Castles and Cornerstones: Level Up

True self-protection is a castle with layered battlements and buildings. The castle’s individual structures represent unique and essential subject matter areas, contributing individually while reinforcing the whole. A cornerstone is the first set stone around and upon which the rest of a building’s foundation forms and, for our purposes, Cornerstones are central concepts or themes upon which areas of self-protection rest. 

Four central areas form the most important structures in our self-protection castle, each with its own cornerstone. These areas are Bad Guys 101, Becoming, Level Up, and Beyond Power.
This Cornerstone is central to understanding physical approaches to solving the Bad Guy problem: Level Up.

Preface

The crowd murmured in anticipation as the instructor positioned his students for the next demo. Suddenly, he exploded into motion, striking his prey with blinding speed. His hapless victims regained their composure as the instructor stared intensely at the crowd around him, basking in their adulation.

Rolling my eyes any harder would have flung them out of my head.

The instructor’s demo ingrained two things: ineffective striking and standing, unresponsive, when attacked suddenly. Seems dumb, right? But self-defense and martial arts (SD/MA) are rife with these suboptimal practices. "Level Up" is about building the best physical training for developing stronger individuals rather than serfs or zombies.

Roll Your Own

“In the real world, these are just people with ideas. They’re just like me and you when smoke and cameras disappear.”

-Dead Prez

I've learned early to be an active, skeptical, agentic participant in my learning. My eminently quotable father had it right: "you don't buy these; you have to roll your own.” Functional growth requires individual engineering; nothing worthwhile comes ready-made. SD/MA training is no different.

All training should focus on building students’ power. Instructors should be physically, mentally, and emotionally engineering growth in their charges while students must actively, intentionally participate in strengthening themselves. Unfortunately, many instructors hoard power, pushing students to be passengers in their own journeys. I’ve walked away from such toxic environments; the epistemologies made my teeth itch. Even among solid instructors, there are limitations to playing practically, ethically, or safely and students must be active participants if they're to overcome the limitations. 

My varied experience and search for cool ideas has adjusted my training to keep me in the driver’s seat, even under suboptimal conditions. When I became an instructor, I invited my students to find their own ways.

The “Level Up” series examines said adjustments, both those I’ve practiced for years and ones I’m still pondering. I’ve borrowed from friends, training partners, and teachers. Use it all or none of it. Students and instructors growing, on their own terms, is all that matters.

It’s your life.

-M

Level Up: Flaws and Scars

Preface

The crowd murmured in anticipation as the instructor positioned his partners for the next demo. Suddenly, he exploded into motion, striking his prey with blinding speed. His hapless victims regained their composure as the instructor stared intensely at the crowd around him, basking in their adulation.

Rolling my eyes any harder would have flung them out of my head.

The instructor’s demo ingrained two things: ineffective striking and standing, unresponsive, when attacked suddenly. Seems dumb, right? But self-defense and martial arts (SD/MA) are rife with these suboptimal practices. "Level Up" is about building the best physical training for developing stronger individuals rather than serfs or zombies.

Scars and Flaws

Physical self-defense is practicing for a worst-case scenario: being forced to protect yourself by breaking other people. Effective training requires partners, posing at least two problems. First, broken people can’t train which means we either purposefully injure training partners or train not to hurt people. Second, half the time we’re practicing losing while partners take their turns defending. These realities are the results of training flaws and training scars. Training flaws are purposeful adjustments in methodology designed to maintain safety. However, when an instructor is unaware of the training flaws in an exercise, they become training scars: unintentionally ingrained bad habits. Both training flaws and scars ingrain as deeply as the skills the training’s designed to develop.

For example: your training partner puts you in a headlock; you drive his chin back, “attack” his groin, and drop him. Great job! But why’d you let him grab you? You spent just as many reps allowing yourself to get grabbed as you did “defending.” Moreover, if you’d counterattacked with commitment he’d be curled up on the floor; what did your partner get out of that rep, acting practice? Training ingrains habits into all participants. If the “bad guy” practices attacking weakly and then passively taking a beating, aside from giving you a bad stimulus to which to tie a response, he’s ingraining his ineffectual actions just as deeply as you’re ingraining yours. The solutions lie in making conscious adjustments to make training both safe and effective.

-Go Slow- Improve efficacy and safety by changing your speed. Slowing down is a great safety flaw that promotes perfect mechanics, precise targeting, and full follow through without injury. Moving slowly also limits training scars: predators don’t kill slowly so, when partners attack, you’re not training yourself to ignore a serious threat. In the headlock defense example: practice the initial attack unthreateningly slowly and, once you both feel comfortable with how headlocks work, start defending them. Still slowly, have your partner try to headlock and, as soon as you detect a threatening motion, do something about it. Gradually, let your partner apply the headlock more and more so you train counters at every stage of the attack.

-Use Equipment- Equipment like pads and armor allows for striking with power and intent without doing serious harm to your partner. This avoids frequently seen training scars like pulled punches or purposeful inaccuracy. When practicing headlock counters with your partner, have them position a pad or focus mitt near their groin so you train to strike with power and follow through.  

-Train from Surprise- Practicing from surprise involves restricting visual or audio cues. With this you can counter at every stage of an attack without the training scar of ignoring assault indicators. Coming back to headlock counters, have your partner set up close to you with a pad arranged to protect his groin. Close your eyes and have your partner randomly head lock at full speed. React immediately to the aggressive touch and counterattack the pad. Ideally, the level of speed, combined with the surprise, should force you to react at varying stages of the attack.

-Use Safety Officers- During many drills; especially as intention, energy, and skill increase; it becomes difficult to participate and be conscious of safety simultaneously. Many adjust for this by unconsciously employing bad habits but safety officers can help maintain safety protocols without training scars.

-Involve Resistance- Attackers shouldn’t be practicing losing while defenders practice winning; you should be retaliating or, at least, fending. Coming back to the headlock example: when you’re the attacker applying the headlock, push your hips back to avoid the groin attack and cover up to fend off follow up strikes. Even injured attackers will respond in some way to a defender’s counteroffensive onslaught, do the same in practice.

-Move with Intent- This isn’t so much an adjustment as a principle. Whatever moves you’re doing should do damage if not for your chosen safety flaw. You should strike with full intent to do damage which is only limited by a pad, partner’s reaction, or another intentional element. Training with intent enhances realism and helps find potential holes in safety protocols. So, when you’re counterattacking after the headlock, avoid a training scar; use full intent so your partner has to rely on pads or armor, or even defend themselves.

Notice that these safety flaws counterbalance each other, creating a robust training method without major holes and avoidant of training scars. Conscious adjustments and safety flaws should always exist but creativity can blend them to your advantage.

Be dangerous, train safely

-M  

The Mission

I don’t think I even saw the gun. 

The memory of that afternoon has long since blurred and blended with several others. I distinctly recall curiosity at their awkwardly coordinated movements as we walked down the empty train platform toward the stairs. It was late afternoon on a weekday and, as their adjusted pace met mine, one of them reached for his waistband. I vaguely remember the glimmer of something metal arcing toward my face and alarm bells going off in my head. I stepped back, forcing him to reorient around his companion, and ran for the exit. The train station happened to be next to a school where I’d tutored; I made some excuse to get past security and hid in the bathroom. After what felt like an hour, I walked out of the school and saw them headed in another direction. I’d had minor run ins on the train before, particularly with people from that area, and wondered if this was related. I wasn’t even sure what had just happened but the clearest memory of that day was the feeling, expressed out loud as I turned to talk home.

“Not me. Not today.”

Though that day’s experience cemented, in my teenage mind, my orientation toward victimhood, it was just one piece in a tapestry of influences. I’d grown up weird: living in a neighborhood where my parents did gang intervention and going to school with kids who lived so far from the tracks that they didn’t know there was an “other” side. My parents’ combination of ivory tower backgrounds and community outreach programs meant that my mentors were a mix of ex-cons and valedictorians. I spent my formative years on both sides of a fence, trying to reconcile what I saw in the neighborhood with what I learned in the outside world. I began to code switch; my school persona was night and day different from the neighborhood version. Navigating both gave me invaluable perspective but I spent most of my time as a man without a country. Eventually, I concluded that my neighborhood friends mattered much more than my classmates and began to focus on understanding the politics of that environment.

Most of the kids in my age group, civilians or combatants, didn’t consciously understand what we were seeing or experiencing, conceptually. I thought that being scared all the time in a neighborhood where friends and acquaintances were killing and dying meant that I was a coward. I learned to approach small conflicts with irrational apprehension, assigning the weight of "hood politics" to dissimilar contexts. The street guys I grew up with were learning by trial and error, only to realize the foolishness of their youth well past the point when it could have helped. We were all flying blind; led by rumor, conjecture, and others’ brutal examples. I managed to make it through, more or less unscathed, through a combination of divine providence, protective allies, occasional bouts of strategic efficacy, and dumb luck. My father’s pull in the neighborhood played the biggest role in keeping me safe but even he couldn’t fully protect me from an environment where young men proved themselves through violent acts and other forms of creative dysfunction.

As I transitioned into young adulthood, I began working in urban education and saw, routinely, that many young people were learning hard lessons in similar ways to those of my contemporaries. I realized that, even in contexts rife with violence, many children were also flying blind and gained new perspective on how much this reality contributed to unnecessary suffering throughout their communities. A large part of my personal mission crystalized. 

My goal in this field is to do what was done for me. I want to put conflict and violence into perspective, primarily to help others avoid learning the hard way as so many in my orbit did, but also to use the material to build better lives. SD/MA (self defense and martial arts) showed me how much power I could wield in my own life, coming from circumstances where I felt powerless and afraid. I want to help other people find, claim, and use that power and create a better world.

-M