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For quite a long time in my training career I laboured under the illusion that the methods of training I was using were preparing me to deal with actual violent encounters and combat outside the dojo. For many years I trained in traditional karate and then Jujitsu, diligently practicing techniques that I was told would help me if someone tried to attack me and I pretty much believed this to be true. I thought that if I practiced the techniques enough and with enough intent behind them each time I did them, then eventually I would be good enough to handle anyone who ever tried to attack me.
God help anyone who ever tried to lay a finger on me because I would just react with one of the great techniques I had been shown and that would be it, the show would be over and I’d stroll on home feeling particularly lethal and pleased with myself. That’s how I thought anyway.
Then I got a job as a bouncer and realised that I would never be able to effectively use the vast majority of the techniques I had been shown. Very quickly I realised that I had been training away in a blissful cloud of ignorance, completely blinkered to the goings on in the concrete dojo. There was nothing fancy about the real world of violence. It was brutal and it was very goddamn scary. Very scary.
In that job, being somewhat proficient in martial arts, especially traditional martial arts, was both a blessing and a hindrance. I wasn’t the biggest bouncer in the world. Indeed I was a light weight compared to most of the guys I ended up working with, so I wasn’t very physically intimidating and I knew this.
So I took confidence from the fact that I was better trained than most of the people I would be coming into contact with. This allowed me to think I could do the job. It gave me just enough credibility to get by. The rest I would get by proving myself capable of the job by doing it right. So my martial arts training was a blessing in that respect.
I soon realised though, that it was also a hindrance and this happened when it became clear that I would never be able to use most of what I knew. I got caught up in a nasty situation one night that involved about eight big guys against three of us bouncers. I used a few techniques that were no where near as effective as I thought they would be and the crushing fear of the situation made me back away at times when I shouldn’t have. On the whole the experience was a complete eye opener for me. I had never felt such adrenaline- induced fear in my life, a fear that rendered my oft practiced techniques almost useless.
I had never trained for such a situation. In the dojo the pressure I had previously felt was miniscule by comparison to the overwhelming pressure I felt that night. In the dojo I felt calm and in control, powerful even. That night, with the fists flying and the blood splattering, I felt like I was being controlled only by fear and that I was weak instead of powerful. Years of training had practically come to nothing.
I stuck with the job for a while though because I thought the experience would be good for me, both personally and as a martial artist, which it was on both fronts. The fear though, never really went away. Although I got better at handling situations I never ceased to be afraid. It wasn’t until later, when I read Geoff Thompson’s book, Fear, that I realised this feeling of fear was completely natural and that everyone feels it. You just have to learn how to control it.
I got in a few more scrapes while bouncing and after each one I got more used to the experience (exposure training) though never completely. From a performance point of view, I still needed a lot of work.
Eventually I quit bouncing because of the unsociable hours and because at times it felt like a prison sentence. A lot of bouncers get almost addicted to the job and when they quit they wonder why they ever did it for so long. I was in that group. I don’t miss it.
The whole bouncing experience though, taught me the very real need for different training methods when it came to street self defense and actual combat. The traditional methods of training in this regard had proved to be woefully inadequate. That’s not to say that the training was a waste of time, it wasn’t. The techniques just had to be modified to meet the demands of a high pressure live situation.
So now I strive to make my training as alive as possible. More and more I have tried to move away from the static nature of traditional training methods (though not altogether as I’ll soon explain) and to make the training much more dynamic and realistic. My new goal was to be able to perform better, mentally and physically, in a combat situation and to not kid myself that just because I had trained extensively in martial arts that I would somehow naturally be able to handle a real attack. I believe this is a fatal assumption that many martial artists make and it takes a bit of humility and swallowing of pride to actually admit this fact to yourself. It certainly did with me. I had to admit that I didn’t know half as much as I thought I knew when it came to effective street self defense.
Once you do make this mental leap however, you really do start to come on leaps and bounds in terms of your training. To paraphrase Bruce Lee, you will be emptying your cup of knowledge (what you think you know) to make way for new knowledge (what you should know). Now you can really start to learn.
Injecting the concept of alive training into your martial arts is like coming up for air after being trapped under water; it’s like a new lease of life. You can finally shrug of the weighty and unhelpful elements of tradition and feel a lot lighter for it. Suddenly you feel like you’re training in real life instead of still life. The shift is that transforming. I felt reborn as a martial artist when I started to liven up my training and get creative. I felt like I was finally on my own path instead of someone else’s and that is a very liberating feeling.
Before I go let me show you this video that illustrates the concept of alive training very well and its importance in making your training more practical. The video will serve as a good grounding before we go on to discuss different training methods to achieve this.
Practice your striking with heavy bag by Everlast.
In part 2 of this article I’m going to discuss how you can actually go about breathing life into your training and how you can better adapt yourself to the conditions of combat through just a few very effective training methods.
