a snake as a stick".

So, the motto of the fear reaction system for which the amygdala is responsible, is "better safe than sorry" and in the long run of evolution, this has been a successful strategy. But, guess what: the amygdala, in order to initiate emergency reactions, is capable of ignoring a lot of information as irrelevant (under stress, you see less, hear less, miss more cues from the environment) and of course, it is also wrong a lot of the time!!! As Lawrence Gonzales, author of the best selling book Deep Survival puts it, "emotions [like fear] are survival mechanisms, but they don't always work for the individual. They work across a large number of trials to keep the species alive. The individual may live or die, but over a few million years, more mammals lived than died by letting emotion take over, so emotion was selected".

There exists a number of modern self-defense systems (among them Krav Maga, Rapid Assault Tactics, Tony Blauer's S.P.E.A.R etc) that are based on this function of the brain. These are known as "adrenaline based" or "reflex based" and the logic behind them is that since most crisis situations will trigger the fear reaction system, the training should take advantage of these fear responses as starting point for a few gross motor skills techniques. Systema instructor Kevin Secours from Montreal, Canada, has an interesting point to make regarding this approach: "If we simply decide that 'all reflexes are good', then we will be relegating control to every impulse and nervous twitch that we have and deprive ourselves of the incredible powers of our cognitive brains that have made us the dominant species that we are today".

Now, imagine you're training in martial arts, Systema, or what have you. You want to work against a front kick and your partner decides to throw it not slow and smooth, but hard and fast. Your eyes see a leg coming towards your mid-section at 60 kph. The visual information goes through the thalamus to your cortex that will decide that this is your training partner who doesn't really want to hurt you, so you should try to do something technical and martial artsy, right??? Wrong! Because a rough version of the same info will reach your amygdala first and it'll go all "Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!!!" So your abdominal muscles will tense, you'll probably bend at the waist and your arms will flail uncontrollably towards your partners leg trying to stop it, resulting in a... well, less than technical move. Let's presume you survived the attack (although this depends more on your opponents speed, or lack of it) by using this primal instinct, which is triggered without your cognitive brain even knowing what exactly happened. Please keep in mind that, even if your partner"offered" you a chance to counter-attack (like and arm you can manipulate, a slight loss of balance you can capitalize upon, or a vital target which is waiting for you to reach out and touch it), your amygdala has considered this information as irrelevant and ignored it!!! Have you learned something from this exchange? Have you gained some sort of experience that you'll be able to use against real life danger? I'm afraid not... The only thing you've probably "learned" is to be fear conditioned and respond in the same spastic way every time somebody front kicks you.

The most important thing about our training sessions is that they should be educational and productive. There is a time and a place for both soft-smooth and hard-fast training. But training is not survival, and it is definitely not contorting our faces with anger or flushing our systems with poisonous chemicals (like adrenaline) which will do us harm in the long run. Training is about learning skills which some day may aid to our survival, in a sustainable way. So, next time you come to a training session think of this: if you go hard and fast, you use your amygdala which cannot be educated. If you go slow and smooth, you use your cognitive brain, which can be educated. Which one will you choose?

*The Youtube video above is an excellent example of soft work by senior Systema instructor Martin Wheeler - really impressive!

Suggested reading
1. LeDoux, Joseph: The Emotional Brain (Simon & Schuster, 1996) Although this is a popular science book, it doesn't in any case constitute what one would call a "light" read. Still, if you're interested in knowing more about the workings of fear in the human mind, it's excellent.
2. Gonzales, Lawrence: Deep Survival (Norton, 2003) This one is a very entertaining book, by a journalist and writer who's been studying human behaviour under extreme circumstances of stress (like accidents) for more than thirty years.
3. Be sure to check the articles on senior Systema instructor Kevin Secours' site: www.montrealsystema.com

Don't just relax your body, relax your face too!

I believe it was right after Fedor Emelianenko’s victory in his MMA fight against Andrei Arlovski, when I read in some martial arts forum a number of comments on how and why this dominant Russian fighter manages to keep his face totally expressionless before, during, and after his fights. Well, in my opinion this is pretty typical of most Russian fighters – for one thing, Fedor’s brother, Alexander Emelianenko is pretty famous too for his facial expression (or rather, lack of) when he fights, and during my competition days and later, my refereeing days in san shou (Chinese kickboxing), I had the opportunity to meet from up close with a number of formidable Russian fighters who, when on the ring, looked as if they were spending just another boring day at the office!

Most of the explanations given on this matter by the members of the forum I was reading had to do with Fedor not wanting to give any information about his emotional state to his opponent. This view is actually quite correct - without a doubt, the human face is an enormously rich source of information about emotion. Still, there is another explanation to Fedor’s emotionless facial expression - not a strategic but a neurophysiologic one - which is based on the claim posed by a number of scientists that the information on our face is not just a signal of what is going on inside our mind, but in a certain sense, it is what is going on inside our mind.

A great deal of our understanding of facial expressions comes from the work of psychologist Paul Ekman. During the sixties, Ekman was interested in studying faces, so he travelled to Japan, Brazil, and Argentina and also visited some remote tribes in the Far East, carrying photographs of people making a variety of facial expressions. To his amazement, everywhere he went, people agreed on what those expressions meant. After that discovery, Ekman and his collaborator Wallace Friesen decided to create a taxonomy of facial expressions. What they did was sit in a lab and try to move each one of their facial muscles, first separately and then in combination with other facial muscles. This way, they documented (through video) over ten thousand facial configurations. Most of those were nonsensical, but about three thousand of them were indicative of specific emotions. Now, here comes the interesting part: when Ekman and Friesen were working on expressions of anger and despair, they discovered that after a session of “putting on” these faces, they were feeling terrible, so they started to keep track of this effect! “What we discovered”, said Ekman, “is that expression alone is sufficient to create marked changes in the autonomic nervous system. When this first occurred we were stunned. We weren’t expecting this at all. And it happened to both of us. We felt terrible. What we were generating were sadness, anguish. And when I lower my brows, and raise the upper eyelid, and narrow the eyelids and press the lips together, I’m generating anger. My heartbeat will go up ten to twelve beats. My hands will get hot. As I do it, I can’t disconnect from the system” [1]. Ekman and Friesen conducted further research on this subject, and so did a German team of psychologists a few years later. The results were, in my opinion most interesting: while we think of the face as the place where emotions end up, the process also works in the opposite direction – emotions might also start on the face. In a few words, just forcing a smile can make you happy!

So, how does this relate to hand-to-hand combat and our training? Well, without getting very scientific here, the tension in your face can result to tension in your body and disintegration of your skills. So, during training, when performing a task that you find challenging, instead of contorting your face in a mask of agony or superhuman effort, just relax and keep your expression neutral. When you find yourself frowning (yes, you have to try and be aware of that), just stop the drill you’re performing for a moment, and rub your forehead, cheeks and ears with your palms and then give yourself a few light slaps on the face, before you resume - you will find that it helps a lot to get rid of the tension in the rest of your body and enhances your general performance.

Try this out and let me know how it works for you!

[1] as quoted in the book Blink (Little, Brown & Co 2005), by author-journalist Malcolm Gladwell