Pressure Testing Your Art
by Geoff Thompson FSMA (Joint Chief Instructor British Combat Association)
Firstly, thank you very much for taking the time to read this article. I hope that you find something within that will be of help in preparing you, your students and your art for an arena that is as savage as it is unrelenting.
As with all my articles, this is based on my own empirical study, with three hundred street fights under my belt I fell ideally positioned to help those that seek help (and apparently irritate those that think they do not need help!). I don't want to sound like a poser when I talk about how many fights I've been involved in, and how tough I am, but if you're reading this piece then I'm sure that you want to know where I'm coming from. I don't want you to think that I'm yet another dry land swimmer reaching about how it feels to get wet, neither do I want to sound patronising. I am extremely conscientious about my teaching and writing and will not write what I think people want to hear simply to sell an article or book, what I will write though is how it is. If my honesty offends accept my apologies before we begin. I'm not here to offend anyone thatⳠnot my game, I love all the arts and have studies most, but if you want to make it work for you open your ears and eyes. Many people ask me to show them truth⠡nd then close their eyes to my demonstrations because it is not what they want to see. Others ask me to tell them the truth⠡nd then close their ears to my words because, again, it is not what they want to hear.
Please don't be one of those people. Truth is often harder than a big bag of hard things, but honesty is the only way, so be honest with yourself, strip the bullshit from the art that you art studying and ask yourself (or your instructor) is this really going to work for me? If the answer is negative, or even if you are not sure, start trying to find ways to MAKE it work. Without a shadow of a doubt pressure testing your art will help you in that quest.
It would seem that in delivering what I would classify as educational books and articles I have ruffled one or two feathers (as Bob Sykes succinctly put it, when you pluck feathers, chickens squawk). It would seem that some are shocked, no less, by what I have to say.
They think that I'm a thug. To these people I would say: "Shocked!!?? Let me tell you my good and sensitive people that if you are so easily shocked within the pages of a text, me thinks that you tigers must be as paper as the pages within. I dread to think how shocked you will be then when societies grotesque minority shatter your porcelain lives with their shocking⠴actics and leave you in a decimated heap because you failed to heed the warnings, and worse still, failed therefore to pass on the ill-tidings to your students and loved ones.
Shock isn't a word in a sentence, it's broken glass in the eye. Shock isn't a sentence in a paragraph, it is three pig ugly youths who take your baby out of its pram and say, give me your purse, or the baby goes in the canal, neither is a shock paragraph on a page, a page in a book or even a book in a collection. No! Shock is being so frightened by those that threaten you that you canⴠsleep at night, the 2am voice on the phone that says, I'm going to kill your wife and children, because you dared to tackle a burglar in your own home and finally, Oh,Ye of the sensitive heart, shock is the judicial system that feeds the predator and starves the victim. So when we are talking about shocking, please lets keep things in context.
I apologise if I seem a little over-zealous but we are not living in an idyllic world where my base tactics would be unnecessary, we are living in a violent society where they are. I have used all of the tactics that I endorse to protect myself and to protect others though I always without exception recommend flight about fight. If flight is not an option, you, like I, will use everything and anything to secure survival, or expire.
Many people feel, as a for instance, that attacking first or biting is a gratuitous act, and hey!! don't let the kids see that, whatever you do! Do me a favour. Check out the Kata that you teach your children in every training session, finger strikes that would crush the windpipe and kill, single finger strikes that would blind even with minimum force, ankle straps that would easily cripple, head butts? Do you teach your kids that or wouldn't that be classed as Karate, they're in your Kata, too. Harry Cook was in Japan when Yahara Sensei scored in Ippon (full point) in the J.K.A. Championships with a head-butt that could be heard all around the contest arena. I don't remember anyone calling him a thug. In Kata there are also leg breaks, back breaks, wrist breaks etc, etc. Are we thugs because we practice Kata? In many of the ancient Kung-fu systems students practised jaw exercise to aid biting technique, are these masters thugs also?
Martial art by definition means designed for war. What is war? The greatest expression of violence known to man. In war we brutally kill our fellow human beings, we torture then, blow them apart, sometimes in hundreds, thousands, even millions, then we cheer and congratulate ourselves on a job well done. Well done and legalised in the name of religion, politics, survival, put any name you like on it, no matter, someone will sanction it, especially if there is money involved. Now my friends, that's what I call shocking!
I am also told, though never to my face, that what I teach is not Karate. I'm even told this by people as high as 3rd, 4th and 5th Dan. How did you manage to get such a high grade without knowing your Bunkai. I teach boxing, wrestling, choking, butting, biting, stamping, awareness (zanshin), line-ups, distance control, deception etc and my learned friends say, that's not Karate. Really? Have a closer look at the system youⲥ in and tell me that all those elements and more are not here. Of course they are there, they're just not taught it on the curriculum.
The enemy we are dealing with today is a cruel one who, like the terminator, has no feelings, no emotion and will not stop until you are down. To deal with a gratuitous enemy we need to employ gratuitous tactics, we need to be attacking first, forget this antiquated block-counter lark, it's not going to happen and if that's what you are being taught now then I feel sorry for you. Be first and ferocious, anything less and you'll be laughed off the planet and then battered. If a finger in the eye is what is needed to stop an attacker or a bite or an incidental weapon, use it. It is a ridiculous concept to morally restrict yourself, or your students, by disallowing certain techniques and concepts for fear of offending the heritage of your art or your instructor. Are they going to be there when you, your wife, perhaps your children are lying in a pool of blood because you dared not to change a horse and cart for a 2.5 injection?
Only a fool would go to a gunfight with a feather duster!
Defending yourself is a serious business, people are dying in street attacks all over the world so you've got to get it right, and if that means change, then so be it. Change is not sacrilege it's sense, it's survival. Anyone that says that they will not bite/butt/gouge or whatever has obviously never had to defend the life of a loved one. Believe me, you'll do anything when the pressure is on.
First and foremost I teach humility and respect. I teach avoidance, escape, verbal dissuasion, but if a situation becomes physical I do not deny my students nor myself the use of techniques/concepts that may be ugly or socially unacceptable, if I did that I wouldn't be able to teach them anything because all the techniques that really work are obese in their ugliness.
If you worked in a factory making manifolds for cars, you wouldn't see a single manifold leaving the factory gates without first being pressure tested, because the reliability of the car is determined by that manifold (or any other part for that matter). If the manifold does not stand up to the pressure test it doesn't leave the factory. We, as martial artists, work in a factory called a dojo or gym, we give our students metaphoric manifolds called technique and character, then we send them out to the violent streets of Britain without pressure testing either and then wonder what went wrong? When they collapse under the pressure of a real confrontation.
Would you ride the roller coaster that hadn't been safety tested? Would you travel in an aeroplane with un-pressure-tested wings and engine, or go down in a submarine that has not been water tested? No? Neither would I! So why take yourself or your art into a savage and relentless arena (the street) without testing its potency and reliability first, in the controlled arena, and I don't mean testing it against other practitioners of the same art. I mean testing in an Animal Day where any range is allowed and contact is encouraged.
Training in the martial arts should be like immersing a bicycle inner tube into a bowl of water, and then applying air pressure to find out where the leaks are. The rising bubbles tell us that the inner tube has a leak so we take it out of the water, get out the puncture outfit, and fix it.
The last thing you want as a martial art practitioner is to find that your technique or character crumbles in a confrontational situation. It could get you killed or certainly badly injured.
The controlled environment is the place to find out these things and not the live scenario.
By applying artificial pressure in a controlled environment one can find the bubbles and then fix the leaks without fear of being badly maimed or killed.
Therefore, your training should be about exploring different ways in which you can supply that artificial pressure so that when confronted by an adverse situation in the street you will already know how well your technique and character is going to stand up to pressure.
The live scenario is about understanding the enemy and understanding yourself (to steal a line from my late friend Sun Tzu): Understanding the enemy is knowing his game-plan, his ritual of attack and his strengths, weaknesses, lair, the deception that he will employ as a pre-cursor to attack, his mental and physical armour chinks, how he is likely to react to different stimuli like aggression, passivity, pain, fear, power etc. Understanding that the enemy is unlikely to wear a stocking mask and hold a swag bag and cosh and demand, give us your cash you beggar, or I'll swipe you with me cosh. Rather he will probably seem a rather ordinary person's asking for the time or directions who suddenly transforms into an ugly attacking demon who shocks you so rigid that you are unable to activate a positive response. Understanding that a good street fighter will probably drop into single syllables like, Yeah! And! So! and go through a ritual of body language as a pre-cursor to attack. Understanding that the art many of us practice was designed to fight an enemy of today is different from the enemy of a decade ago and of two decades ago. We are dealing with a foe that is likely to change with each subsequent generation. Therefore, we must adapt our art and tailor it to the adversary of the day. I could go on all day about the traits of the enemy but that would be out of the context of this article, so for more about understanding the enemy see my book, Dead or Alive.
Understanding yourself is knowing how you are likely to react when the s**t hits the fan. Will your technique work for you when youⲥ so scared that all you want is your mother. Will it work when you are bleeding or when you're exhausted or nauseous, when you are outnumbered, outweighed or simply out of your depth. Will your character stand up to the threat of aftermath, come backs, threatening phone calls, police involvement, intimidation? At the end of the day, do you really want to wait until it happens to find out?
Wouldn't you rather measure your own response to stress in a controlled environment so that you can learn to understand your own body and therefore fix up all the leaky bits so that you are better prepared? Pressure testing may differ from one person to another, what I find demanding you may feel very comfortable with, or vice versa. Often you may have a good understanding of what puts you under pressure, other times you won't know and will only find out when exposed to different kinds of stressful stimuli.
Adversity in training therefore must be sought out and confronted so as to highlight your weakness in technique and/or character and then confronted again and again to gain familiarity and desensitisation. This is of course hands-on stuff, and cannot be confronted through the pages of a book or through the chalk of a demonstration blackboard.
Animal Day is a term that I coined many years ago and is, basically, a universal way of pressure testing technique and character in the controlled environment, but let's not pretend there will still be elements missing that can only be found in a live scenario. What Animal Day will do though is get you as close as damn it.
Sugar Ray Leonard once said to my friend, European Pro-Boxing Champ Jim MacDonnell, that boxing at a high level is 90% mental, coping with a real fight is exactly the same. The physical part is the easy bit, it is the mental part that really hurts. Coping with think-fight, pre-fight, and post-fight.
It is a lot harder than coping with in-fight/in-flight is very tangible and more or less instinctive, it will look after itself, if your training is good you will cope with in-fight well, if your training is plastic (unrealistic) then you will not.
What you should try to discover in your training is your own personal limitations and then help to expand those limits.
For more details of the intricacy of Animal Day please refer to my books and videos by the same name.
Reply
