Principle Based Martial Arts Training

[barrypardue]

Great article!!! THANKS!!!!

[sensei8]

As always, Alex make it points valid and quite thoughtful...SOLID article!!

Thanks for sharing it!!

[CredoTe]

Yes! Great article...!

One of the things we strive to tell / instruct our students is to never get locked into one way of doing things, for precisely the reasons you mention. More importantly:

Simply put, teaching fighting through principle is dealing with the larger picture of conflict rather than merely considering technique. Practicing technique is good; repetition is the key to being good at a physical skill of any kind. The problem comes when one trains in the fashion of meeting X attack with Y defense. This continued practice trains the body to respond in only one fashion to a premeditated attack with no variability. Suddenly, when faced with true combat where things do not progress as anticipated, your reaction time becomes compromised due to an inability to cope with variables that did not exist in training.

We do our best as instructors to drive home the idea that kata, kihon, drills, etc, are to show us HOW to perform techniques / respond to conflict rather than showing us WHEN to do moves. We are not computerized equipment, not robots. When we go through kihon / partner drills, we always select a few moves in impromptu fashion that works on a certain aspects of movement / response to conflict that we're trying to hit on for the week. Almost none of our drills / kihon have formalized names or numbers or sequences. The only drills we do that have formalized names and sequences are the Yakusoku Kumite kata that's part of our syllabus.

I'm not sure if the way we do things is exactly like the principle based training you describe, tallgeese, but it sounds similar...

[alexis101]

Very nice article, thanks for sharing it

Learning martial arts will surely be more fun and interesting when we understand its core and principles