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Guy's Blog

Guy frequently keeps this blog updated with thoughts, challenges, interviews and more!

Tag: learning

Online course, almost there! Plus a little vlogging…

Tomorrow, I’ll pull the trigger on my latest venture: an online course. It is called “Recreate Historical Swordsmanship from Historical Sources” and by the time it is done, it will be a clear and systematic way for people to learn how to do the academic side of historical swordsmanship. You know, the bit that makes it actually historical. The course is by no means finished: my plan is to have enough material up to keep people busy, and to use the feedback from the students to guide my creation of the rest of the course. I cannot reasonably predict exactly what every student will find difficult, or need extra help with, so I will create the necessary modules as the need arises. I have a fair bit of content up already, including all the homework assignments (which will tell you what the goal of each section is; if you can do the homework, you have acquired the intended skills and knowledge). I have a stable map of what the course will cover, and how it’s broken down. But the specifics of “a pdf with examples of translation problems” or “explain how to set up a more advanced drill”, or “we need more explanation here”; that will be finalised, expanded on, and polished with the first batch of students telling me what they need.

Which is exactly how I run my seminars; start with a theme, ask the students what they need, and give them that.

When I launch it tomorrow, I’ll send a note out to my mailing list, with some 50% off discount vouchers. These are limited to a total of 45 students, because I want to keep enrolments small to start with, while I work on the course content. These vouchers are intended for people who really want to be beta-testers and co-creators. There is nothing stopping people signing up at the full price, but I hope it’s clear that the course isn’t finished yet.

Because the format is so different to what I am used to, this is a really hard process for me; writing books is, if not exactly easy, at least totally straightforward and familiar. But creating an online course is very different.  Once this one is properly up and running, I’ll get started on others, such as turning the content of my Medieval Dagger book into a course, and indeed, eventually, the entire School syllabus. Ambitious, much?

I’m writing this in the Atrium Studios space in Suffolk University; they run a “Jelly” networking meetup on the last Thursday of every month, so I came along and met a load of interesting folk. Explaining what I do for a living is a great ice-breaker.

I am also doing a daily vlog thing, partly because my daughters are totally into vloggers right now, and partly to help with goal-setting for creating this course. I’m in a totally new environment (Ipswich), and finding my feet here creatively. It’s hard to get into the proper zone, outside the really specific environment I had created for myself in Helsinki. Perhaps the vlogging will help. I’ve got 5 short clips up so far; you can find them on my personal youtube account (with almost 0 views, because it’s not my main swordschool account). But there may be stuff there you’ll find interesting. I’ve embedded day 1 here, though it’s way out of date! Nearly a week old already!

https://youtu.be/DYoyrmHDlc0

So, that’s what I’m up to in the land of Sword. How about you?

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Training for Boldness

Boldness is a key virtue in swordsmanship. Perhaps the key virtue. Under the Lion on the famous segno page, Fiore wrote “Piu de mi leone non porta core ardito. Por di bataglia fazo a zaschun invito”. Nobody has a bolder heart than I, the Lion. I call everyone to battle.

It is a key virtue, and one which can be trained for. I cover it in breadth and depth in my book Swordfighting, but didn’t include there the specific exercises we use in class to begin the study of boldness. In the women’s class I lead in Seattle recently, the participants explicitly requested boldness as a topic, so I took them through the following sequence. This was a longsword class in which most of the participants were relatively inexperienced, so these exercises were done relatively slowly.
The first step, always, is decide what you’re working on. In this case, boldness. So the only thing that matters (other than “everyone finishes class healthier than they started it”) is whether you are embodying that virtue in the constraints of the drill. It’s ok for technique and other things to suffer.
The flinch is the enemy. Your body’s instinctive jerking away from threat needs to be brought under control. For many people, simply having their personal space invaded is enough to make them flinch, but to train martial arts effectively, you have to get comfortable with people getting right up in your face. So we began with the standing step drill, in which two players face each other square on in a wide stance, touch wrists, and then try to make the other player take a step. Move a foot, you lose.

This involves pushing and being pushed, some arm locks, and once the first level is comfortable, you can introduce things like gentle face-slaps. Anything that does not threaten your position can be ignored, so it’s remarkable how quickly incidental contact, that would have created a flinch before, becomes something the players can simply choose not react to. It also gets everyone playing together in a useful way. The next level is to allow one step, in either attack or defence; you lose when you make a second foot movement.
This drill is all about standing your ground, grounding, tactics, misdirection, wrestling, locks, throws… it’s a very good way to get beginners into the game. It also caused a lot of hilarity in the class, which in the circumstances was a good thing; it broke the ice, and made being brave easier. I also covered what to do if you are much bigger and stronger, or more experienced: take it to the very edge of your balance, and play from there.
After this, we did some basic sword handling, so I could assess the level of the class as a whole, and then we got started with step one of first drill: defender on guard in tutta porta di ferro, the attacker strikes a mandritto fendente (controlled, of course) to the head. The defender does nothing.

That is hard. Don’t blink. Don’t flinch. Don’t even change your breathing. Stare over the attacker’s shoulder and do absolutely nothing as the blade touches your mask. We also do this exercise with no masks and no contact. It’s harder, for most people. The exercise should be done at the rate that maintains the difficulty for the defender, so long as that doesn’t take the attacker past the point where they can properly control their strike.
Now we have identified the problem, flinching, we have to set up exercises in which it will happen naturally, allowing you to practise preventing it, in circumstances of ever increasing complexity. Remain calm and dispassionate. It’s really better to get hit in training than to practise flinching, because every time you flinch, you are ingraining that response in your nervous system.
Once you can remain impassive against the attack, you can defend against it with much better precision, so from here, move on to the second step of the drill; actually defending yourself. Now it’s the attacker’s turn to be impassive about being struck.
Boldness is also about moving forwards against the threat. In the Lonin loft they have two car tyres hanging from the ceiling, which act as pells and striking targets, so from here we moved on to hitting the tyres: approaching boldly, striking hard and moving away under cover. This was fun, and should be trained regularly, not least to make you aware of just how hard you can hit.
We then went back to the pair drills, and worked on the attacker’s bold entry. During this time, I prepped one of the students, and then gave orders for the class to go as hard and fast as they could, with no masks, to really hit each other. A dangerous, stupid, thing to do with a class at this level. But the teacher was telling them to… and the student I had prepared beforehand said, quietly but firmly, “no”. I said “what the hell do you mean, no?”, and she replied “no, it’s too dangerous.”
It takes boldness to stand up to authority figures when they are not acting in your best interests, and as with all necessary skills, it can and should be trained for. Roleplaying the scenario can really help. So what the class saw was one of their own (boldly) saying no to a dangerous exercise, in defiance of my authority. That was probably much harder, required more boldness, than simply not flinching when a friend gently approached with a sword.
Training for boldness only works if the situation is one in which it is hard to be bold, but you can just manage it. It is especially important to emphasise that success is defined only by whether you manage to act in a way that demonstrates the virtue of boldness according to the scenario of the drill. No other factors are important. This is the key to successful training. In weightlifting, you either lift the weight the prescribed distance, or you don’t. Success is easy to define. When training for virtues, success is more difficult to pin down, which is why I like controlling the flinch as the starting point; it’s the easiest way to check on physical courage. We can take this out into the wider world too; let’s say you have difficulty talking to strangers, so you set yourself a task of asking one stranger for directions every day on your way to work. It doesn’t matter if you stammer, or if you forget what they tell you, or if they are rude, or any other thing; you did it if you went up to someone you don’t know and asked. Success is making the attempt.

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Errors of Judgement

Justice, from Lorenzetti's "Allegory of Good Governance"
Justice, from Lorenzetti's “Allegory of Good Governance”

Training happens in the brain, and in my experience, the biggest barriers to training exist between a student’s ears. One of the most common problems I have seen (and experienced myself), is the tendency to stop and make judgements when things aren’t going well. For example, I’m practising my still-imperfect mandritto fendente, as part of the Farfalla di Ferro. I make a noticeable mistake, so I stop, berate myself (“you bloody fool, couldn’t swing a sword through a wet paper bag, come on, what kind of idiot are you?”) and then get back to practising.

Or for another example: I’m fighting someone for real. I get hit but am not dead. So I stop fighting back, and start criticizing myself for getting hit. Meanwhile my assailant keeps hitting me.

Do you see the problem? Do you ever do this? I have seen this problem so severely ingrained in a student that he actually stopped in the middle of the class and hit himself three times in the head for making the mistake, about five times a session, three sessions a week, until I trained it out of him. This corrective technique has never once in the history of mankind ever been shown to work.

So what does?

At its core, the mistake is allowing your attention to be taken off what you are doing, and on to what you were doing. This is followed by an emotional reaction to the mistake or imperfection, which locks your attention on to what you have done. This is the very opposite of mindful presence. But because it is disguised as paying attention to what you are doing, because you are indeed paying close attention to what you have done, it can feel like something you should do. And if you are not alone at the time, it can feel like you need to indicate to everyone else that you have noticed the mistake. The social pressure to do this is actually quite severe. But think on this: it’s not them that need to fix the mistake, so bringing it to their attention does nobody any favours. If they are not well trained, they haven't spotted the mistake anyway, and if they are, they will be less impressed by your reaction than they would have been by your dispassionate correction of it next time the opportunity arises.

The trick is to notice the mistake dispassionately, and calmly correct it next time round. It should not break your flow, not so much as a flicker of a frown should cross your brow. There should be no emotional reaction clouding your ability to actually enact the correction. Noticing something and reacting to it are two completely different things.

This is a skill, and can therefore be trained. Here’s how:

  • Set up an exercise in which you know you’ll make a natural error. Do a form a bit faster than usual, or do a pair drill at a level of complexity that challenges you.
  • Knowing that a mistake is coming, decide that when it does you will notice it but not react.
  • Pay attention to your emotional state. When the error arises, spot your reaction. Just notice it, and don’t interfere.
  • Keep running this exercise, the point of which is to practice noticing mistakes without judging them. If this is a common problem for you, then every training drill you do should be done as a way of generating natural errors for you to practice noticing without judging.

Beating yourself up about mistakes simply reinforces the mistake. Noticing them dispassionately allows you to correct them much more quickly and easily. It took my head-bashing student several months to change the habit; because his case was so severe, I had him replace the head-bashing with push-ups to change his reaction before getting rid of it altogether. This worked quite well, and no doubt saved him many brain cells.

The image at the top of this post is of Justice, from the “Allegory of Good and Bad Governance” by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, in the Palazzo Publico, Sienna. I saw it last year, and was swept away. Notice that Judgement is necessary, and must distinguish between Good and Evil. But she is calmly seated, dispensing Justice even-handedly. Think on this.

I’m writing this on Wednesday March 30th, and will be flying off to Seattle on the 31st when it goes live. I’ll check in with the comments and whatnot in a couple of days. Looking forward to seeing my Seattle chaps soon! I’m then popping down to visit Sean Hayes in Eugene on Monday, before spending a couple of days in Chicago with Nicole Allen and Greg Mele on my way home. I travel a lot, and yet spend far too little time with my far-flung friends. I’m making a deliberate effort to change that. If you're in any of those cities, I hope to see you too!

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Think Like a Criminal

Rory Miller, Kortrijk 2015

A couple of weeks ago I took four days away from the wife and kids, and spent a good chunk of money, flying to Belgium for a seminar with Rory Miller. Regular readers will have heard me banging on about his superlative Meditations on Violence. Rory and I have corresponded a little over the last few years, but this was the first time we would actually meet. I asked him when he was next coming to Europe, he said December, Kortrijk, so I signed up to the seminar regardless of the topic. Really, I just went to get my copy of Meditations signed.

Mission accomplished!

But the topic itself was fascinating. This was not a hands-on technical seminar; it was all about learning how criminals think, and therefore how to avoid becoming a target. We spent most of the time in the lecture hall. Yes, we did actually plan and demonstrate a violent crime, and it was pretty chilling how into it some of the participants got; I ended up playing an old lady being tortured for information about where she kept her jewellery! As well as mugging an old Italian couple in downtown Brussels, with my partner in crime, a Brussels lawyer, who clubbed them over the head with a gun.

The seminar was hosted by brothers Koen and Jan Vandersteene, representing Systema Belgium and Ryugi Kortrijk, and took place in the “House of Violence”, an old farmhouse that has been converted into a training centre, complete with dormitories, kitchen, lecture room, and lots of outdoor training space. There were about 50 participants, from all over Europe (though I think I came the furthest), with a wide range of martial arts backgrounds. One of the real side-benefits of the seminar was meeting so many new people with whom I had at least one thing in common. I even met one person there who had read one of my books!

I wrote copious notes during the seminar, then condensed them onto a single piece of paper (in pencil), then rewrote them into the computer. This process massively aids retention, because by re-arranging the material, you have to think about it. One interesting aspect of the way Rory taught the class was that he deliberately allowed space on the flipchart and time in the class for “tangents”: interesting sidebars to the main seminar. It provided a  way for students to get what they came for without derailing the class plan.

Flipchart showing tangents.

I asked Rory whether it would be ok to share all this information. His answer was interesting: “this information could save somebody's life. What kind of an asshole would I be if I didn't let people share it?”

So, here is the pdf version of my notes. You're welcome 🙂

RMseminarnotes

This is my last post before Christmas hits in force, so let me just say Merry Christmas to all my readers, and see you next year!

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How to Win Tournaments

So you want to stand on one of these? Why?
image from: http://www.postgraduatesearch.com/postgraduate-jargon-explained/ap-55456/

 

All world-class tournament competitors in low-contact combat sports use this method to succeed in tournaments. Whether you want to treat your tournament career like this is a whole other question, but, at the top level, everybody is doing this because it’s the only method that works.

1.  Analyse the Rules

Analyse the rule-sets, equipment, and every other aspect of the tournament environment. Your job is to score more points than your opponent in that environment and that’s it. You are not there to look good, be popular, or gain respect. You are there to win, and win only, according to the rules that are set.

Here’s an example of this in action: in 1999 Tim Ferriss, with a couple of months of preparation, won the Chinese kickboxing US national championship. He did this only because he found a loophole in the rules that allowed him to win by dehydrating himself before weigh-in down to 165lb, rehydrate back up to over 180 between weigh-in and the tournament, and, avoiding kicking and punching altogether, pick up his much lighter opponents and throw them out of the ring. Did he beautifully represent the spirit of the Art? No. (In the article I link to, he writes about “how to win at kickboxing the wrong way”!) Did he win? Yes.

Here’s another example: Johan Harmenberg, who pretty much single-handedly destroyed sport fencing (in my eyes at least), by ignoring conventions and analysing the rules to figure out a new and more effective way to score and not get scored on with the electronic scoring apparatus. He got from nowhere to World champion and Olympic champion in a few years. I highly recommend his book Epee 2.0 which recounts the details of how he did it. Did he beautifully represent the spirit of the Art? No. Did he win? Yes.

2. Create an Area of Excellence.

Pick one, or maximum two actions that lead to you striking, and train the hell out of them. Start with the action itself, and then work back to create the situation in which you can pull it off. Harmenberg’s action was the parry sixte-riposte. Ferriss’ was throwing people out of the wring (he has a background in judo and college wrestling). In every match, your only job is to lead your opponent into your area of excellence, where you can beat them. You need one world-class action in your repertoire. But only one, and it should suit your physical and mental strengths. Don’t waste time getting good at things you are not going to get world-class at. Will you beautifully represent the spirit of the Art? No. Will you win? Maybe.

3. Analyse your likely opponents

Who are the few individuals you are most likely to be beaten by? Go over every second of their tournament footage and analyse exactly what they are doing to win. What is their area of excellence? Your job now is to train ways to keep them out of their area of excellence, and lead them into yours. Your coach’s job is to model their behaviour to give you the opportunity to train against their specific game. For lower ranked opponents, you have to rely on your general skill at leading people into your area of excellence; you can't train specifically against more than a few opponents, there just isn't enough time.

Will you beautifully represent the spirit of the Art? No. Will you win? Probably.

The problem of course is that all world-class competitors are doing the same thing, analysing you (once you become successful enough to become a threat and so warrant attention). This is why every now and then a complete outsider comes out of nowhere and wins: he or she has prepared to fight the best; but the best have never seen his one area of excellence before.

Further reading:

The best books on this subject that I’m aware of are Josh Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning, which details how he went from chess champion to world champion in push-hands (the moment when he realised that the one opponent he had trained to beat was now in a different weight class was priceless. As was the moment when they realised that the ring was now a tad smaller), and the aforementioned Johan Harmenberg’s Epee 2.0.

This process is simple. But it is not easy. And, personally, I am much more interested in the spirit of the Art. Which is why I don’t normally train students for tournaments, but will if I’m asked to. I have the necessary skill-set, but it’s not a terribly interesting field for me.

I would also note here that I do not think that everyone should train like this for tournaments; there are plenty of ways to have fun and learn useful things from tournaments without going all-out to win them. But the topic of this post is not how to use tournaments, nor how to enjoy them. It’s how to win them. And this is the only way to train for that in any truly competitive field.

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The Fiore Creed

You know you've done something right as a teacher or writer when somebody takes your stuff and recombines it into something new and meaningful. In my latest book, Swordfighting for Writers, Game Designers, and Martial Artists, there are individual chapters for three of Fiore's four virtues; boldness, strength, and speed. (I've yet to write the one on foresight/prudence). They are titled along the lines of “I am weak, so I study strength.” There is another chapter on talent and how it doesn't exist. I never thought to do this, but Lars Johannes was clearly inspired by the book, and put this up on Facebook:

I am fearful, so I study boldness.
I am weak, so I study strength.
I am slow, so I study speed.
I am careless, so I study judgement.
I do not believe in innate talent.

And it just blew me away. It's what I wrote, but better. I'd adjust only the last of the four, to read “I am rash, so I study prudence”. This meme seems to be gaining some traction (though not nearly so much as some kitten videos, of course), so I thought I'd issue an “authorised” version, in the hope that you will not take that authority at all seriously, but hopefully take this and make it your own.

I am fearful, so I study boldness.
I am weak, so I study strength.
I am slow, so I study speed.
I am rash, so I study prudence.
I do not believe in innate talent.

And then, just to take it to its logical conclusion:

Fiorean Creed

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How to Win More Fights, in one easy step.

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I have been stuck in bed with some ghastly ailment for the last week or so, and am still not recovered yet (don't tell my wife I'm working!), so I'll be brief.

The question on many fencers' minds is how to win more matches. The solution is pretty simple: be a better fencer. Good fencers win more matches.
Problems arise when we get this the wrong way round; you don't become a good fencer by winning matches. You win matches when you're a better fencer.

Today's post is inspired by a teaching opportunity that raised its head after rapier class a couple of weeks ago. Three senior students were fencing each other, and getting frustrated by lack of progress. In short, they were trying to win each point, and as a result being too cautious, snipy and generally not very swordsmanlike. So I stepped in to help, with a couple of simple rule hacks.

Firstly, we created a rule that if your opponent disengages, you must attack. This directly led to some obviously foolish attacking, yes, but also bumped them out of their excessive caution.

Then they fenced between two lines on the ground, far enough apart that with their back foot on the line, they were one step out of measure. The winning conditions were now strike, or get your opponent to step over the line. This reduced the tendency to run away! At this stage I had each fencer identify one thing they should be working on. One needed to be bolder, one wanted to work on their attack by disengage, and the third was working on keeping their parries neat under pressure (if I recall correctly).

Then I had them fence normally, but explicitly working on the one specific aspect they were trying to improve. Unsurprisingly, they were fencing much, much better. This is because they were not trying to win points, they were trying to fence better, let the points fall where they may.

So your goal in every match should not be to win it; it should be to improve one specific aspect of your fencing. This might be boldness, speed, maintaining technique under pressure, getting one specific action to work, whatever. If you pursue this consistently, you will inevitably improve, and, as a result, win more matches.

Yes, you caught me. This is just another way of prioritising process over outcome. But it can be very hard to let go of the point-scoring mentality, which is why little rule hacks can really help. Play with them, and let me know how you get on!

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Begin Again: on being a beginner

As I slowly progress towards mastery in my chosen Art, I get further and further ahead of my beginners. This could lead to me getting out of touch with their needs. I also get accustomed to a certain routine, a set way of doing things. Both of these things are death to a good teacher. So I have made it a deliberate habit to be a beginner at something, all the time. From early 2001 to the end of 2003, I was a private student of an instructor in a very traditional kung-fu style; the same chap that fixed my wrists. The sort of school where to learn the inner secrets of the Art you have to be legally adopted by the grandmaster. Old School indeed. So much so that I will not identify the school here, because its internal politics are so damn Confucian that it may cause all sorts of trouble if I do. The training was not just profoundly uncomfortable, it was also hellishly painful, as this school included serious hardening training in its core curriculum. I would not normally touch hardening with a stick, as it is often a short-term unhealthy strategy, but in this case it went hand-in-hand with serious maintenance; specifically massage, breathing, and herbal medicine. So I ended up much healthier than I started, but also, and this is the point: from 7am to 9am three mornings a week, I was an absolute beginner. Which meant that when I was standing up in front of my class that evening, I had some sympathy for, and insight into, what my students were experiencing.

As I started to get emotionally comfortable with the kung fu, and so it lost some of its beginneriness (if you’ll allow me to coin a term), I took up something I’d wanted to learn since I was a little kid: bullwhip cracking. I loved loved loved Indiana Jones, and could think of no more apposite multi-purpose tool than a bullwhip. You can fend off baddies and swing across ravines with these things. Really, why doesn’t everyone carry one?

Indiana Jones

I met a professional performer at Hämeenlinna medieval market in 2002, Ari Lauanne, who taught me some basics; in half an hour I striped myself from knee to shoulder, and found out why they are not so commonly carried. They are damn hard to use! So I got a beauty made by Alex Cobra of Cobra Whips, just a six-footer to start with, and practised most nights before class. I got quite good, compared to a beginner (though I’m not in the same class as Alex, or Ari), and so while I keep up my skills every now and then, I needed to find something else. The essence of beginneriness is having no frames of reference with which to make difficulties approachable. The same is basically true for everything else; once people ask me what I’m doing and I can explain it properly, I’m no longer really in the true beginner state.

Around this time I started to seriously study Finnish. Now there is a language where you can stay a beginner for a very long time. I put in two years of real effort, and got to a very basic level of competence. Then my first daughter was born, and I had to make a decision; spend my now much more restricted time putting in another thousand hours or so getting to fluency; or spend that time writing a couple of books. I chose books, and while there are negative consequences to not being comfortable in Finnish, there are about five million people who can speak Finnish, but perhaps only fifty who can write books like mine on European swordsmanship. The world needs my books more than it needs me to speak Finnish. Another side-benefit of course is that I can step outside my comfort zone (I literally break into a cold sweat) by simply engaging a neighbour in basic conversation.

Being a parent is also a state of being a constant beginner. Just as you get competent at taking care of a baby, you’re suddenly running around after a toddler. They develop faster than you do. Excellent, long-term beginneriness. But like everything you do day-in, day-out, it gets easier.

In 2012 I was given a flying lesson in a light aircraft, by a friend of mine. Oh. My. God. It was terrifying, exhilarating, very, very challenging (like learning to drive a car in three dimensions instead of two, then multiplied by about a million), and I was literally giddy with it for days afterwards. But it will cost about 6,000 euros to get my license, so that will have to wait until one of my books goes all 50 Shades on me and I am rolling in cash. (No, I will NOT be adding tepid BDSM scenes to my next book. Nor torrid ones neither.) So in 2013 I took up the yo-yo. Yes, really. Very cheap, and really, really hard. There are some excellent tutorial videos online (go to André Boulay’s site yoyoexpert.com; there he has arranged a complete curriculum from beginner to master level, and explains every trick in detail. Check it out online to get some idea of what expertise in that field actually looks like). So for a thousandth of the cost of learning to fly, I was constantly working at, and failing at, something. And it was really fun.

This is about as far as I got:

http://youtu.be/Lav_uBPGYJM

This is what good looks like:

Then Audatia came along, and what a learning curve that was. I knew nothing about game design, or producing card games, and not much about any of the nitty gritty of getting a project like that done, with several different experts all working on it at the same time. But after the first decks are out and the rest are on their way, while it remains challenging, I’m not a proper beginner any more.

Of course, from the inside, I am a beginner whenever I pick up a sword. My errors of form and technique are as obvious to me as those of the clumsiest beginner. But I have a large store of experience to draw from when figuring out how to improve. The art is deeply familiar to me. Huge chunks of the relevant sources are just there in my head to read at leisure. So even though my skills are sadly lacking, from my perspective, that doesn’t give me a true insight into the beginner because the problems are well known to me, not confusingly new. I know exactly how to fix them, I just have to get on and do it.

Right now I am looking for the next activity to be a beginner in. It needs to be a) ethical b) affordable c) have a physical component other than using a computer d) clearly defined basics (success/failure states. Is the yoyo tangled? fail. Did the whip crack? success. Is the plane still in one piece? success. Is the whip wrapped round my own face? fail. And so on) and e) not require formal classes unless they happen in the mornings.  I welcome your suggestions!

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Training for Fear

I am writing up the Fear section of my new book, Swordfighting for Writers, Game Designers and Martial Artists. This particular section seemed like a useful snippet. About half the book is blog posts from here, so cannibalising a section of it to make a blog post seems, well, fair. Here goes.

“One of the many things that martial arts training can teach you is the ability to deal with fear: the ability to control your autonomic responses, the ability to choose all your actions from a position of confidence and strength, rather than just react out of fear and dread. [At this point I tell stories about the many times I have been variously anxious, frightened, terrified, and gibbering in panic, in hospitals, schools, fencing arenas and the mean streets of Sydney (yes, the Spider story) and Edinburgh.]

In addition to fear management strategies, it is also useful to actively practise handling fear. For this you will need one irrational fear inducing activity, ideally one that requires little cash or preparation, and a commitment to daily practice. One easy option is cold showers; not ideal, because most people are not actively afraid of cold water, they just don’t like it. But having the nerve to turn the tap all the way to cold and let it hit you, is a good start.

I personally have a wildly irrational fear of hanging off things. Especially upside down. I’m ok hanging off a pull-up bar by my hands, but jumping up to catch hold of it in the first place gives me a heart attack. In the back of my mind I am completely certain that if I miss my catch, the contact of my fingers on the bar will flip me upside-down, and I’ll fall on my head. Yes, really.

But I know that it isn’t so; the forces at work just cannot make that happen. My rational mind overrules my irrational body, in this case. So every day, I jump and catch the bar. And every day, I nearly die of fright. But it is much easier to handle now than it was a year ago. I can feel the dread building as I approach the bar, and steel myself to jump and catch. It’s horrible. But useful. And good practice.

Hanging upside down by my knees is another one. For the longest time, I could not do it. In my heart of hearts, I knew that if I let go with my hands, my legs would straighten, and I would fall. As if my legs were not under my control at all. And as if the teeny little muscles in my grip were somehow able to generate more force than the ginormous (in comparison to my forearms at least) muscles in my thighs.

My cousin is a professional aerialist (she organised the Mary Poppins’s at the London Olympics opening ceremony), and way back in 2005 she was performing in Berlin, doing scary-as-hell rope tricks. You can see her in action here:

http://youtu.be/http://youtu.be/e_SSEXF4kFM

I flew over to see her and while I was there she invited me along to their training hall, to have a go on ropes and trapezes. It was fantastic good fun. While she was teaching me to get onto a trapeze, I managed to get my legs over the bar, but I could not let go with my hands and hang down. No way. Instant fall onto head. So she shinned up the rope next to me, laid her arm on my shins and said “don’t worry, I won’t let you fall”. (The physics do not work, of course. She was about half my weight, and hanging off a rope. But irrational fears do not require rational solutions.) And so I let go, and after a moment, she could take her arm away, and there I was, hanging by my knees upside down for the first time ever.

Unfortunately, trapezes are quite tricky to find round here, so I didn’t do it again, until this summer. We have a climbing frame in our yard, and my eldest daughter and I were playing on it, and I did Katherine’s trick of holding her shins (though in this case the reassurance was backed up by physics!) and in short order, my 7-year old turned into a monkey, as regards hanging off stuff at least. So I decided to join her, and had my wife hold my shins, and I let go with my hands. After a few reps of that, I could do it without her. And now it’s easy. Scary, but easy. I still know in my bones that I’m about to fall, but I still do it. When that stops being scary enough, I’ll have to find something else to be frightened of. Because the benefits of daily overcoming terror are way too great.

photo credit: Sarah Frechette of Pikku Arkki.
photo credit: Sarah Frechette of Pikku Arkki.

So, give it a go. What are you afraid of?

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Know what you want, and ask for it.

The ability to ask for what you want is a critical life skill. It does not absolve those around you from paying attention to your needs, but it makes it a whole lot easier to have those needs met. This skill has two components: knowing what you want, and asking for it in such a way that you might actually get it.

As always, swordsmanship can show the way. In the basic class on Tuesday this week, asking for what you want was the theme.

It began in the warm-up, with students spotting each other in the execution of a basic exercise (the scoop). The spotters were supposed to tap their partner on the shoulder when they saw an error, but of course, to start with, they were invariably too far away, and relied of verbal communication instead. So the first fix was I had to ask them more precisely for what I wanted. Once the spotting technique was up to scratch, I had them chose either the push-up or squat to work on, using their partner. First they had to identify one possible error (such as dipping the head in a push-up), and ask their partner to watch for it. The lesson: know what you want, exactly, and ask for it, exactly. People generally are pretty good at being co-operative, but very bad at mind-reading.

The rest of the class went the same way; each student would ask for what they wanted (“give me a mandritto, not too fast”; “let’s run the dagger disarm flowdrill, you break the flow, I’ll try to counter it, put me under pressure”), and their partner would give it to them.

And here is the catch; every time you are giving your partner what they ask for, you should be doing it in such a way that you are also working towards your own goals. Every action can be improved in terms of mechanics, consistency, accuracy, and so on. So even if (especially if!) your partner is a beginner (relative to your exalted level of accomplishment), you should be getting useful practice out of giving them what they want.

Whenever I am asked to do a seminar somewhere, I always ask the organisers and the attendees to be really specific about what they want. We then set goals, work towards them, and run diagnostics to make sure we are meeting them. This practically guarantees not only improvement, but also student satisfaction. But only if, and it is a big if, the students present ask for what they actually want. Not what they think they should want, or have been told to aspire to.

A senior student recently came to me with motivation problems. I asked him what he wanted, and we discussed his goals and how we could work towards them (I see my job as helping my students meet their goals, whatever they may be, so long as they don’t go against my overall goal of restoring European martial arts to their rightful place at the heart of European culture). In this process, he admitted in a kind of embarrassed way, that he wasn’t really into the history side of these arts at all. He was much more interested in the practical, physical swordsmanship. Alleluia! Progress! Because he could articulate what he wanted, I could tailor his training in that direction. No embarrassment required.

The relevance to daily life should be obvious. You must first be honest with yourself about what you truly want. Then ask for it, specifically and without reservation. That way, you might just get it.

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Guy Windsor: a website all about the Renaissance Italian martial arts expert who blends historical accuracy with practical training.