The Martial Touch - Part I

One of the most interesting aspects of the martial arts, is when it comes to actual application there is a serious debate as to which style or system is effective or what system is most applicable for actual self-defense. While that debate will in my view never be resolved because let’s face it every man thinks he’s right in his own eyes and thinks the system they train is the best, one of the best or at least the most effective for self-defense. If you’ll notice in many of my blog posts, I don’t really knock any particular system, now that doesn’t mean I won’t call out stupid concepts or techniques.

However, the main reasons I don’t do this are 1) life is short and I don’t have time for the dick measuring contests; 2) there is something to be said for individual talent and you cannot dismiss that, and some people have enough physical skill to make almost anything work for them; and 3) there is this intangible quality to making a strike or controlling move work that goes beyond mere technique and that quality is actually how we make things work. Okay and 4) life truly is short and I just don’t have the energy arguing over who’s kung fu is best.

Like I said there is this intangible quality to how we really make things work and that is what the focus of this next series of blog posts will cover and that is this thing we call “touch.”

“It” or what is it?

“When I strike, I do not strike hard or soft I strike to kill.”  ―Miyamoto Musashi

Okay, here we go…

I remember when I was about 12 years old, every now and then I would be hanging out with my grandmother, “Ma Sis.” She wasn’t my real Grandmother per se but my great aunt, but we called her grandma anyway because she practically raised us with my parents, plus she had that pure white hair like Mary McLeod Bethune. Even more, she was very close to my mother they were like partners in crime and every time they got together you knew some sort of scheme was afoot. I can also tell you, her, and my mother every now and then had a bad habit of engaging in some poaching activities.

Ma Sis, like my mom or Grandmaster Carron, was one of the most talented people you would ever meet. She was born right before the turn of the last century at a time where if you didn’t have pioneering skills life got really tough for you fast. She could cook, skin animals, shoot, hunt, fish, sew… make booze, etc., and was probably a little crazy. I once watched her catch an eel during one of our illegal fishing activities, step on the body, stretch it out with the fishing line and cut its head off like the Kurgan from Highlander. Me and my brother thought it was cool until we found out it was for dinner. She was one of those southern girls that if you got on her bad side, the next meal she fed you might be your last. You just knew it was a place you didn’t want to go with her. I can remember asking my mom when she would do things “How does she do that?” She would just laugh. Because you see, Ma Sis never seemed like she ever struggled to do anything because in everything she did she just had that touch.

What is touch in the martial arts?

When we discuss this thing, we call touch we’re really trying to define something that has sort of that je ne sais quoi quality to it. Touch is neither “this nor that,” it is that space between too much and too little, for it is just right. Just enough to achieve the thing you want to achieve and no more. Touch is the ultimate quality of the concept of balance or control of equilibrium “in all things.”

Now, in my school of fighting touch is the essence of what we call creativity for there is a mental aspect of touch where how you think influences how you move which reinforces what you think of it influencing the outcomes. It is not just about developing good technique, speed, or power for you see in Warrior Flow this thing we call touch is a different thing all together. It permeates everything we do when in motion too include the thing we do before we do the thing we are going to do or what we refer to as Anticipatory Movement.

The thing is touch and how we apply it is hard to know or define because you don’t know what you don’t know and won’t know it until you know it. You see, there are a million things, we do outside of our conscious awareness, and it is in those things where we do the things that actually make something work.

Meaning the things, we know we are doing are only the minimal things we are consciously aware of because it is not possible to know the other 1 million or so things we do. We only know it when we get there. That's just how touch is, it's that unknowable quality.

To complicate things further, touch also has an internal external feel to it where when you do it right you just know it. This is why when training people in Warrior Flow we try to ensure people understand what it is they should be experiencing when performing an exercise or technique. Since it’s not possible to know exactly how something feels to another person we try to describe and approximate what they should be experiencing, based on our own experience of course when say striking or evading.

This idea that you “just have to feel it” is bullshit.

Feel what?

If you don’t know what it is, you should be on some level experiencing then how can you anticipate what it is you are supposed to feel in order to understand?

Understand, there is a certain feel to anything physical and though hard to put into words, nonetheless a person being trained needs to know what those things are if they are to gauge and correct themselves as they train.

As an instructor you can only do so much because at the end of the day they have to put in the work. You can only guide them in the way, but you have to provide the map in the process. It sort of reminds me of a quote attributed to Royce Gracie I recently heard,

“A black belt only covers two inches of your ass, the rest you have to fill in yourself.”

Touch is a Focus of Will

As Rev. Sykes of the Shiloh Baptist Church used to say, 

"I may not have gotten everything I've worked for in life, but you can be sure everything I got, I worked hard to get!"

Amen!

So, if you want to learn how to dunk a basketball you need to practice the skills necessary to do it. However, in the process even if you never achieve that goal does not mean you cannot improve your leaping ability, agility, power, speed, and coordination in the process. But what it does mean is that whatever you achieve, wherever you end up, you’re still further along than where you were. Like lifting weights, you may never reach the goal of benching 300 lbs., but through training and consistency you’ll definitely get further than where you started. You may never become a prize fighter but then again if you never knew how to throw a punch, knowing how to and being able to pack a wallop, well, there’s something to be said for that. If you want to develop your touch when you strike you have to train it just as hard as learning how to throw that first punch, that first kick, execute that first throw. For in each of these things there is a touch that must be developed if you are to do them well. Meaning you have to put the work in.

I remember reading an article I think it was Guitar Player Magazine and the lead guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine was telling a story about when he was asked a question during a workshop he did and a guy asked him, “How can I improve my playing?”

Tom Morello replied something like, “Why aren’t you practicing 10 hours a day.”

Then he went on to point out that’s what he did. He also clarified his comments by saying that he’s not saying you need to practice exactly like he did but whatever it is you need to do, you need to do it whether that’s one hour or 10 hours, but there are no shortcuts only the right way and the wrong way.

This is one of the reasons where I take issue with the sweeping generalizations on training and practice in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. Because it is presented in a manner where in order to become expert at something requires 10K hours of focused practice and if you don't practice something and get your 10K hours in then somehow you have failed. Or, if you can't invest the time get to the Magical 10K hours then you cannot improve or succeed at what you desire. So, there's no use trying. Thus, the so-called rule becomes an obstacle to learning. The truth is it varies from skill to skill and depends on a lot of different factors, talent, time, resources, motivation, what your goal is, and most important of all, whether you have a process that can get you there in the first place.

You go on the internet, and you see all sorts of promises to hack this or hack that. So, I’m going to give you the foundation to the ultimate hack when it comes to developing touch 1) learn how something is done right and make sure you have a clear understanding of what it is and focus your mind on that thing; 2) learn how it actually works, 3) learn how to practice it, as you practice observe and self-correct as you go along and don’t look at mistakes as a bad thing but as feedback in the learning process; and 4) put the work in. However long it takes is how long it takes whether 5 minute, 5 hours, or 5 days, etc. whatever. I can tell you this though, a lot of things do not take as long to develop as people will tell you they do.

At the end of the day whatever the skill, you want to do it effortlessly where it is intuitive, and a focus of your “will.”

We’ve all heard the term “self-fulfilling prophecy” it was a term coined by American sociologist Robert Merton back in 1948. While people pontificate on it as with many things like “Hicks Law” or the “Tueller 21’ Foot Rule,” they almost always get it wrong because they never actually read what the author said. Anyway, here's the definition he gave it:

“A false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true.”

The point is how we think influences how we behave and how we behave reinforces those thoughts even if it is the wrong thing. I can assure you there are a lot of wrong thoughts on things in the martial arts that as a result have people traveling down the road to perdition.

So, once again I delve into the realm of comic books, so for those who are comic book fans probably one of the most underutilized characters in the Marvels comics is a character named “Gladiator.” Gladiator was sort of a Superman type of character except for the x-ray and heat vision but he had a major advantage that Superman didn’t have, he had virtually no known weaknesses. He also was rocking the Blue Mohawk long before the punk rockers at “CBGB.”

The limit of Gladiator's strength according to legend is really unknown, but he once boasted to be able to move planets. But you know that’s probably a sea story and like fine wine they only get better with time. He’s probably boasting about moving neutron stars these days.

Anyway…

He first appeared fighting against the Fantastic 4 and to say he smoked them is an understatement. No matter what they did no matter how hard they fought they couldn’t gain the upper hand on this guy. But then he did something that should not be possible, but he did it. He picked up a 35-story building by its corner and without the building crumbling apart from its own weight he was able to lift it intact. Now, Mr. Fantastic may be a character of fiction but the writers at Marvel still had an appreciation for physics.

When Gladiator pulled off this feat, Mr. Fantastic (Reed Richards) realized he had to be using something else than sheer strength since there would be no way to lift a building like that without it falling apart. He realized that Gladiators true power was his ability to focus his will and through mere touch he was able to perform impossible feats of strength. To make a long story short by means of deception, Reed Richards was able to cause Gladiator, for a moment, to doubt his abilities and when he did that’s when they were able to pounce and defeat him.

In a certain sense touch is like that where it shows up not only through meticulous training but also when we learn to focus our will into what we are trying to accomplish. But in order to do so we need to get our minds right.

The Philosophical Underpinnings of Touch (Getting your Mind Right!)

“From one thing, know ten thousand things.” ―Miyamoto Musashi 

In Warrior Flow, we are very concerned about the philosophical aspects of what we do and teach. For us words have meaning and if the words we use don’t mean what we say they mean then nothing means anything. Therefore, the philosophical underpinnings of the concepts we teach are every bit if not more important than the actual skills. For they are the signature or guiding reason as to why we do what we do the way we do it when we do it.

It is this understanding we feel is the reason many people cannot get to the place they desire in their training no matter what system of fighting they engage in because the etymology, underlying philosophy, and the warrior ethos, are just not there. This is important in my view because if you are to develop your touch in what you do you need to think differently in how you train and develop skill. In other words, you may not have to change what you do but rather how you think about what you do when you are doing it; and how to develop those underlying skills to develop the necessary touch to make a certain technique work. So, we have a number of assumptions when it comes to training that we go by,

“When you remove the impossible, no matter how improbable whatever remains must be the truth.”

―Sir Arthur Cannon Doyle, Sherlock Holmes

In Warrior Flow one of the main things, we train to do is strive to get ahead of another person’s motion and move to end a confrontation instantly, for us there is nothing else.  We do this by training to recognize patterns or the foreshadowing of the thing before it becomes a problem for us, shape it, allowing for a multitude of choices. None of which are good for our adversary. Other sayings if you will we continually emphasize in our training are:

• There is a way the universe works and a way it doesn’t. Get over yourself.
• If you can learn one thing you can learn another.
• If you know what something is, if you know what is true, then you know what is not.
• If you know one thing, then you know its opposite. For if it is true then its opposite must be true as well.
• If you can know one thing you can know 10,000 things.
• Each thing is its own unique dynamic and thought process behind it.
• The idea of training yourself to recognize when to give something up is a different thought process. Even the idea of creativity is a different thought process.
• If you want to develop the thing you want to develop, you have to train yourself to the thing you want to be able to do. There is no other way.

And more… (I’ll save that stuff for another blog post).

Well, I’m going to end this blog post here and will get into more detail later on about how I go about developing touch. Hopefully, you got something out of this.

LtCol Al Ridenhour, USMC (Ret) 

Creator, Warrior Flow