Indigenous Ability

Footwork is a mainstay of combat sports and martial reality. The feet are the deuce-and-a-halfs that get your munitions to the field of battle. The feet are your mode of retreat to get out of harm’s way. Your feet are the two pegs you use to cut angles to better deflect, diminish, evade an attacker’s gambit and apply your own meanness. Footwork is, was, and will always be vital to matters martial. But…Just as important is what you can do on your feet while basically standing stock still. How much heft can you generate from this on-point position? There is a huge archive of material from the historical record showing how much emphasis was placed on static stances, but this static base was seemingly not the primary focus of static-stance drills. It seems that static balance in-the-midst-of-power was the treasured attribute. The ability to deliver “ Oomph! ” while retaining poise. The historical record presents us with more than a few drills that seek to dev...

Let’s start with a couple of definitions. Firstly, “training scars” are not the casual war wounds incurred in the day-to-day bumps and bruises of combat sports training and street-operative preparation. Those bumps, bruises, scrapes, abrasions, busted noses, lost teeth, et cetera are collateral damage, accidents, part and parcel of the fun. Training Scars refers not to a physical phenomenon that you can point to for bragging rights in your own version of the USS Indianapolis scene in Jaws , but to a cognitive quirk of the human mind. Training scars, aka path-dependence, refers to bad habits in training [for our purposes combat training] that will carry-over from training to real-world application much to our detriment. Training scars does not specifically refer to bad habits in the bad-form sense of the actual training of your chosen combat endeavor. That is, you “ swimming your jab ” [leaving an open line as you fire or retract the jab], “ Sweeping out of plumb...

There are so many examples of blind training, or blindfold training that the paltry examples below don’t even scratch the surface. ·         Blindfolded Chi Sao [“Sticky Hands”] training among Wing Chun practitioners. ·         Blindfolded disassembly and re-assembly of the M-16 by armed forces cadre. ·         Blindfolded judoka and jiu-jitsu practice. ·         Emperor Joseph I, challenging the young Mozart to play the violin with one-finger, and to play the clavichord with a cloth lain on top of the keyboard. [BTW-The young prodigy did both unerringly.] And perhaps most intriguingly, to me, at least… ·         There was a “war game” engaged in by many American Indian tribes to prepare the young for all contingencies. The Comanche called the practice Pui Wha’i . Essentially, Pui Wha’i invol...