Pseudoscience and Drama…

                Okay, the time has come once again to address some very strange claims made by a couple of people involved in the Chinese Martial Arts. Before we begin, I would ask you to watch this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KArX8iNnY4Q&feature=related 

                From the opening line, “It is called Qigong…” this is all about drama. There is very little in the entire video that has anything to do with real issues or a close and unbiased examination of facts. The line claims, “science will attempt to reveal the truth” is quaint, but when the facts are in your face and you ignore them in favor of drama, then you are not going to be taken seriously.

                The fact is, I would not even take this clip seriously enough to write about it except for one problem – a student sent me the clip wanting to know if I would be willing to teach them “Iron Shirt Qigong”.

                So when there is a student taking this garbage seriously enough that they actually want to learn it, we have a problem.

                Take another look at the swing taken on the crash test dummy at the 1:59 point of the video. One can clearly see that the strike was intended to achieve maximum impact. The strike goes well into the chest of the dummy and there is a false recoil made by the person swinging the bat after it had already bounced free from the dummy. This is important later.

                When we take a look at the strike on the “monk” at the 3:43 mark, we can clearly see that the strike was pulled. The recoil happens almost on impact. There was a strike, as is evidenced by the red mark, but I have to let my inner skeptic out and ask, why did they allow the strike to be performed by the “monk’s” student. Why not A-Rod? Why not any pro baseball player? If Qigong does protect, what would there be to fear from a strike from anyone. Let me take a swing at him!

                The spear is very impressive to the uninitiated, but it is an ancient parlor trick where the pressure is not going straight in but rather, down. They make passing reference to the redness on his chest below where the spear tip was but fail follow up on why it should be red, and exactly how much pressure was applied there to cause the redness.

                Sorry kids, this is one for the crackpot file. Nothing special here, just some pseudoscience and a heavy dose of drama.  

Practical Application (Study and Practice)

I had a very interesting discussion with a friend of mine a couple of days ago regarding practical application study within the Chinese Martial Arts, and how this field of study compares to the same field of study being done in the Okinawan and Japanese Martial Arts.

The study of practical application within the Japanese and Okinawan Martial Arts seems to have begun in earnest with the debut of the UFC. In this event, on a huge stage, the traditional striking martial arts got it handed to them in short order, and everyone who had any sense saw immediately that we needed to go back and take another look at what we had been taught and what we were teaching.

For the Japanese and Okinawan systems, this study took on a very serious note and many open minded practitioners saw that much of the problem lay in a lack of objective understanding of the techniques themselves. Where it had been standard practice to teach a block as a block, these thinkers began to see blocks as strikes. The chambered hand, long taught as being an elbow to the ninja that had just jumped onto your back, was seen more and more as being a limb control/repositioning of the opponent type of maneuver. And as this study goes on, much is being re-evaluated and understood to have a much more practical use than had previously been taught.

Within the Chinese Martial Arts, there was a lot of resistance to the idea that we didn’t know what the techniques were supposed to mean. As I mentioned in a previous article, for many years I had taught that a particular technique was a swinging strike to the underside of the jaw, when in looking at things from a more practical perspective it is a scoop to the underside of a kicking leg that allows you to (quite easily) dump your opponent onto his backside.

The people who resist have pointed out to me on a regular basis that the techniques of Hung Gar need not be seen as anything complicated. They love to point out the tiger strikes as their support for their position.

 

In Hung Gar, the tiger strikes are quite obviously a redirect with one hand and a strike with the other. And on the surface, there is nothing complex. I think, at least to me, the real complexity would be readily apparent to anyone as soon as they try to use these tiger strikes on a fully uncooperative opponent. The first time I experimented with this, I was amazed at just how difficult it is to pull off the techniques properly, and have them deliver as promised, when the opponent is doing everything in their power to prevent you from being successful. It took quite a bit of training to understand some of the more subtle aspects of timing, pressure, and adaptation required to make the techniques successful. They payoff was not just that I developed the ability to use the techniques. Better still was that I understood how to use them well enough to effectively teach how to use them.

There need be no insecurity in this study. In fact, insecurity should be the last thing you feel. Each time out, I got better at it, and eventually made it look and act like I was told that it would.

So, once again, we find ourselves back at the basic idea of training. No matter how basic and obvious the application may seem to the naked eye, unless you get out there and work until you can apply the technique on an uncooperative opponent, you will never be all that you think you are.

Here are some training ideas that I found useful:

• Start Slow. It can be very disheartening to dive into full speed application study. Starting slow allows you to build up the understanding form the most basic levels. As you become more confident, you can increase the speed of everything going on, and then increase the level of resistance that your partner is providing in the exercise. But learn to do it right first, and only then start increasing resistance.
• Be sure the opponent in not always wearing long sleeves. Yes, train with sleeves, but train sleeveless as well. You will need to understand the differences in what you have to do to make a technique effective under both circumstances. Have you partner, if they are not sweaty enough, go run water on their arms. This will provide some further exploration in the study of application against a slippery opponent.
• Multiple Opponents. Have three to four partners standing at various angles around you. Do not fool yourself into thinking this means you will be able to take on multiple adversaries! Rather, this training provides a quick change up as a different level of resistance, as each person will define the level of resistance differently. For Hung Gar people, you can position them to allow you to go through the Ten Tigers section of Fu Hok for a great drill.
• Have the opponents stand at different distances and practice the appropriate footwork needed to reach the opponent. Not everything is going to take place at the optimal distance. Allow for this by varying the distance in the starting point throughout the drill. Have the partner start out too far, as well as too close, and also start from poor angles (place the defender at a disadvantage)We have to train as realistically as possible, and yet maintain our understanding that “close” is as good as we are ever going to get. We have to make every effort to get as close to the real thing as possible, but at the same time maintain a safe environment. We must also take care not to make claims that we are mimicking an actual violent encounter, because in the end it is only training. Training is not just our best hope for surviving a violent encounter, it is our only hope.

 

I hope that the point I am trying to make is clear. Understanding that this is the probable application of this or that individual technique helps only a little. You need to take time and drill the technique. A surface understanding is going to do you no good. There is no replacement for experience. There never will be. Train the use of the techniques more than the mere repetition in the air. You do need a live opponent. Where many schools go wrong is in not trying with a partner at all, usually out of never seeing the initial stage of slow technique as being “step 1” of the process), or in jumping to full speed too soon.

When training for application, one must start very slow, to learn placement and footwork. Then pick up the pace of the entire execution. Once this becomes proficient, then the opponent will begin to offer resistance to the execution, and the real learning will now begin.

Don’t Fool Yourself

The topic came up recently on the Iain Abernethy forum and I thought I would give my take on the subject.
Very often in the martial arts we approach our subject with a kind of arrogance that is not well founded. When we train, we tend to use the term, “untrained street fighter”. The arrogance is in the belief that anyone who attacks us on the street is inferior to us based on the fact that we are trained martial artists, and they are not.

This is not a well thought out idea, and in this article we will look a little more closely at what the truth of the matter probably is.

First let us take a look at a trained martial artist. We spend our time in a relatively clean, very much controlled environment. Any martial arts school, aside from the decorations on the wall, is going to look pretty much like any other martial arts school, a big open floor, mostly free from clutter. The classes will be pretty similar; repeated practice of techniques from the style or system. Whether this practice will be in the form of kata or partner drills makes little difference in what we are seeing. The bottom line of this point is that the situation will not be chaotic. You will know what you are working on, and you will know you are safe. Even in sparring, where you may not know the actual technique your opponent will be using, you do know that it will fall within the construct of a known set of particular rules. These rules are necessary (no matter how much this is downplayed) to ensure the safety of the participants. Over time you will develop a certain mindset regarding the training. You will not have to think about the rules, legal targets and techniques and so on. It will become a habitual act to follow these rules, and free the mind for the creation of strategy.

But here is where we fool ourselves.

We think that this training is for the real thing. It could not really be much further from the real thing, but we turn a blind eye to this fact and press on and convince ourselves that we are in fact training for the ultimate street fight. We know that whenever the day comes that an untrained street fighter is dumb enough to attack our well trained self, we will defeat them while dazzling the onlookers and bystanders with our prowess.

Now let us take a look at these untrained street fighters. Street punks have more than likely spent their entire life in or near violence. In the real world, there are gangs and fights every day. When kids in these neighborhoods grow up like this they are quite likely to have a much more clear understanding and much more intimate knowledge of violence than any martial arts student ever will. The fights these kids grow up having as a part of their life are not pretty, but they are violent. Proper technique and sound strategy are not to be found.

What comes to mind for me is a scene from “A Game of Thrones” wherein Ser Vardis Egan is in a fight to the death with a common sellsword named Bronn. Here is a look at it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN30YMzja6Y

In the scene, the knight is well trained, and much better armed and armored. Bronn does not fight a clean or pretty fight, but he uses experience and “street smarts” to kill Vardis.

When violence happens, it is not going to be pretty. It is going to be sudden, and a lot faster than you can imagine. Visit www.nononsenseselfdefense.com , http://www.conflictcommunications.com/  , and http://iainabernethy.co.uk/forum  for further reading on the topic by people who can present much more thoroughly, and from a much more experienced perspective.

Flights of Fancy and Fervent Hope

            To some degree, we all engage in wishful thinking. When we buy a lottery ticket, and we imagine what we will do with the money, we are doing just that, wishful thinking.

            I have made no secret of my initiation into the martial arts through the door of mysticism. The true appeal of the martial arts to me was that aura of secret knowledge and power. And I chased these powers for a disturbingly long time. On some level, I knew they probably didn’t exist, but I wanted them to exist. I was, quite truthfully, choosing to believe in something that more than likely (to my best knowledge of the time) was not true.

            The folly of youth is to believe in nonsense. Belief is a funny thing. The word comes from the Anglo-Saxon root lief (to wish) and it is a strong hope that things will turn out to be this or that particular way.

            This hope does a funny thing to many people who become interested in training in the martial arts. We seek out these extraordinary powers. We listen to tales that, were we in any setting outside of a martial arts school, would be brushed aside as children’s fairy tales without so much as a second thought. But inside the martial arts world, these tales are not merely believed in, they are held up as examples of the powers we can have for our very own, if only we put in the time and effort under the guidance of our esteemed master.

            Some of these tales are beyond absurd. I have been told by people asserting in all seriousness;

• A master can walk on snow and leave no footprints.
• A master can thump you on the head and produce a stream of tears from only one eye.
• A master who had the ability to produce an electric shock in your body by stroking your armpit.
• A master who could strike you and cause you to start bouncing. You would be unable to stop bouncing until he un-did whatever it was that he did.
• A master who had the ability to make your nose bleed by stroking one of your buttocks. (No, I am not making this up…)
• A master who could kill animals with a light touch to certain acupuncture points (this one is very widespread and extends to the “touch-of-death” claims which are still widely popular today).
• A master who could shout and cause the fish in a lake or river to become unconscious and float to the surface where they could be scooped up with a net. (When I was in the Philippines, I chanced to see some kids in a river with nets, and their Father was up stream tossing lit sticks of dynamite into the river to produce much the same effect).
• Masters who could climb a wall like a lizard.
• Masters who could levitate.
• Masters who were able to defeat 20 or more armed attackers, while they themselves were unarmed. (Except for the awesome powers of Chinese kung fu!).
• A master who could be sliced open and not bleed.
• Masters who could seal a wound with their mind, and heal broken bones in minutes through herbs and massage.
• Masters who could extinguish a candle flame by staring at it intently (I would just blow it out…).
• Masters who could read your mind.
• One master I met claimed the ability to travel in another dimension. He claimed the ability shorted his life, so he refused to do it, “unless the world was in danger”. Nice way to not get tested.
• Many masters claim the ability to knock you out without touching you in any way.

     One thing the people who make these claims are good at is in avoiding the scientific method. Would that the martial arts communities were more like the field of science. In science, when someone makes a claim, they must also provide proof, in the form of testing. When they get certain results, other scientists step in and repeat the test. Claims are examined to see if there are other possible explanations. Even claims that have been generally accepted for great lengths of time are subjected to further testing as our ability to test more accurately grows. In the martial arts, a person makes a claim, and far too many people just accept it as fact!

     In the mid 1990’s in Austin, a fellow took his Wing Chun school, which was not making any money, and claimed he had discovered the lost fighting art of the Aztecs! He began teaching Wing Chun and Filipino stick fighting, and renamed it “The Hand of War”, and he started making money! People bought memberships in his school, and bought his videos for further training. And it was all nonsense, but they kept buying, until the next fad came along.

     I have attended many seminars where the “masters” claimed they were teaching the inner esoteric martial arts. They claimed amazing powers and gave demonstration of some strange skills (always demonstrating only on their own students). Exactly why I thought I needed the ability to stand behind someone, and with intense concentration and strange hand gesticulations, cause them to slightly sway side to side is lost to me at this moment, but rest assured, at the time I really thought it was important.

     But underlying this was a simple cause – I wanted to believe. I am certain that on some level I knew it was all BS, but I wanted it to be real. I wanted to have these super powers, however useless they might have been. I wanted to be different, superior, better. I deliberately ignored the sound advice of those who were not so deluded as I. I bushed off the facts, and the overwhelming evidence that these powers are not, and never were real. I convinced myself more than they ever could have convinced me that these powers were real, and attainable. All I had to do was find the right master and train hard enough for a long enough period of time and spend enough money.

     Why would anyone do this? Why would anyone, facing the scorn and pity of their friends and family, ignore the truth and choose these flights of fancy.

     When we study the martial arts, we seldom hear reference to the scientific method. For something to be accepted in science, it has to be observable, explainable, testable, and repeatable. When a claim is made that this or that happens because of Qi, well… that just falls short. There have been studies going on for decades, and the only studies that show any promise for Qi to be real are studies conducted in China. Now, this could (I suppose) mean that Qi only exists in China. Or it could be that, with much to gain on many levels, the Chinese Government, never known for being the bastion of freedom and truth, skewed the results, or left out counter information. Studies conducted in the west have, as yet, been unable to find one shred of evidence that Qi even exists.

     In the regular world, most people when pressed will admit that psychics are frauds, they possess no real powers and are really just stealing you money by exploiting your hope that they really do have powers. There are palm readers and psychic healers. There are those who claim they can communicate with the dead. Anyone who has lost someone dear to them has a deep ache and a longing for even just one last moment with that person, to right some wrongs, to ease their conscience over some past slight, or simply to say a goodbye that was left unsaid. Because there is a desire to communicate with lost loved ones, there is a market for these people. But take a close look and you will see that the psychic is never quite specific on anything. They throw out very vague generalities until someone in the room latches onto something. “I’m getting a name from a male spirit…a male with the letter j in his name…did anyone lose a male with a j in his name.” “I did! Not really j but g…his name was Geoff!”

     This is where subjective validation starts to come into the picture. The person who lost someone overlooked the obvious in order to have that contact with their lost loved one. For a start, the guess of “male” is going to be right for someone in the room. The letter thing is easy, because the psychic never specified that the name started with that letter. The “mark” filled in the blank and the carny show continued. We overlook or dismiss all of the wrong guesses. We do this because we want to have contact.

     In the martial arts, we have our own peculiar version of psychic power. We have Qi masters! These people deliberately, willingly and knowingly steal you money by exploiting your desire that super powers are real. Some of them actually believe their own hype, but many and more know it is all a sham. In order to make money doing this, one need only learn a few parlor tricks and sacrifice all of your morals and sense of accountability. To be a victim of these charlatans, you need only believe. There are people in the martial arts who are making a lot of money by exploiting the wishes of people who like to fool themselves.

            As one who was deeply immersed in the hoax, who spent disgusting amounts of money in pursuit of Qi power, I can tell you from real clear experience, the people teaching and training it know it isn’t real, but we play along. In much the same way that the Evangelical “healers” cause people to pass out by a mere touch (Wayne Coleman tells a funny story of “passing out from a preacher’s touch and laying on the floor, when another “believer” asked how, “How long are we supposed to lay here?), the “believers” of the Qi lie play along and tell stories of how they felt the Qi, what it did to them, and how amazing it is. I’ve done this myself. This is, at least in part due to the conditioning the “masters” use, wherein they tell of how “normal” people, people of a lower level cannot always feel it, and how if you cannot direct it to various parts of your body, then you are very weak in your kung fu, or may simply not have any hope of developing it at all. So, we lie. We say we can feel it, direct it, project it at will. We do side research to find out how the parlor tricks are done so that we too can perform them and be thought of as Qi masters as well.

            Very few people have what it takes to be totally and completely honest with themselves. It takes a lot to admit we are too fat, too lazy, are less. It is not a comfortable position to know that others are better than we are.

            But others are better than us, in nearly every category we care to name. There need be no shame in this fact. No one among us is perfect, and no one ever will be. Even when you are the best, you are only the best at that moment. In the next moment, things will change. You will change. There is no real need to be perfect. Accept your imperfections, your shortcomings and your weaknesses. Work on them, but do not punish yourself over them, or worse still – feel guilty about them. Guilt and shame are what lead people to follow the charlatans and liars.

            Be better than that.

            Common sense doesn’t seem to be all that common anymore. In the world of martial arts, common sense seems all but dead. Armed with the skills of critical thinking, you can move beyond the nonsense and start to learn and earn some real skills. With practice, and education martial artists can start to rise up and reclaim some of our lost respectability.

 

Don’t check your brain at the door…

In the martial arts we have a very strange habit of taking off our shoes when we enter the training area. This is the reason most martial arts schools smell like a strange mix of sweat, and feet. The original reason for this ritual is probably a simple matter, like sandals fly off when you kick, or something along that line. I have heard very creative reasons given, such as “we take our shoes off to keep the dirt from outside where it belongs, outside. It is symbolic of the larger idea that personal issues are to be left outside of the training hall.”

Fun stuff.

Just as often, we also tend to leave our brains outside as well. We can be rational, intelligent, competent individuals outside of the dojo, but once our feet hit the floor of the training hall, we somehow willingly give up our intellectual freedom.

I have written at length recently on the moronic mysticism that so permeates the martial arts as to leave we devotees looking pretty asinine. I do not intend to revisit that aspect of the subject here. I am going to look at a more practical aspect. Below are some of the unexamined misconceptions to be found in most martial arts schools.

The Black Belt is always right. Martial arts Black Belts and Instructors are human. Just as there are no perfect people, there are no perfect instructors. People, every single one of us have good and bad qualities. A friend of mine relayed a story to me once about an instructor who, while holding a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, admonished him to “learn to think like a champion”.

As students, we tend to take every word from the instructor’s mouth as being rock solid fact. And although it is sad to admit, we rarely take a moment to examine what we are being told. Leaving aside the mystical claims, we are still told some pretty strange things. We have a strange concept of the black belt as being a morally superior human. A simple google search can turn up over a million results on black belts who commit crimes. And many of these crimes are not simple self-defense gone too far. Assault, extortion, murder, rape, crimes against children, and the list goes on. No, a black belt means that you have trained in a system for the prescribed length of time and can meet the minimal physical requirements set forward by whatever sanctioning body you are attached to. It has nothing whatsoever to do with ethics or character.

Martial arts can build character. But it will require the right approach from both teacher and student or it will not work.

Related to the “Black Belt is always right” is the mistaken conclusion that “the black belt knows everything”.

I am just as stupid as anyone else on many subjects. I make mistakes every single day, and I am blessed to have many opportunities each day to discover that I am wrong about something. If you keep your eyes open, you might just find that Black Belts get flustered when proven wrong, and will very often throw out many logical fallacies in order to prop up their opinion on the topic in which they were just shown to be wrong. Most often, in my experience, the “master” will use the Appeal to Authority. When shown that they are wrong, they come up with “Grandmaster Stin Kee Toes said, “Blah blah, blah.” The idea being that “Grandmaster Sin Kee Toes is an expert on this subject, and he agrees with me, so therefore I am right.” That dog won’t hunt…

All you need to know about self-defense. There are the claims about how the practice of kata, or sparring will teach you how to handle a real self-defense situation.

While I love to train forms, and in my younger days sparring was life, neither one will teach you what to do when someone steps up behind you and cracks your skull with a baseball bat. In looking at the statistics from the Department of Justice’s website, 76.4% of the time the criminal was the first to use violence in the situation. What this means is that the violence occurred before the victim knew the situation was going to become violent. Action is, and always will be faster than reaction. The attacker knows going in what they intend to do, and they are prepared for it. You were going along in your day, and things took a drastic turn. When you are in this situation, nearly everything you learned in the dojo is going to be unavailable to you. Another interesting fact from the site is that resisting the attacker made them angrier and more aggressive 66.1% of the time. Women are injured more often than men in a violent encounter. Time does not permit, nor does inclination urge me to go into great detail of these statistics and what they mean, you can view all of the stats here: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/cvus0804.pdf  

So, most of what we are told in the dojo about self-defense is not true. The training hall is a good place to be, get a workout, hang with like-minded friends, and hit people. But self-defense is a legal term, and most of what we are taught in the dojo is not self-defense, it is assault.

Lineage. We are taught to place much more importance on the idea of lineage than we really should. True enough, lineage can show that a person comes from a legitimate line. And very often in our modern world, with all of the training videos on the internet, one should be careful to select an instructor who actually trained in a system and didn’t just memorize some forms off of the internet. But beyond this, is lineage that important? Or is it the fallacy of the Appeal to Authority? I have stated before, and others before me that the famous masters of the past were well-known because they were well-known, and not because they were the best. If my lineage passed through the famous Wong Fei Hung, does that really mean that my kung fu is more legitimate than someone whose lineage did not? I don’t buy it. The legitimacy of my kung fu is found in the kung fu itself, and nowhere else. I do not recognize the need to cling to well-known people from the past in order to legitimize myself or my style.

When an instructor goes on and on about lineage, to me it screams of one thing – insecurity. In trying to continually show that he is legitimate, he starts to look less and less so. And in any other field of study; medicine, science, technology, you name it, modern means progress. There is no way on earth that we know less about kinesiology, proper training, etc. than what  they knew 200 years ago. That entire line of reasoning is just fatuous.

A Black Belt knows how to teach.  Knowing how to perform a technique, and teaching someone else to perform that technique with the desired level of skill are two completely different fields of study. Most black belt instructors have not gone through any training in how to teach, and just rely on what their instructor did. Unfortunately, their instructor probably just relied on how his instructor did things. This is not, and never should be confused with actual teaching. The martial arts organizations, in large part, have overlooked the real value to be found in setting up and running an instructor trainee program. IN most organizations, the trainee program is nothing more than putting the trainee at the front of the room and telling them to teach. Placed in this situation what will the trainee most likely do? You guessed it – he will do what his instructor did! So it isn’t really an instructor training program at all, it is a way for the instructor to get someone to do his work for him, without paying him!

These are just a few of the unexamined practices that can be found in most martial arts schools around the world. The list goes on, but the main message is simple. Don’t take anything for granted, and don’t take it as fact based solely on the instructor’s word, or the sheepish mindset of the students. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, and legitimate and honest instructors are not afraid of, nor offended by questions.