Trivial Pursuits

Ninja Blogging

Haven't posted much at all about the self defense training (kakutogi in Japanese).  It's still going relatively well, though I just find it impossible to get there more than once a week, which obviously is not enough.  You try working BigLaw hours, then going and training for 3.5 hours (which generally includes an hour of boxing fitness and conditioning, an hour of boxing/Muay Thai/F.I.G.H.T., and an hour to an hour and a half of grappling) more than once a week. 

Besides which, when I get out of training, I am mentally and physically beaten down and exhausted, and Dr. Ms. TP pointed out that she hates me driving the 30 miles on the highway home.  She thinks its dangerous, and she's right, so on days when I train, I stay in town, which is fine, but I kinda like Dr. Ms. TP and find it difficult to stay away from her two nights out of the week, heh heh.

I am getting a bit better, especially at boxing, but very, very slowly.  I need a lot more practice, which I will hopefully be able to do soon.  I'm really hoping to up my grappling practice a great deal, as I'd like to be able to compete in a grappling tournament at some point.  I'm willing to do this mostly because of the relatively low risk of injury.  If someone gets you in a bad position while grappling, you are in total control.  All you have to do is tap out, and it's over.  Sure, chokes, neck cranks, limb locks and bars are not fun, and are painful, but there's no lasting injury so long as you don't try to do something stupid and be a hero (do that and you may not walk for five months; not a joke, I've seen it happen).

But as far as something I'm not willing to do -- an actual mixed martial arts fight, which involves kickboxing -- here's a great article on the current state of MMA fighting in this country.  I have incredible respect for these guys -- for anyone who has the guts to get into a ring and fight.  Not going to be TP.  I like my brain too much.  I'll just enjoy spectating, and maybe having a slightly better understanding of what's going on in the fight than the average person.

Sweet Spot

I forgot to mention, last night while training I submitted someone. This guy has just begun training, but he is stronger, bigger, and more athletic than I am (he's probably 6'2 200lbs, and I'm 5'7 160). We worked on grappling all night, which is wonderful, b/c I sorely need the practice; groundfighting is not my forte at this point in my training. We were drilling for most of the class, but we started messing around at the end, and he did something he shouldn't have, and it was amazing.

I didn't even think about it; I just went right into the submission. He essentially gave it to me, b/c he wasn't aware of what he was doing, but I got him in a triangle choke and made him tap. It felt pretty cool; triangles are hard to pull off. However, can't get too high on the feeling when you know that immediately to your right is a guy who can tap you in 20 seconds flat, but small victories feel pretty good regardless.

One of the things I want to do is spend more time training grappling, preferably in submission style or brazilian ju jitsu (no gi). I'm not very good at it, but I like it. I remarked to Ms. TP, I imagine it's kind of like playing golf early on in the learning curve: you're not very good, but on those few occasions where you hit a sweet shot, the feeling is so sweet it drives you to continue, even though you stink.

Jiu Jitsu

Translated literally, ju jitsu means "gentle art." Ha ha ha. I went to a 3-hr Brazilian ju jitsu seminar this past weekend, and had the good fortune to be trained by an incredible martial artist, teacher, and person, Master Leonardo Xavier, aka 'The Wizard.' If you'd like to learn more about the man himself, his background, and his affiliations, just go to his website. I've added the link to TP For Your Safety.

I attended my first LX seminar about a month after I'd started BJJ, and I was hopeless. Yet Leonardo tirelessly came over to help me with just the very basics of what he was showing me, never got aggravated with me, and demonstrated infinite patience with a hopeless novice. Now, almost six months later, I have been starting to feel more and more comfortable while grappling. By no means am I good or even decent, IMO, but I am starting to relax and feel more comfortable out there, which is crucial. Moreover, I'm beginning, just beginning to do 'good things' by instinct. Grappling with someone superior last week, I managed to avoid submission for quite a while; I made him work for his supper. I don't get so tired grappling--I can now 'roll' (equivalent of sparring on the ground) with a mouthpiece in at all times without losing my breath and without having to stop constantly (I can barely breathe through my nose). I'm not straining and fighting so hard anymore, and I'm so much more relaxed on the ground.

Anyway, it was awesome to train with LX again this past weekend, feeling more comfortable about my practice and my training, and I got so much more out of it than I did as a hopeless newbie. With some of the fundamentals down, I was able to really focus on the techniques Leonardo was teaching us. I left exhausted but happy, extremely sore and bruised but elated. For the first time, I really understood how to land an armbar or a triangle choke.

Tonight I went to grappling class, and my training partner was a newbie--someone who's probably only been coming to classes about a month at most, with no prior grappling experience. That's more or less me of 6 months ago. And I controlled him easily; submitted him 5 or 6 times. I locked my first armbar on someone tonight; it was cool. What I feel best about is the instinctive reactions beginning to work their ways into my movements. Example: I had him in my guard (I'm on my back, with my legs locked around his back, don't get any funny ideas, it is THE superior defensive position in any groundfighting at all), and I happen to know it is almost impossible to submit anyone when you are caught in someone's guard; you have to pass the guard first.

He's working real hard, gripping my wrists tightly, trying to stay close to my chest (bad idea, he should sit upright, close in is dangerous, as triangle chokes and armbars are not that difficult from the guard), and I'm just relaxing, not working too hard, hand fighting and waiting for an opening. Almost by accident, I notice he's off my center line--his left shoulder is on the left side of my chest--he's twisted a little bit.

Cardinal rule of grappling, I think: never, ever get caught off-center unless you are doing so for a split second to transition into something else. Here's why: instinctively, I reached up with my right hand, pushed his back, which was already turned to me because he was twisted, in the direction he was facing, swiveled my hips immediately, and wham, I had taken his back (probably the worst position to be in). Rear naked choke, submission.

Cool. Again, lest any think this is arrogance, I'm quite aware of how 'not-good' I am. A few rolls with some of the advanced students in my class would cure me of all delusions of grandeur, and I was, after all, rolling with a newbie. Still, I'm less 'not-good' then I used to be, and it's fun to get better at something physically challenging with lots of hard work. It will also help with the many frustrating training sessions in the future to remember what it feels like to know I am getting better, albeit slowly. Baby steps.

Keeping It Real

I went to Haganah last night from 7:30-10:00 pm. I love when instructors are not sticklers for time, though I obviously understand that time is money.

The official class goes from 7:30 through 9:00, I think, but we didn't even begin sparring until 9:00.

We began by doing some focus mitt work, which is essential to training good punching techniques, eye-hand coordination, balance, and even defense (the pad holder meets the punch with the pad, simulating the movement of a parry). We then practiced kicks, both roundhouse and jab kicks, as well as trapping roundhouse kicks (an excellent technique if you can do it). That was just the warmup.

We moved from there right into gun defenses, which is one reason I really like Haganah. KM only incorporates weapon defenses at higher levels of training, though all of the basic unarmed combatives and defenses are the building blocks of the later-used weapons disarms. Haganah, by contrast, starts training weapons immediately, and even includes positive weapons training (teaching you how to use weapons, as opposed to just disarming someone with a weapon), like Israeli Tactical Knifefighting, as I've mentioned before.

We practiced disarm techniques for a lateral encounter with the gun both in front of and behind the ear (different techniques for each, for good reason). Anyway, after practicing it for awhile, I realized something: how can I become an expert in gun disarmament when I don't know a darn thing about guns? I do not like guns in the slightest. I find them odious. My ultimate self-defense plan is to become an expert knife-fighter and to carry a knife, not a gun, for many different reasons, some tactical (if I'm an expert knife fighter and someone untrained pulls a gun on me, believe it or not, the advantage is mine, unless my assailant is standing 20 feet away, which is rare in most gun encounters), some personal (i.e., I just don't like guns).

But I realized that my ability to be a weapon myself, to be able to restrain, incapacitate, and terminate (only as a last resort, of course), the three goals Haganah teaches as to any self-defense encounter, is in some sense dependent on my ability to understand how guns work, when they will fire and when they won't, what discharge sounds like, how ammunition is fed into the gun, etc, etc. If, for example, I don't know a darn thing about how to use guns, then even if I successfully restrain and disarm an assailant, and take the gun away from him or her, I stand a chance of either hurting myself, or of failing to successfully control the situation because I don't know how to use the weapon I have procured.

I guess what I am saying is that I realized that to be a weapon, you'd better know how to use weapons. In the modern world, you cannot escape the fact that one of the weapons you need to know how to use is a gun. So I realized I'd better start figuring out how guns work, what they feel like, how to be safe with them, shoot them, etc. It's not something I'm looking forward to, but I understand now that my life may depend on the knowledge I learn about guns, though I have no intention of ever owning one.

My instructor said the same thing last night. As we were practicing, he left the room and came back with his own gun (he's a knife and a gun expert), and passed it around the room, showing us how to safely check to see if the gun is empty. He said that you can't ever be really good at disarming an assailant with a gun and controlling a gun scenario unless you know how to use one, and I think he is absolutely correct. As with knives, higher levels of Haganah incorporate tactical firearms training, related to that taught in KAPAP (the acronym for Krav Panim L Panim, or face to face combat--amazing bad@ss stuff, click the link if you are curious).

We sparred from 9 until 10. Sparring is so interesting to me. Every time the instructor tells us to pad up for sparring, I get so nervous, I almost want to run out the door. Sometimes, I have to force myself to stay in the class, to tell myself that no matter what happens, I'll be better for it. It's not all negative anxiety, though; I'm usually also anticipating testing my skills, trying something knew I've been thinking about. As the saying goes, since no one likes getting punched in the face, protective gear or not, the solution is simple: don't get hit.

Sparring is not real fighting, of course. You can barely throw knees (ribs break easily, and even bruised ribs, which I have had, are incredibly debilitating and take forever to heal up) and can virtually never throw elbows (your elbow acts as a blade, and draws blood almost effortlessly, which is incidentally why it, aside from head butts, are my favorite close quarters weapon), but it's the closest you can get in terms of training to actual fighting. John Whitman, one of the head KM instructors in the U.S., has a good forum post on the relationship between MMA (mixed martial arts) fighting and RBSD (reality based self defense).

Most of the class seemed to be more or less at my level, which was great. Some people I controlled, some I held my own against, and some were better than I, which, is great because I learn a lot from my betters. The instructor controls the class well, and everyeone's ego seems to be kept in check, which is great. That's the only feature of sparring that makes me nervous: a partner who while sparring, gets a little out of control, sets out to prove he/she is The Boss, can really injure a training partner. It's crucial to safe training that the instructor set the tone, which can be done fairly easily, by the instructor's offering to spar full contact with the offending party. This should end the problem and deter it from happening again.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the sparring last night. I can't wait to begin training for my Phase A instructor certification in krav maga, which I'm currently planning for August or October.

F.I.G.H.T.

F.I.G.H.T. stands for Fierce Israeli Guerilla Hand to hand Tactics. Its Israeli name is Haganah, which is the Hebrew word for 'defense.' I mentioned Haganah on TP v. 1.0. It's an Israeli combat art, coming from the same roots as krav maga, but definitely being distinct in many ways. Like KM, it is designed to be learned quickly, with proficiency coming inside of a year, and mastery obviously coming some significant time after that. Like KM, it is RBSD, and like KM, it is tried and tested on actual battlefields and in actual CQC (close quarters combat).

It is different, in many ways as well, however. It emphasizes something called points of reference--positions which every range, every technique, is designed to funnel one towards. From these points of reference, one or ideally all of the three goals of Haganah can be met: control, incapacitate, and terminate. Another difference between KM and Haganah is the weapons defenses. KM teaches basic unarmed combat first, and only in more advanced stages does it introduce gun and knife disarms. The approach here, is that first you learn to stand, then you learn to fly.

Haganah is different. Gun and knife defenses are part of the training from day one. The theory is similar to that of the Filipino Martial Art known as sayoc kali, or just kali, which is generally acknowledged as the finest knife fighting system in the world. In kali, practitioners begin training with knives (and sticks). As those are so much more difficult to defend, the theory goes that once someone can successfully defend knife attacks, unarmed combat is that much easier.

Now, this is only true to a point, IMO, and isn't the only reason Haganah introduces weapon defenses so soon. The primary reason is simply because the vast majority of reality-based street encounters in the modern world include weapons, so no sense waiting to try to learn how to defend them. Regardless, I like the approach of Haganah, and I am really glad to begin my training in it.

Anyway, I got to try a F.I.G.H.T. class last week, and absolutely loved it. I'm definitely going to stick with it. I'll contine training at least muay thai and submission grappling, but may scale back on some of the other training to invest more time and energy in Haganah.

In TP news, this next week is going to be very busy for me, so posting may be light. But, as always, I'll do my best to make sure there's plenty of TP on hand.

Stayin' Alive Part II

The Japanese system of land inheritance traditionally begins and ends with one word: primogeniture. Because in landed families, the eldest inherits, the younger sons had to find some viable means of sustenance. The same system operated during the High and Late Middle Ages, incidentally. What powerful European families often did was dedicate their first son as heir, and dedicate the second son to the Church. In this way, the family's temporal obligations would be satisfied by the first son, and the family's spiritual posterity would be assured by the second son (accompanied, of course, by generous grans and donations to the Church).

This system had profound effects in Europe. Louis VII, King of France, and Eleanor of Aquitaine's husband (Eleanor being a favored matriarch of TP) was just such a second son. Dedicated to the cloister at an early age, he was plucked from his comfort zone at the age of ten, when his older brother and heir died, and groomed for the throne. His early dedication however, marked the remainder of his life, punctuated by Eleanor's famous observation, "I thought to have married a king and find I have married a monk."

But that is a story for another time. When Japan opened up to the West in the late 19th century, scores of second sons had a hitherto unheard of opportunity: emigration. A substantial portion of Japanese immigrants settled in Brazil. (Incidentally, the melding of Brazilian and Japanese cuisine is nothing short of heavenly--when next you find yourself on South Beach, try eating here).

In 1911, a man named Mitsuyo Maeda emigrated to Brazil. He brought with him a master's knowledge of Japanese fighting arts, which would not be differentiated into forms like "judo" and "jujitsu" until gai-jin became exposed to them. Maeda imparted his knowledge to a Brazilian man named Carlos Gracie. Gracie took the training, melded it with Western wrestling, and Brazilian indigenous streetfighting techniques, and voila! Brazilian jujitsu was born. Even today, the name "Gracie" is synonymous with Brazilian jujitsu, with the Gracies among the world's best No Holds Barred (NHB) fighters.

Thing is, 20 years ago, almost no one in the world outside of S. America knew of BJJ. One couldn't train in BJJ; no one even knew what it was. NHB competitions changed all of this. These relatively small men from Brazil were showing up at these tournaments, fighting vale tudo (anything goes), and absolutely dominating. Their secret?

The vast majority of fights go to the ground (the number 90% is bandied about frequently, though its accuracy is dubious). Once a skilled BJJ practitioner gets you on the ground in a ring, you are in deep, deep frijoles if you are not similarly skilled. That's it. In these fights, the BJJ fighters would use takedowns, get their opponent on the ground, and submit them. As Carlos Machado, a highly respected BJJ practitioner who lives in Texas is reputed to have said, "The ground is the ocean, I am a shark, and most people don't know how to swim." Needless to say, BJJ, or variants thereof, are now everywhere. I'm just guessing that there are probably 15-20 places minimum in the greater Houston area where one can train BJJ, and perhaps many more.

Now, as someone who is primarily interested in RBSD (Reality Based Self Defense), the question always has to be asked: what is the efficacy of this in a real-life encounter? The prevailing answer seems to be that regardless of the exact percentage, it is true that many real-life fights do end up on the ground, and that once you get there, it might be helpful to have some idea of how to extricate yourself from the situation. Krav maga, for example, teaches some groundfighting techniques, though nowhere near as extensive as BJJ. Combat hapkido, another RBSD system, also has incorporated a groundfighting program.

But, and this is a huge but, I think it is accurate to say that you rarely, if ever, want to go the ground intentionally in real fight. First, b/c it makes it difficult to use your best weapon: your feet, running away. Second, b/c real life fights are rarely one-on-one, while you are positioning yourself for a rear naked choke on your assailant, his buddies are kicking your brains in. Third, streets themselves can be dangerous: glass or other sharp objects, concrete burns, no fun at all. I think the best idea for RBSD is that you'd better know what to do if you ever get taken down, but try to avoid going there if you can.

I train in combat submission grappling, taught primarily by world famous fighter Erik Paulson. In CSG, we do not wear gis; we train in normal clothes. This is considered more difficult, because some BJJ techniques are centered around using an opponent's gi (thereby revealing judo roots), Obviously, people do not generally wear gis out. This is NOT to put down any BJJ at all--gi or no gi, it is a devastatingly effective system, IMO.

BJJ is not designed to be learned quickly. It takes quite a while, and many many repetitions, IMO, to have just an idea of what to do. Slowly, I'm getting better. VERY slowly. Pretty much everyone I train with is better than I am, and it's not as much fun as it sounds to get submitted left and right, with little apparent effort. But I'm getting there. I've managed to submit a few people here and there, avoid submission here and there, and generally obtain better positions on the average than I did five months ago. The technique you see demonstrated to the left is a classic example of an armbar, a deceptively simple technique (easy to learn, very hard to apply). If you get it, they will submit or have their arms broken. Fun!

So, that's JKD and BJJ. Next up is the brutal sport of Muay Thai, Thai kickboxing, which I like very much.

Stayin' Alive, Part I

As loyal users of TP can attest to, KM was a big part of my life whilst in Austin. I had hoped to continue training krav maga in Houston, but for reasons I shan't divulge here, I have not done so. I am not completely bereft of KM, and I still hope and have tentative plans to attempt to become certified as an instructor within the next year.

I am still training self-defense in earnest. I'm concentrating my training right now in jeet kune do, muay thai, and combat submission grappling (links to the left). Really, what I'm trying to do is train in whatever works, which is pretty much Bruce Lee's philosophy of fighting, centered on the concept of 'aliveness,' i.e., whatever will keep you alive. In his last film, Game of Death, Lee's costume is designed to exemplify this effect. He wears a simple yellow tracksuit, spandex-style, flexible, but still fitted and precise. The plainness of the costume is meant to show (1) the lack of any 'uniform' associated with any particular style of self defense; and (2) the adaptive and flexible approach Lee conceptualized in terms of fighting.

From Lee's theories (and many other sources, of course), comes his martial art: jeet kune do, or the Way of the Intercepting Fist. Unfortunately, Bruce Lee died before he could truly develop and disseminate his art, so there is left a substantial debate over what exactly is, and is not, jeet kune do. There are generally two divergent schools on this point, though this is assuredly an oversimplification.

The first is known as JKD-Concepts, which basically holds that the key is the concepts Lee brought to the table, of 'aliveness,' of doing anything and everything that keeps one alive, of not being bond, in a doctrinaire sense, to any one style of fighting. That's what the Game of Death was all about. The movie takes place in a pagoda, with each floor being guarded by a (real-life) martial arts master in a particular discipline. Lee wanted to show that 'aliveness,' and its concomitant flexibility and adaptability is the essence of self-defense. The final scene shows Lee taking on his real-life student, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It's cool.

In any case, JKD-Concepts is less a coherent system of fighting (though Lee left enough information on actual techniques that some of the actual methods taught come from him or his chief pupil, the legendary Guru Dan Inosanto) and more a theory of fighting and self-defense, and perhaps, of life in general. If it works, then it should be used, regardless of where or whom it derives from. This notion, I think, meshes very well with the ethos of krav maga: doing what will keep you alive in a real-life assault.

The other school of thought simply says that if Bruce Lee didn't write about it or teach it, it isn't JKD, regardless of the theory behind it.

People FAR, FAR more knowledgeable than I have written and discussed this subject ad nauseum, so I won't go into it any further. Nevertheless, I always find the difficulties groups and institutions have in defining their own parameters to be fascinating. What is it to train JKD? What is it to be Jewish? What is it to be American?

I train, as far as I can tell, mostly JKD-Concepts. JKD involves quite a bit of trapping, which derives from Wing Chun Kung fun (another name for JKD is Jun Fan Gung Fu), some takedowns, power leg forward stance (KM is the other way), and some throws, but in many other ways, isn't so dramatic a departure from KM. In any case, I don't know enough about JKD yet to be able to give it an honest comparison to KM. I do know that one particular school of JKD, that of Paul Vunak's Progressive Fighting Systems, seems to have an excellent reputation as a real-life self-defense system.

Next up: Brazilian jujitsu, and the variant I train in, combat submission grappling.