Indigenous Ability

Today let’s take a journey from the ancient Olympics, stop by Denmark for some Viking practices, sojourn with the Inuit and Chippewa cultures, and steal an idea or two from the boxing heavyweight great Joe “The Brown Bomber” Louis. First, let’s define our terms. By movement under load training I refer not to weight lifting but the conducting of your sport/training with additional weight or added resistance hampering your standard movement in the aid of increasing performance once the limiter is removed. Let’s start with the ancient Hellenes. In the original incarnations of the Olympic Games, the jumping events, standing broad jump, running jump, clearing obstacle et cetera were conducted with devices called halteres. Halteres were bits of stone or metal loosely shaped like a modern dumbbell. The athlete would grasp the two ends of the haltere and use a swinging momentum of the arms to “assist” the jump without ever releasing the device. It was thought that halteres...

Today Las Vegas, Nevada is known as the fight capital of the world (both boxing and MMA) and the reason for that has a long history. Prizefights had been conducted throughout the US Western frontier from the 1840s onward with supervised bouts being held in saloons, railway stops, mining camps, in short, anywhere you could get two fighters together and draw a crowd. Despite the reputation of being the Wild West, the sport was considered neither respectable nor was it necessarily legal. One of the early adopters of making prizefighting legal was, you guessed it, the state of Nevada—they did so in 1897.           Like most good decisions a bit of greed was at the heart of it. Nevada had fallen on tough economic times after a long boom period. Carson City (one of the nation’s smallest capitals at the time) was only a few miles from the Comstock Lode-one of the biggest silver lodes in US history. Miners (and all those who profit from min...

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...

The man born as Norman Selby in 1872, who later becomes Charles “Kid” McCoy (another fighter’s name that he casually adopted as his own,) who later took on the nom de ring “The Corkscrew Kid,” and then eventually, and simply, “Kid McCoy” was not a good man. He was a con man, a thief, a cheat, and a hustler. His out of the ring exploits could fill a book of nefarious deeds, but despite all this thuggish and disreputable baggage you can’t take away the fact that he was one of the slickest boxers to step into the ring. Selby, McCoy, or whatever name he was going by on any given day won the vacant middleweight title with a knockout in the 15 th round of Dan Creedon in 1897. He never bothered to defend the title, but don’t let that winning of a vacant title and lack of title defense allow you to assume McCoy was inactive or yellow. On the contrary, he was active as hell, and seemingly fearless. Consider the following. In 1896, the year prior to picking up the middleweight belt...

There is a surprisingly long history of hair-pulling in combat history, both sportive and on the battlefield. Today we’ll confine ourselves to sportive instances of what we now perceive to be unsportsmanlike behavior. Combat hair-pulling, or pugna capillos trahens , if you’d like to gussy it up a bit with Latin, or get a bit more primal with the Comanche tso’ya naraut’u [literally “hair fight”] was permitted in more than a few organized endeavors, and in some cases, out and out encouraged. Before we continue, if anyone doubts the efficacy of hair-pulling in sportive combat, please stretch the memory back to UFC 3 with the iconic match between the up to that point mighty dominant Royce Gracie and the pony-tailed behemoth that was Kimo Leopold. Royce gamely takes the “W” in that match, but if anyone thinks that would have been the outcome had not that handy pony-tail been available, I suggest a second look and re-evaluation of opportunistic handles. It seems the early Greek...

For those not in the know… James Albert Keating: Master at Arms - Astonishingly good with all small weapons. A graduate of the ESI Bodyguard academy. A knife designer of note. A writer of poem, prose and storied tale. Four books to his name so far. Currently residing on a large Arabian horse ranch in the mountains of Oregon. Keating is the owner and operator of the Comtech Training Studio known worldwide as home to a vast array of fighters, fencers and fast guns. Keating has operated the training hall since 1972 when he first began teaching publicly. James Keating has trained in various combative systems since age 10. Just shy of being sixty years of hard work in the martial arts and tactical fields. His 2018 season of training seminars looks as strong as one of his hand made Bowie knives. His beliefs are as follows: " We advance together into the unknown future with the strength of our abilities sustaining us through thick and thin. Skill banishes fear. Skill is the secret, ...

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...