Martial arts and pressure testing.
A brief look at how ‘pressure testing’ is used, or might be used, in the martial arts.
Theoretically, pressure testing is woven into all martial arts training, and it is not solely limited to the contest arena. Although, if you unpack the origin of martial art contests and try and figure out what the originators and pioneers were trying to achieve, it is not as straightforward as you might think.
Stripped back to its most basic purpose and motives, it came out of the pressing issue for those teaching and learning martial arts skills to manufacture scenarios whereby the hardwiring of formal drills could be put to the test. Theoretically, you’d built a web of neural pathways which were so engrained that they were able to bypass the usual circuitry and the cerebral calculations associated with normal day-to-day actions, and feedback was needed to find out how effective this training had been. At least that’s the theory.
Everything martial artists do is geared towards this sophisticated programming of actions and reactions. In karate we have our fundamentals, our solo forms and our paired forms. In Wado we even have forms that are supposed to be bridging forms, a nudge closer to freeform exchanges (I am thinking of Suzuki Sensei’s Ohyo Gumite). But, how successfully are we addressing this issue?
Japanese martial arts.
In Japanese systems, the ones that flourished in periods of peace, opportunities for meaningful feedback had to be concocted and this really stretched the creativity of the senior teachers. Somehow, they had to devise methods that were of value, containing the right levels of randomness, freedoms, opportunities for initiative and stress, but without maiming or even killing the protagonists.
I must admit, when thinking about instances of early versions of solving these problems, the first example that came to mind was Maniwa Nen Ryu, an old established system of Bujutsu founded in 1591 and unusual in that it stayed in the same village for generations. In this school they still use the proto-protection equipment devised very early in their development, which was the forerunner for kendo armour and weaponry. As you will see in this clip (enjoy the arrow dodging in the first part of the film).
In karate’s early days in Japan there was an urge to figure out their own ways of pressure testing. Photos exist of Mabuni Kenwa of Shito Ryu in makeshift padded armour.
I often wonder about what their deeper thinking was? Was it that they wanted to unleash the power of their techniques, or were they just experimenting with a potential sporting format; or was it more about eliminating the fear factor in unrehearsed exchanges?
Who gains from pressure testing?
If pressure testing opportunities are designed properly, then clearly the protagonist has much to gain – it’s a gift that keeps on giving and it’s a reality check on so many levels. If it has the right measure of stress then it’s going to test more than just technique; it’s going to put the focus on mentality as well.
The involvement of protective equipment.
It is possible to become too dependent on protective equipment, or even to promote poor technique. An example would be that when wearing protective equipment you might be inclined to ignore a hit that without the padding would have floored you; or the other side of that would be that you would find yourself relying on far too much power to create any kind of effect.
Also, what about weapons? If any of this pressure testing involves freeform training with weapons, how much does the weapon, the technique or the strategy have to be changed to make it work? If we take the Japanese sword for example and understand that the sword evolved into the ‘safer’ equivalent of the bokken and then again into the kendo shinai; just how much was lost along the way? Techniques with a ‘live’ sword take into consideration that poor technique and poor handling actually can result in damage to the weapon; so much for technique. I suppose you have to accept that you gain in some areas and lose in others. My feeling is that the weight of responsibility sits with the supervisor, the Sensei, who has to observe with a hyper-critical and watchful eye, to stop the whole thing going to hell in a handcart.1
Stress – in general.
It’s worth pausing to look at what ‘stress’ really means.
With stress; everyone is aware of the bell curve of the ‘performance to stress’ performance graph; it is a very useful reference to keep in mind.
To focus on stress for a moment; I heard it said that stress is an inevitable part of living, and not necessarily as a negative, because stress is also associated with growth, because it facilitates the necessity to change.
When the circumstances or even the environment changes, then we have to act quickly and adapt or suffer the consequences. If there is a reaction lag then the period of stress is prolonged. My go-to example is the urban fox; a countryside animal that in the long term has had to adapt to urban living to survive, but foxes must experience a continually changing survival challenge almost as a daily, if not hourly, phenomena. It is a bit extreme and seems a long way from the human experience, but history tells us that humanity has also experienced similar uncertainties.
Stress as a learning experience.
In martial arts training, if we look hard enough we can find examples of stress testing happening to a greater or lesser extent.
There seems to be ones based on endurance and physical resilience; example, the 100-man kumite in Kyokushinkai karate, in fact anything with numbers marking marathon training is going to be a test to the individual. Yes, this tests physical fitness and what might be called ‘bounce-back-ability’, but what exactly is being tested as regards to technique?
I think it works best when the system and the individual is being tested; or, to put it another way; how effectively has the individual been able to absorb the system, so that it becomes a natural part of their being? If it’s done well, the student and their teacher gain valuable feedback that they can learn from. The student will grow in stature and move further up the evolutionary tree.
Resilience, robustness and antifragile.
If you have resilience (and you are robust) you have a hard shell-like exterior, you can take the knocks and not be damaged… up to a point, but ‘antifragile’ is something else, and, to my thinking, there might be something in it for martial artists.
Antifragile is a concept coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb; basically it describes entities that actually gain from being subjected to disorder, chaos, change and unexpected events.2 There are many examples of this, an obvious one is bacteria, which, through the process of evolution thrives when the right level of challenge arrives. I am reminded of the much-used quote from Nietzsche, “That which does not kill me makes me stronger”.
A wonderful example of a man-made antifragile entity is the Netflix tool on its server system called the ‘Chaos Monkey’. It is programmed in to randomly attack its own system and try to disable its own production instances to ensure it can handle such attacks when inflicted from the outside in the future. All clever stuff.
Another example is that some businesses and systems have dedicated ‘disruptors’ whose job is to deliberately try and damage and oppose the systems/businesses to tease out the potential future problems.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has used examples from the world of sports to apply his antifragile theories to. I am planning to dig further into this in future Substack posts (watch this space).
My thinking is that if we keep the qualities of ‘antifragile’ at the back of our mind when we are trying to design pressure testing scenarios in our own martial arts teaching then we could create some really effective and innovative training opportunities, that are meaningful in growth to both the individual and the system.
Can this be done in martial arts?
I have attempted this myself and I know others in Wado have made serious efforts to rethink the system.
Personally, I became frustrated with such things as ‘dead time’ in training encounters, as well as the tendencies to over-plan in free exchanges. With me this is still a work-in-progress for myself and my students.
I would also give credit to the current grandmaster of Wado Ryu karate for his own pioneering attempts to rewrite the rulebook and create worthwhile opportunities, or at least force a meaningful refocussing on what it is that we really do.
Conclusion.
The big question is… why bother?
My own Sensei has a slightly oblique way of putting this; he asks the question, ‘Why are you doing this?’. Now, he could be asking us to address the bigger existential question; but not really, ‘Why are you doing THIS?’ If you think about it, it’s a multi-layered question; ‘This’ could be, ‘this technique’? It could be, ‘this method?’ It could be, ‘Why this thing called ‘Wado’, or ‘Karate’ or ‘Budo’?’
I thought long and hard before trying to explain my thoughts on this subject. It comes out of my feeling that in our teaching and training we need to be ambitious and deploy all the tools we have to hand to move forward. Wado karate is a complex system that is not ashamed of its complexity, in fact it presents its sophistication to us as a challenge, throwing down the gauntlet, as an antidote to complacency. It is up to us to rise to it.
Whatever your discipline, leave no stone unturned and keep an open mind as to how other systems; even those outside of the martial arts, create stress-test opportunities. There are bound to be people out there better than us; curiosity is the key.
Photo by Jonathan Bean on Unsplash
In an interview Ellis Amdur related how in his own Old School training in So-jutsu (spear fighting) the wooden weapons used were really expensive to replace if they broke in hard clashes in training. He said this seemed to result in training becoming overly precious and restrained. Amdur explained that he took the radical step of having the training weapons made of up-to-date modern resistant, almost indestructible material to allow for full blooded exchanges without fear of damage.
Antifragile. Book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, ‘Antifragile – Things That Gain from Disorder’. His description of what he calls the ‘triad’; ‘Fragile’ is like glass, any pressure and it breaks apart. ‘Robust’ is like the diamond, it doesn’t care about pressure, you have to go some considerable way to even put a mark on it. And, ‘Antifragile’ think of how bones respond to reasonable pressure.