Why Scenario Training - Part IV

"When I strike, I do not strike hard or soft I strike to kill." ―Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings

So, picking up from Part III I want to dive into a little more stuff from The Professor to place things in proper perspective.

And like I said, I don't do what those I criticize do and that is take a little knowledge and become dangerous by making sweeping generalizations when I could have gone to an authoritative source and obtained the correct understanding.

So, this idea of “no mind” or what can be referred to as "thinking without having to think" is crucial to develop the proper actions to a given situation.

I believe and The Professor will correct me later if I'm wrong what we're really talking about is a different methodology of training the somatic system which allows for the voluntary control of the body movements through the use of our skeletal muscles. Since these are the functions of the body, we are aware of, and can consciously influence, such as the movement of our arms legs and other parts of our body.

Through proper training we can learn to perceive in a manner where we make the right decisions in the proper contextual time frame. In order to achieve the best outcome and that is to crush the bad guys and send them to the afterlife. So, whether we move first, or they move first as Yoda would say, "matters not."

Again, how you think of something influences how you practice it and move, and how you move reinforces that understand as well as allows you the feedback necessary to polish the skill. But... that is provided you already have the proper understanding of how it works in the first place. 

It is how we have prepared ourselves for battle that makes the difference.  But for my money that is a process that has to start between our ears in order to "focus" the training to achieve what we want to achieve. Even the idea of "no mind" has to be trained but it first has to be conceptualized in our minds in training the right way.

The Combat Hunter Training: Training the Mind

As I hinted at in previous blog posts Combat Hunter and the subsequent Combat Profile Courses under the direction of Col Jack Sparks, USMC (ret), our contractors Ivan Carter, David Scott, Donelan Greg Williams, and later my good friend Ralph Morton, former LASD and 3^rd Bn 5^th Marines Grunt. They really put together a top-notch program. I got to know them because I was one of the evaluators of many of their courses. This idea as The Professor states where it has to start in the mind was the foundation of turning around the IED problem. But as with many things it was not easy at first.

This was the lesson we learned in the Combat Hunter training at the beginning and trust me there were some folks with stars on their collars who at first thought we were wasting our time until the numbers of deaths came tumbling down. This is because as soon as things just "clicked" for Marines and Soldiers getting ahead of the enemy became a very creative game. Then... as always, the folks well above our pay scale wanted to act as if they were behind the program from the start. Typical...

As I recounted one story to The Professor,

“I remember a unit that will remain nameless when I was doing some work for them in Afghanistan, became so aware of the enemy and his tactics. They would actually allow themselves to appear vulnerable (I’m not going to tell you what they did) in the areas they knew the enemy had planted IED's. They knew the Taliban would sometimes shoot at us to draw us into an IED ambush. What the bad guys didn’t know was we had them under surveillance and when the bad guys were ready to launch their attacks, we would smoke them off the planet. Let’s just say I never saw a happier group of Snipers in all my years in the Corps.

After that happened a few times guess what? No more IED’s in that battle space, 1) because they killed the guys who were doing it; and 2) after people stopped coming back to the village the others figured it out and realized it was better to be an opium farmer than on our bad side. True scoop.”

No matter what we do there is some level of cognition that has to take place the real question is where it takes place?

The issue is this stuff happens so fast it only "appears" as if there is no cognition involved. So once again instead of making stuff up I defer to The Professor as he replied to my story above.

“…we need to understand that cognition is a full body process not limited to neocortical processing. This means that we process, to a great degree simultaneously, or close enough to it to appear that way in consciousness, in the limbic system, cerebellar system, brain stem/pons loop, ANS (Autonomic Nervous System), and somatically in the peripheral nervous system responses and feedback loops (mostly organized in the CNS, Central Nervous System, i.e.: spinal cord feedback systems) and Enteric system (vagus nerve and intestinal neural mass).

We're so conditioned to believe that thinking (i.e.: cognitive processing) happens in the ‘brain’ which refers to the portion of the processing we're conscious of, that we miss the complexity of multiple system interacting and the hierarchical processing in those multiple systems, depending on the emergent contextual demands.

A great overview of these distinctions is found in Daniel Kahneman's book, ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ based on his Nobel Prize winning science. It's actually pretty simplistic, but a great introduction to what I'm referring to here.

What great martial arts training, (i.e.: training for combat, requires is superseding the false notion that when we are consciously "aware" we've learned.) While that is great for Kahneman's ‘Slow Thinking’ it's an utter fail when ‘Fast Thinking’ is required. Combat is a ‘Fast’ situation, like most athletic events. Learning ‘Slow’ has its place, but you must train the ‘Fast’ system too!”

So, there’s the science behind it.

Yes, I know that hurt but the pain was necessary because without understanding there is a real science behind how the body does things it becomes too easy to attribute these things as I’ve seen to the realm of magic. Where people think such skills are derived through osmosis or vain mindless repetition without any consideration whether what they are doing is even valid. My point is you get good at whatever you do, including if it’s the wrong thing, and doing the same thing over and over only makes you good at that thing, and again even if it is wrong. By the way if you practice mindless stupidity, you get good at mindless stupidity.

I’ve spoken on this before in previous blog posts so I won’t get into detail on this and will speak in broad terms here. Just understand that what I am presenting here is a very real thing and with proper training and understanding as to how people learn things in the body people to varying degrees develop this.

But I’ll say this echoing the good Dr. Riggio on this, if you do not develop the mind first or at least this understanding this is a place you cannot get too.

So, I’m only going to speak on how we do things in my school of fighting and how it works in Warrior Flow.

First, we train our bodies to move in a way to not just feel what people are doing in relation to our bodies, but we train our perceptual awareness to recognize things and what they mean as we experience them.  

Based on that we move in a manner to alter their perceptions of timing, to get ahead of them and even influence their actions because once you begin to move with another human being. You are both playing off of each other’s bodies even if you are not fully aware of it. There is no way around this.

This is why people use subterfuge in fights to catch the other person unawares, to circumvent this ability we all have but you have to train it right and focus on it to develop it properly.

The key is through our perceptual awareness we train our bodies to understand in context what it is we are experiencing, and we then develop an understanding of how to deal with it, control it or whatever. This is why we spend a lot of time developing our bodies in order to develop greater control over our movements. This actually frees us to move in a variety of ways without thought and with as little movement as necessary. The bottom line is you have to practice this stuff and with the right mindset to get good at it.

The Signal in the Noise

As my Grandmasters, John Perkins and Tim Carron would say, “You’re just dealing with motion.”

This is so profound that I could spend an entire blog series (and may down the line) just on this aspect of combat alone. Once you grasp this simple statement and understanding it opens a world of possibilities relative to our ability to recognize patterns in human movement that is almost infinite.

Let me reiterate something here that I’ve spoken on before. All human movement, "all movement," all means "all," has a pattern to it. There are no exceptions...

This is one of the advantages that all of the grappling arts and internal arts have or those systems that do a lot of sparring like boxing and kickboxing. And that is they are always making physical contact with one another, so they are always getting direct feedback. This feedback in turn allows them to recognize patterns in the body of others in a microsecond and enable them to respond and vis-a-vis.

This is why in arts like Jujutsu, Judo, western wrestling, internal systems, and other similar arts people find themselves progressing quickly. These systems have a very intuitive feel to them. This direct feedback allows them to correct mistakes in a fraction of the time versus systems where there is little to no contact. Because without human interaction there is a level of timing and touch that is impossible in my view to duplicate. This is why moving with another person while even operating in space allows for you to learn how to recognize patterns of movement and is why sparring is so important however you define it.

Where the flaw lies is not in the systems but in the mindset of how people approach their training and whether they are progressive. Or just trying to master a few moves and not explore the importance of how their perceptions of the signals they are receiving influence and shape their current and future actions. The point is without understanding what you perceive in proper context it is difficult to find the proper signals and filter out what is just noise.

This is what many of the best are able to do in their given arts, this is also what allows them to then develop their touch. Their anticipation, timing, and precision allows for fewer mistakes because they have learned to recognize the patterns of another’s movements soon enough to make a decision or to correct themselves more quickly should they make a mistake. Even if the other person is unaware that they had made a mistake. As I tell my instructors all of the time it’s not that I don’t get caught by them it’s what I do about it that causes them to recognize it too late. 

This is the brilliance of the idea that you are only dealing with motion because it frees your mind from overthinking the problem. This is why when I teach a technique, I emphasize that it is only “a thing" and not everything. It is something that allows me to build upon other similar or like things where I can then teach them how to connect the dots to other things even if in the beginning, they seem unrelated. This is why I focus on concepts and principles over techniques. It allows people room to grow and helps them maintain that beginners’ minds in their martial growth.

Just to give you a taste of what I mean, Ericsson and Pool in their research of chess players wanted to understand the mental models used by the best chess players in the world and how they are able to play against multiple players at the same time. Where they are keeping track in their head all of the pieces on the boards and making moves and counter moves racking up impressive wins.

Now, based on their math, they calculated that there are more possible situations or combinations the pieces could be in at any given time in a game of chess than there are stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. The actual figures they offer are at the high end of estimates 400 billion stars compared to 1.3 trillion possible combinations in chess. Now that is just two-dimensional chess, but what about three-dimensional chess where you have to deal with the vertical element?

Who the hell knows and I’m sure there is someone out there smarter than me who could figure it out. But now what about human movement or as we refer to it in Warrior Flow as 5^th Dimensional Chess, where unlike 2D and 3D chess. All of the pieces are able to move in virtually any direction all at the same time where time/space becomes even more of a critical factor?  

Where people are free to create and almost unlimited number of patterns within their movement and able to strike with power in any direction as long as they move within the natural range of motion within their body. I can’t tell you how many combinations there are but I’m sure it’s a hell of a lot more than 1.3 trillion. This is a different thing and a different understanding of hand-to-hand combat.

It is this understanding along with some other stuff as to why I don’t get wrapped around the axle over technique or scenario training.

Anyway…

We start slow focusing on what it is we are doing and then as we gain proficiency, we pick up speed until we can perform at full speed or at least pushing people past their comfort zone.

We then slightly change it but intentionally with each iteration until whatever it is we are trying to develop we are able to build in enough understanding and experiences if you will. To make logical intuitive inferences of what to do before it becomes a problem if possible or to train yourself when to give something up and do something else.

Each one of these things I am describing is a different thought process or way of thinking and they are in some instances not easy because you have to do the internal brain work in order to get there in the mind first.

For example, it’s one thing to train to punch people in the mouth, I’m all about it. But then at some point you also have to figure out what to do if you succeed?

What to do if you miss?

What to do if you hit them but it seems to have no effect?

What to do if they counter it?

For there is a consequence to each action good bad or indifferent.

This is why it is important in your training to focus on whatever you desire to develop for without focused attention the learning is difficult.

Understand that people learn best when the information is presented to them in a structured manner. It doesn’t have to be laid out in such a ridged format from A to B for them per se but how it is presented needs to be structured and presented in a logical progressive manner.

There are different ways to do this you can even present them with a challenge up front then go back over it and explain what happened and then begin teaching them what it is they need to know. However, you approach it what is important to understand is that when the information is presented it needs to be progressive in nature where the level of difficulty is increased in increments of 3% to 5%.

These are not exact figures and there’s really no way to measure this when dealing with relative movements, but the idea is that you don’t progress to a level of difficulty too quickly that overwhelms them otherwise they shut down or just panic. There is a time to develop their ability to take control of their panic reflex later on but in the initial stages you just have to be careful of pushing their buttons to soon.

From my experience you want to give them a little skill first or at least an understanding before you start pushing their panic button. The exception to this is if the training from the start is specifically designed to cause them to panic and then work on helping them learn how to control their body and manage in that state.  

Like I said there’s a lot of different ways to do this either way eventually this is what you are working to do.

In Warrior Flow we call this Ruthless Intention training which is a form of progressive desensitization where we build a lot of skills off of this especially the ability as we like to call it to move at “supernatural speed” and some other weird deceptive stuff we do.  

Other systems commonly call this pressure testing, which is fine, however my observations of pressure testing are,

1) often the goals are not clearly defined as to what the objective is

2) how are the drills framed, are they to perform the technique under pressure or is it to learn not to freak out? (believe it or not those are actually two different questions)

3) what, are the alternatives if they are just not capable of performing a specific skill for various reasons

4) since they already know what the person being attacked is going to do. Do the attackers know to “not” game the game and screw up the drill or continually cooperate too much?

5) is the drill also designed to show the participants the limitations of the technique or will there be other drills that demonstrate this as well as the alternatives?

Oh, I can go on…

I could also go on and on about stuff I see that psychologically messes people up and actually reinforces the wrong things in them. The point is you can always build on a skill but at each stage of the game whatever is being developed, that is where the focus of the drill, scenario, situation, or whatever should be.

The Power of Choice

Ultimately what you are giving people when you train them are the tools to instantly make intuitive choices in the body but also the ability to recognize danger soon enough to make those choices. To include knowing when to cut their losses if a specific technique employed just will not work and moving on to something else based on what they perceive and on and on it goes. These are things that have to start where the work begins developing the body through the mind.  

Hopefully you got something out of this and if you are an instructor found something useful that you can use to enhance your own training for your students and yourself.

Thanks.

LtCol Al Ridenhour, USMC (Ret)

Creator, Warrior Flow