Indigenous Ability

Before we pick apart the titled idea to see if it holds merit, let’s define terms. Vacuum Tactics are any combat sport or street application that requires isolation or handicapped drilling to develop full facility. Example 1 : If one really wants to step up a boxing game one might forgo kickboxing training for a bit so that the hands become the focus. Example 2 : If one really wants to build a facile guard-passing game one may ban leg-locks as the “easy out” until we see the guard-passing rise to the desired level of leg-lockless facility. On the surface such compartmentalized training seems to hold intellectual water but.. Let’s drill down past this first trickle of thought-water and see if there is truly a sustaining aquifer below. Opportunity Costs Opportunity costs is a concept borrowed from economics that simply means, for every purchase we make, each individual “ Yes” decision automatically say “ No, thank you ” to everything else we could ...

Today’s combat voyage will take us into the mind of a legendary Civil War guerrilla fighter and what he learned from 17 th -century French drama. We’ll discuss two logical/cognitive fallacies and how they can drive even quite effective martial arts into useless margins, and, if we’ve been paying attention we’ll wind up back with our guerilla fighter and how to “ play the game well by not playing the game at all.” We’ll start with our French drama and not the Guerrilla warrior, you’ll see why we start here before we’re through. The following passage is from Moliere’s 1670 play The Bourgeois Gentleman , the premise of which is that a shopkeeper newly come into money decides that to be one of the upper-crust he needs to take great pains to “become cultured.” He engages numerous “culture instructors” who gladly take his money and leave him none the wiser or better cultured. One of these “culture instructors” is a fencing master who teaches him a few basics in the form o...

A change of pace as we look not only to the past for today’s lesson but also to a completely different realm of combat to see if there just may be any advice that is pertinent for the sport of MMA and real-world operator survival. We’re going to look to strategic advice offered by German flying ace Oswald Boelcke, one of the top (if not the top) innovators and instructors in the Axis’ formidable flying force during the First World War. Boelcke personally chose the legendary young Baron Manfred von Richthofen (the famous/infamous Red Baron) to become his pupil and protégé and coached him to an astonishing string of air victories. Boelcke was flying at a time when the airmen of both the Axis and Allied powers considered themselves “knights of the air”; they exercised a sort of curious chivalry with courtesies often offered to the opposition. Stories abound of pilots who upon finding their primitive machine guns jammed mid-dogfight receiving a simple salute and fly-away from th...

Let’s talk shark attacks for a few moments. Me, you, the media love shark attacks. No, not because we wish any of the victims harm, but we do love the “ Oh, my God ” moments, the brief titillating fascination of pondering the fact that there are still a few beasts out there capable and willing to feast on us occasionally (beyond microbes and insects, that is). Each time we hear one of these shark attack reports, and that’s pretty seldom according to the mighty Wikipedia the US average is 16 per year with an approximate death every two years; still, after hearing of an attack either we ourselves, or someone we know says “ You won’t get me into the water .” Now, looking at these numbers in no way diminishes the impact on the victims and/or their families, not at all. But I would like to point out to those who reason that there being man-eating fish in the sea and deciding not to enter the sea is not quite as wise at it may seem. Sure, any of us who have stood on a crowded shore...

If you’re like me, that word “noyau” may be as unfamiliar to you as it was to me a mere six months ago, but once we understand the word and its wider meaning we begin to recognize its explanatory importance in global and everyday matters, not to mention conflict resolution. Before we get to the definition of the concept let’s first ponder this quote: “ Antagonism must have some value to living things: why otherwise would evolution have tolerated so much of it?”- Robert Ardrey The Territorial Imperative Keep that thought in the back of your mind as it underpins the noyau concept. In 1944 a German ornithologist by the name of Dieter Burckhardt offered up the observation that each species of bird seems to have an “individual distance.” That is, a territorial divide within a larger shared territory. A beach seemingly crowded willy-nilly with swarming emperor penguins is actually adhering to species-specific rules regarding nest position and permitted distance between ind...