The Thing of Mastery Part V

Continuing on with the discussion of Mastery, as I said in the previous post a big part of Mastery is this knowing yourself your enemy and his capabilities within the art of the possible. Again, Warrior Flow pure and simple is a system of fighting designed to train people through the Warrior Mindset, “in the body” that they already possess and to be able to fight at an optimum level for their lives and win the fight. That’s right, win the damn fight! Especially if it’s for their lives!

Warrior Flow is not just a martial art, but a philosophy, and the science of winning in combat. With an emphasis on bringing the fight right to the enemy with ruthless efficiency for the sole purpose of their utter destruction and the preservation of yourself. Warrior Flow above all “abhors” the spirit of fear and will never entertain it nor take counsel of it. The only fight that really matters, that really counts, is the one you win for your life and those you protect, everything else is all bullshit, a game.

This process I have in the past referred to as “polishing” and is in line with the Japanese philosophy “Kaizen” or “continual improvement”. I believe without this way of thinking, this beginner’s mindset if you will there is no way to attain Mastery for Mastery is a never-ending thing. 

In other words, we seek rather than training people in a bunch of techniques the ultimate goal is to enable them “in the body”.  Again, “in-the-body” to continually improve in which over time their movement becomes so “refined”, so “smooth”, so “seamless”, so “creative”, that they “transcend technique”. 

Meaning they reach a point where their ability to deal with another person’s motion becomes so well developed. That it pretty much doesn’t matter what the attacker does. To reiterate the philosophy along with “Don’t let it happen in the first place”, pertaining to a potential attack, and a number of other concepts that I learned from my Masters over the years form the core underpinning that has shaped my training philosophy and the “why” I do what I do the way I do it when I do it.

The Wilderness of Mirrors

I’m often asked by people,

What I think is the best art for them to study?

What are my thoughts on this art or that art?

What do I think about a certain martial arts instructor?

While my opinion is obviously biased I try to remain as objective as possible because to give them a primer on all the arts that I’m familiar with will only confuse them. It’s simple if they already knew the answers they wouldn’t ask me in that truly inquisitive tone. Over the years I’ve sort of come 180 degrees on a lot of things because I realize people are asking the wrong questions. Not their fault mind you, because they just don’t know.

The reason is the martial arts for the average person is a wilderness of mirrors with so many styles to choose from all promising the same things. Like the funhouse at the amusement park nothing is what it seems. Things that look to good to be true while often they are, in the same vein a person with greater physical ability could probably make the same lame looking techniques work. Things that are simple and look like nothing are scoffed at and things that are unworkable on the street are hailed as the thing you want to learn and are defended with religious zeal. In other words, everything is distorted by our perceptions and depending on what you understand determines how you will view what you are seeing.

I belong to a number of martial arts forums and I find interesting some of the arguments that take place over what style of fighting is best for self-defense. Now most folks mean well and some of it is just silly whose dick is bigger fight club bullshit. My favorite argument to watch is how people who are proponents of MMA, the art de jure (usually I find them to be young guys in their 20s) who argue with people whose arts literally teach the same skills but because they wear a uniform of some kind somehow their arts are inferior to MMA. Or the folks as in a recent argument that scoffs at JKD yet advocate MMA as they attempt to proselytize the sinners into right-minded thinking. They miss the whole point of the name Mixed Martial Arts which was on a philosophical level basically what Bruce Lee was advocating. Go figure.

A Little History

Like most people when I started my martial arts journey, I had visions of fists of fury and poison death touches. Hey when you’re 19-years old, that’s the kind of thing you have in your head. After a few sessions with my first Sensei, Sensei Versey Graham, a former Marine originally from the hood in East St. Louis and later Hugo, OK he had trained in Isshin Ryu while stationed on Okinawa. He was hardcore and now that I look back at it probably a little fucking crazy. He was one of those guys where if it weren’t for the Marine Corps his life would have probably taken a wrong turn at some point because he loved to fight and loved to shoot. Sensei Graham was quick to dispel those notions with a focus on what was real versus some romanticized version of what the martial arts were.

Sensei Graham was old school, knuckle push up’s, makiwara boards, strict form and with the exception of strikes to the eyes, throat, and groin he was all about sparring. Purple bruises, fat lips, and swollen noses were the order of the day and of course, he was well versed in the healing arts. Like the Wolverine, it sucks to have those claws if you don’t have the instant healing. Sensei Graham knew how to get your body back in shape so your shit was right for a fresh beating. When I was stationed in Iraq in 2005 it broke my heart to learn that my old teacher who also helped me get into the Marines as an Officer passed away earlier that year. He was a great mentor and fearless and like Grandmaster Carron at his passing, I wish I had told him that…

Over the decades I’ve come to discover that for many of us myself included there are a number of things that we may have gotten wrong in our pursuit of perfection and Mastery in the martial arts. I’m older now and hopefully wiser and now I see this stuff with a different set of eyes. I believe the focus or overemphasis on techniques and drills has lead people away from some fundamental truths and that is. Above all, you have to develop some level of control over your body and how to move within time and space upfront if you are to achieve Mastery. Sounds obvious but rarely is it implemented. 

While you saw this type of thing in the movies of old like The 36 Chambers of Shaolin and even the first Karate Kid movie (the second one was pretty good but the third installment sucked so bad I had to go rent the first one just to get my mind right… just sayin). Today, and I want to reemphasize this point that, this idea of developing the body first is a radical departure from the way many arts are taught. In most martial arts there is in my view still an overemphasis on technique or the development of tools, and not the actual mechanisms in the body of how things work within the known universe.

Don’t get me wrong there’s nothing wrong with tool development or technique because you can’t have a fighting system without it. But at some point, if your students are to as I like to say “kick that ass” you’re going to have to teach them how to make the technique work under dynamic conditions, and you can only do this by developing their body to respond appropriately to the subconscious competence level of thought.

To their credit even though Musashi was talking about this sort of thing for over 400 plus years ago and boxers have known this. The idea of developing better timing in the body for fighting and not just hand speed, etc., are starting to become more commonplace.

Now if they could just focus on well… how it actually works?

Somewhere in Time

When Neo in the Matrix fought Agent Smith in the last part of the movie once Neo became awakened. While agent Smith was going all out Neo was just coasting, blocking and striking at will.  In other words, his ability to anticipate as well as play-off of the inverse relationship of Agent Smith’s movements made it easy to overcome his seemingly supernatural speed. Thus, kicking that ass!

Like I said before everything takes time... moving takes time, thinking takes time, anticipating takes time, patience takes time, As Einstein showed, time is also relative to our position and observation of events. Time is also a perception and is every bit as much influenced by our thoughts and how our bodies process information takes time, and our perspective, observation, and understanding of it shapes what we think is possible.

I’m just going to say it flat out if you want to develop Mastery you also have to develop an appreciation for time and how fast can a human being actually move or react to something within the known universe.

By now every police trainer, martial arts instructor, practitioner, marksmanship coach, or sports coach is familiar with “Hick’s Law”. I also want to point out that not only is it one of the most misused studies to validate their point of how fast a person can react especially under duress.

Like the infamous 10,000 Hour Rule popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers” (something he never directly said by the way). Hick’s Law in the same vein has for many become a definitive standard for how human reaction time works and people have even attributed things to his study that he like Gladwell never said. In other words, people filled in the blanks to make the point they wanted to make to convince people that there was some level of academic rigor behind what they were saying.

The problem is even with Hick’s original study he was making huge assumptions that just don’t hold up today. In a nutshell, his study showed that when challenged to perform multiple tasks in a relatively short period of time. Initial reaction time seems to slow until it reaches a certain level where it remains relatively constant or the person becomes overwhelmed or freezes because they don't know what choice to make. The problem is not in the study he did in the early 1950s it’s that the people who quote this study like gospel act as if there have been no advancements in the study of human performance. Or ways to measure it in the last nearly 70 years. As Chaucer might say they, "speaketh out their arse..."

Even worse are those that repeat this study as an absolute in their training when they do so, they do their students a disservice because they are being told something that is not only not true but can if framed incorrectly, only prevent them from seeking ways to improve their performance. In past blog posts, I’ve discussed this in general terms how human reaction time works so I won’t get into too much detail here because I will cover it in more detail when I discuss ways to improve your movement and reaction time in a future blog post. But there are a few things I want to point out:

• Whatever full speed is for you is full speed. The key is you can improve speed with training but you don’t know what full speed is until you reach it. and as you become more efficient in your movement you may never truly know. In other words, even in the body, you don’t know what you don’t know until you know it, and you won’t know until you know it.
• While our reaction time is a set thing meaning we can only react but so fast with training you can improve reaction time in the same way you can improve speed. Thus my previous point.
• If you trained yourself to behave or react in a certain fashion by asking the right questions about movement. You can develop different responses to different stimuli and even develop multiple options to the same stimuli.
• You can if you train yourself properly, train to take on multiple inputs of information in a short period of time. You know there was a time where I was leery about using sports analogies when discussing the combative arts because I didn’t want folks to get the wrong understanding about the differences between sports or more specifically sport fighting and real fighting. But you know what, over time I’ve realized that was just wrong thinking. There are a lot of things we can glean about human movement from sports and more specifically we can by examining sports as well as a million other things people do every day. To call bullshit on a lot of false assumptions out there about movement and how people interact with each other in time and space.
• People do this stuff all of the time when they play sports where they develop what is called vision, savvy, skill. Hell, even little kids do this when they play sports yet we have people out there teaching people even in law enforcement that this type of movement is not possible. Well… don’t tell that to all those little league coaches teaching kids how to be infielders. This way of thinking is just not true. I’ll say it again. Not true!
• Through training, you are capable of developing the ability to distinguish between different responses or stimuli faster than you can move and train to respond appropriately to a high degree (ie., develop purposeful habits).

While doing research on this, in an excellent article by Hoch Hochheim, “Hick's Law – Reaction Time in Combat, Or How Modern Research Challenges the Value of the 70-Plus-Year-Old Hick's Law!"

He makes several great points,

“…just how fast can we get? How dumb should we be to fight back confusion and stalling out? Don't ask Mr. Hick from the 1950s. Mr. Hick was not conducting tests on baseball or fighting, and the 1950's computer he used long ago became a stone-age museum piece.”

He goes on to point out the following:

     1) Hick's Law certainly exists, in its most generic sense of an idea. The overall idea is good to know. Things do take milliseconds to see and respond.

       2) There are 1,000 milliseconds within one second. Not many grasp this. Almost no one can conceive just how fast 100, 250, 500, or even 750 milliseconds actually are.

     3) There are other, more modern, reaction studies with differing and prove even faster results than Hick's.

     4) It is blindly regurgitated and overrated in training courses.

     5) These misuses and misunderstandings are frequently used to sell training programs or to feign a certain "insider" expertise.

     6) Hick's Law is often used to dumb down police, military, and martial arts programs.

     7) People can only get so fast within these milliseconds anyway. Losing or winning by milliseconds may not be consistently manageable.

     8) Hick's widely accepted version of math and expanding delays between multiple choices cannot be played out in the reality we witness in our daily lives around us such as walking, driving cars, or the common sports events that even children play successfully.

     9) Many other definable issues can cause choice delay. And all delays simply cannot be blamed on the root, Hick's Law principle. Stress and emotion can cause delay. Stuns and gas can confuse and delay. Also lack of sleep, antihistamines, and numerous other ailments. Also, your “zero-to-sixty” alertness before the needed response is important and the subject of a whole other essay.

   10) Hick's Law and its milliseconds are rather inconsequential as a martial training tenet. “They” sell you Hick’s Law for about $1. It may only be worth about 15 cents.

In the Kindergarten of Good and Evil

“Ryan Reynolds: My job is to keep you out of harm’s way…

Samuel L. Jackson: Shit motherfucker… I am harm’s way!”

--The Hitman’s Bodyguard

You’ve got to love that quote above, so here’s the deal. People train in a martial art to become “harm’s way”. Your students are not there for any bullshit and if you’re not trying to make them harm’s way you really need to find something else to do. Like for real!

You know as a former Marine nothing pisses me off more than people whether in a martial arts class or an LEO / Military training course treating warriors like children. When I was in the Corps if there was a Marine who didn’t measure up and people felt he was inadequate. Whenever they would complain about said “shit-bags” my only question to those leaders who felt that way about them was,

“If you feel that way then why is he still in the Corps? Get him the fuck out of here!”

My attitude was if you have a Marine that is so incompetent that you can’t trust him to do Marine things. You need to push him out the door as soon as possible because dealing with the problem in combat is not the time to figure that shit out. I find this attitude childish.

Like the misuse of the LAPDs ASLAT Reports statistics to support the often repeated and incorrect statement that 90% percent of fights go to the ground. The one observation that Hock Hochheim pointed out that I found very interesting and I’ve felt the same way is point Number 6. Where this way of thinking has been used to dumb down training programs for those who have to go into the heart of darkness as a profession and close their minds off. Once you buy into this way of thinking until you shake off the hypnosis your learning ceases.

This is bullshit…

This comes from the minds of people who either do not know how the universe works, are too lazy to find out or are too lazy to train people properly. In any event, it does not matter what the answer is, whatever the reason it’s not good.

I believe this misunderstanding over the years and I alluded to this in my last post, has destroyed the development of countless people who earnestly seek the ways and skills of the warrior for self-preservation. As I build towards my next series of posts on how time and developing proper timing affects combat this will become clearer.

Like I’ve said before how you think of a thing influences how you move, how you train etc., and how you move reinforces how you think of it. In other words, our behavior is driven by our beliefs if you believe the wrong things you will act as such and if you don’t believe something is possible then you act as such because it doesn’t exist for you.

Now… and trust me when I say this because I know this for a fact, there are those who when I discuss how reaction time works and how humans move within time and space who scoff at it. They think it is a waste of time to study such things. They’re only concerned with what they can see in front of them. They can’t see it with their minds so they can’t see it with their eyes. They don’t believe it exists so it is not real for them.  Yet it is a skill that 10-year old running backs use all of the time in little league football. The truth is they really do not understand it which is why they cannot master the ability to manipulate the perceptions others have of time to their advantage. They can’t explain it to a 10-year old so they really don’t understand it.

Once Again What You Really Want To Do

I went over this in my last post but some of it needs repeating.

• Learn in your training, based on how the universe works (i.e., laws of physics, human physiology), to ask better questions. When you ask better questions you not only get better answers but often you answer your own question just by asking.
• Understand that if you can make an observation about something based on knowing how it works, and understand the "why’" question, you can train yourself to respond in the manner you want to respond and teach yourself to the subconscious competence level to make a better choice in your movement, and on and on.
• Understand that anything that you teach yourself how to do to the subconscious competence level, by the time your body is in motion "it" whatever your body is trying to do already happened. This is a scientific fact! And how guys fake each other out in sports all of the time.

I’ll reiterate this point for those who asked me about it. If a given technique for say dealing with a strike is to block it and I’m using this just as an example. While nothing necessarily wrong with that if you can do it. It avoids the obvious questions you should be asking. Remember if you want to get ahead of the game you need to learn to ask better questions.

Generally speaking, and this is just the way my mind works, if I have time to block it then I have time to avoid it; if I have time to avoid it; then I probably have time to strike and preempt all of that nonsense in the first place.

If not?

Well, then you were probably going to get hit anyway because you may not have enough time to avoid it completely. Now, this does not mean that you still can’t do something about it by trying to move out of the way it just means you have to accept on some level you’re probably going to get hit.

So the only question here is how will you be hit?

Moving away from the strike?

Getting grazed by the strike?

The point is by training to recognized things sooner you get to move sooner but in order to do so, you need an appreciation as to how time works for combat. The last point I’ll make on this, just understand and don’t let anyone tell you differently. If you can get ahead of another person’s movement you can do things that seem to defy logic and physics, things that come right out of the Kung Fu movies. Cool shit or as one of my students calls it “superhero stuff” sometimes right in their face. But in truth, it only seems that way especially to those who do not understand and therefore cannot see these things with their minds.

Again, within Warrior Flow through this understanding, we do not strive to follow people although at times it cannot be avoided but strive to get ahead of their movement and lead them to the wrong place... for them.

This is the ability, to perceive and cut things off through your perceptual awareness beforehand that all practitioners of Warrior Flow need to strive for in all they do when performing the Warrior Flow Exercise. 

Well, that’s it, for now, like before I know this was a little long-winded but I felt it was important to share as it relates to Mastery.

Thank you. 

P.S. for those who want to learn more about how to develop this type of movement.

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     Al Ridenhour

     CEO, Creator Warrior Flow™

Al Ridenhour is a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the US Marine Corps with 28-years of service active and reserve with multiple combat tours to Iraq and Afghanistan. He has also served as a Law Enforcement consultant to the NJ State Police Special Operations Section, NJ Transit Police Operations Section, The NJ Regional Operations and Intelligence Center, the FBI Philadelphia Bomb Section, and subject matter expert to the US Department of Homeland Security's, Explosives Division. With nearly 40-years of Combative Arts experience, he is recognized as a self-defense expert worldwide and is highly sought out for seminars, workshops, lectures, and special individualized training.  He is the author of "Warrior Flow Mind" (2020), Co-Author of "Attack Proof: The Ultimate Guided in Personal Protection (Human Kinetics, 2010) and the Co-Author of "How to Fight for Your Life" (June 2010).

For more go to https://protectyourself.mykajabi.com/

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