Journal Martial Arts Energies in Practice

[HoldAll]

The Capoeira Circle as the Sacred Mass of Axé

So how is capoeira

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different from the wild energy dancers feel at parties or in clubs?

For a time our capoeira group rented a room at a local gym, and the people at the reception always thought we were members of some kind of cult, what with us capoeiristas being such fanatic enthusiasts full of bright-eyed anticipation for the next class. In some ways they were right, a capoeira circle does have a certain cultic character, and it's simply inevitable that a special bond between roda (capoeira circle) participants will develop over time; I think it could be justifiably claimed that each capoeira grupo was a kind of magical order or at the very least some sort of tribe. We roughly wore the same uniform, white pants with a cord slung around our waists as well as t-shirts commemorating past capoeira workshops in various colours except for batizados ('baptisms'), a kind of initiation ceremony where beginners would receive their first corda and where the motto was "todos em branco" ("everybody in white"); I once heard that whenever you went to a

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ceremony in Brazil and didn't know in which orisha's honour with its associated colour it was, you always showed up dressed in festive white just to be safe.

The elitist cultic nature of capoeira circles becomes fully pronounced in street rodas: onlookers may enjoy the exotic spectacle but won't be able to replicate it themselves without years of training. They will neither know nor understand the Portuguese 'liturgy', i.e. the songs, and they won't know how to play all those percussion instruments, in short: they can never be capoeiristas but merely outsiders, not members of that special club. It also means that spectators won't be able to share in the capoeira circle's ecstasy, it's like tourists watching those

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shows in Istanbul - they may be fascinated but merely looking at these dervishes won't make them instant sufis.

Rodas are what all religious group ceremonies ideally should be: rituals that uplift the spirit, events at which you can experience energies much more powerful than your own. A full-blown roda at workshops or in the street always starts with a

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(litany) when the first two players would squat opposite each other in front of the boss of the roda circle leading a call-and-response chorus invoking God, the group's mestre, etc., and only then the games will begin.

So you have special clothing, live music, singing, clapping, movements that can be seen as both dancing and fighting, and the end result is an ecstatic ritual very different from mundane parties with all their booze and drugs. There are fixed percussive rhythms for different types of games, certain taboos to heed, particular customs for playing, group-specific traditions, in short, a roda is in fact a magic circle filled to the brim with loads of raw energy you can distinctly sense and that will grip you despite of yourself.

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A huge roda at a workshop in Hamburg featuring living legend

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(84 years old at the time) as well as my hero Mestre Acordeon* (74 years old at the time, his game starts at 2:50) about whom Wikipedia has the following to say: "At the age of 70, on Labor Day 2013, he, his wife Suellen Einarsen also known as Mestra Suelly and nine of his disciples embarked on a 14,000 miles bicycle journey from Berkeley to his home town of Salvador de Bahia in Brazil." Capoeira will keep you young, many have already commented on this.

I suppose the ecstasy produced by a capoeira circle and its players can be explained away in the driest of psychological terms but even a stone-cold sober scientist would probably be hard put to describe and analyse it without using the word 'energy' even once, so a kind of energy it is, and you might just as well call it axé after the Yoruba religious concept. Just like karate ki and kime, it cannot be generated by any other method except by practising the respective martial art, and that's precisely what I often miss in discussions about occult energies: an awareness that each energy is unique and cannot be raised by just any old means.

 

[Audiolog Edu]

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One of my favorite Muay Thai fighters of all time, he is pretty damn good, can beat up taller oponents, even heavier ones.

 

[HoldAll]

Duty and Inclination in the Martial Arts

Let's start at the beginning: probably the worst motivation for taking up a martial art (or any kind of exercise really) are New Year's resolutions - I read somewhere that most gyms are only able to show a profit thanks to the tons of memberships bought by inveterate couch potatoes in late December which they will subsequently seldom use. What's more, your original reasons don't have to be serious at all and can even include movies or video games - one world champion point-fighter, for example, once admitted in an interview that she mainly took up karate because of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle shows she used to watch as a kid while capoeiristas will sometimes cite Tekken or Street Fighter III as their initial inspirations; it's all good.

Additionally, there are dozens of biographies of famous martial artists of every stripe that begin with something like "I was always a weak and sickly child until one day I discovered…". I always have to think of

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in this connection who had eczema as well as severe asthma as a child and used to be very skinny; I remember reading somewhere that one year he was completely laid up in bed and unable to go to school. Bullying is frequently mentioned too, and in such cases the story usually goes that the kid one day would one day triumph over his tormentors, but not by achieving a glorious victory thanks to the mysterious techniques of style XY but he learned by displaying fierce fighting spirit, and any subsequent black eye, bruises and chipped teeth would be secondary in comparison.

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What makes

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so remarkable is that its main actors are all top-notch karateka in real life.

So imagine you have spent decades of your life training (more or less hard ) martial arts several times a week and have been practising empty-mind meditation daily for over a year when one day you come across this crap:

"Make a list of personality traits of yourself. Do you persevere, do you find it easy to enter into a state of mind vacancy? Well, another word for perseverance is stubbornness and to suffer. To put that into another light, it's sort of like saying concentration camps and ethnic cleansings are noble because they ultimately cultivate perseverance […]"

This is a real quote from a forum member's review of Bardon's IIH; its author had previously 'proved' to me in another one of his threads that empty-mind meditation, something which people have done for thousands of years and which millions around the world are still practising today, was ultimately futile because true

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(no-mind) was impossible to attain since there would still be measurable brainwaves left even if you succeeded. Ok, we get it, you don't want to meditate, you don't have to waste entire AI-assisted walls of text on your transparent excuses. However, the quote above really takes the biscuit. Putting in a sustained effort to master something is like suffering in a concentration camp? Makes you wonder how the guy learned to read and write…

Yes, studying martial arts and becoming successful in them takes perseverance just like about any other human pursuit but you don't (necessarily ) have to be a masochist about it. I think there is a martial art for everyone. In our dojo, we had insurance employees, bank clerks, policemen, scientists and IT engineers, the sort of person that doesn't mind the monotony of basic training or the pedantic struggle for perfect technique. The capoeiristas, on the other hand, typically were social workers, nurses, teachers, and college students who would have rather run a mile before subjecting themselves to such an austere regime; the karatekas on their part would have felt utterly lost and embarrassed in a noisy and boisterous capoeira roda, a bit like monks at an orgy. While some capoeiristas I knew had in fact been practising karate for a couple of years previously before they ultimately decided they didn't like it after all and switched to capoeira, I've yet to meet a karateka who had been doing capoeira before, it's completely one-way. To each his or her own but regardless of what martial art you study, the motto remains the same: "Perseverance furthers", as the I-Ching is fond of saying.

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This is the trailer for "

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", a Brazilian film about a famous capoerista.

Once again it comes down to the specific energy of a martial art and whether you find that energy appealing or not. For a time we shared a big hall divided by a curtain with students from other martial arts, and I never really liked what I saw whenever I watched those guys once our karate class was over. There was this alleged 'anti-terror combat' system taught by a cop who had his students armed with rubber knives perform the same dull drills over and over again. The kung fu classes were held by a frail elderly Chinese gentleman who rarely corrected his students and would teach long sequences of movements without any regard to the efficacy of their techniques - if I'd be forced to take part in such a class, I'd start to cry. The most interesting classes though were

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s where you could watch all the different martial arts devised by a certain Japanese samurai clan being practised but where you couldn't help feeling that several lifetimes would be required before you could hope to get any good in all those disciplines.

Sometimes it's the primitive training facilities that put you off a dojo or capoeira academia, sometimes it's its instructors or the personalities of the other students. All of these factors contribute to the kind of energy you will experience in class - it's not only about that specific martial art viewed in isolation. My first capoeira instructor, for example, had a charismatic personality but could be a right asshole when he was in a bad mood, and rodas (capoeira circles) were veritable ordeals on such days but being the stupidly loyal soul that I am, I stuck it out for three years before finally leaving and finding a much better grupo; similar things have happened to me several times in the course of my karate career as well. It's no use spending several years and countless hours in an environment you don't enjoy together with people you dislike, no matter how venerable the martial art. Terry Pratchett somewhere wrote something like "Inhumanity starts whenever principles become more important than people." After all, nobody can demand from you that you sacrifice your entire spare time to the noble pursuit of martial arts and dedicate your whole life to them, that's strictly fiction.

My karate coach once likened the martial arts to a buffet - eat what you want, eat as much you want, stop if you've had enough, it's your choice, and no shame attaches if you quit. There are more important things in life, a thousand ways of expressing yourself and experiencing fulfilment, which is after all what this earthly existence should be about.

 

[HoldAll]

Shotokan Energy

I can't help feeling that when the ancient Japanese samurai adopted zen buddhism, they studiously ignored the buddhism part with all its pesky ethics and only kept zen because of its usefulness in cutting each other up with their swords. There is this weird disconnect where modern karate presents itself as this noble martial art and as a spiritual path towards perfecting one's character while at the same time being utterly ruthless in its fight techniques some of which remind me of the old nickname for Winston Churchill's Special Operations Executive during WW2, i.e. "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare" - and make no mistake, karate katas contain many ungentlemanly techniques that could actually land you in jail for using excessive force even in the direst of self-defence situations.

It goes without saying that Gichin Funakoshi's idea to present karate as humble character-building and self-cultivation exercises is not really reflected in sports karate today, never mind all the pious propaganda put out by traditionalist dojos. You are hardly reminded of peace-loving subjects of the holy Japanese Emperor dutifully honouring their elders and betters within a feudal hierarchy when watching the grim determination in the face and eyes of a kata expert at top-tier competitions, or of a champion point-fighter going through a hopelessly outclassed opponent like a buzzsaw through a wet kleenex. As I mentioned in previous posts, shotokan karate has gone to various transformations that all served to transform it from an obscure Okinawan fighting style into a streamlined modern martial art, in which process were discarded all poetic, purely ornamental and exotically idiosyncratic vestiges left by its ancient South Chinese forbears, turning it stone-cold sober, hard-hitting and hyper-aggressive.

It was

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who introduced all those low, long and wide stances that practitioners from other styles would always bitch about whenever they decided to give good old shotokan a go at karate workshops - just try walking in really long steps for a minute or two while keeping your head and torso strictly upright and you'll know what I mean. Gigo was a militant perfectionist who always expected his students to go far beyond their limits, and the legacy of this attitude can still be felt in modern shotokan karate today.

I only came to appreciate the full enormity of this metamorphosis at a karate workshop where I took part in a class in

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, a style that has retained many of the stylistic features of kung fu and during which we learned the elegant hakutsuru (white crane) kata; it was a really moving experience for me because this beautiful kata felt completely unlike all the humourless shotokan robot-stomping forms I was so used to and because it imparted such an entirely different energy - after a while you really thought you were a long-legged bird stalking across a dewy meadow:

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When practised with an extreme degree of fanaticism, shotokan karate energy is as Martian as it gets; it's confrontational, direct and straight to the point, employing maximum force to maim and kill. It somehow reminds me of the English translation for the sephira Din or Geburah: 'Stern Judgement'. No matter how much horseplay and joking may go on in the locker room before a shotokan karate class, the art itself lacks any sense of humour and can make you at times feel absolutely merciless like a judge, jury, and executioner in one who has never heard of such ridiculous niceties as fairness or human rights.

One of the privileges that occultism affords us is the freedom to investigate such energies in the abstract, independently of the individual's psyche and free from any ethical considerations. Mars is Mars, Geburah is Geburah, whether you embrace them or not, and no moral justification whatsoever is required for their invocation. In my opinion, glorifying this fierce kime energy is just as foolish as abhorring it, and in my book it's totally unnecessary to dive headlong into a frantic struggle to 'balance' it by means of its polar opposite (and besides, the word 'equilibrium' is used far too often in Dion Fortune's "The Mystical Qabalah" for my liking). Two equally strong opposed forces raging on the battlefield of the soul? That's a recipe for permanent turmoil if you ask me. Pull that fierce kime energy out of the box when circumstances require it, put it back when it's no longer needed and otherwise keep your mind empty, that's the ticket (ok, again ideally ).

 

[HoldAll]

Exu

I first heard the name of the orisha Exu when my first narcissist Brazilian capoeira instructor broke with his Brazil professor who then promptly broke with his own mestre in Brazil and started his own capoeira outfit named something something 'Exu' himself. My former instructor commented this betrayal with a snide remark along the lines of

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being a malicious trickster god in candomblé and the perfect fit for that two-faced bastard of a professor before proudly proclaiming himself to be a son of noble

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based on some numerological reading of his name (might also have been a cowrie shell oracle, I forget). Anyway, Exu too makes an appearance in the Brazilian capoeira movie "Besouro" where the protagonist is taught a harsh lesson by the god:

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Trickery has of course always been a part of warfare, just think of the mythical Trojan Horse. I remember seeing a documentary once about ninjutsu where grandmaster

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stood close to the presenter on the narrow balcony of his apartment explaining the history of his art while his hand sneaked up slowly behind the presenter's back; it turned out that the ninjutsu grandmaster was holding a lighter whose flame was eventually only a couple of inches away from the presenter's hairline … My first karate sensei had this trick where he would slowly inch towards his opponent while a couple of times touching his nose and subsequently pretending to wipe his hand on his gi - it wasn't gross or anything, just slightly distracting and irritating, but then he would suddenly perform a long lunge punch (kizame zuki) with his lead hand, more often than not catching his sparring partner by surprise. I once squatted with one of my two capoeira contra-mestres, a really nice and sweet guy, in front of the bateria group of capoeira musicians as is customary before a game in the roda; he then started to hold both my hands, which I thought a very touching gesture, before slowly beginning to twist my little fingers (small joint manipulation is even illegal in mixed martial arts, by the way)… You just never know what will happen next in a capoeira game and sometimes even before.

Trickery is only resorted to in karate to a very limited extent and in point-fighting will mostly take the shape of feints. Like I mentioned in a previous post, all feints must be backed up by the power of your body and hara within a range that's close enough to actually threaten your opponent, otherwise he or she will simply ignore them. One of my favourite things in sparring was elevating my centre of gravity while breathing shallowly and rapidly, thus inviting a rash knee-jerk attack from my opponent who'd think I was panicking or nervous, and then countering. Another one of my ploys was first matching the 'skipping' rhythm of the other guy, then moving in the exactly opposite one, going up when he was going down, toing when he was froing, then switching to a chaotic rhythm and suddenly attacking; it rarely panned out, my execution of that idea must have looked rather unconvincing.

In capoeira, however, trickery is the name of the game and is sometimes referred to as mandinga - the word allegedly comes from the African

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people who were excellent herbalists, which to other tribes seemed like witchcraft. I've never heard my instructors use it but mandinguero (in the sense of a skilled and devious capoeirista) makes an appearance in several capoeira songs.

Really mean ruses are the unspoken privilege of high-ranking capoeira players, professores and up. Chances are that whenever a not very advanced player employs them, they will inevitably appear desperate, clumsy, or inelegant, a serious blunder in a capoeira game. All such tricks must look spontaneous and uncontrived, and that's why they're so difficult to pull off. A capoeira mestre, for example, once facetiously performed a two-finger stab to my eyes but it was a more playful and ambiguous gesture - did it hint at a savage streetfighting technique, did he mean to tell me that I should pay closer attention to the game, or was he simply fooling around? I'll never know. Benji, the martial arts prodigy whom I mentioned in a previous post, once held out his arms wide open after a game with a big grin on his face as if wanting to give me a hug but as I approached, he gave me a light telefone which is when you clap your hands simultaneously over the other guy's ears - in self-defence, you could easily rupture an aggressor's eardrums when performing this technique in earnest and with full force.

One of the cleverest martial arts tricks I've ever heard about is this story about an old sword master who was travelling on a boat along the coastline of Japan when one of the other passengers, a young firebrand samurai, spontaneously challenged him to a duel. The old sword master said, "Ok, but let's fight it out on the small island over there, no need to upset the other people on the boat. Why don't we get on the boat's dinghy and row over there?" The young samurai eagerly agreed and got on the dinghy first when the old master, still standing on the deck of the boat, suddenly cut the dinghy's rope, setting the would-be duellist adrift. Beautiful, simply beautiful.

By all of this I want to say that Exu, Loki, Old Man Coyote, Hermes, Anansi, etc. have a firm place in the martial arts pantheon alongside Ogun, Mars, Ares and all the other gods of war, or as someone said: "I have to accept the cards life is dealing me but I'll be damned if I didn't cheat!"

 

[HoldAll]

The Crazy Ebb and Flow of Martial Arts Energy

Apart from the highly challenging athletic requirements, what makes capoeira so much more difficult than karate is that winning a game can be accomplished in a myriad of ways and that victory isn't even the stated goal here. In a fast game, you have all these spectacular crescent kicks at head height where it almost seems as if the legs of the players were interlocking like the teeth of two cogwheels. You cooperate with your partner in order to create something spectacular and beautiful… until you or the other guy are abruptly done with cooperating. Gone are the lovely crescent kicks (which would never do any real damage in full-contact fights anyway), and it's scoring and takedown time. Mostly. Not always. Sometimes. You can never be sure, even the players won't know beforehand what will emerge when interacting with familiar partners in a game.

I've been unable to find the exact quote but I seem to remember that in his "The Book of Five Rings", Miyamoto Musashi (1584-1645) writes that one should always be on the lookout for openings instead of blindly hacking away at one's opponent with one's sword. However, what he didn't write (and I could be wrong) is that openings are never static, they will come and go, suddenly emerge and then disappear; openings can also be forced, for example by a feint, and lastly you can also intentionally present an opening to your opponent in order to trigger a heedless, badly timed attack that you can subsequently exploit.

It's a bit like that in capoeira games. In a karate point fight, you can always rush a weaker opponent using your superior strength, speed and technique, and even if you don't score, you'll have him or her intimidated and on the back foot for the rest of the match. You can't do that in capoeira. Instead, a game is an exercise in seduction in a way - you sort of flirtatiously invite your partner to leave himself or herself open to your offensive and then execute a ruthless takedown, a powerful direct kick, a head butt or whatever but only if such an opportunity arises organically, smoothly and naturally. It's not about scoring yukos, wazaris and ippons by brute force as in karate point-fighting, it's about winning 'cool points' which are much harder to acquire. After all, everybody knows how ridiculous guys looks when they're trying too hard to appear cool and relaxed, and that's also (or especially) true in capoeira games. There are a dozens of ways of riling up your partner, e.g. by performing acrobatic moves your partner hasn't quite mastered yet or by gracefully escaping a clumsy attack and then performing a handstand (bananeira) as if cocking a snook at the other one (of course you can in fact cock a snook at your partner while in a handstand provided you're able to perform it with one arm only!).

Apart from movie clips, there aren't that many professionally shot capoeira videos; I really love this one though:

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Martial arts energy is protean, it ebbs and flows with varying intensity and quality. What's more, one should never forget that it takes two to tango and that your opponent might attack or defend in a way that clashes with your own style. In MMA matches, brawlers may get knocked out by brainy tacticians whom they had originally thought of as wimps, brainy tacticians may get knocked out by brawlers whom they may consider primitive brutes. Then two brawlers would meet, resulting in a slugfest without a clear winner; at other times it will be two brainiacs interminably circling each other at a safe distance until the audience finally starts to boo.

This is another reason why I think it's so wrong to liken occult energy to a uniform force like electricity - it may stop for a moment, return with renewed power, change direction, will often react to fighters' emotional ups and downs, spiral out of control, disappear underground, double back, race forward or move slowly like treacle, unexpectedly burst forth from underneath and so on. I read somewhere that fluid mechanics feature some of the most notoriously difficult processes that can be described by means of applied mathematics, which is why Bruce Lee's famous dictum

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" actually provides a more appropriate analogy for the chaotic ebb and flow of martial arts energy.

 

[HoldAll]

That Darn Knot

As opposed to those American

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with their own home-cooked 'styles', nobody makes money from traditional Japanese martial arts, be it karate, iaido, keno judo, aikido or jujutsu, in countries with a robust culture of volunteer work. A full-year membership for our dojo would set you back by approximately $530 which just about covers the rent for a highschool gym for a few evenings a week plus insurance, a sum which may be even lower for dojos out in the country.

A black belt isn't such a great deal. You can get a cheap cotton one for as little as $6 which will be long-wearing and look as good as new even after several decades. However, if your taste is more on the flamboyant side you might go for a silk belt with your name embroidered on it (optionally machine-transcribed into Japanese characters that hopefully won't mean something bizarre then) which will become stylishly frayed after only a few of years of wear, and there's this rumour that some guys like to speed up the natural ageing process of their expensive belts by taking a wire brush to them in order to make them look more experienced. Oh, you mean all that black belt mystique as portrayed in fiction? Sorry to burst your romantic bubble here but it's quite different in real life, although even more complicated than you think.

Here's the system I know first-hand, and I think it's similar for mainstream karate dojos all over the world. First off, you will have to pass through all the 'colour belt' grades, slowly rising through the ranks according to a nationally binding grading syllabus that not only stipulates the required skills in basic techniques, katas and partner exercises but also mandates certain waiting periods until you may take the next grading exam which will become gradually longer the closer you draw to 1st dan. This means that it will take you at least four or five years before you will be able to take your black belt exam with no possibility of any shortcuts whatsoever, and it has to be said that many advanced karatekas wii never progress beyond the brown belt stage. Your black belt grading exam will not be held in your home dojo but before a committee consisting of local dojo bosses and senseis, organised by your regional karate association which is tasked with upholding general standards and where there will be absolutely no chance of cheating because these guys will have been teaching and refereeing for decades, which means that they will have an extremely keen eye for even the minutest of mistakes. Furthermore, an age limit of 16 or 18 applies in many countries because it is thought that a black belt degree should go hand in hand with a certain maturity of character; however, this philosophy is not followed everywhere:

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What mars this otherwise flawless performance by this little girl a tad is that her belt is gradually coming loose, probably not because of any fault of her own but because new belts are prone to do that.

You can't register for such a committee grading exam yourself, only your sensei can do that for you, and he will be known to all the other dojo bosses sitting on the committee, again from decades of refereeing and sitting on such committees himself. This means he won't register you for this exam if he thinks that you will sully his good name as a sensei by demonstrating your inadequacy and incompetence in public. Seen this way, a black belt is in fact a big deal. You must not only be able to demonstrate high technical standards, you also have to convince your sensei that you're genuinely ready; I've heard several stories over the years where senseis refused to register excellent students for black belt exams because of their immaturity or flippant attitude, so intangibles play a certain part here as well.

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What real grading exams in karate look like… if you make it to the end of that video, you won't be even half as bored as the members of the examination committee who have seen it all dozens of times before:

As soon as you've happily won your black belt, you'll have to defend it, i.e. act the part of a proficient and competent karateka, which at first may feel odd after spending years as part of the anonymous mass of other brown belts most of whom will never make it to 1st dan. There is this Japanese saying I mentioned in a previous post according to which "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down", and from one day to the other you will stick out. I've heard that some Japanese dojos have this custom where new black belts will have to fight all the others one after the other in their first class after their exam as to dispel any delusions of grandeur, so the protruding nail that is a new black belt will literally get hammered down, but that's not how it's handled in Western countries, of course. However, people will behave differently towards you from now on. Colour belts that may have ignored you before may begin to seek your advice because they will now see you as an expert and an example to follow. You may have been good friends with the other brown belts, whether ambitious up-and-comers or perennial no-hopers, but it will be different from now on the same way as it would be whenever someone gets promoted in a company - suddenly he or she is not part of the gang anymore but a person of authority around whom they might have to tread carefully from now on.

I really wonder if a black belt was in fact capable of storing the karate ki of its owner. A long time ago my sensei's black belt was stolen together with his gi while on a karate holiday in Greece - he simply bought a new black belt (a cheap cotton one), and that was that. Would that Greek thief have sometimes proudly posed in front of a full-length mirror all dressed up in my sensei's karate uniform and black belt? It's possible but in all likelihood he wouldn't have known

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properly (always a problem for beginners), so he must have cut quite a ridiculous figure. Could such a black belt worn for decades by a master confer any occult martial superpowers? I'll try to keep an open mind here but I repeat, tying that knot just right does take practice. A neatly tied black belt is the hallmark of any decent karateka, and without that darn knot you'll simply look pathetic, so no purloined karate sensei ki for you.

 

[HoldAll]

Destruction Wednesdays

According to ancient karate lore, you won't truly understand a

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unless you have performed it at least ten thousand times. Shotokan, in particular, to this day has this tendency to go to extremes when it comes to developing body and mind. When

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was in town for his Monday to Friday workshop every year, there would be a "Destruction Wednesday" where the entire morning class consisted of interminable repetitions of the same technique, sequence, or kata (afternoons were always free, thank god). One year he had workshop participants perform 100 repetitions of

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kata (which I thankfully missed out on because of work); another year we did 400

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right and 400 front-snap kicks left, a feat I would have otherwise considered impossible. Forty black belts would be arrayed in front of us, one after the other counting up from ichi to ju in a monotonous rhythm that only heightened the otherworldly trance I would soon find myself in. It was indescribable. I felt like I wouldn't have been able to stop if I tried; I have no idea at what point exactly I switched legs to begin the whole ordeal all over again.

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(Wow, nice trick in his fight at 1:37!)

Another time Tanaka sensei had us do a partner exercise where you first stepped forward and punched while the other one took a step back and blocked, and then it would immediately be your partner's turn to attack by stepping forward while you took a step backward and blocked, to and fro, locked in a seemingly endless seesawing attack and defense, with each and every punch and block performed in a low basic forward stance (zenkutsu dachi) until your thighs were on fire. I've no idea how many reps we did but it must have been hundreds. I was paired off with this shaven-headed fanatic who didn't know any English so I was unable to ask him to take it a bit easier when we became exhausted; we weren't wearing gloves so failing to block a punch to the head could have easily spelled stitches; he always attacked with full force right until to the end but had excellent control, always pulling his punches to the chin whenever I got careless (after we had repeated the whole damn exercise with punches to the mid-section, my gut was red for days though).

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Like those two but instead of the defending partner countering to the mid-section after his block, he'd become the attacker now and step forward with a punch to your chin, which you would of course also block while moving back, subsequently again stepping forward with a punch to your partner's chin, ad infinitum. In this partner exercise, you'll have to attack at a realistically close distance, focussing precisely on your partner's chin without punch deliberately above his head to make it easier for him, or he won't be able to develop strong and effective blocking.

Of course performing any repetitive manual task can transport you to dreamland but what was so exceptional about it, especially when we did that 2x400 front-snap-kicking marathon, was the grim, almost militant atmosphere that arose in the non-descript sports hall. In the beginning of these gruelling classes it was of course all about peer pressure and keeping face but after a while you didn't even notice the other guys anymore. I could have never made it through those Destruction Wednesdays on the strength of my willpower alone, that's for sure; my brain simply shut off, and it was the combined energy generated by all these other karatekas executing punch after block after kick which carried me through, certainly not just my own.

The take-home from this account is that exhaustion trance induced within a group setting can take you beyond your normal physical limits, no doubt about it. It goes without saying that from a strictly physiological point of view, such athletic excesses like those Destruction Wednesdays will do your muscles much more harm than good because of

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. Tanaka sensei wasn't by any stretch a bull-headed traditionalist ("You won't be allowed to rest until at least five of you have fainted, haw haw!", that kind of tall tale about about studying karate in Japan), for all his old-school samurai charisma. I think he just wanted to show us what our bodies and minds were capable of, and his object lessons didn't disappoint.

 

[HoldAll]

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There is something special about street rodas. Historically, capoeira was reportedly first played by slaves (slavery was only formally abolished in Brazil in 1888!) in secret in clearings in the woods. Until 1937 it remained illegal because it was mostly played by hoodlums and gangs in the street, and there used to be this special cavalaria rhythm played whenever someone spotted mounted police arriving, eager to disperse the capoeira circle and arrest the players. As soon as this rhythm was sounded, those street capoeiristas would switch to innocently dancing samba in order to avoid confrontations with the law, and to this day you often have

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circle dances after a capoeira street roda.

The first indoor capoeira schools (academias) opened in the 1930ies but the street capoeira tradition is still very much alive today, and it was always great to play with capoeiristas from other academias because each had a unique style different from what we were accustomed to, so you could learn a lot every time. If you wanted to be sneaky (and sneakiness is considered a major virtue in capoeira), you'd leave your capoeira outfit and your corda (coloured cord worn around the waist denoting rank) at home so nobody would know which group you were from and guess how proficient you were before you played. Casual spectators always loved it - there was exciting music, singing & clapping as well as enthusiastic players putting on a thrilling show. Our Brazilian contra-mestres were good friends with all the other capoeira grupos in town, so there were never any really rough games fuelled by rivalry, just a brisk exchange of ideas.

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Capoeiristas always surpass oneself themselves in street rodas. This is maybe because of admiring (and sometimes puzzled) audiences or the relief of finally being able to play out in the open where no morose highschool gym caretakers will chase you out of the building the minute the class is over. In part it's exhibitionism, in part pride in showcasing one's skills, together with a strong desire to excel in front of audience as well as the general feel of an exuberant street party. There was this one time where I hogged the agogô (a percussion instrument consisting of two cowbells welded together) for the entire street roda, becoming so entranced by my own "dong-ding-dong!" and engrossed in the whole spectacle that I completely forgot to play in the circle myself; there's a video of this street roda where I can be sometimes seen wearing a happy stupid grin. Good times.

Anything can happen during street rodas. We've had toddlers, drunks, and dogs blundering into the circle, suspicious policemen giving us the beady eye, Asian tourists filming every second of our games, an unknown Brazilian guy suddenly joining a game and proving to be an outstanding capoeirista, an elderly tipsy gentleman insisting on joining the musicians with his harmonica, etc., and not a single Joule of axé energy was lost as a result.

Karate, on the other, doesn't thrive in public, I don't know why. We would sometimes do public exhibitions to acquire new members which were strangely muted as if our ki and fighting spirit dreaded the light of day; I think it was because we felt so out of place in our exotic karate garb whereas nobody would look twice at people wearing capoeira uniforms (ok, without the cordas) because they simply look like any old street clothes. One time we even did a karate demonstration for the Japanese ambassador and a delegation from Tokyo in the corner of a park where the city government had built a Japanese tea pavilion, a quaint little wooden bridge, and a zen garden as part of some cultural exchange programme, and it still felt wrong practicing karate even in this Asian setting. Another possible cause could that be the sober 'clean room' atmosphere of a dojo simply doesn't translate into the outdoors (with its damn mole hills, arrgh!); a group of scientists wearing white lab coats would also look funny and weird at a street party...

 

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Fight or Flight (or Freeze with Fright?) [Pt. 1]

No true martial arts energy can be experienced without being in reasonably good shape, and not even the most sophisticated fighting system can make up for a lack of physical fitness. The old question "If a boxer fights a wrestler, who'll win?" is easily answered: "The better fighter" (well, duh). It's not the system, it's the fighter. Both boxing and wrestling are extremely demanding when it comes to strength and cardio, and if you don't measure up, you'll never be allowed to enter the ring or the mat. Even outside competition it's crucial to be maintain good shape for self-defence purposes because your hara, or more prosaically expressed your lower abdominal muscles, must be strong enough to be capable of acting like a fulcrum when executing escape techniques from grabs from behind, defences against knife attacks and whatnot. What's more, physical fitness will give you more self-confidence which will in turn enhance your energy and fighting spirit.

Once you've hopefully survived a life-threatening attack in an unenclosed space, it's a good idea to simply run away after you've successfully defended yourself since you can't very well hold an aggressor in an armbar for half an hour until the cops finally arrive on the scene (and how do you propose to operate your mobile under such conditions anyway?), or slowly choke him out a in ground-fighting hold while his friends are playing merrily soccer with your head. Legging it after scoring a knock-down in self-defence might also be a good idea because of the urban legend according to which the cops will unfailingly arrest the guy still left standing. Making yourself scarce fast will very likely involve an initial sprint to put some distance between you and your attacker(s), and even if you won't be forced to run a full-blown parkour race, there still might be stairs you'll have to run up and down or other obstacles like park benches, trash cans, ditches or rows of parked cars to navigate, all of which manoeuvres will sap your energy and slow down your reaction time in any subsequent fight(s) with your pursuer(s).

From what I've observed in sparring, actually going toe to toe with someone is something of a truth drug that will invariably reveal your own and your opponent's true nature. All pretences will vanish come fight time; all masks will drop and all phoney posing cease. For a time, I went to this experimental martial arts class where we would try out different martial arts disciplines, all good fun and very instructive. One time we tried tried our hands at boxing and did some light sparring which in effect wasn't much more than a friendly pillow fight, given the thick padding on those huge gloves. I was paired off with this pudgy middle-aged guy whom I recognised as a former local one-hit wonder, a male-model handsome singer who had been notorious for his slick arrogance both on-stage and off-stage. However, his remaining pop star arrogance quickly disappeared once we were exchanging the first blows; he became such a pathetic puddle of fear that I began to feel pity and went easy on him.

When in physical danger from an aggressor, some guys will go apeshit while others will simply become paralyzed and may even start crying - in reality, it's fight, flight or freeze. Going apeshit isn't the worst of response, you can often surprise and frighten your opponent, maybe clocking him with one of your desperate flailing punches and subsequently breaking free. Freezing, however, always spells disaster, and most self-defence systems do not even take that possibility into account; due to peer pressure, everybody in such classes will act all courageous and plucky while practicing with a polite training partner who would then half-heartedly pretend to be a bloodthirsty aggressor, only to blindly panic when faced with real emergencies. The truth will always come out in fights.

One's fighting spirit is something deeply personal, similar as anger, affection, or laughter. Unlike the cookie-cutter caricature of bold courage portrayed in comic books or action movies, it's different for everyone. Loudmouths may become jittery cowards, mean streaks may surface even in the kindest persons; some guys will just explode while others will become half-paralysed with fright; other people still may savour the extremeness of the situation, or go simply bonkers. What martial arts can do, however, is to correct this instinctual response to aggression by promoting certain mental habits that are thought to be advantageous when in a tight corner; personally, I think it's best to become stone-cold sober and all businesslike, not to rise to verbal provocations such as name-calling or comments on the virtuousness of one's mother, and first to attempt to deescalate the situation if possible.

I'm not advocating this strategy because of some lofty moral principles - anything can happen in a fight and you may get injured even if you have the upper hand right from the get-go. Once in a karate class I did this basic exercise with a beginner that I had done hundreds of times before ever since I earned my first belt. As I was higher-ranking, I wanted to frighten him a bit because I thought that his rising block (age uke) was so sloppy and weak, so I thought I would teach him a lesson and attacked full steam ahead with a punch to his chin but instead of performing that rising block as he had been told to, he panicked and blindly lashed out, giving me a nasty scratch on the forehead in the process. In mixed martial arts referees often have this problem of having to decide whether an eye poke was intentional or inadvertent because many fighters like to leave their guard hands open instead of making fists. Ok, you may have knocked the other guy out but now you have a detached retina... not pleasant. Or your glorious self-defence trick may not work so well, and you might sustain injuries while still desperately racking your brain for plan B.

Attempting to evoke courage and fighting spirit by purely mental exercises is utter nonsense, period. You can't 'program' yourself to be brave and fearless in real-life fights by means of affirmations or self-help books. Either you have fighting spirit or you don't, and if you lack it you have to develop an adequate response to danger in physical confrontations within a safe environment. I once saw this comedy show where its star clowned herself through a

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class. It was good all fun until four of these big hulking guys dressed all in black decided to give her a taste of a genuinely dicey situation and started to surround her from all sides, even putting some light physical pressure on her; she tried to defuse the situation by smirking and squeaking something sexy to the effect that she was surprised it didn't feel all that unpleasant, but such a setting with huge male bodies pressing in from all sides could be a realistic way for a woman to overcome her debilitating freezing habit. In a documentary about the Russian martial art of

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, a group demonstrated its traditional initiation ritual (or rather hazing) where a beginner would have to lie down flat on the mat while two guys each applied a leg or ankle lock, two guys twisted each arm in an armbar while another started to slowly choke him out. Try to keep your cool under such conditions on the strength of your precious daily courage affirmations alone… you could just as well become a student of Master Ken here:

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[HoldAll]

Fight or Flight (or Freeze with Fright?) [Pt. 2]

Another good idea for avoiding panicky freezing would be to study

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, always a useful skill set to have since you don't want to incapacitate yourself by simply tripping up when threatened. Breakfalling can not only help you remain unscathed when hurled to the ground, it will also make you more impervious to physical shocks in general since freezing will often occur when the victim is given nothing more than a hard push. Some people are scared of making actual physical contact with aggressors and will rather curl up blindly (= "What I can't see can't hurt me") than raise a guard and try to soften incoming blows. It's no use to point out the unsuitability of this tactic to an easily scared person because it's an ingrained behaviour pattern that you can only ever hope to unlearn by exposing yourself to actual physical confrontations, again within a safe environment where no serious injuries are likely to occur. Get used to playing rough a bit in order to lose your fear of other's hostile body parts impacting on yours.

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Additionally, I would suggest learning a few groundfighting techniques. I once went to this jujutsu orientation class (I'm rubbish at grappling) at a karate workshop where our partners would have to lie on top of us initially (I know, I know, but it's only embarrassing the first few times) and we had to reverse positions, coming to lie on top of them - it's ridiculously easy but again, always provided your hara is strong and your muscles are in decent shape to ensure that you will have the required strength to buck your partner off and slide away from underneath him. If nothing else, such an exercise should help you stop panicking in such seemingly helpless positions while being crushed by another body - which by the way is the bread and butter of

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by the way, those guys actually thrive in the bottom position when having another guy sitting on their chest.

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I think it's too much to ask from fledgeling self-defence students to keep a cool head in dangerous situations without fail and calmly apply all they've learned in class, that's nonsense. When stressed out by the threat of physical violence, everybody will react in his or her own way, and a good self-defence system should take this fact into account so that its simple techniques will be effective even when intimidated or feeling scared, which rules out complicated arm-twisting holds or locks that might land you in even more hot water if they fail.

Time for another anecdote: one of my karate friends once got into a dispute over a parking space which he had just found and was about to use when suddenly another driver in front of him got out of his car and started screaming he'd seen that parking space first and therefore it was his. So my friend got out of his car to confront him when the other guy suddenly threw a punch at his face. My friend parried it easily with a

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like he had done thousands of times in the dojo and asked, more puzzled than angry: "What's this supposed to mean?" and didn't even retaliate because he found the whole thing so absurd.

The age-uke is one of the first techniques you'll learn in a karate class and which you will repeat and practice for years and years until you're blue in the face (and then repeat it some more), so my friend's response was purely instinctual. For non-karatekas, this block isn't suitable at all because if you raise your blocking arm a bit too late or too soon, the incoming punch will come through anyway and hit you in the face so it's better to hide behind a boxing guard and initially try to endure the sting of blows glancing off your arms until you see an opportunity for a suitable offensive move. Everybody knows how to cover up their head and protect their face from getting hurt while e.g. ducking and delivering a forceful head butt to the aggressor's stomach will take practice and a certain presence of mind that you might not have when in actual trouble.

Another story: a friend of mine once told me about this self-defence workshop for women she'd just been to. What really impressed me about about her account was the instructor's inclusion of pragmatic psychological exercises. For example, she had them play what she called 'the naming game': she told two women to sit close to one another side by side. One of them had to place a hand on the knee of the other who then had to 'name' the threat and tell the first one to stop, for example: "Take your hand off my knee immediately!" Dead easy, right? One woman, however, was absolutely unable to name that threat, let alone defend herself, and instead mutely froze. In such cases, I would again recommend 'exposure therapy' such as experiencing controlled physical contact, then actual pressure within a safe environment, breakfalling, and/or playing with simple groundfighting techniques (what BBJ fans call 'rolling').

This is again one of these cases where 'empowering' self-help books, ordinary psychotherapy, indoctrination with cheesy

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slogans screamed at the start of

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classes, thoughtful logical advice and so on won't help a bit; neither does watching UFC fights while slowly working your way through a six-pack when not sucking on a bong, for that matter, or invoking some macho or samurai code out of some anime movie. Run if you can, fight if you must but don't freeze, is all I wanted to say here.

 

[HoldAll]

Applied Martial Arts Energy - Punches

An excellent test to gauge your martial arts energy is hitting an actual semi-yielding object like a

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(striking post) or a heavy boxing bag. Newton's Third Law states: "To every action, there is always opposed an equal reaction" This means that the harder you hit an object the harder it will push back, so if you punch a heavy bag, for example, you must be able to withstand the return force it will in turn exert on your body, and that means assuming a solid stance and tensing up all the appropriate muscles including your hara upon impact, otherwise the rebound effect will make you jackknife at the waist (= weak hara) or fall flat on your ass. In such a case, your body will reabsorb most the energy it had just expended and turn it against you. Any weak or buckling link in this chain of supporting and postural muscles will thus result in a weaker punch or even injuries, e.g. if the puncher fails to make a sufficiently tight fist or doesn't keep his or her wrist sufficiently straight and stable.

The amount of force generated by a puncher will be influenced to a large extent by the quality of his or her techniques; actual arm strength is secondary by comparison. You can often watch beginners' bodies 'sabotaging' themselves and their own punches, for example by making insufficient use of the power potential inherent in hip rotation. A good punch involves the entire body and focusses all of its energy on a single point. Big muscles won't help you if you're unable to coordinate them well, and this is one of the reasons why karate techniques are practised over and over again. Martial arts energy can be yours, but you have to earn it by endless repetition of all the techniques, as boring as that sounds.

Probably the most important karate technique is the gyaku zuki, misleadingly translated as the 'reverse punch' but which basically is a straight right/left where you execute a punch with the arm opposite your front knee. The secret behind its efficacy is the karateka's hip rotation, once again involving the hara here. A good gyaku zuki starts at the heel, with the whole foot pushing hard against the floor (Newton's Third Law in action once more). The resulting rebound energy travels up the extending leg and to the hips which will now in turn begin to rotate forward under their own power and add thus add even more momentum; only then will the arm start to extend and execute the punch. This means the power of your punching arm is augmented by the power of both your hips (or rather your pelvis) and your legs; it's not only the fist that will punch, it's the entire body. There's an exercise we'd sometimes do where we would practice just the foot, leg, and hip movements in tandem and with our arms hanging loosely by our sides - if you're doing it right, your arms would be set violently flying by the leg extension and the hip rotation without even involving the arms' muscles, and that's what adds the real power to a reverse punch.

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It's a bit like riding a bicycle: you push the pedals downwards, but the direction of the kinetic energy generated by this downward motion will subsequenlty be translated via the geared wheel and the chain of the bike into forward movement. There are so many things that can go wrong with this punch, just take the stance - if it's not correct, rock-solid, and stable, your gyku zuki will be weak and unfocussed; it's like driving a powerful car with a rubber chassis. Small flaws in the execution of this technique will make the kinetic energy produced by your muscles become dissipated into every direction except the one you try to punch in.

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A very detailed explanation of the gyaku zuki - no ki without biomechanically correct technique!

Kinetic energy can only flow unimpeded when all your limbs, head, and torso act together in concert. If e.g. your hip flexors are shortened, executing a full hip rotation will be difficult, and your own body will literally hold you back - which beginners often try to compensate for by leaning forward, never a good idea in fighting. Muay thai fighters have this expression: "to take the plum", which means grabbing the opponent's head, pushing it downwards and hitting his face with a rising knee. If you lean forward, you're handing your opponent your plum adorned with a nice pink bow on a platter.

Don't let all those angular karate movements fool you: they are predicated on a harmonious flow of (kinetic) energy generated by good technique, and I can't see how any ki could be generated by shortened tendons or muscles, paralysing excess tension, inadequate breathing, insufficient attention, or overall sloppy execution. It's true, the mental component plays a big part in martial arts, but the mind is helpless if the body doesn't cooperate or is unable to respond in a biomechanically optimum fashion. Whenever asked by beginners about ki, I'd always do my best Mr. Miyagi impression and reply "First sweat, then ki!" (not to mention sore muscles, bruises, injuries, etc.), or as the Japanese saying has it: "Seikō ni chikamichi wa nai - There is no shortcut to success".

 

[HoldAll]

Applied Martial Arts Energy - Kicking

Kicks rely on a slightly different kind of martial arts energy I can't quite put my finger on yet. In action movies kicks either hit thin air or are bang on target, and do I really have assert yet again that's not how it is in real karate point-fighting bouts? According to the old scoring system, you were awarded a point if you landed either a punch or a kick, so over time fights would degenerate into stilted punching matches because nobody wanted to risk being taken down; they subsequently changed the system which would now grant you three points for kicks to the head (or a punch to the head of a downed opponent - who more often than not had landed on the mat as a result of a botched kick), two points for kicks to the midsection, and only one point for punches, which means that karate point-fighters will now kick more often and thus are rewarded for taking chances.

Kicking is dangerous for your own health, not so much for your opponent's. There are so many things that can go wrong with a kick that action movie goers will never appreciate. As pointed out in my previous post, your body must not only be able to exert force on a target, it also has to withstand the resulting rebound energy (see Newton's Third Law of Motion) produced by making actual hard contact with an object while standing on one leg only (or no leg at all in the case of jump kicks) in contrast to being safely anchored to the ground thanks to a solid stance when punching. And then there's injuries… for a while I had this bad habit of throwing my midsection roundhouse kicks straight into my opponent's guard, which often meant that the instep of my foot would hit the other guy's elbow. Ouch. Try hitting your instep with the knuckles of your fist really hard sometime, the pain is excruciating (I've heard there was a nerve plexus there but never checked it out). Banging my toes, again against people's elbows, was another favourite pastime of mine while sparring, and it's really surprising how much an injured little toe can affect your ease of walking.

What's more, you should know when to use kicks and when to give them a miss which again takes years of practice and experience. At one of these experimental martial arts classes I mentioned in a previous post, I was paired off with a rather green young practitioner of taekwondo, a martial art that uses almost exclusively kicks. We were doing some very relaxed sparring, and suddenly I saw he was so obviously gearing up for a back-leg roundhouse kick to the midsection that I could spot coming from a mile away, so as soon as he attacked I quickly moved into his range as I had been taught, caught his kicking leg and took him down. However, he didn't know how to break his fall, came down really hard on the mat and was so severely incapacitated that he had to quit. I hadn't meant to do that and apologized profusely but I feel sorry about this incident to this day. However, he got off lightly considered all those nasty things Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or combat sambo practitioners can do to the legs of kicking opponents with their knee bars and ankle locks:

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Another time, however, a guy knocked me out of a local competition with a series of front-leg roundhouse kicks to the head that came so fast that I didn't even have time to block. He would at first always approach slowly, twitch his hips as a feint a bit, and suddenly there would be the light slap of his of his foot on my left cheek. I don't know how he did it, it was an unreal experience. It shouldn't have worked after the first or second time around but he eventually defeated me 6:0 (= old scoring system) using one and the same kick, and I was suitably awed afterwards. Then there was this world champion point-fighter whose favourite scoring technique was the spinning back-kick (ushiro geri), easily the most powerful kick in karate but easy to spot. All her opponents were of course already aware of her speciality and always prepared to evade her spinning back-kick in matches with her but she would still score with it, and that's what I guess made her a real champion.

It's even worse in capoeira because you're forced to cleave to the rhythm and beat of the music and can't just steamroll over the other guy with full force like in karate, so you have to leave yourself willy-nilly open to takedowns - just watch what can happen once your partner spots an opening and exploits it with good timing:

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(At 0:30 the instructor applies the so-called tesoura or 'scissor' takedown which you'll even find in some karate books and that we would often practise in capoeira classes; it's difficult to pull of in actual rodas though)

Yes, kicks are stronger than punches because the leg muscles are larger and able to generate more force and thus energy, but they will take longer to learn and even longer to apply effectively. The higher the kick, the greater the danger to yourself. Low kicks, on the other hand, have a fairly short range but are employed in muay thai or kyokushin karate to great effect because they are relatively low-risk since opponents will be hard put to catch or trap them; hit an aggressor's thigh with your shinbone hard enough, hurl him to the ground, and odds are he won't even be able to stand up anymore.

This is a good example where ki and the hara once again come in: when practising kicks against a heavy bag or shield or in full-contact fights, you really have to lean into your kick with your hips in order to generate torque and be able to absorb the reactive force (old Newton's Third Law again) produced by the impact of your foot or shin - which isn't a concern in action movies or mainstream karate point-fighting where there's either no or little contact but is crucial whenever you want to kick a target with full force. A weak hara (meaning in this context insufficiently flexed or underdeveloped lower abdominal muscles) will again send your body jack-knifing under such an impact; if additionally your focus is poor and your pathetic low kick simple glances off your opponent's thigh, it won't do any damage and will amount to not much more than mild sexual harassment.

Tl;dr: Kicking is risky, takes excellent timing honed by experience and requires sufficient strength as well as body tension to withstand hard impacts while balancing on one leg or sailing through the air.

 

[HoldAll]

Venting & Ranting

First off I would like to say that I'm completely unable to believe that practising internal martial arts alone can confer miraculous powers that can be exploited in real-life fights. This myth is probably based an exaggeration of Taoist claims of what these arts are supposedly capable of, and what were originally methods to promote good health, improved wound healing, or mental fortitude under stress were subsequently distorted by folklore into 'secret techniques' to gain superhuman strength. I think these ancient Chinese masters were well aware that 'hard' styles were always needed to complement 'soft' ones, and that the one-sided emphasis on the latter at the expense of the former is in all likelihood a naïve Western misconception. If you seriously believe that a pudgy old taiji master will be able to defeat a strapping young muay thai fighter thanks to his 'secret mystic powers', you need your head examined if you ask me. Flesh will always yield, bones will always break, and I've yet to spot Dr. Strange on a tournament mat, in the ring, or in the octagon.

Let me get indulge in some polemics here: there is so much

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around that I don't even want to watch those hilariously bizarre videos on youtube anymore, the epitome of stupidity being the so-called

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. When it comes to martial arts, NewAgers tend to over-stress the intangibles of combat like awareness or ki, and by that I mean not only any supposed 'miraculous forces' that allegedly can be harnessed by anyone reading this or that book, but also that a 'superior mind' in capable of besting any scruffy street thug. Not very sorry, but it just doesn't work that way. Brawn will always defeat brain unless said brain has also sufficient brawn as well as superb technique, excellent tactics, and years of hands-on experience. If you move like a slug and punch like a five-year old, your superior IQ or your hard-won zen calm will help you precious little in a fight.

When

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burst on the mixed martial arts scene and won one fight after fight, often against much taller and heavier opponents (one of them was even a sumo wrestler!), he accomplished that feat to due his exceptional Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, a very sophisticated ground-fighting style especially developed for physically weaker and smaller people, but then he was also a superb athlete and could have never been so successful without sheer physical strength and cardio. You need a lot of stamina in grappling as trying to sink in a choke or applying a leg or ankle lock can be a protracted and exhausting affair.

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Other culprits include judo and

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. It all probably started with the old judo propaganda slogan of "winning through yielding" and "using the strength of an aggressor against him" as exemplified by so-called 'sacrifice throws' such as the notorious

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so popular in Sixties movie fight scenes (it seems like Mr. Zulu used it in every other original Star Trek episode ). However, even such seemingly effortless sacrifice throws require a powerful grip, sufficient breakfalling experience, a strong enough hara acting as a fulcrum as well as excellent timing, or the other guy will simply land on top of you, and do I really need to write "Don't try this at home!"? Aikido, on the other had, seems to rely on the opponent's overcommitting, i.e. throwing a punch while dangerously leaning forward and not bracing his legs properly, running recklessly towards the practitioner, or having as much body tension as a ragdoll while attacking. However, you again will need a strong grip and a rock-solid hara to pull off all these circular moves, or the momentum of your opponent will simply drag you with him. Aikido may look very smooth and elegant but this doesn't mean that a minimum of physical strength isn't required as well.

If you take up judo or aikido, you'll have to spend the first three months or so learning how to break your falls first, which should deliver enough physical shocks to your system to make you finally wake up and smell the roses of actual combat. I once watched a dojo full of top-level judokas warm up but soon decided to leave because the constant "blam!" "blam!" "blam!" produced by bodies hitting the mat hard made my ears hurt after a while. "Judo, the gentle art", my ass… not when you begin to study it in actual practice. Not when your face is crushed against the mat while locked in a stranglehold applied by a guy with halitosis and an unshaven chin (always a problem in grappling), not to mention insufficient personal hygiene.

Then there's movies and fiction. You've probably seen every conceivable combination of striking, blocking, countering, and evasive techniques the human body is capable of in a thousand fight choreographies before reaching adult age, so ways of adding more spice to the same old same old chopsocky frequently include allowing the underdog to triumph against all odds, letting endearing nerds defeat big hulking mountains of muscles, or - for our sins - involve the supernatural and the occult. If you believe that 'mysteriousl martial arts powers' are real, you probably believe that pro-wrestling is real, too. I don't get these NewAge armchair esotericists who are too scared to ever set foot in a dojo and too lazy to practice all those 'secret mystical' ki exercises and meditations themselves they've read about in some questionable tome, which doesn't stop them from spouting all sorts of nonsense about the martial arts which they can neither prove or replicate. It's hard for me not to take such bullshit personally because I find it so deeply offensive.

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Catching one's partner doing a cartwheel or a handstand with a head butt is one of the standard situations capoeira beginners are taught.

Here's a little story recounted by a visiting mestre to our capoeira class: he described the training method his own mestre used to teach them really powerful cabeçadas (head butts). He had his students line up in front of a heavy boxing bag and told them to hit it with their heads as hard as they could. In the next class, he had them line up in front of the heavy bag again but this time, he pulled it back towards himself as far as it would go and swung it violently at the first student like the clapper of a bell who then again had to hit it with his head. The resulting headaches must have been excruciating…

This little tale gave me the idea for verifying the outrageous claims of a fraudster martial arts sensei: put him in front of a heavy bag as described in the capoeira story above but this time make sure the bag is actually filled with sand, not with old rags as customary in ordinary gyms. Pull the heavy bag towards you and swing it hard at the clown. If he really possesses supernatural powers, he should be able to stop the heavy bag in mid-air or at least soften its impact on his head; if he doesn't, he'll get literally sandbagged as if struck with a cosh. Simple, sadistic and immensely satisfying. I love it.

 

[HoldAll]

Intangibles of Martial Arts - The Mind [pt.1]

In the West we have this traditional philosophical separation between the intellect and the emotions; lumping them together feel somehow weird as if we were scared to sully our famous rational thinking with all this yucky feelings stuff. I think any attempt to inflict this theoretical separation upon the martial arts, or everyday life for that matter, is bound to result in an extremely narrow perspective that in no way reflects reality, so let's just include the emotions in our investigation of the mind's role in martial arts as well.

The tired old movie cliché is of course that unearthly zen-like calm will always win out against blind passion and rage which simply isn't true - any passionate or bersek fighter with superior abilities will always triumph over a supposedly cool customer lacking adequate skills. Anyway, you won't be truly able to control your emotions in fights, no matter how many hours a day you may meditate or rattle off your affirmations. If you're scared, you're scared and won't have the presence of mind to implement such hare-brained notions like "A-ha! I will now simply use my fear as a weapon to make my mind crystal-clear and my focus razor-sharp!" you've found somewhere in a book. No. What you can hope to achieve through extensive martial arts practice, sparring, and experience is being scared while remaining relaxed and businesslike, since blind fear will paralyse you, thus making you slower to react and move; in a fight, your fear won't go away until you've hopefully dodged a few attacks and maybe even scored a couple of hits yourself. If the fight situation changes, your emotions will change as well but not due to any conscious decision on your part.

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A prime example of a brash young newcomer defeating a more careful, seasoned fighter. Here boisterous aggression won out over a more studied approach despite all conventional wisdom.

Or let's say you're the overly aggressive type. The gong sounds, the referee shouts "Fight!", your opponent stands in front of you, and your blood is already up. Not even years of psychotherapy will be able to change that. Just as in the case of naked fear, raw aggression will lead to excessive muscle tension and slow you down, so after a couple of defeats (and not any time sooner!), your behaviour will hopefully adapt, and you'll be able to be aggressive while remaining relaxed and businesslike instead of over-zealous and rash. People will always to revert to type when under pressure such as in combat situations unless prior negative experiences have conditioned them to act in a more appropriate way.

Lay people always erroneously assume that a fighter's state of mind remains uniformly stable throughout the entire fight and he or she will therefore be able to act rationally all the time, a naïve assumption that even long-time sports commentators routinely make, forgetting how dramatically one's state of mind will be affected by the sequence of actual events. Say your opponent has taken you down twice in a karate point-fighting match and each time has crowned his achievement with a punch to your body or head, which will put him six points ahead (the contestant who wins eight points first wins), and if he repeats that feat only once more, it will be all over. In this situation, you will be unable to make a conscious decision not to be disheartened and to put in some brave effort instead - you either have the required resilience in you or you don't, and no amount of prior mental exercises performed in the privacy of your home will change that, only the practical experience of battling your way out of tight corners can.

It's much, much worse in full-contact bouts because in addition to the mental stress caused by your opponent, it will be actual hard knocks that will impinge on your emotions and affect your clarity of thinking. Even the audience notices when a boxer has been clobbered so hard that he'll function more or less on auto-pilot and will consequently admire his tenacity - which quality again such a fighter must possess even prior to this fight. Desperation or survival mode is a far cry from the romantic idea of zen-like calm that's supposed to triumph in every kind of conflict, but it'll help you to pull through, hopefully with health and dignity intact.

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Try maintaining your composure when half out of it and punch-drunk… it's real shame that such a great fighter like Mark Coleman will forever be remembered for suffering one of the worst KOs (or rather an execution) in UFC history.

 

[HoldAll]

Intangibles of Martial Arts - The Mind [pt.2]

Real-life fights are another matter though. In his

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, Gichin Funakoshi, the pioneer of modern karate, writes:

Do not think of winning. Think, rather, of not losing.

In our dojo we had this scrawny guy in his sixties, one of the perennial brown belts who'll never make it to black belt but who'lll keep on trying regardless despite their obvious lack of talent. I was better than him but never able to score during sparring because every time he would put up a frantic and desperate defence that I was always completely unable to penetrate. He'd turn away from me, raise his front leg and kick out rather ineffectively into my direction whenever I attacked, mostly straight into my raised guard, but it was enough to keep me at bay. Of course he never won but he didn't lose either. Heaven knows what went through his mind during these encounters. He was a very soft-spoken, friendly and likeable guy, very cultured and intelligent, but he always fought like cornered wild animal, even during relaxed sessions.

Funakoshi's advice is pragmatic, a long way from the commonly understood martial arts code that naively requires chest-pounding heroism at all costs. According to legend, he never had to use karate in earnest until his 80ties when he was mugged by a young ruffian inside a phone booth. Classic shotokan karate with its long strides isn't very suitable for close-quarter combat anyway, so he simply grabbed the young guy by the balls (a technique quite formally featured in heian godan, bassai dai, kanku dai, and other katas) and squeezed… Ironically, way of his applying of such 'undignified' defence move does in fact come close to the zen ideal of acting spontaneously without thinking.

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At 0:48 you can see a move that reportedly is called 'the monkey plucks the plum' in kung fu

What I love so much about katas is their versatile applicability. Unlike so-called 'practical' self-defence systems like krav maga, they teach patterns instead of one-dimensional 'if - then' solutions. These patterns will change from one step to the other just as self-defence situations are likely to evolve, are repeated in other katas, sometimes in a slightly modified form to create new ones. A kata move or a sequence of movements can be seen as a way of responding to a threat, of exploiting an opening, or an evasive manoeuvre; katas allow you to become creative instead of forcing linear cookie-cutter responses upon you.

Take for example the beginning of

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: while other katas favour a hyper-aggressive approach where you move into the range of your opponent, or at least make you stand your ground and hold firm in the face of an attack, this one features a smooth evading step back with the open left hand pressing downwards, which could be interpreted either as a block or grabbing your opponents hand and pulling him towards you, or both. All three approaches are equally valid - stepping forward and proactively meeting a threat, not moving back an inch, or evading and yielding; which of these three option you use is your own (hopefully instinctive) choice according to the situation you may find yourself in.

In the penultimate move of enpi kata accompanied by a kiai (short battle shout), there is a double-armed movement that could be interpreted as two simultaneous punches, one to the face and one to the testicles of an opponent, but since the hands should be open and not clenched into fists, the most common explanation is that you grab an aggressor by the groin and hair and hurl him over your head to the ground (head first if you want to be especially mean), which is not a technique you can very well practise with a partner. When performing a kata, you can be as ruthless as you want to be, go balls to the wall and attack with all the force you can muster without regard to another person's well-being.

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Kata practice as an alternative way of learning self defence: first a kata move is demonstrated by a karateka, then its possible interpretation and application (bunkai) with a partner, then shown in actual MMA fights. Another similar video can be found

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.

Don't get me wrong though, practising pre-arranged sequences with a partner is crucial in order to learn correct timing, effective blocking, and a feeling for range and safe distance, which is what you get in ordinary self-defence systems as well; however, both free sparring and kata training adds yet another dimension that such systems lack. In sparring, you learn how to improvise and react instinctively, where protective equipment like groin protectors and fist guards are worn, and where competition rules apply that have been designed to ensure your own and your partner's safety.

It's those different headspaces within three different areas (scripted partner exercises, free sparring, katas) karate will take you to that makes it so enjoyable. Accordingly, I think that instead of the ideal of an unearthly zen-like calm, it's a certain mental flexibility that should be the goal, covering the entire range of self-defence situations, from de-escalation (e.g. apologizing in order show 'respect' and thus restore the so-called 'honour' of some random chump), deterrence (projecting an aura of strength and self-confidence), powerful defence without retaliating (often enough to discourage casual aggression), resorting to trickery (whenever such an appropriate opportunity presents itself), ending any staged macho 'man-to man' contests quickly while still showing some consideration for an opponent, e.g. a drunk (I recommend punches to the midsection here, try to hit the solar plexus, it will immediately take the fight out of his while punching him to the face may only rile him up some more), to dealing with an aggressor with full force and extreme prejudice, for example in order to discourage his friends from intervening.

All told, I think the quality of one's martial arts energy is to greatly dependent on one's state of mind which will in turn depend on the situation you may find yourself in, whether it's in the dojo, at competitions, or in the street; when investigating these different states of mind, both your own emotions and those of your opponent's should be taken into account as well, in my opinion. I think it's wrong to proclaim that some sort of idealized mental vacuum, completely divorced from one's feelings, should prevail in your head at all times - that's not how humans function, and the bare naked aggression that is

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(or fighting spirit, or however you want to dress it up) has its place in martial arts too, always provided it's 'pure', abstract, and impersonal, not clouded by blind hate and unobstructed by excessive eagerness, and which you are able to switch on or off at will; in short, using aggression as a stone-cold tool that does not originate from hurt pride or an upset ego but rather from your whole body and your sharply focussed mind.

 

[HoldAll]

Shotokan Karate Energy - Fire with Earth

Let's look at the sword-duel scene in Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai":

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As I mentioned before, karate has this expression

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('to annihilate with a single blow') which is more like an ideal and will only rarely happen in fights, for example in the case of punches to the midsection which karatekas learn to absorb by flexing their abdominal muscles right from their very first class onwards. I have this theory that the term was borrowed from sword-fighting: the old samurai strove to end a fight with a single blow because they didn't want to be skewered from the back by another guy while still hacking away at his friend. Karate katas embody the same way of tactical thinking as they all symbolise battles against multiple attackers, so it's advisable to dispatch each enemy as quickly as possible.

The old scoring system for karate point-fighting still in use in some tournaments in the 1990ies also reflected the ikken hissatsu philosophy: you were awarded a full point (ippon) for a potentially fight-ending technique that was technically correct, strong, and precisely on target, while a half-point (wazari) was awarded for correct techniques which were not seen as devastating enough to merit an ippon. The karateka who scored an ippon first (either a single ippon or two wazaris) would win the fight, which meant in practice that fighters would slink around each other like cats for a long time and then suddenly clash; often no points were awarded in such lightning-fast collisions, or no attack at all would occur throughout the entire three-minute match at all because both competitors avoided the risk of their attacks being countered, in which cases the fighter who - in the opinion of the referee and the four corner judges - had shown more fighting spirit would be declared the winner. You may understand why such bouts were not exactly captivating for laypersons in the audience but the feeling at that time was that these rules embodied the ancient ikken hissatsu spirit best.

It was basically a game of nerves, and the competitor who blinked first lost. More often, however, you saw those heedless "Banzai!!" charges I mentioned in a previous post which in my opinion traditional shotokan karate overemphasises and the result of which you can see in the "Seven Samurai" sword duel - the attacker rushes forward without regard to his own safety and is duly cut down, which highlights the downside of

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(fighting spirit); it's a fiery kind of energy that makes you rash and reckless. Not that unalloyed aggression doesn't have its place in combat but its misapplication against superior opponents with cooler heads can spell defeat or even death, as in the movie. In classic shotokan karate, however, the blocks are just as aggressive as its attacks, there's simply no tradition of evading dodging or ducking apart from a few kata sequences- right from the beginning karatekas are taught to keep their torsos ramrod straight at all times. Up and down the dojo you'd stomp year after year, punch, punch, block, kick, punch, always in a straight line, always on a collision course, always do or die, or nothing.

A long time ago at a workshop with a very traditionalist sensei, we practised a downward block (gedan barai) against a front-snap kick (mae geri), having been explicitly urged not to step sideways but to meet the other's kick head on, hold resolutely firm and stand our ground (although wasn't our own piece of real estate, after all ); the guy would watch us like a hawk to make sure we made it as hard for ourselves as possible. The whole idea of a block is to deflect the energy of an offensive technique so this downward block wasn't strictly a bad idea in theory but in practice, it takes precise timing to pull it off and will more often than not result in nasty bruises in case you get in wrong - a front-snap kick is a really fast and strong technique, half the time you bang your forearm on the other guy's shin, and I know of at least two cases where karatekas broke their blocking arms as a result of the selfsame exercise. In our dojo, we always sidestepped this kick in formal partner exercises in order to avoid such dicey direct confrontations but at that workshop it simply wasn't an option.

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I had a really hard time to find a video showing exactly the same exercise - either the defending partner used a more appropriate block or side-stepped the kick, which is much more sensible. I guess even traditionalists have seen the light by now…

Karate energy is unequivocally fiery, with earth almost always featuring in the defending role where you simply refuse to budge and stand your ground. At the beginning of most shotokan katas, you either hold firm (earth) and block, or meet fire with fire, i.e. step straight into the face of aggression and block as fiercely as you can. It's different in free sparring and in competitions, of course, where you can move around as freely as you wish and use the approach most suitable for thwarting your opponent's attack, but the basic fire/earth tendency is omnipresent all the same, and point-fighters often have to unlearn what they've learned during basic training.

In my first sparring sessions and competition matches, I often made the same mistake as that impatient samurai guy above - thinking that I was expected to attack no matter what, I would rush blindly at my opponent, only to be met by a single punch to the mid-section, the classic counter move in karate; every time it felt like like driving a car into a tree (ok, I'm exaggerating here ), fire meeting suffocating earth in the form of a stationary opponent just waiting to stop me cold with his counter punch. The fact remains, however, that the basic techniques of karate (

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) don't prepare you sufficiently for all contingencies you may meet in real life or on the competition mat, for that matter - point-fighting tactics guru Antonio Oliva Seba whom I wrote about in a previous post had a hard time of convincing foolhardy young point-fighters to adopt an evasive behaviour when faced with a stronger opponent, it simply didn't jibe with all they had been practicing for years.

As every boxer knows, the head is a very mobile target when compared to the trunk, so ducking, moving the head backwards or sideways would make good sense, and top-level karate point-fighters have long realised that; to stubborn fire/earth traditionalists, however, such evasive manoeuvres will always feel like a betrayal of their misunderstood idealy while forgetting what Gichin Funakoshi himself wrote in his

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:

"Perform prescribed sets of techniques exactly; actual combat is another matter."

 

[HoldAll]

Capoeira Energy - Water with Air

The Water principle of capoeira is most obvious in its defensive moves like ducking, dodging and evading but can also be identified in its offensive strategies. The first kicks in a game are usually crescents with the legs of the players moving in long flowing arcs which are not meant to hurt anyone (and are not very effective as offensive techniques anyway) as if to say: "Hey, look what I can do!" to which the other responds, "I can do that just as well, and better!" There's never a clear attacker and a clear defender, it's more like an amicable mutual Q&A session consisting of kicks and acrobatics, a passionate but friendly exchange of ideas where each player will give the other one enough space to shine but where things can turn nasty any time when those graceful crescent kicks are replaced by powerful direct ones that are identical with the ones used in karate and just as ruthlessly employed to score, only pulled much sooner than in the Japanese fighting art.

There are simply no blocks in capoeira, period. You may instinctively raise a protective hand to your head in emergencies when you're too gassed out to duck towards the end of a fast game and barely able spot an incoming roundhouse kick / martelo / mawashi geri, for example, but that's about the extent of it. Capoeira is all about the fluid evasion of attacks and moving in sync with the kicks & tricks your partner may be dishing out. At the same time, you have this typical duplicity of Water - the intoxicating

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energy of the roda (capoeira circle) will make you act like your partner had been your best friend since childhood days, unfailingly responding in perfect harmony with all your moves until all of a sudden the fun is over and you get taken down or surprised by a direct kick thrown at your head at maximum speed and with evil intent. Once this brief interlude of playful violence is over, it's back to the usual good clean fun as if nothing had happened… until you retaliate, immediately, during the next class, or next week, maybe never.

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Check out the guy sliding just on his head at 0:23!

I've described this concept to various karatekas over the years, and no one ever liked it - either we're fighting or we're horsing around but not at the same time, for heaven's sake! However,

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, the founder of modern capoeira angola, once defined his martial art thus: "Capoeira is treachery", and that's exactly it. Nothing aggressive may ever happen in a game at all, and it could be even claimed that such occurrences were rather the exception but make no mistake - all these graceful crescent kicks are still aimed at your head, and even if they wouldn't do much damage to you, they may be followed by more vicious and stronger ones you'll definitely want to dodge. What makes this 'Watery' fighting style even more unpredictable is that the players themselves won't have a clue as to what tactics or tricks they'll employ next - every fight/dance will evolve organically, with playful twists to which your partner may respond spontaneously in a way that may surprise even himself or herself. At the same time, it could be claimed that a capoeira jogo (game) was all about proving you're cooler than everyone else, so even if you executed a masterful takedown and made your ignominiously partner fall flat on his ass once or twice but moved around the circle like a klutz otherwise, you would have still have lost in the eyes of the capoeira roda. Scoring isn't even that much of an object, having style and showcasing your prowess is the name of the game(s).

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I must say I've always like the mid-tempo games best. Whereas in fast games you can bamboozle your partner with rapid combos of showy crescent kicks and acrobatics, in slower games everything depends on your skill of outmanoeuvring him or her using guile instead of flashy techniques. The dendê you hear in the song originally denotes

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but in this context means 'tasty', 'magnificent' or 'great', meant as a compliment for an outstanding game.

Another major characteristic of capoeira that could be characterised as 'Watery' is that you don't stop moving, never ever. Its basic step, the

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, ensures that you will always present a moving target, with your head going up and down as well as back and forth just like the so called 'bobbing & weaving' defensive manoeuvre in boxing. There is a constant flow, sometimes briefly interrupted, other times changing direction, once again moving with the rhythm of the music or in syncopation, but never stopping. The Water element in action, in short.

In capoeira, the Air element comes to the fore whenever you briefly separate from your partner by escaping out of his her range and execute a floreo (a 'flourish'), a piece of acrobatics like a somersault or a handstand that serves no practical purpose except to emphasise your abilities, subsequently insinuating yourself back into the game and to your partner. A possible analogy would be a feather carried away by the wind, tumbling aimlessly but occasionally displaying a will of its own. This sometimes happens in a fast game when your partner won't stop whirling about and throwing up his or her legs in the air like a Radio City Rockette without once giving you the chance to make a contribution to the game of your own, so you'd step back, do a cartwheel or whatever and let the fool gas himself or herself out with his/her antics. A 'Watery' defence, on the other hand, would mean clinging to your partner like a film of some liquid on the inside of a glass, while an 'Airy' one would imply completely disengaging and doing your own thing for a while.

What do you get when you mix some Watery liquid with the Air element? A cheap soda pop or a glass of vintage champagne, depending on your and your partner's skill. And on the wild axé energy generated by the capoeira circle, of course.