Timing is everything in life,, and also in fighting. A person can practice and train his entire life and fail to develop the timing required for a real altercation. In order to develop the timing we must expose ourselves to "as real a fight' as we can. This will depend on the skill level,, but we must place ourselves in a stressful situation and be forced to use what we know. Now we have all watched TV and the fights in movies. Unfortunately this is the largest exposure that most of us have to a real fight. And our mind will revert to this "exposure" when are placed under stress,,, and we will try to reproduce the pretend scenes. We find out (in a rather dramatic way) that this will fail for most of us. We must do what we know and not try to make things up on the fly. Right now the skill set has been building and it may seem boring to perform these basic strategys,,, but if allowed,, the body will take over from the mind and success will follow.
SO, in order to not produce a large amount of injuries to each other,, each man was placed into combat against YHC. We started off slow, with YHC only defending. Motorboat and Fingerlickinggood where tentative at first, their bodies unsure of how to utilize the techniques (they have been practicing) in a combat situation. Like testing the water, each dipped his foot into the ring and tried out whaat they knew. It was awkward at first but as the nervousness settled down,, their moves began to flow more naturally. Effective attacks began to be produced and the surprise of success brought about the fun of battle. And then reality set in,,, YHC was allowed to attack (at slow speed). Once again the nervousness suffocated the mind and the feet got stuck in an invisible pool of cement. Moving the feet in battle is extremely important,, and not as easy as one would expect. Stress puts our minds and bodies into protective mode and taking steps into and around a person trying to hit you is not what the body wants to do…. But it must. So we do the same attack and defense over and over until the body figures out it can do these things without the approval of the nervous mind. And then the fight truly begins. But "This Aint Swimming" and the next thing to stand in the way of success is getting hit. We are training to fight not swim, and no matter how good we are,,,,, we are going to get hit. And as Mike Tyson said,, "everyone has a plan until they get hit". So we expose the reason we got hit, train the body to adapt and hopefull avoid, block or counter and move on to our attack. And if we get hit, we train ourselves to continue,, we destroy what it was that attacked us and move on inward to center line attacks.
And, we really started having fun as the moves, strikes, defenses and techniques began to flow more easily. We did this for an hour straight, and if you wonder why they fight in rounds, resting between each, on TV,,, it is tiring. YHC was drenched at the end of the training and I believe each man got a good workout, and a few bumps and bruises.
We will be revisiting the battle portion each week to maintain the progress in timing and a dose of reality. It is also fun,,, and we like that.
Thank you for the battles this morning. I am honored to be able to train with you fine men.