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Tag: Safety

Recovering from injury: 6 useful ideas

I’m in the process of recovering from a nasty injury. Why am I telling you this? Because shit happens to everyone, and I thought it might be useful to you to see how I deal with it. This is not my first training injury, and I’d be very surprised if it was my last. My basic approach is the same as for training when sick: fuck it, but don't poke the bear. It boils down to a few key mental principles applicable to most difficult situations, and a couple of guidelines for treating the actual injury, which are applicable to most injuries.

Before we take a step further, while I am technically a doctor now, I’m not a medical doctor. And even if I were, I’m not your doctor. So this is what I do, what works for me, in case you might find it useful or interesting. Do not under any circumstances mistake it for qualified medical advice.

In the course of writing this article, I formulated the principles that I'm following to get through the problem. They are:

  • Keep gently moving (I’ll expand on specific treatment too)
  • Keep a sense of humour (even when you can’t pull up your trousers)
  • Fear is the enemy (much worse than pain)
  • Use professional help (it’s often worth it)
  • Get back on the horse (because fear is still the enemy)
  • Perspective (viewed from the right angle, even severe injuries aren’t that important)

So, what happened?

On Monday January 29th I was in the gym, and managed to sprain my back doing a hex-bar deadlift. (A hex-bar is a weights bar in the shape of a hexagon, which you can step inside of, and lift like picking up two suitcases. You can see the lift discussed and done here.) It was one of those situations where there were no obvious mistakes: my form was correct, I'd prepared properly, I was paying attention, it was a weight I'd lifted before, but for some reason my right thigh declined to take its share of the load half way up, and so the whole lot came onto my lower back. Ow.

I hobbled home, took some ibuprofen, and not to my surprise could barely get out of bed the following day. Major ow.

The injury is on the right hand side of my lower back, between my hip and my spine. When I very carefully levered myself out of bed on January 30th, I ran through some range of motion tests, and found that I could do just about everything except bend forwards. Normally, I can lay my palms flat on the floor with locked-straight legs. Now, I could reach approximately one inch down my thighs.

Keep gently moving

This is a musculoskeletal sprain, in which there is some damage to the muscles, but also to the soft tissues (ligaments and/or tendons). This sets my expectations, and my approach. Using agony as a useful guide to whether a motion was a good idea or not (if it causes shooting pain, don't do it), I gently kept moving for the next few days, and the spasms eased off, and by the Friday (2nd Feb) I was able to go up to London as planned to see a friend. At the weekend I ran some errands, and even managed to drive (though driving was unpleasant). I was taking about 400mgs of ibuprofen three times a day, to limit the inflammation, and doing very gentle range of motion exercises to maintain flexibility as much as possible without aggravating the injury. Pain can be a learned response, a habit. ‘Doing this movement hurts this way'; the pain becomes associated with the movement, and it can persist long after the initial cause for it has gone. So it's really important to learn to move without the pain, and to break the connection as quickly as possible, which is done by doing the movement right up to the point just before the pain starts, and gradually pushing that range of motion further and further without triggering the pain response.

The specifics:

  1. Keep moving as much as possible, but be gentle and attentive about it.
  2. Rest often. Many short sessions, punctuated by many rests, is better than long sessions that induce fatigue.
  3. Regain range of motion before adding weight. It’s critically important that the injury site is returned to a reasonable range of motion before you add weight to the movement. When you have an injured spot, your body will tend to immobilise it, so your range of motion comes from other areas. I think of regaining mobility like making a bow. The idea is to avoid stiff spots or hinges, so the stress of the draw is evenly distributed along the limbs. If the bow hinges at any spot, that’s where it will break. I really don’t want to acquire a compensating over-flexibility next to the stiff area in my back. So I have to be very careful about locating the motion in the correct place.
  4. The timeline for soft tissue injury is at least 9-12 months for full recovery of tendons and ligaments (because they have a very poor blood supply, as they are not very metabolically active). So I will be taking this injury into account in my training for at least a year. Once the worst is over (which it already is) that just means paying attention to the area, doing exercises to build strength there, and retain mobility, and watch for signs of strain. Muscles heal in 3-6 weeks, usually, depending on how badly they are damaged. Muscle damage doesn’t worry me, I only have to make sure that I don’t trigger protective spasms which will slow the process while I stimulate the ligaments to repair themselves.
  5. Breathing and meditation. What, you didn’t think I’d forget about breathing, did you? The best ally you have in healing is your brain. By focussing attention on the problem area, you can persuade your body to send resources to it. I do this by breathing into the area itself (in this case, as if my breath is inflating my arse. Great image, huh?), and by simply sitting (or for the first few weeks lying down, because sitting aggravated the problem) and paying gentle attention to the injury. Not interfering, just noticing.
  6. Medication: no more than two weeks of continuous painkiller use (for me); I can go back to them if needed after a week off. Anti-inflammatories work best if they build up a bit in your system; they usually take a few hours to work their magic. So taking them on rising, on going to bed, and maybe once more during the day, is much better than taking them when the pain happens to peak. I am also using my magic medicine (lotion from a kung-fu instructor) which is great for bruises and sprains, and for pain control, ibuprofen cream on the sore spot. I also found this “Advance 7” cream to be really effective (thanks Sam!).

Keep a sense of humour

Monday morning, Feb 5th, I woke up, moved an inch, and regretted it deeply. Somehow during the night the injury had gotten ten times worse. I lay there with a full bladder, and seriously considered not getting out of bed to get to the bathroom. My wife was away and the kids were in bed, so there was nothing for it but to keep everything as still as possible, while nonetheless getting out of bed onto the floor, from the floor to upright, and making full use of the walls and doors, get to the loo. That done, I woke the kids, and told them they'd be walking themselves to school. Bless their little hearts, they had no problem dressing, getting their own breakfast, and getting on their way. I called the doctor just to check that I didn’t need to go into A+E, and he confirmed that this was common for a back sprain, and told me what symptoms to watch out for (e.g. nerve pain radiating out, or numbness) in case it was something worse.

I was faced with a problem of needing to keep moving, a bit, to prevent everything seizing up completely, and yet every movement creating blinding pain. My solution was to dose up on a bit more ibuprofen, and watch Altered Carbon on Netflix; 45 minutes or so of lying down, then get up at the end of each episode and move a bit. Work of any kind was out of the question, as I couldn’t be in an ergonomically acceptable position to use the laptop (standing or even sitting) for more than a few minutes. And the last thing I needed was to bugger my wrists by typing lying down. Also, the pain was too bad for the kind of work reading I need to do (the kind where you have to pay close attention to something that is not particularly gripping). So no work for me! I did manage to shepherd The Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts through layout and into print, but that was it.

The next day was about the same, only worse. Sat on the loo, ready to get back up, I tried to reach down to snag the hem of my trousers between the extended tips of my fingers to pull them up, but it caused a spasm of pain so bad I nearly passed out. I managed to lever myself up, and shuffle to the bedroom and lie down on my side on the bed, and bring my ankles back towards my arse; once there, I could snag the trousers, and pull them up. Picture the scene. I did, and it was bloody funny. Dignity can go fuck itself.

Really. If you'd been there, and had your empathy circuits temporarily removed, you'd have been laughing your arse off. Creating a little distance between the agonised carcass you live in, and the you that's there to notice it, makes handling the injury easier. It's a bit less personal. Most comedy revolves around pain of one sort or another- why not your own?

Fear is the enemy

It would be easy to imagine all sorts of horrible futures in which the injury is permanent, I'll never swing a sword again, all that terrifying shit. But it's also possible to imagine a future in which the back injury is a funny story about events long passed. Focussing on the worst case scenario is borrowing trouble that hasn't happened yet. How mobile I used to be, and how mobile I may become, are both irrelevant. The only thing that matters is how mobile I am now, and what I can do to make that better. Banish ‘if only' statements. “If only I'd stopped one weight earlier”. “If only my back didn't hurt”. And so on. They are useless bullshit to be eradicated. It's perfectly possible to make yourself miserable by grieving for an imagined future *that might never have come to pass*. For all I know, by staying home for a few weeks I may have avoided a fatal car accident that would have killed me had I not been too injured to drive. There's no way to know, so speculation is futile and counter-productive. If you must project into the future, make it positive. “I will get better” or, “even if I don't get better, I'll be fine; I can cope.” But it's much better to just deal with the current situation without judging it relative to past or future.

For me at least, Pain ≠ Suffering. Pain + Fear = Suffering. I can’t avoid the pain, but by eliminating the fear, there’s no suffering. I'm fine, it just hurts.

Gradually, being careful to limit my painkiller intake, and keeping moving, and doing as much of my usual training routines as the injury allowed, it got better over the course of the week— and Altered Carbon was awesome. I probably wouldn't have got to watch it otherwise, as my wife isn't into that sort of show and we usually watch stuff together.

After being on painkillers for two straight weeks, I decided to come off them and just live with the pain. I really don't need a painkiller addiction, nor the kidney or stomach issues they can cause. Two weeks to the day after starting to take them, I stopped.

Get professional help

The following week I was still stuck in the house, unable to walk more than a few steps, or drive at all, pretty much until the weekend, when I had a seminar to teach on the Sunday. Doctor Theatre took over, and the seminar was fine, but it was a stretch and I was very careful not to demonstrate more than absolutely necessary. Progress continued slowly but surely for the next week… Then on Monday 26th February when I woke up my lower back was sore but still getting better, but my neck had seized up. This was not surprising, as I have such a long history of neck issues, and the back injury had prevented me from doing the full preventive routines.  By being super-careful, I didn't make either problem worse, and on the Wednesday I was well enough from the chest down to walk, and so could get out of the house and to go see an osteopath to fix my neck. It took three sessions over the course of the next couple of weeks, but by the second week of March, I was pretty much back to normal.
There are professional services that can sometimes help. Use them.

Also, I bought a pair of those nordic walking sticks, that make you look like you forgot your skis. I was a tad dismissive of them in my previous post, but damn, they make a difference. After having them for a day, I was already able to walk further without hurting my back, and then had a chance encounter with a friend who happened to know how to use them properly and taught me the trick of it. Hot damn, it’s like you can push yourself forwards even when your legs are knackered. Now I use them everywhere I go (despite the constant ski references). I exchange knowing nods with fellow un-embarrassable stick users, and indeed with stick-wielding pensioners. The only really odd thing about them is that I've never caught myself using them in a sword-like fashion. Normally, any long object in my hand gets automatically converted into a sword, but for some reason, these haven't. Maybe it's the hand grips.

Get back on the horse

By gradually increasing the amount of exercise I was getting each day, and being strict as hell about my spine maintenance routines, I was fit to go back to the deadlift on March 16th.

“WHAT???” I hear you cry. “Are you mad?”

No. When I say back to the deadlift, I mean *just the bar*, a very careful single rep to check out the system, a couple more because it was ok, then a few more pulling from the rack (so the bar is held up off the ground). Other than that I did some bench presses, pull-ups, the usual, but all still quite light, and well “in the pocket”. The critical point was getting back on the metaphorical horse; interacting with the bar again to re-learn that it's a tool for creating strength not injury. Since then, I’ve built it back up to nearly half of the weight that I was lifting when the injury occurred. I’m in no rush. I think it's vital for long-term psychological health to get back on the horse.

I had a similar injury some years ago doing kettlebell swings with my 24kg bell. It turns out, after careful examination of the evidence and my experience, that kettlebell swings and my spine are just not made for each other, so I don’t do them any more. But I do do clean and presses with the bell, Turkish get-ups, and similar. I’ve rehabilitated the equipment, but learned to avoid that specific exercise with it.

Perspective

My final thought on this is perspective. I don't view my training goals in increments of weeks or months; I usually think in terms of two to five years. In any five year period there will almost certainly be periods of at least a few weeks where training is impossible for one reason or another. Flu. Injury. Family crisis. Something will come up. But even a major setback is unlikely to take me far away from my long-term goals.
This graph shows the US stock market over the last century:

from http://www.theamateureconomist.com/is-the-u-s-stock-market-going-to-crash/

My back injury is like one of the dips. Shitty to live through, but even the monster crash of 2008 bottomed out at a higher point than the best of the 1960s, and recovery was pretty damn fast. An injury like this, handled right, is just a blip.
This analogy only holds good up to a point: the human body is much less resilient overall than the stock market; its 100 year old self will never outperform its 20 year old self. A body is easy to permanently damage or destroy. I have a friend who has had to quit historical swordsmanship after 20 years because of damage to his knee- he's right to put his health over the Art, and my heart breaks for him. But my point about perspective stands; by viewing my progress over a long enough time span, I don't have to worry about short-term dips like the one I'm just pulling out of. This perspective is also very useful for maintaining a sense of humour.

In the grand scheme of things, my back is the very tiniest of tiny problems. Yes, when the spasm hits it seems to take over the entire world, but that’s an illusion caused by faulty perspective. To put it another way; I’d trade my kids being healthy for my back being fucked any day of the week. On the same day that my back took a turn for the worse (February 5th) two people I care about died. My mother in law Bridget, age 79, after years of ill health, and my friend Hugh Hancock, age 40, with a heart attack out of the blue. Compared to this, a sore back is a minor temporary inconvenience at worst.

To sum up, those points again:

  • Keep gently moving
  • Keep a sense of humour
  • Fear is the enemy
  • Get some help
  • Get back on the horse
  • Perspective

They serve me well: I hope you never need them, but in case you do, I hope they serve you even better!

If you've read all the way to the end of this post, you'd probably enjoy my book on a related topic: The Principles and Practices of Solo Training. You can get it from me directly here, or find it wherever you buy books. Or ask for it in your local library!

Cover image of Guy Windsor's book The Principles and Practices of Solo Training

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Safety Guidelines for the Practice of Swordsmanship

safety-guidelines-cover

Safety Guidelines for the Practice of Swordsmanship

These safety guidelines come from my Recreate Historical Swordsmanship from Historical Sources Course (included in our Mastering the Art of Arms and Solo Training packages here) and have been adapted from guidelines in The Medieval Longsword, The Duellist's Companion, and The Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts. All of those books are included as downloadable pdfs in the additional course material.

Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nothing without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end.

Edward Whymper’s admonition, from Scrambles amongst the Alps, elegantly encapsulates the correct attitude to all potentially lethal activities. Substitute “practice swordsmanship” for “climb”, and there is the correct mindset for any swordsman, beginner or expert. Take it to heart before you start training with a partner.

When training with weapons you hold your partner's life in your hands. This is a sacred trust and must not be abused.

Disclaimer: I accept no responsibility of any kind for injuries you sustain while you are not under my direct personal supervision. During this course you will be taught how to create safe training drills, and I am certain that if you follow the instructions there is a very low likelihood of injury. But if I am not there in person to create and sustain a safe training environment, I cannot be held responsible for any accidents that may occur.

Principles

The basic principles of safe training are:

  1. Respect: for the Art, your training partners, the weapons, and yourself.
  2. Caution: assume everything is dangerous unless you have reason to believe otherwise.
  3. Know your limits. Just because it’s safe for somebody else, does not necessarily mean it’s safe for you. Never train or fence when you are tired, angry, or in any state of mind or body that makes accidents and injuries more likely.

Most groups that keep going for more than a year have a pretty good set of safety guidelines in place. Make sure you know what they are, and follow them.

My senior students routinely train with sharp swords, often with no protection. That’s not as dangerous as it sounds, when you remember that they have been training usually for 5+ years at that point, under my supervision.

Safety first: you cannot afford time off training for stupid injuries. Life’s too short. Whatever training you are doing must must must leave you healthier than you started it. You will not win Olympic gold medals this way, but you won’t end up a cripple either. The path to sporting glory is littered with the shattered bodies and minds of the unlucky many who broke themselves on the way. Don’t join them.

Every time I find myself teaching a group I don’t know, I tell them that the class will be successful from my point of view if everyone finishes class healthier than they started it. Most injuries in training occur either during tournament (highly competitive) freeplay, or are self-inflicted during things like warm-ups. In my school (and other classes) we have a zero tolerance policy on macho bullshit.

If any exercise doesn’t suit you, for any reason, you can sit it out, or do some other exercise. If you are sitting it out, a good instructor will ask you why, and help you develop alternatives or work up to the exercise in easy stages, but will never pressure you to do something that might injure you.

This is also true of work-related injuries, like forearm problems from typing, or the ghastly effects of sitting all day. By avoiding the things that will hurt you, you will naturally seek out the things that are good for you. Hungry? Avoid sugar, avoid processed foods, and lo! there’s a fresh salmon salad. Tired? Sleep is better than barbiturates, no?

This requires good risk-assessment skills (I recommend Against the Gods, the Remarkable Story of Risk, by Peter Bernstein) and the courage to take risks that truly serve your overall aims. A safe life is not worth living, but foolish risk-taking will not make your life meaningful.

Try adopting these key habits:

  • Before any new activity, do a risk/reward calculation. How risky is it, and how
    rewarding?
  • Practice saying no to training suggestions: even safe ones. Most people do stupidly
    risky things due to peer pressure. Being able to say no to your peers is perhaps the most important skill in reducing injury rates. If this is hard, make it a habit to decline at least one suggestion every session, until it’s easy.

Equipment

Without doubt the single most important bit of safety equipment is good common sense. Fence according to the limits of your equipment, exercise control and respect the weapon at all times, and you will never have a serious injury. Minor bumps and bruises come with the territory.

There were some masters who believed that the safest course is to fence with sharp weapons and no protection. This is how it was often done in the past until the invention of fencing masks (though there are tournament records and declarations as early as the 14th century that record the use of blunt practice weapons; King Rene d’Anjou’s treatise of 1470 is perhaps the best source). Such masters are right in theory, in that freeplay with sharps is the best way for students to learn absolute respect for the weapon, and the importance of absolute control. There are a few contemporary masters with whom I will fence like this, and there is nothing like it for generating a perfect fencing approach. But try explaining that to the insurance companies, or in the event of a slip, the police or coroner.

It was often said in the eighteenth century that you could tell a fencing master from his eye-patch and missing teeth. Never forget that even a blunt blade can break bones. When free fencing, or when practicing drills at speed, it is essential that you wear appropriate safety gear. You do this not for your own sake, though self-preservation does come into it, but for the bene t of your training partner. Your protection allows him to hit you safely.

Choosing protection is a very controversial subject. Too little, and you can end up badly hurt (even in practice). Too much, and you can’t fence properly. Firstly, it is important to establish what style of fencing you will be doing. If you are practising armoured combat, then buy the best fitting, best made armour that you can from an armourer who knows how you intend to use it and has seen what you want to do. This is the hardest style of fencing to appropriately regulate, because accurate technique requires you to go for the least armoured spots (throat, eyes, armpits, joints), but safety requirements obviously prohibit that.

As a general guideline, I recommend the following for most weapons.

  1. An FIE standard fencing mask. This allows you to thrust at the face (a very common target), and generally attack the head. This does have three major caveats. Firstly, it leaves the back of the head open, and you must be very careful not to strike at this target. An added apron of thick leather affords some protection. Secondly, it does not protect the head and neck from the wrenching force of over-vigorous blows. It is vital that you and your opponent learn control before engaging in freeplay. Thirdly it is designed to protect the face from high-speed, light, flexible weapons, not slower, heavier, rigid ones. So continually check them for wear, and make absolutely sure that your weapons are properly bated.
  2. A steel or leather gorget, or stiff collar, to protect the throat. Points can slip under the bib of a mask and crush the larynx.
  3. (For women) a rigid plastic chest guard.
  4. A point-resistant fencing jacket rated at least 500 newtons. Sturdy, preferably padded and/or armoured gauntlets, which should extend at least four inches past the jacket cuff to prevent points sliding up your sleeve. I have twice had fingers broken through unpadded mail gloves, and now use a pair of fingered gauntlets from Jiri Krondak, which cost about 150€.
  5. A padded gambeson, or a plastron. If you are making one yourself, bear in mind that it should be thick enough to take the worst out of the impact of the blows, and prevent penetration from a thrust. All openings should be covered. The collar should be high enough that thrusts coming under the bib of the mask do not make contact with your throat. A plastron must wrap around the ribs, and properly cover the collar bones and shoulders. I usually wear a fencing jacket and plastron (as pictured).
  6. A box for men (called a “cup” in the US). You only forget this once.
  7. Rigid plastic protectors for the knees and
  8. For the elbows, of the sort worn by in-line skaters (worn under the
    clothes for that period look if you prefer), will save a lot of pain, and some injury.
  9. Footwear: on the matter of footwear, few practitioners agree. In the longsword treatises, there are no heavy boots, and certainly no built-up heels.  For a completely historical style, it is necessary to wear completely accurate period clothing at least occasionally, because it can affect the way you move. It does not matter much what you wear on your feet provided that you understand grounding, body-mechanics and footwork, but attaining that understanding is much easier barefoot or in very thin flat soles. Excessively grippy soles can lead to joint injury as you may stop too suddenly, or get stuck when you should be turning (particularly in falls at close quarters). The dangers of wearing too slippery soles are obvious. In the salle I usually wear medieval shoes or ‘barefoot’ shoes (aka five-fingers, or ‘toe shoes’), and recommend a thin, flat sole regardless.

You can find our current equipment recommendations here.

The Sword

Training swords come in three main types. Authentic sharp reproductions, which are used for cutting practice and some pair work with advanced students, blunt swords that try to reproduce the handling characteristics of the sharps, and fencing swords that are designed to make fencing safer. These all have their pros and cons, and you should use the sword that’s right for your style and the kind of practice you will be doing.

It’s perfectly all right to use a wooden waster or something similar to start with, but do not imagine that there is any such thing as a safe training sword. Even modern sport fencing blades engineered for fencing sometimes break and puncture people, and anything heavy enough to reproduce the handling of a medieval or renaissance sidearm is going to be able to do damage.

Looking after your weapon is largely a matter of keeping it dry, clean, and free of stress risers (a stress riser is a weak point, usually a deep nick, which encourages the blade to fold at that point).

Occasional rubdowns with a moisture repellent oil and steel wool or scouring pad, followed by a coat of microcrystalline wax, should keep the blade and hilt clean (follow manufacturer’s recommendations if you have a gilt, blued or otherwise ornamented weapon). Do not be afraid to file down any large nicks, and file off any burrs: this is important from a safety perspective, as the blade is most likely to break at a nick, and burrs can be very sharp.

The edges of a blunt weapon should always be kept smooth enough that you can run your bare hand hard up the edge and not get scratches or splinters. Even the toughest and most cherished sword will not survive repeated abuse: the best guarantor of longevity for your sword (and yourself) is correct technique.

Rules of Engagement

Once you have agreed to fence with someone, it is important to agree on rules of engagement. This is partly to ensure safety, and partly to create an environment in which you can learn. The two most simple rules are these:

  1. Confine permitted actionss to the safety limits of your protective gear
  2. Confine permitted actions to the technical range of the least trained combatant. In other words, do not allow face-thrusts when wearing open helms, or throws when one of you is not trained to fall safely. The rules can be adapted further to develop specifi aspects of technique: for instance, you may not allow any close quarters work at all, or even restrict allowable hits to one small target. The idea is to come to a clear, common -sense agreement before facing off. You are only ready for no-holds-barred, totally “authentic” fight simulation, when you can enter such a fight with your judgement unimpaired.

Following the rules of engagement will not make you soft, nor will it dull your edge if it comes to the real thing; rather it it will develop self-control.

These rules apply to all fencing:

  1. Agree on a mutually acceptable level of safety.
  2. Wear at least the minimum amount of safety gear commensurate with rule 1. Confine allowable technique to those within the limits of your equipment.
  3. Confine allowable technique to the technical ability of the least trained
    combatant.
  4. Appoint either an experienced student or one of the combatants to
    preside over the bout.
  5. Agree on allowable targets.
  6. Agree on what constitutes a “hit”.
  7. Agree on priority or scoring convention in the event of simultaneous hits. Usually it is better
    to allow a fatal blow before a minor wound, but simultaneous hits should be avoided whenever possible.
  8. Agree on the duration of the bout either in terms of hits, such as first to five, or in real time.
  9. Acknowledge all hits against yourself. This can be done by raising the left arm, or by stopping the bout with a salute, or by calling “Halt!” and telling your opponent where and how you think she hit you.
  10. Maintain self-command at all times.

Safe Training

In my experience most injuries are self-inflicted. It is far more common for students to hurt themselves by doing something they shouldn’t, than to hurt their training partners. Here are a few simple guidelines for joint safety, which should be followed during all training. I am using the lunge as an example of a stressful action, but these principles apply to any physical action.

  1. The knee must always bend in the line of the foot. Knees are hinges, with usually a little under 180° range of movement. The do not respond well to torque (power in rotation). So whenever you bend your knees, in any style for any reason, ensure that the line of your foot, the line of movement of your knee, and the line of movement of your weight, are parallel. This prevents twisting and thus injuries. This one simple rule, carefully followed, eliminates all knee problems other than those arising from impact or genetic disadvantage.
  2. Whenever performing any strenuous task (such as lunging, or lifting heavy objects), tighten your pelvic floor muscles (imagine you need to go to the bathroom, but are stuck in a queue). This supports the base of your spine, and helps with hip alignment.
  3. Joints have two forms of support: active and passive. Passive support refers mainly to the ligaments, which bind the joint capsule together. This is basically set, and can’t be trained. When training your joint strength, with exercises or stretching, avoid any action that strains the joint capsule. Any action that causes pain in the joint itself should be modified or avoided, as it may damage the soft tissues (ligaments, tendons, cartilage). These tissues have a very poor blood supply and hence heal very slowly.
  4. Active support refers to the muscles around the joint, and these can be strengthened by carefully straining the joint with small weights and rotations. To strengthen a joint you must stress these muscles, without endangering the ligaments. Any competent physiotherapist can show you a range of exercises for building up the active support around your knees, wrists and elbows, where we need it most.
  5. Rest is part of training. Your body needs time to recover, and is stimulated by the stress of exercise to grow stronger. However, the body is efficient, and will withdraw support from any muscle group that is not used, even if for only a few weeks. So regular training is absolutely crucial.

If you can’t lunge without warming up, don’t lunge except in carefully controlled drills. Warming up is essential before pushing the boundaries of what your body can do.

If you find this advice sensible and useful, please feel free to share it as widely as you like!

If you would like these guidelines as a handy PDF, then drop your email in the box below and I'll send it to you.

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Fuck it, but don’t poke the bear. How to train when sick.

Everybody gets sick or injured every now and then, and I’ve had a pretty rough winter so far in that regard which has got me thinking about how I train when sick. In this post I’ll lay out my general principles for dealing with the problem and let me apologise in advance if it ever comes across as me whining about the flu. I really don’t mind getting ill, and I’m generally very lucky with my health.

Let’s start with the overarching principle: health comes first. This is directly drawn from one of my Seven Principles of Mastery “no injuries”. (You can find The Seven Principles of Mastery as a standalone booklet on various platforms, and it's included in my Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts). If training makes you worse, don’t do it! (You’d be amazed how often that rule is broken by people who should know better.) I train for the long-term benefits, not for the short-term buzz.

Injuries

With injuries, the trick is to modify your training to encourage recovery. My latest injury, just before Christmas (of course!) was yet another round of problems with my thoracic and cervical spine; every time I pressed even a small kettlebell above my shoulder, the right side of my neck would seize up in agony. No fun. So I went to the physio, and together we worked out a series of mobility and stability exercises that should restore mobility to the stuck bits, and restore stability to the hyper-mobile bits, and after three weeks of not being able to lift so much as a tennis ball over my head, I was back in business. So I immediately starting hoisting my biggest bell over my head, and the problem came right back. Or, that’s what I would have done when I was younger and stupider. Instead, I stalked my strength like it was a skittish colt. I very, very gently made sure that the full range of the motion was available, then slowly, slowly, added weight back on, all the while paying attention to keeping up the exercises that had restored the movement. The slightest twinge, and I’d stop. Now, three goddam months later, I’m back where I was three months ago.

But if I’d rushed it, I’d still be injured.

For impact injuries and soft-tissue injuries, the goal is the same but you need to pay attention to the difference between ‘good pain’ and ‘bad pain’; good pain you ignore; bad pain, indicating that the injury is being aggravated, you avoid.

The mnemonic I use here is “fuck it, but don’t poke the bear”. Specific neurological pain (such as my neck issue), or pain that indicates an injury is getting worse, is like a sleeping grizzly: the goal is to keep it asleep until it dies of starvation. But all the rest? Fuck it.

Sickness

So what about sickness? I have a very strong sense of the difference between a “walking cold” and a “systemic cold”. A walking cold is one with local symptoms; I might cough, or have a sore throat, or a headache, or whatever else, but the rest of me is basically ok. A systemic cold is when I can’t distinguish the boundaries of the illness, my whole body feel wretched. My goal with a walking cold is to prevent it becoming systemic. Here the principle I follow, along the lines of “no injuries”, is to pay close attention to how I feel right after doing any particular activity. Energy up is good, energy down is bad. “Avoid fatigue” might be another way to put it. So a little light stretching to preserve range of movement, leaving me feeling a bit better is ok; but if doing a push-up makes me feel tired, I’ll stop doing push-ups.

You read that right. Yes, there are times when I stop doing push-ups. Rare, but it does happen.

My first indication that my bout with tag-teaming viruses this winter was something I should pay attention to was when my cold shower in the morning left me feeling chilled to the bone, not invigorated. And yes, I did stop doing them, and gently worked my way back to them.

I’ve noticed that when my system is under attack from some horrid virus I do best by avoiding anything that elevates my heart rate more than a few extra beats per minute. So I might do one light lift, and stop. Swing a sword for a minute or so, and stop. Over the last few months when I’ve been hit by virus after virus (I’ve not been 100% well a single day since Christmas), I haven’t touched the deadlift bar. But I’ve been practising my deadlifts for a couple of minutes about three times a week, using just a stick. So the technique and range of motion is there, and, just last Friday, started back by picking up about half the weight I maxed out on last time I did them properly (before Christmas). Don’t poke the bear.

Most of the time, when I’m ill, it’s a walking cold; I can move around a bit, do light stuff, and not get sicker. But when or if it goes systemic, I have to be super-careful, and usually I don’t train at all, just the very lightest of moving about so my spine won’t seize up completely. Specific symptoms respond differently to different exercises. For example, I had a really bad cough for about three weeks in February; during that time, my Wim Hof breathing had to stop because it made me cough. But I could manage the Crane ok. When the cough morphed into a sinus nastiness, the kind where your entire skull becomes completely filled with nothing but snot, Wim Hof breathing was ok and so were some light kettlebells, but some of my meditation practices brought on bad headaches so I cut them out.

The last time I was at WMAW, in 2013, I had a bad walking cold; I was sick as a dog, coughing and feeling like shit, but I could move around. I had travelled all the way to America to fence with my peers. But I didn’t have a single bout with anyone, because I could feel it might trigger the walking cold to become systemic. That’s how seriously I take this.

Health comes first. As Count Rugen says to Prince Humperdinck, “If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything”.

And if you don't know who they are, start here.

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The Cargo-Cult Theory of Security

During the Second World War, some tiny Pacific islands were suddenly strategically important, and inundated with Japanese or American service personnel and material. In the years following the war, islanders started dressing up like servicemen and doing parade ground drill with wooden rifles, carving headphones out of wood and sitting in control towers wearing them, lighting signal fires on the runways, and in short doing everything they could to bring the influx of material goods (“cargo”) back. You can read all about these “cargo cults” here.

Because they did not understand the underlying structures behind the sudden appearance of all this wealth, they simply copied the external behaviours that seemed to attract it. They mistook form for substance, and sure enough, the cargo planes did not come back.

Financial security: multiple income streams

A friend of mine recently went from being employed to being effectively a freelancer. We were discussing how having lots of separate income streams was actually much more secure than having just one, when she came up with the analogy for the way people can mistake the trappings of security (a big house, a smart car, a good job) with security itself. It’s a kind of cargo cult. And ironically, many of those trappings make us less secure. A mortgage (literally translated as “death grip”) is the very opposite of security. Your home is secured on the mortgage so the bank will lend you the money to buy it: the security is the bank’s not the borrower’s. And the bank will take your house if you fail to keep up the payments. This has happened to several friends of mine, in the UK and the USA, in the last recession. It is horrible.

Whenever a friend of mine gets laid off, my first reaction is to congratulate them. I have discovered that this can come across as me being an asshole, so I have learned to choke back the impulse to shake them by the hand, and offer condolences instead. But inside, my actual feeling is “you’re free!” Because while a job is no doubt one perfectly good way to spend much of your waking hours, and can pay well, and even at times be worth doing for its own sake, the one thing it absolutely cannot provide is security. No company, government, or any other employer lasts forever. Countries rise and fall, companies come and go, and if you rely on a single income stream, then your financial security has a single point of failure. It doesn’t matter if you have an iron-clad lifetime employment contract: if the company goes bust they stop paying you. There’s a saying in the military: “two is one, and one is none.” It refers to redundancy in any situation; you cannot rely on anything for which there is no backup in place.

The primary solution to this is to have more than one source of income. In my own case, my income derives from teaching in my school's various branches, royalties from my books, and seminars taught outside my school. I think three is a safe minimum. Any one of those streams could fail tomorrow, and we would still be able to pay the mortgage. Just. But none of them can fail instantly, because none of them rest on a single person or entity. My readers can fire me one at a time. But I have several thousand of these wonderful people. My branches and other groups can stop hiring me for seminars; but they are unlikely to do that all at once (more likely that some catastrophe would prevent me from being able to teach).

For most employed people though, running a side-business of any kind is problematic; if it’s within their field, there may be conflicts of interest, and if their job doesn’t give them much time to spare, then there may just not be time. Some friends of mine just do not want to run a business. Fair enough. So the approach then is to siphon off at least 50% of the income into income-generating assets. This theory is beautifully presented by one of my favourite bloggers, Mr Money Moustache. In brief; learn to live off 50% of your income (easy enough if you earn more than about 40k/year, something I have never done!), invest the rest in index funds, reinvest all the income from the funds, and keep doing that until the passive income from the assets reaches the point that it meets your current expenditure. Bingo, you’re secure. Or as Mr Money Moustache would put it, retired.

But…

Well, up to a point. Because the problem with money as a marker for security is that it is highly unreliable. When my family moved to Peru in 1986, my parents bought a new car, a Nissan Sunny, for 150,000 Inti. Three years later, a beer in a nightclub cost half a million. That’s an extreme example of inflation, but we all remember the recent bank crashes, pension fund fraud, and a host of other things that can strip you of all your savings in a heartbeat. War, for instance. The Soviets invaded Finland in living memory. The property I own here would become immediately worthless if that happened again, because I would grab my kids and run, leaving everything behind. Afghanistan in the 1970s was generally a safe nice place to be. Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner has a lovely description of it. Some Europeans and Americans even retired there. Oops. Likewise Lebanon. Before the civil war, Beirut rivalled Monaco as a place for Europeans to footle off for a nice safe vacation. Less so since it tore itself apart. I don’t think it’s likely that Russia will invade Finland, nor that Europe will plunge into yet another maelstrom. But I’d be a fool to rest my sense of security on it.

What is safety?

So what is safety? Mostly, an illusion. You can lose everything, including your life, during your next heartbeat. Life is dangerous: everybody who tries it dies eventually. So step one in non-cargo-cult security is to make friends with risk. Everything is risky; if something feels completely safe, you’re wrong. Then learn to evaluate the real risk, as opposed to the perceived risk. Which is more dangerous: driving a car or eating candy?

Driving your car is very, very dangerous. About 36,000 Americans were killed in car crashes in 2012 (source). Eating too much sugar is much more dangerous. In 2010, according to the American Diabetes Association, 69,000 died from diabetes, with a further 234,000 whose death certificates credit diabetes as a contributing factor (source). In 2010, there were 25.8 million diabetic Americans. Only 1.25 million of those had type 1 (which is not caused by lifestyle). Type 2 diabetes is caused almost entirely by abuse of sugar. There are other factors, but in short, you can’t get Type 2 diabetes from a diet with no fast carbs. Here is a documentary that is worth a look.

I digress somewhat; my point is that human beings are very bad at assessing risk, and treat as safe things that are dangerous (eg sugar) and treat as dangerous things that are safe (letting your kids walk home from school). One very good book on this topic is Against the Gods, the Remarkable Story of Risk, by Peter L. Bernstein. Read it!

So what's the answer?

So the question then is what is real security? I refer you back to this post. Love is vastly more reliable than money. I know for a sure and certain fact that no matter what happens to me or my wife, my kids will neither starve nor be homeless, because somebody among my family or friends would take them in. That may seem obvious to you, but at root, this is what security means: the freedom from watching your children starve. Those friends of mine who lost their homes? They had a couple of shitty hard years, absolutely. But their children didn’t spend a single night in the open or a single day hungry. Because they had friends, sources of income other than the jobs they lost, family to take them in until they got their feet under them again, and so on.

So here are my recommendations for actual security:

  1. Spend time connecting with the people you care about. If the shit hits the fan, they’ll be there for you.
  2. Diversify your income. Have more than one stream.
  3. Build up income-generating assets. An assets is something that generate income; your home is not an asset, unless you rent it out.
  4. And most importantly: understand and be ok with the fact that it could all collapse in an instant, life is inherently unsafe. If you feel completely safe, you’re wrong.
  5. Get some perspective. What, really, are the chances of you starving to death?

I anticipate that this post will ruffle some feathers, because people don't like to be told that their sense of security is based on illusion, or that they are not managing their money very intelligently (I have friends who have earned 150k or more per year for the last 10 years and still owe money to the bank. That is baffling to me). I'm sorry if I've hurt your feelings. But comforting illusions cause more trouble than they are worth, and it's always better to see what's really there.

 

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Gun and shovel not required.

Grace saved for weeks and bought this knife…

Ten days after I first arrived in Finland, back in 1994, I met a girl. Not very long after that I met her mother Kexy, a civil servant who was a serious horsewoman, and had hunted with her father when she was younger. Rosy, the girl, told me that her mum was nervous about meeting me; most Finns are pretty shy. She also told me what had happened the first time she had brought a boy home. It wasn’t planned; they were passing her home and just popped in to pick up a book. There was Kexy, sat at the kitchen table, cleaning a 9mm semi-automatic pistol.

You can imagine the effect on the boy.

I recently posted a link to this article on my Facebook profile, and it gathered quite a lot of comments, mostly from people who seem to agree with the basic premise, and some who are very much of the “I’ve got a gun and a shovel” school of parenting.

This lead me to think a bit more about the issue.

I totally understand the visceral satisfaction of the idea of being able to murder anyone who hurts your child. I remember walking through the park near my home with my 3-month old firstborn in her pram. A young man on a motorbike (which aren’t allowed in this park) came blasting by. If I’d had a gun, I would probably have shot him. The black rage that came over me at his daring to put my baby at risk was so deep, so fundamental, that only smashing the person’s face through the back of their head would have assuaged it in the moment.

It would, of course, have been entirely inappropriate, and instead of taking my kids to the park, they’d be visiting me in prison. It’s hard being a good parent when you’re at home; it must be way harder parenting from jail.

If a person is threatening your child’s life, and killing them is the best way to stop it, then by all means, taking their life is justified. But the “gun and shovel” meme isn’t about that. It’s about how fathers want to protect their daughters, not from assault, or rape, or anything like that. We want to protect them from sex. Because we (most of us, I assume) remember what it was like to be a teenage boy, and how desperate we were to get into the knickers of the girls we went out with. It was, in the 80s at least, still a truism that girls had it, but didn’t want to give it; boys wanted it, and had to persuade them to give it up. “It” here being sex, of course. There was also a pretty universal assumption that girls didn’t want sex, and so would only do it basically as a favour to the boy, or under some kind of coercion from the relatively benign but still horrible ‘he won’t love me if I don’t’ to worse forms of influence like drink and drugs.

So let’s unpack some of these assumptions.

1) Girls don’t want sex. This is just not true in most cases. Indeed, for centuries it was believed that women wanted sex MORE than men did.  So let’s move on.

2) Whether the girl has sex or not is up to her father or her boyfriend. NO! NO! NO! It is, or should be, up to the people doing it: her and her boyfriend, assuming they are both of legal age. Of course, good parenting includes educating kids to understand the possible consequences of sex, both good and bad. But the core problem here is that in the gun and shovel scenario, the father and the boyfriend have agency, but the girl does not. So whether the woman has sex or not is down to an agreement between these two males. This was normal in the Stone Age, but it is an utterly disgusting pattern of thought in this day and age.

3) Sex = assault. Umm, no. So long as there is informed consent all round, sex does not equal assault. So while murdering a rapist has a certain appeal, murdering your daughter’s boyfriend should not. And if the daughter in question consented freely, then while it may be appropriate to counsel her against it if you think it’s not in her best interests, the boyfriend is innocent in this.

4) In the case of a woman being assaulted or coerced by a man, you should focus on the man… You see it in films and tv shows all the time; when a woman is hurt by somebody, her husband/brother/father/whoever doesn’t stay by her to help her get better; he charges off to wreak his revenge. As if it’s him who has been hurt. But the loving thing to do is to attend to the woman, not race off after the assailant; and only go after the son of a bitch if that’s what the person sinned against wants you to do. 

So what is my plan, with my two daughters?

1) Sex education. That’s number one. If they know what they are doing, then they can grant or withhold informed consent.

2) Self-esteem. I want my kids to feel that they do not have to do anything to ingratiate themselves with anyone, or do anything they don’t want to. They can say no. If they have been brought up in an environment in which their desires, opinions, and consent matters, they are that much less likely to put up with abuse of any kind.

3) Self defence. Bad stuff does happen, but my kids will know at least the basics of how to spot bad situations before they kick off, and have the wit to walk away in time. I’ll teach them physical skills if they are interested, but by themselves, those skills are useless if you’re not willing to use them.

4) Support. They should know that no matter what happens, I (and my wife of course) will support them. That ranges from picking them up from a party at 3am, no questions asked, so they don’t get in a car with a drunk driver, to helping them get through whatever bad things happen to them. They should also know that Daddy isn’t going to shoot anyone unless they specifically ask him to, and he agrees it’s a good idea.

5) Patience. They will bring home all sorts of potential partners, I imagine. Some I’ll like more than others. But the only fair way to judge any of them is “how do they treat my child?” However much I might want one, I don’t get a veto on who my daughter finds attractive. While they are minors I do get to establish curfews, bounds, that sort of thing; where they go, when, and with whom. But if I’ve done my job even half right, they will tend to make decent choices in the end. And if they do come home having been hurt in some way, I hope I’ll have the discipline to do what they need me to do to make them feel better, not what I would want to do to make myself feel better.

The best “meeting the boyfriend” scenario I’ve ever heard though came from my friend Jherek Swanger. I met him in Seattle in 2004, along with his utterly adorable 3-year old daughter. She loved fencing, and would go and get her little mask and a sword and challenge people to fight her. Because all of her daddy’s friends were swordfighters. My own kids were some years away in the future, but I asked him what he was going to do when she started bringing boys home.

I’ve got it all worked out. I’ll be sitting on the porch sharpening a longsword with a stone. Schrrrripp! I’ll look at him and say: “So, you want to take my daughter out, huh?” Schrrrripp! 

“Um… yes sir”

“You’re not planning on doing anything with her, are you?” Schrrrripp!

“Um, no sir. Really. I’ll just take her to the movies and bring her right back”

“Really? You don’t want to do anything else?” Schrrrripp!

“No! No, I wouldn’t even think about it”.

“Really? What are you, a eunuch?”

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Using the Seven Principles case study: an advanced dagger class.

Happy Mothers' day, from sunny Finland!

And what could be more motherly than a spot of medieval combat?

It is very hard to defend yourself against a fully-committed attack with a dagger. To be honest, it’s not something we focus on all that much; we tend to prefer sword fights. But a couple of weeks ago I ran a class on dealing with committed dagger attacks. It went like this:

First we ran a diagnostic; did everyone present have a reasonably complete knowledge of the dagger curriculum? The answer came back “yes”. There were no obvious gaps in knowledge (distinguishing carefully between knowledge and skill). Then I polled them; how many felt confident of defending themselves with a sword against a sword attack? All hands went up. Unarmed against a dagger? No hands went up.

The next step was to analyse our drills from the point of view of my “bullshit” theory. Where is the bullshit?

The attacks they were used to from basic classes were a) done with a training dagger, not the real thing; b) done singly; just one blow, or maybe two. No flurries of strikes; c) done without a great deal of force; and d) done usually in a set pattern of some kind, allowing them to predict what the sequence would be, so what techniques were likely to work.

We began with speed: the attacker had to make multiple fast strikes. This quickly overwhelmed the defender. Clearly there was no point being competitive about this, so using my rule of ‘c’s (which is there in the “how to spot the bullshit” post), we had the attacker coach the defender by easing off the speed to the level where the defender was successful most, but not all, of the time.

Then strength; instead of lots of fast blows, the attack was to be done as a single blow, but with maximum force. This generated slower, but more forceful actions. Again, the attacker had to coach the defender; modifying the force to what they could only just handle. All the students agreed that a single hard blow was much easier to deal with than multiple fast ones.

Speed and strength had been trained against using rubber or wooden daggers; it’s easy to be brave against a dummy weapon. So the students were given the option to train with or without masks, and with sharp daggers. Some chose no mask with sharps; some chose masks with sharps; some chose no mask with blunts; some chose masks and blunts. But all of them went more slowly, and more gently. Funny that. It is hard to be bold against lethal force.

It was actually at this stage in the class that I noticed that we were actually working through Fiore’s four virtues (celeritas, forteza, ardimento, avvisamento) one at a time. So I thought for a minute about how to train for avvisamento, foresight. And I came up with responsiveness drills, in which the attacker varies his response to the defender’s initial defence, and the defender has to adapt; they do not know what is coming in advance.

Of course, at each stage of this class, we were working on just one thing. We never did full speed, full force, highly variable attacks with a sharp weapon against an unprotected face, because someone would have died. But by breaking the problem down into its component challenges, we could address each area of bullshit in turn.

Readers of my Seven Principles of Mastery booklet will have recognised the principles at work here: we trained with no injuries, we differentiated between knowledge and skill, we ran a diagnostic, and we worked on the 20% of technique that make up 80% of what you’re likely to use (though we didn’t actually address the range of techniques available except to establish at the start that all the students in class had a sufficiently broad knowledge base). The practice was mindful, and the students were sufficiently challenged that they spent most of the time in a state of flow. The one thing we didn't really go into was adopting useful beliefs; perhaps that should be the subject of another post?

7PrinciplesCover

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Violence, a Punch, and Three Broken Legs

As you may imagine, I think about violence a lot. It’s been my experience that most people in our society either embrace violence, or shy away from it, and it’s certainly the case that we are, as a culture, massively less tolerant of violence than we used to be. Physical violence, that is. The psychological violence of our culture is appalling; entire communities of perfectly decent people vilified for believing in the wrong god, or no god, or wanting to do sex differently, perhaps with the wrong sort of person, or whatever the hell else. And at the same time, despite prohibiting violence, we have boxing (aptly described in this fascinating article on martial arts and self defence here as “a brain-damage contest”), MMA, and we allow people to take part in all sorts of activities in which they might get very badly hurt. Driving cars, for instance.

In addition, we have political parties like UKIP and the “True” Finns who would send all immigrants back to whatever hell-hole they escaped from, non-violently of course (though god knows what sort of violence awaits most of them when they get there). But that’s fine (at least according to a depressingly large number of voters) because they are not advocating direct violence against these people.

So let’s take a concrete example of an act of violence.

I honestly believe that throwing a punch is not the worst thing you can do. And in some cases, it is utterly justified. I know that this is not a popular belief, but check out this video, in which Buzz Aldrin, an elderly man, is being bullied by an arrogant and entitled little shit of a conspiracy theorist, and resolves the situation by decking him.

https://youtu.be/wptn5RE2I-k

Nice punch, Colonel Aldrin, sir!

Why do I approve? Because the person who got punched was using our culture’s restrictions on violence to get away with a different kind of violence. He had no right whatsoever to make Col. Aldrin listen to his importunate demands regarding the moon landings. He had no right to Col. Aldrin’s time, attention, or response. Yet he was aggressively invading Col. Aldrin’s personal space. Col. Aldrin tried to walk away. A hotel employee asked the entitled little prick to stop. Col. Aldrin asks him “can you please get away from me”. He finally calls Col. Aldrin a coward, a liar and a thief. And got what he entirely deserved.

I’m probably preaching to the choir here; I imagine that most of my readers, and indeed most martial artists, would see this punch as justified (as indeed local law enforcement did), and have thought a lot about things like self-defence, the right to bear arms, and so on.

But for those of you who are new to thinking about violence in anything other than black and white terms, I have a thought experiment for you, to demonstrate that any recoverable injuries sustained by violence are far less problematic than our emotional response to the violence itself. I call this “three broken legs.”

You wake up in hospital in a lot of pain. You have a broken leg.

1) You went skiing/hang-gliding/mountaineering/insert fun but dangerous activity of choice. You had an accident, and your leg is broken. It happens, you knew the risks and took them.

2) You were walking down the street one day, when somebody came up to you with a baseball bat, shouted hate into your face, and broke your leg with the bat.

3) You were walking down the same street one day, and saw a truck about to run over a child. You leap into action, you save the child, but the truck breaks your leg.

One of these injuries is neutral; one is likely to require some serious counselling and may result in long-term psychological problems, and one is a badge of honour that you will draw strength from for the rest of your life. The broken leg is the same in each case.

I suggest that your emotional response to the injury is at least as important as the injury itself. Deciding whether Buzz Aldrin’s punch was right or wrong requires that you take the context of it into account (I was careful to link to the version of the video that shows the build-up); and determining the damage done necessarily entails finding out how the prick (I will not call him a victim, because he was the victimiser, neither will I mention his name) responded emotionally to the violence. Did it give him nightmares? Probably not. He probably went back to his posse wearing his aching jaw as a badge of pride. Was it the best solution to the problem? Hard to say. Maybe, maybe not. But I see no reason why anyone should have to put up with behaviour like that, and I don’t see any available exit.

I do not require that my students hold one opinion or another about this sort of subject. I just require that they engage with this sort of question: “is this act of violence justified”?

And I would point out that except for extreme cases, resulting in permanent disability or death, the psychological violence we do to each other is potentially vastly more damaging than a bloody nose.

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Oh Finland, how art thou?

Thanks to my latest posts, about Lucca and Florence, my Finnish friends are now thinking “right, we’ve seen the last of the English git. He ain’t never coming back”. But hold, not so fast. I have moved countries many times in my life (England ’73-78; Argentina ’78-80; England ’80; Botswana ’81-86; Peru ’86-92; Scotland ’92-94; Finland ’95-6; Scotland ’97-2001; Finland 2001-present) which has left me with no real sense of home being a place. Home is people, and, to a lesser extent, some elements of culture. So the idea, and even the process, of moving to another country doesn’t faze me at all. But it has also made me think that it would be nice for my kids to see something of the world, but to always know where home is.

[If you are interested in what my family was doing in Africa and South America while I was growing up, go read my Dad's new memoir, More Sherlock Holmes than James Herriot. I haven't read it yet (it only just came out) but I know it does include baby cheetahs, angry rhinos, and me and my sister playing with a rabid dog.]

When I moved to Finland in 2001, everybody asked “Why Finland?” They still do. It’s probably the question I am asked most often. Even while teaching seminars, in foreign lands, I sometimes get asked it in class. It’s that odd a choice, apparently.

Nobody, not one person, has asked “why Italy?” They ask “how did you manage it”. (See here for the answer.) Because Italy is a normal choice. The advantages are obvious. Gorgeous architecture? Check. Great wine? Check. Great food? Check. Fabulous bloody everything? Check. And it’s all it’s cracked up to be.

But Finland? The last decade or so has seen a major improvement in Finland’s international perception; people think “good schools” or “clean environment” or something like that. But apart from the wretched bloody snow, and the way the entire population seems to be shifted towards the silent end of the gregariousness spectrum, here are some much-under-appreciated elements.

1) The Tax Office. Yes, really. Customer service in Finland as a whole sucks. But the Tax Office staff, unless you are obviously trying to defraud the people of Finland, are extraordinarily helpful, and will go out of their way to make the quite transparent tax system even clearer. And unless you are making serious great gobs of cash, the healthcare, daycare, public order, public transport, and other taxpayer-funded benefits, far outweigh the somewhat higher taxes than you might pay somewhere else.

2) Fairness and transparency. The system seems to be pretty fair all round. Sure, it’s hard to get really rich (but that’s true anywhere); but it is very easy to start a business (and there’s plenty of government help to do so), and you have to be making way more money than I ever have before you start paying seriously high taxes. Sure, there’s some corruption, but it tends to only exist at the higher levels of finance (where it exists everywhere); knowing how to deniably offer a bribe is no part of the basic education here.

3) Kids walk to school at age 7. On their own. No problem. That is really true, and totally unlike any other country I know, other than possibly Sweden or Norway.

I could add to this list decent plumbing, properly insulated houses, free daycare, no traffic, decent cycle paths and pedestrian routes (my elder daughter and I tried walking from Lucca to Torre, about 10k. We ended up walking along a dyke for much of the journey, and not quite making it (much to her fury) as there was literally nowhere for people to walk or cycle except on the road with the Italian drivers. It was just too dangerous.). Really, people, Finland is lovely.

I miss mountains. I miss really proper old buildings and castles and such. But I can travel to see those, and even live among them for a while as I am now doing. But I have no plans to give up transparency, stability, and my kids walking to school, in an education system that seems to work.

So relax, peeps. I am not seriously planning on relocating. Yet….

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How to spot the bullshit in any martial arts drill, and what to do about it.

The first play of the dagger, from the Getty MS.
The first play of the dagger, from the Getty MS.

The real thing is the only bullshit-free scenario in martial arts. If you’re an MMA fighter, that’s the ring on fight night. If you’re a soldier, that’s being in the presence of the enemy. And if you are a swordsman, that is someone trying to take your head off with a blade. But the real thing must be prepared for, so we have drills, exercises and training. Problems only arise when we mistake one scenario (a training drill) for another (the real thing). To properly understand any drill, you must have a clear idea of exactly how it deviates from reality. I call this spotting the bullshit.

Let us take a simple example, a drill that is usually included in day one of our Fiore beginners’ course: the basic execution of Fiore’s first play of the dagger. This technique is a disarm, done against the common overhand blow.

In its basic set-up, the drill goes like this:

“Both players start left foot forwards, hands down, in a proper guard position. This is very artificial, and is intended only to create a consistent starting point for beginners.

Disarm and counter

  1. Attacker and defender both in porta di ferro, left foot forwards.
  2. Attacker passes to strike with a fendente. Aim it at the mask!
  3. Defender intercepts attacker’s wrist with his left hand and
  4. Turns it to the left, creating a leverage disarm with the dagger against the back of his wrist.
  5. Defender collects dagger and strikes”

(Quoted from Mastering the Art of Arms vol 1: the Medieval Dagger page 51)

You can see the technique on video here:

There is nothing wrong with this, as a starting point. But it has at least the following dollops of bullshit in it:

  1. The attacker is not trying to kill you.
  2. The weapon is not sharp.
  3. The roles are pre-set, attacker and defender.
  4. You can’t run away or call the cops.
  5. You have to wait for the attack.
  6. You are wearing protective gear, that will allow the attacker to make contact, but would not work against a real dagger (we tried this with a mask on a dummy: the mask failed against all medieval weaponry).
  7. The line of the attack is pre-selected.
  8. Your defence is pre-selected.
  9. The attacker is not allowed to counter or continue.
  10. The attack is done with little force.
  11. The attack is done slowly.

I am sure that you can think of other dollops, but 11 is enough to be going on with. So, how do we deal with this? How can we eliminate the bullshit without killing students?

To start with, number one cannot be trained outside of the real scenario. Don’t even try. It is this one element that really makes the difference between those that have done it for real and those that haven’t. (I haven’t and don’t intend to.) Regarding combat sports, you haven’t done it till you’ve been in the ring or competed in a serious tournament. Fortunately, those are much more survivable environments, so anybody who trains seriously enough can get there and do that art “for real”. This is one of the big attractions of combat sports I think: the real environment is available. I will never forget my first fencing competition. It was an eye-opener, to say the least!

So, if my drill above is so full of bullshit, why do we do it?

It does:

  1. Teach core mechanical principles, such as grounding, finding lines of weakness, etc.
  2. Teach core tactical principles, such as control the weapon before you strike; timing, and control of distance.
  3. Given the source of our art, it gives beginners a chance to reconstruct a technique from the book.

It is a perfectly good starting point. Just as a child learning to read sounding out the individual letters and creating the words is not really reading yet, we don’t say that they should just recognise the words straight away. This level of practice is a necessary step on the way to expertise.

But be aware that this drill does NOT:

  1. Teach a survival skill.
  2. Teach situational awareness.
  3. Teach decision making or judgement.
  4. Teach the ability to execute the action under pressure.

But given our list of eleven dollops of bullshit, we can map a route through training to systematically eliminate each of them in turn (except for the first). By applying the “who moves first” multiplier, for instance, we can eliminate point 5, so the “defender” is not required to wait, but can enter or move away, gaining some control. By allowing degrees of freedom for one or other student, we can eliminate 7, 8 and/or 9. By applying the rule of c’s you can increase the intensity in a systematic way, so eliminating 10 and 11.*

It is very important not to eliminate all the bullshit all at once. Especially when eliminating no. 2 by practising with sharps, you should absolutely keep all sorts of other bullshit present to avoid serious injury.

So, by carefully considering all the ways in which a set drill is not a real fight, you can design variations to the basic version to systematically clean up some of the bullshit. You will need lots of different drills, each with a different bullshit profile, to make sure that you are training in all of the attributes of the “real” technique. (For more on customising drills, see Mindful Practice).

Just for fun, and to see if you are paying attention, I have inserted one deliberate dollop of bullshit in this post: a deliberately misleading statement made for pedagogical purposes. Can you spot it?

* The “Rule of Cs” (abridged from Mastering the Art of Arms vol 1: the Medieval Dagger p136) every drill is first worked through with the players:

  • Cooperating in creating correct choreography

This is means exactly what it says: the students are just co-operating in going through the motions of the technique.

Once that is easy, increase the difficulty by increasing intensity, or introducing a degree of freedom (e.g. is the attacker might vary the line of attack), with one player adjusting the difficulty for the other to learn at their most efficient rate- if it works all the time, ramp it up- if it fails more than twice in ten reps, ease off a bit. This is called:

  • Coaching correct actions

Finally, the players each try within reason to make the drill work for them. When coaching, the attacker would try to make sure the defender can usually counter him; when competing, you just try to make your action work. This can be dangerous if it gets out of hand, so be careful, and wear full protection just in case. In practice, the more experienced scholar should get most of the hits, without departing from the drill. This is fine, and gives a good indication of whether your training regime is working. So,

  • Compete.

 

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Teaching Teachers, part 1: Class instruction

If I wasn’t teaching swordsmanship I’d be teaching something else. Giving instruction is my best learning environment. If ever I’m having difficulty with any skill, be it woodwork, writing, or getting my sword to go where it should, I conjure up an imaginary student and in my mind teach them how to do it. Instant improvement, every time. This means that my job suits my nature, yes; but it also means that because I’ve never really studied teaching, I’ve just always done it, I find it very difficult to pass on my teaching skills. I have no method, I just do. Or rather, I had no method, I just did.

In this I have been failing my students, which is unacceptable, so for the last couple of years I have been working on teaching. I began by attending a British Academy of Fencing coaching course, in April 2010. We trained from 9am to 9pm for five days straight, and I was deeply uncomfortable and out of my depth almost the entire time. Not very enjoyable, as such, but seriously good for me. It opened my eyes to a pedagogy of teaching, and crystallised for me a clear and simple set of goals for teaching. The Art of Arms is a way of organising the practices and principles of combat so that they may be studied and taught. The BAF has done to the art of teaching fencing what Fiore did for the Art of Arms. It is irrelevant that the techniques and theory of sport fencing are radically different to those of my core systems. What matters is that there is a clear body of technical and tactical knowledge, a perfectly defined environment in which it is supposed to be applied, and a systematic way to get students from one to the other. That system is priceless.

I established a set of quite high-level teaching qualifications for the school long ago, but never put in place a clear and unambiguous ladder for students to climb to attain them. This had to change. And so I discussed the issue with various branch leaders, and we agreed that it would be a good idea to institute a series of seminars in which we would go over class instruction and individual instruction from the ground up. Once this is in place, there will be a clear and transparent way for anyone interested in becoming an instructor to do so. By making it a requirement that anyone who stands up in front of a class has had some teacher training before they do so, we not only maintain standards, but also create a face-saving way for anyone who does not wish to teach to avoid ever being asked to do so; they simply never go on the course and so can’t be asked to run a class. Of course we must also grandfather in the senior students who have been running classes for years without a piece of paper saying they can. Actual certificates and course requirements are not yet in place, but we took a major step in that direction last weekend, when I ran my first ever pedagogical weekend course. We covered running a basic class on the Saturday, and giving individual instruction on the Sunday. I’ll cover Sunday’s adventures in a second post, let’s look at what we did on Saturday.

Twelve students attended, varying in experience from having never stood in front of a class before, to having run dozens and dozens of classes. Naturally, one of our topics was how to run a class for a mixed group! But the first step, of course, was to set the requirements, the expectations. It is simply this: at the basic level, the class leader’s job is to provide a safe environment in which training will occur. That’s it. You don’t need to be able to teach the punta falsa from first principles, nor customise the class to the interests of its members: just open the doors, give folk stuff to do, and make sure no-one gets hurt. In short: create and maintain a safe training environment.

We then had a look at the structure of a typical class. It looks like this:

1. Opening salute

2. Warm-up

3. Footwork/mechanics (especially 4 guards drill)

4. Dagger

5. Solo sword practice (especially cutting drill)

6. Pair sword practice.

7. End salute.

Within each section we identified a typical structure: for example, the warm-up usually goes something like:

1. Open joints

2. Heat body

3. Activate stabilisers

4. Establish range of motion

5. Establish smooth movement

The students then had 10 minutes to plan a class, including a specific warm-up. This written plan would be developed further later in the seminar, but to start with I had them test the plan by simply going through their own planned 10  minute warm-up. Did it work as they intended?

We then started to follow the usual pattern, with each student in turn setting and demonstrating the next step, and having the class follow it. I made sure that those with the least teaching experience went first. I also compressed the practice time- the point of the day’s training was to teach the basic drills, not doing them with a partner.

When everyone had had a slot in front of the class, we stopped to look at class progression: how to know when to move on, or take a step back. In short, if everyone is busy training, leave them to it. If the flow starts to clog up, the class is either unready for the current assignment, so bring them back a step; or ready to move on, so add the next action or move on to the next drill.

You should stop the class for one of the following reasons only:

1) Safety. Things are looking dangerous, so stop.

2) Obvious error: more than half the class is making the same mistake. Stop and correct the group, rather than make individual corrections.

3) Training flow is clogged: see above.

4) Time: classes must start and finish on time. It is disrespectful to your class to keep them past the allotted time.

We then looked at the difference between setting the class a new, unfamiliar exercise, and setting them something that most of them know. In short, for new material, demonstrate step by step, and have them do each step before adding the next. Demo for 2 minutes, have them train for 4. For familiar stuff, demo for 1 minute or less, have them practice for 5. (One of my sins is I talk to much in class. Swordsmanship is learned by doing, not listening.)

Once we had set the theory, it was time for practice. They split into three groups of four, and had each member of the group in turn be the teacher, setting a familiar drill. So, short demo, and have them get on with it. The teacher then had to watch their class (all three of them!) and assess whether to move on, move back, or let them get on with it.

I then had the teachers “teach” a new drill (of course everyone present had already passed their level one, so must know the four basic drills already). This had to be done step by step, starting with something familiar, and building up from there.

This helped to introduce the idea of interval training, which is the bedrock of pacing any class. Gradually increase difficulty, until mistakes start to be made, then ease off a little, before pushing ahead again. (I go into this in more detail in my Little Book of Push-ups.)

Given that almost none of my students who lead classes get paid for their time, it is unfair to expect them to sacrifice all their training time to running classes, so we looked at when and how you can incorporate your own practice into the class. One such technique is to join the group, have everyone train in two straight lines, and when time to change partners, you hold the corner and everyone else shifts one place to their right. The person you just trained with goes across to your right (or waits out one turn if there’s an odd number in class including you).

We then turned out attention to running a mixed class, the pattern of which should go:

1) Everyone together, seniors helping juniors.

2) Juniors and seniors split into groups- juniors practice what they just learned, seniors doing something at their level.

3) Back together, but this time seniors get to play a little, taking advantage of the junior’s predictability, or beginner’s unpredictability.

The basic goal is that everyone in class gets something they can do, something they can almost do, and the students at various levels learn to value each other.

Of course it often happens that students may show up to class that have more experience than the student in charge, so I gave the attendees a few key phrases to use for pushing people along who are already ahead of you. Such as: “add a degree of freedom to that”; “coach for the first two passes then do the drill competitively”; “how’s your grounding?” etc.

I had the students expand their original class plans to include more advanced variations on the set drills, so that if more experienced students showed up their plan could easily accommodate them. I showed them how to do it with a basic example:

They then worked up their plan, before putting it into action. I split the attendees into two classes, and each class being further split into “seniors” and “juniors”. The class leader for each group had to practice setting the whole class an exercise, then splitting them up by skill level and assigning different content to each group, then bringing them back together. We largely left out the actual training time, though everyone present knew that in a real class you must leave them to practice. The drill was for the class leader to practice assigning appropriate content, and splitting and reforming the class as necessary.

We then looked how the attendees could maintain and improve the skills they had picked up over the course of the day. It is now school policy that anyone who has attended this kind of course can ask to lead a section of someone else’s class, to get to practice their demonstration and observation skills. We will also encourage them to take a whole class, at first with a more experienced student present as back-up in case things start to go wrong, and then on their own.

Towards the end of the day we discussed the difference between being responsible and being culpable. While students are under your care, you are responsible for their safety. But this is a naturally dangerous activity, and accidents may happen. Provided you stick to the syllabus and safety guidelines and behave responsibly, you can’t be held culpable even if you are the one responsible. This lead us on to a set of scenarios, such as: what do do if

1) You see a student sitting out? ask them what’s wrong, help them if needed.

2) There is an accident? Depending on the severity: either apply first aid, organise a lift to the nearest Accident and Emergency room, or call an ambulance.

3) You have a student asking too many derailing questions? Tell them to ask them after class.

And so on.

It only remained to define success. In order of importance, your basic class was successful if:

1) There are no injuries.

2) Everyone was busy

3) They ended class better swordsmen than they started it.

All in all, it was a hugely important day for the future of the School, and I was absolutely delighted by the way the students engaged with the process of becoming teachers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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