Martial brotherhood

I'm not a natural joiner of things. Although my politics leads me to be a member of a fairly orthodox left party, I've never been entirely on message and I'm certainly not comfortable with 'party patriotism'. I'm also a member of a bike club - and although I'm happy to talk bikes until the cows come home with anyone who will listen,  I don't actually involve myself in the social life of the club at all - and the thought of riding around in a group seems to negate one of the major attractions of biking - the solitude.

Martial arts is essentially an individual pursuit, certainly in comparison to most sports, and in some respects it can be positively lonely. But I find a genuine camaraderie with my kung-fu brothers like nothing else I have experienced in any other area of my life. I'm sure I'm not unique in this but it's not something I have heard many people acknowledge.

I'm just back from a fantastic weekend seminar in Ibiza: My teacher lives there nowadays so I go back periodically - but also to catch up with other guys scattered all over Europe. It's as much about the eating, drinking and chilling as it is about the training. We must come across as a pretty odd bunch - a diverse mixture of races, nationalities, ages and individual styles. Particularly so  on that island which is  party-central for the white tribes of England with its twenty four hour full fried breakfasts and football-pubs  along the horrific 'west end strip' in  San Antonio.

One night at a restaurant we were asked what had brought us together and what the occasion was. Preferring to keep a low profile on the martial arts aspect which can often provoke some stupid, embarrassing and potentially even dangerous interest - we said that we were a family having a reunion.

And at the risk of being overly sentimental I think that's a pretty apt description. My teacher talks about how martial arts are best practiced with intensity  between friends because accidents so easily happen, misunderstandings occur and ugliness results. Very true. But I've  found more kindred spirits in my training than anywhere else. Perhaps its because we require a degree of mutual trust when we place our safety in each other's hands. Maybe by - literally - sharing blood, sweat and tears we inevitably forge closer bonds over the years than by sitting around in committee meetings.

Good riddance to Haye

I like boxing but I'm not a boxing fan. Partly this is because I still baulk at the idea of giving any money to Rupert Murdoch so I won't ever have the facility to 'pay for view'. And  Mrs Journeyman, whilst quite happy for me to return from my own training with fat lips and black eyes, finds something ethiclly questionable about me watching other people suffering the same.

But even so I appreciate boxing and boxers. I have to admit to buying into the romantic notion of the sport as possibly the purest expression of athleticism and competition, and hanker after a (probably illusory) idea of an inherent dignity to the sport. And if anyone doubts this as pretentious twaddle, I suggest they first read 'The Sweet Science and 'The Gloves'.

I also think that all boxers - almost irrespective of their ability level - are worthy of some respect for having the guts both physical and psychological to put themselves to the test in the ring.  But my big problem with many pro's is that with with their trash-talking and arrogant self-promotion they come across as ignorant cringe-worthy knobs who bring discredit to the sport.  

And no more so than David Haye - with his  notorious gang-rape pre-fight analogy and now his pathetic post-fight broken toe excuses. Maybe he's  misled by his management and entourage, but I have to say that the right man - someone who brings some much needed dignity and intelligence  - won on Saturday night.

In-fighting: actual & political

Like most people I live my life in neat compartments. In my case they correspond to the sub-headings of this blog. Once in a while one of these will spill into another:

My chosen martial art of Wing Chun has a pretty bad rep these days. Thirty years ago it was the bad-ass of the martial arts world. Partly this is a question of fashion - Karate exploded in the west in the sixties then in the seventies Wing Chun was the enfant terrible. The original  style of Bruce Lee  that by-passed the stylised formality and choreography  of traditional Karate and replaced it with the simple practicality of Hong Kong street fighting. Then along came along Brazilian Ju Jitsu and Mixed Martial Arts - the new kids on the block that made everything that went before look staid and unrealistic. Of course none of this is, or has ever been, true or does justice to any of these arts but always  in fashion perception is everything.

And the Wing Chun world imploded. We lacked the discipline and structure of the Japanese and Korean styles, which were also reinforced by the need for governing bodies for their sporting aspects, and we turned in on ourselves. Rival schools and lineages engage in wars of words - and less frequently of fists – trying to prove they are purer/more authentic / more effective than each other.  Some of this is just simple commercial rivalry – and some of it is born of a sense of inadequacy. Go online and have a look at any Wing Chun forum - it is a depressing minefield of infantile bitching and macho posturing. 

So sadly the style that I love and have practiced now for over 20 years is in some respects now frankly something of an embarrassment in the wider martial arts community.  But that doesn’t make we want to give up or change to another style - although it does make me less mindlessly loyal to my own tribe and a bit more reflective and respectful of other lineages, styles and traditions. Funnily enough talk to most mature practitioners of any martial art and you’ll often find the same. Maybe it’s because if you’re confident in what you doing, tolerance and open-mindedness isn’t a betrayal of your tradition.

And there’s an inescapable parallel to be drawn with the politics of the Left …

A little bit of Zen ?

Breaking my usual blogging rule that martial arts is for training not talking: Recently since my teacher moved out of the country, he visits twice a year to put on  a weekend seminars. I organise these for him,  film them and  make DVD's  to sell. It means that I don't get to sweat much at the actual seminar - but on the on the other hand in editing the footage I get to review the content many times over. I've been to many of these over the years so there's naturally some repetition in them,  but there's also always a few new insights that  keep my thinking. This time there are two thoughts turning over in my head (these are my Sifu's and I take no credit for coming up with them):

Think about the mechanical beauty of a crafted sword or gun - it's cleverness in mechanical and aesthetic perfection in fusing form and function. It is innocent of the consequences of its actions with no pre-meditation  and no consciousness of its effect. Becoming a martial artist is about perfecting ourselves mechanically whilst also ridding ourselves of emotional intent.

The karmasutra wasn't written by a virgin but it wasn't written by a pervert either - and similarly the 'instructional manual' for a martial art - its syllabus of forms and drills etc - whilst grounded in the real world of fighting application is not intended to foster an unhealthy obsession with violence either.   We need to be wary of  developing this as a side-effect of training.  

Beautiful.

Relaxing not killing

I've got a lot of time for Benjamin Zephaniah - but I have to say that in  one of the captions for his  photo-story in The Guardian today illustrating a recent trip to China, he reinforces a cliche about the martial arts:   

'I checked myself into a kung fu/t’ai chi school for two weeks. People in the west perceive t’ai chi to be a gentle form of exercise – what they don’t realise is it’s a deadly martial art. This girl is 15 and a t’ai chi master – she could kill someone within a moment if she wanted to...'

It's all been said before... technique triumphs over force, what appears gentle actually kicks ass, blah blah blah. We all know the potential for maximizing the effectiveness of physical violence so how about a different take ? :

'These guys are the best of friends and they're really just having fun together. One is a scholar and the other a successful businessman much-respected in his community.  Their training helps  maintain their mental health when coping with the stresses of daily life. They don't want to kill anybody':

Chi Sau interlude

 

For the best part of twenty years now I've been disappearing to training several evenings a week. Not unreasonably people ask me - 'what do you actually do there ?' So as some sort of answer I've included this clip of a couple of my Wing Chun brothers playing chi-sau at our school. Apologies for the Blair Witch quality of the footage - and the squeaking is coming from rubber soles on a wooden floor, we don't really train in an aviary.

One very important point to make - when clips like this go up on YouTube or wherever it usually provokes a barrage of negative comments from Walter Mitty types who couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag saying 'but that would never work in the real world'. In answer to that - this is a clip of chi-sau not fighting - it's two old friends playing an exercise which has been developed to condition body positioning and mechanics, techniques and reflexes.

Did I mention that it's also fun ?

Ip Man and martial arts mythology

I saw the Ip Man movie the other night. Strangely I've never been a great fan of the kung fun movies genre but I found it fairly entertaining and true to the underlying myth if not the historical reality of the grandmaster of my branch of Wing Chun.

But in fact as history goes it is very much of the 'Braveheart school'. Both in the liberties taken with the narrative and in the portrayal of Ip Man as a kind of Chinese William Wallace.

It did get me thinking though about the whole question of mythology in martial arts. So much of this comes from the idea of an inspired individual 'inventing' a system or a style. Common sense, and my own experience as a historian, would suggest that this has to be nonsense.

It's a classic case of parallel development: We see all over the world, in all sorts of different societies, in different periods, the evolution of martial arts. Despite an incredible variety of traditions, nuances and idiosyncrasies they are in fact remarkably similar. This is  maybe not so surprising given the limited nature of the human armoury. Most of us are equipped with the same number of limbs, hands and feet  and there's a finite number of permutations of striking and grappling.This is born out when you look at any martial art in a practical fighting situation -  they all start to look increasing similar despite having possibly very different stylised training methods. And interestingly the more experienced the practitioner the less rigidly stylised he is and the greater the apparent convergence with other styles. Based on my own experience - in Wing Chun - in  the 'last' form Bil Jee, the principles of the previous two forms are largely discarded - it's been described as  learning how to break the 'rules'.

I have to think that martial arts are the product of a sophisticated process of collective evolution over a very long period.  They are not delivered complete by a single inspired individual - whether that individual is an itinerant holy man in the fifth century, a sixteenth century Buddhist nun  or an exceptional teacher at the time of the Sino-Japanese war.

On top of this general observation, when it comes to Wing Chun history it is doubly  difficult to sort the facts from the legend because of its underground nature . Underground because of its association  with the nationalist resistance movements  opposed to the Quing dynasty. Other styles - Japanese and Korean -  carry there own nationalist and political baggage which creates a mythology that obscures their true development.

But we can be sure that in a highly stratified and static environment such as Imperial China the propagators of the system would have to be  individuals on the margins of peasant / village society who had the freedom to travel the country. People who could  spread influence - and be influenced - wherever they went. This would seem to provide the historic basis for the legends of monks, nuns and the Red Junk Opera .

I'm sorry if any of this is heresy to any of my Wing Chun brothers but our martial arts ancestors   were clever and dedicated practitioners - seekers after the elusive perfection of technique - and truth. Enjoy the myths and traditions by all means but we  do  our respected ancestors  an injustice if we elevate these myths to a quasi-religious cult.

Martial arts & religion

Chewing the fat the other night at one of those all-important having-a-beer-after-training sessions, the conversation turned to why a couple of students had recently left – in both cases it was a question of religion.

The first was one of our very few female students – a hippy / New Age type. She left because she thought we weren’t spiritual enough: She had asked why we didn’t have anything to say about chi. We said that we just don’t go there – it’s not necessary to explain how Wing Chun works. We only talk about perfecting body mechanics not releasing inner energy.

It’s not that we have anything against chi – we still know so little about how the nervous system works that it is quite conceivable that the concept of chi is just an ancient expression for some sort of energy impulse that medicine is yet to articulate.  It’s just that we don’t need to promote it in the teaching of what we do. As for the student who left because of this omission - we have heard since that she has converted to Islam, so presumably she is not too keen on chi herself now.

The other student was a senior with many years of mileage on him – and experience working as a doorman. Then he became a born-again Christian. His pastor told him that he was practicing a ‘pagan art’. The evidence cited for this was a couple of things found on the internet about techniques known as ‘the half prayer to Buddha’ or ‘the five prayers to Buddha’. These are not the technical names of the techniques – they are effectively Chinese slang that maybe made sense in a society with a Buddhist culture. We don’t even use them in our kwoon – and we don’t use the traditional Chinese yin-yang salute either, believing that a handshake or a bear-hug are more meaningful Western-equivalent gestures of respect and brotherhood.

It’s sad to lose  students for such stupid reasons. It’s also kind of amusing to see how religious belief systems are so mutually-repellent. (Although I should add that we do have some students who are devout Muslims or Christians and manage to reconcile this with their training). Personally as an atheist/Humanist/freethinker/whatever I find martial arts not only compatible but absolutely complementary with my own worldview:

Martial arts training is so essentially ‘promethean’ with much of the training counter-intuitive and aimed to condition new reflexes. It takes short, tall, skinny, fat, timid, aggressive, uncoordinated people, or more rarely natural athletes and scientifically allows them to make themselves into something else. It is about rational enquiry – looking behind the seemingly amazing feats of strength, speed or endurance and breaking them down into perfected physical techniques. And in the long run, more than the physical it provides psychological benefits like stress management and the cultivation of calm. You can call that spirituality if you must but I think that’s just shorthand for mental well-being.

A taste of Wing Chun

I don't really like to do technical posts about martial arts. They mean little to those who aren't into it - and for those who are - they are very suseptible to mis-interpretation. And the internet is already full enough of malicious web-warriors who spread flame wars from behind the safety of their keyboards.

So here is a clip of my Sifu talking - not 'performing' or demonstrating. It gives a nice flavour of what the man and the art are about.

Grasshoper

Next to Bruce Lee, he was responsible for bringing Eastern martial arts to a Western audience: And as a kid in the 70’s, watching David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine in “Kung Fu”, may well have subliminally started off my own journey in the martial arts.

Kids in those days kids were used to their TV action heroes being blue-eyed cowboys and cops, so creating the character of a Buddhist monk who played the flute and tried to avoid violence (but always spectacularly kicked ass) was a breakthrough.

Ironically Bruce Lee was considered and rejected for the part, and a Westerner with no background in the martial arts was cast. Only after the series was made did David Carradine develop a genuine interest in kung fu, although as the owner of one of his laughable instructional tapes I am not sure that he attained any great standard. After Death Race 2000, I then lost track of his career for many years, but he was fantastic when he reappeared in Tarantino's Kill Bill films.

It’s a sad footnote that he should have been found dead in bizarre circumstances ‘a la Michael Hutchence’. Each to their own of course, but I never could understand that particular taste for ‘auto-erotic asphyxiation'. Apart from anything else does it not occur that if it goes wrong you’re going to be stuck with a pretty embarrassing obituary for your grandchildren to read?

And whatever would Master Po have said ?

'Street activities'

Not often that I get to label a post both‘politics’ and 'martial arts'. But then it’s not often that someone disagrees with the analysis in a leaflet that you’re giving out to the extent that they start throwing punches at you.

The guy wasn’t too coherent – he had just come out of the pub – but I think the gist of his beef was that he wasn’t happy with us linking the situation in Gaza with western imperialism and oil interests. Fair enough I suppose. After a few minutes of abuse he tore up the leaflet and threw it in my face. Not really acceptable but also not worth escalating.

But then he started grabbing me and pushing me – I warned him a couple of times to back off and move on. At which he launched himself at me, we exchanged a couple of punches, I managed to get my hand under his chin and back him into a bus shelter and was ready to finish him off, but ended up giving him a very half-hearted head butt – I told him that I didn’t want to fight him and gave him a shove on his way. Nothing worth televising - really more of a stand-off than anything else.

Nevertheless with any encounter you end up replaying the scene in slow motion repeatedly in your head. Technically you could say the training worked - but in the bigger scheme of things I made a couple of basic mistakes:

I’m torn as to whether I should have finished him off when I has the chance rather than letting him go away thinking he had pulled off more than he really had. Or on the other hand maybe I should have just launched a pre-emptive strike once he had crossed the line and started putting his hands on me. Giving him a warning when I had papers and leaflets in one hand wasn’t, on reflection, that smart and it meant that for the vital first seconds I took a glancing blow that I only partially covered.

More basically though I have to question whether I should have allowed the situation to develop at all. The old adage is to either fight or not fight – and nothing in between. Instead I confronted the guy when I didn’t really want to have a stand up fight in public with all the shit and bad PR that could bring down (the reason we were there was to leaflet for a meeting not to brawl random nutters). Rather than confront him and give him no way out other than to fight or lose face I should have found a way to defuse the situation – (a warning isn’t going to make a drunk aggressor back off – he’ll only take it as a challenge). Even once we had started scrapping in the back of my mind I had the thought that I didn’t really want to be doing this and so I mistakenly tried to contain the guy rather than finishing the fight as soon as possible. I was lucky that I was able to regain the upper hand, and lucky again that once I had and I gave him the option of backing down he chose not to continue. Given a more serious aggressor the outcome could have been different.

I often hear it said that every fight in the real world being worth years of training and it’s certainly giving me something to think about as to how to manage the build up of aggression in a pre-fight situation.

Kwoon reunion

Saturday afternoon was spent eating Dim-Sum in Chinatown at a reunion of the old boys from our Wing Chun school. It's now 25 years since our teacher opened up a ‘backyard kwoon’ in the basement of a builder’s yard in North London. Looking around the table at the twenty or so other guys who were amongst his earliest students I felt very much the baby of the group with a mere 18 years with my sifu.

Inevitably we've now scattered to many parts of the world, but just about everyone was still training: Some of us have stuck with the successor-school in London that has kept the original idea going, and others have opened their own schools, but all in the same backyard tradition - word of mouth, invitation only, no uniforms, no rituals, no fancy premises just blood, sweat … and laughter and friendship.

Of course a lot of reminiscences were swapped. One of my own memories sums up the ethos of the place that has kept me coming back for more:

The first time I visited the school was for a Sunday afternoon chi-sau session. I was naïve enough to tell my teacher that I had previously trained somewhere else – under a teacher I later found out he had a pretty poor opinion of. He got me to chi-sau with another new guy who had also recently joined from the same school. For ten minutes we stood toe-to-toe and whacked the crap out of each other. In retrospect it was horrible – ugly and unskilled - and I’m sure from what I now know our teacher would have been cringing at the sight – but we were pretty proud of ourselves.

Once we had got our breath back our teacher told me:
“You’re obviously keen and you’re welcome to train here but I have to warn you that if any of these other guys tells me that you’re an arsehole, then as far as I’m concerned you’re an arsehole because these guys are my friends…”

Training ?

The kwoon has been shut for a fortnight and I'm getting withdrawal symptoms.I've been to the gym most days but that just isn't the same. It's not that I feel a need to sweat and exercise per se. Of course the gym provides this although - despite having done so for years now - pushing weights bores me and the sauna and steam room are definitely the best bits . I find the gym no more than a necessary evil for fitness and strength maintenance and more generally a corrective for sitting on my arse for a living (if I had a more active job I'd probably just concentrate on the martial arts). In otherwords it's 'training' rather than fun.

I had a conversation about this with an old friend who is a serious distance runner. He's has some injuries which meant an enforced lay-off. We both said that we were missing 'training'. But then we came to talk about it more we wondered if training wasn't a misnomer.

In my case, I'm not training for anything. I don't compete - there's no big fight I'm preparing for. Some people talk about 'training for the street' but that is just macho bollocks - life is too short and if you look you for that kind of trouble you will almost certainly find it. You could say that I train to get better - but at the risk of sounding too zen - it's when you consciously try to improve that you usually end up worse. My running friend does compete, and at quite a high level, but equally much of the time he runs only for the sake of running - without a stopwatch and without much idea of where he's going to end up.

Truth is martial arts isn't really training at all. It's fun, or at least it should be - done simply for the sheer hell of it. Why else would you choose to make it a lifelong pastime? Or anything else for that matter ?

Knife crime

It’s difficult to avoid the knife-crime frenzy. It’s literally close to home – the four killings in a single day last week were within a five mile radius of where we live.

Knives scare me. I’ve been doing martial arts for just over 20 years and I can say in all honesty that I have very little to help me deal with a skinny fifteen year old armed with a kitchen knife. Some self-defence experts will demonstrate swift and neat disarms when faced with an armed attacker. This is pure bullshit – try it with an unco-operative opponent with the added bonus of surprise and concealment on their side. I’ve talked about this before - we did it once - in controlled circumstances. It was pretty sobering and it demonstrated to me that you don’t tackle a knife unless your life depends on it, and then be prepared to be hurt.

So what is to be done ? Stiffer sentencing ?

Maybe deterrents can work with pre-meditated street robberies. But these much publicised killings aren’t muggings gone wrong. They’re about a fucked-up culture of ‘respect’ and machismo. I doubt deterrents come into it much – in fact they might even add to the kudos of being a bad boy .

You don’t have to be a sociologist or psychologist to see that the less you have going for you – materially or educationally – the more important things like ‘face’ and status are. I doubt anyone has been stabbed because they ‘dissed’ a homeboy in Henley Upon Thames. Gangsta culture doesn’t help when the Ali G factor spreads it from the inner city to the suburbs but to hold hip-hop or dodgy computer games responsible is to mistake the effect for the cause. Nobody can seriously argue that the root cause isn't poverty or lack of opportunity.

I don’t have any simple answers to knife crime, but there is one thought which might seem a bit old-fashioned: Young males will always fight – it’s a side effect of testosterone – so why not teach martial arts, including boxing in every school? I’ve always found that the more you study the mechanics of violence the less likely you are to resort to it.

Martial arts: check up and maintenace.

I’ve been getting fairly frustrated with my training recently. Inevitably after so many years the learning curve is going to flatten out. But I’ve often come away with the feeling that I’m actually getting worse. This may or may not be true but it isn’t a good feeling.

But last night I had a session where I felt as if I had progressed more in a half hour than I had in the previous three months.

One of my problems is that as a supposed ‘senior’, I tend to spend a lot of my training time teaching less experienced people. Doing so is a blessing in many ways because you don’t really get to understand something until you have to deconstruct it and explain it to someone else. But is has a downside too: If you don’t want to be the kind of bullying teacher who beats up on his students, you can end up with some bad habits. Like letting your opponents into openings so they can try moves out, or over-elaborating your moves so that you can demonstrate things, or breaking your flow to explain something.

Which are exactly the traps I seem to have fallen into. And it only took a half hour with my Sihing (elder brother) to point this out. Of course it’s going to take a lot longer to eradicate ingrained bad habits but at least I now know the cause of my frustrations.

It makes me quite realise how lucky I am to have found the school that I have: small private and old-skool with a high student retention rate. At most ‘McMartial Arts franchises’ I would long ago have been pushed out to teach my own students. But at our place, even though my own teacher (Sifu)is no longer around, with sixteen years training behind me, I still have maybe five or six Sihings who train regularly. And that keeps me (or gets me back) on course.

And it does make me wonder about all those ‘black belts’ that you will find running martial arts classes at just about every sports-hall in the country. If they are not regularly checked out and stretched by their seniors at best they are going stagnate, or worse, if they are not honest with themselves, develop some serious ego problems.

Politicians with bottle

Politicians often talk about taking up a fight against something or other. But generally they’re a pretty wimpy bunch and don’t really mean it.

Which is why I loved the story about Obama-supporting Democrat congressman Jesse Jackson Junior (pictured here). After a row in the House with geeky conservative Republican Lee Terry, Jackson suggested that the pair of them ‘take it outside’.

Washington-insiders seem unanimous in the view that Jackson, a martial arts practitioner, would have kicked Terry’s ass.

Nice to see a return to principled, confrontational politics.

Martial Arts: Money & Karma

There’s a very old tradition that it is bad karma for a teacher to make his living from martial arts. Which is why traditionally many teachers would practice a trade from which they made their main livelihood. This isn’t mystical mumbo jumbo but actually sound practical wisdom. Here's why:

We’ve had a rift in my martial arts family – one of the seniors who teaches has fallen out with our Sifu.

Not an unprecedented situation but still a sad one. Chinese styles are notorious for this and often ridiculed for it – Japanese and Korean styles seem to avoid these clashes to some extent, but at a price by having hierarchical and authoritarian structures. In kung-fu we still have the extended family system built around a teacher or a Sifu –and like all families when it works it’s great but when it breaks down, things get ugly.

There’s a lot of charlatans and wankers in martial arts. But the senior student in question isn’t one of them. He's a good guy who has possibly just over-reached and over-sold himself in promoting his abilities and his school.

And this comes back to the karma thing. If you want to sell anything there are really only two fundamental marketing strategies:
(i) ‘The original authentic’ – ie: all the others aren’t the real thing.
(ii) ‘New & improved’ – ie: now even better than whatever it was before.

Unfortunately when applied to martial arts, both strategies are bollocks. Nothing is the original and authentic once you've passed a skill on to someone else they will unavoidably put a bit of themselves into it for better or worse. New and improved - given we all have two arms and two legs (OK most of us) - in all the years of human development does anyone really believe that they have dreamed up a new way of fighting that hasn't been thought of before ?

The truth is a complex one –studying any system is a journey for the student who must initially make the system his master until eventually he is the master of the system. (Now that may also sound like mystical mumbo jumbo too but think about and it’s actually spot on advice for learning anything).

But martial arts punters are as stupid and greedy as any other punter. And if you want to make your living from them you’re probably going to have to resort to the same bullshit as anybody else in marketing.

On hitting and being hit

I’m sporting a lump over my left eye today – the result of an accidental elbow blow at training last night. Sadly it tends to be things like that get people talking to me about martial arts. I guess it’s inevitable because it gives some physical evidence that they can relate to, and to the average person martial arts begins and ends with hitting and getting hit.

‘But I thought you were supposed to be good – haven’t you’ve been doing it for years?’

Ignoring the fact that doing it for years and being ‘good’ are not synonymous at all – ‘good’ does not mean that we develop an invisible force field that repels all incoming elbows and fists. One of the first thing beginners are told when they first come into the school is that they will get hit, and if they train a lot they will get hit often. If they are not prepared for that, and a lot of people aren’t, then they’d be better to look at some other martial art.

Getting hit (or hitting) should never be gratuitous though.

In fact the most common scenario when I do get hit gratuitously is by less experienced people who fire crazy shots, often reckless of their own safety and the counter that will inevitably follow. Skilled practitioners will let you know that they are ‘there’ with a controlled light touch, even at high speed and intensity. And they won’t launch kamikaze attacks that they know will result in a counter.

But accidents will occur – either physically, like last night because our sweaty arms skidded off each other and into my face. Or mentally – one guy makes an unexpected mistake leaving an opening and the other guy’s hands are on auto-pilot after years of training and fire a shot.

And in the circumstances when it makes heavy contact and someone gets hurt, there will be some mutual frustration. From the first guy that he fucked up and left an opening and from the second guy, if he is cool and genuine, that he didn’t anticipate the mistake and ‘point it out’ with better control.

In a good school that kind of scenario will be happening at some point in every session. My teacher covers this very situation in a lot more depth in an article here:

Having said all this, I still have to contend with people looking at the lump over my eye and saying ‘wow that training of yours must be the real deal’…

Music whilst you fight.

Went training last night and there was some debate about what music we should be playing.

If your idea of a martial arts school is a zen palace with immaculately clean wooden floors and a silence broken only by the thuds of crisply executed techniques and the 'kias' and barked instructions of the sensei then you'll probably be horrified to hear that we have any sort of music at all.

Our place is a a slightly damp and musty room that could frankly do with a bit of a clean. There's also background music and plenty of chat and laughter between the students. The sort of behaviour that in a Japanese dojo or Korean dojang would earn you a punishment of twenty press-ups.

In doing things differently we are not being trendy or 'revisionist' though: For a Chinese kwoon it is entirely traditional to have a bustling school with a constant stream of people coming in and out, chatting and joking, and with a sifu sat in a corner drinking tea and keeping a beady eye on the proceedings.

But there's more to it than just a different tradition - there's a logic too: A big aspect of martial arts, the endless repetition of forms and drills, is the re-programming of reflexes and training of muscle memory. The idea is to remove the aspect of 'intent' so that you can pull off techniques without thinking or emotion. This is not some hippy spiritual thing - it's very practical too - in a fight you're in a highly stressed situation and you cannot rely on conscious rational actions, you revert to instinct - the training tries to condition these instincts. OK - but why the music ?

As part of the learning / conditioning process at times you actually want some distractions. Maybe not in the very early stages of learning, but certainly at some part of the training dealing with multiple stimuli and still getting it right is vital. I can remember time and time again when doing chi-sau being told by my sifu to lose my 'warrior face' and smile instead. This is easier said then done when some guy is trying to hit you at point blank range - but doing so relaxes you and definitely un-nerves your opponent.

(And this is quite apart from the obvious fact that music makes the place more enjoyable and it's all supposed to be fun after all).

Anyway back to last night:

I happened to be the senior guy there so I stuck on some Tinariwen and some Charlie Parker. There were requests for some jungle and drum and bass, but in my experience that kind of rhythm makes everyone chi-sau like a psychotic motherfucker and I'm getting too old for all that shit ...

'Self-defence'

I’m pleased to see that unlikely 'have-a-go hero' Jack Straw has said that the laws on self-defence will be reviewed. Should I be involved in an incident that required the use of force, as a martial artist training two or three nights a week for many years, I could well be subject to a closer scrutiny than the average punter of what constitutes 'reasonable force’. Prosecutors have made such arguments in the past.

But also as a martial artist I’m afraid that kind of thinking perpetuates some basic misconceptions about self-defence: It is based on images in cheesy king-fu movies and preposterous teach-yourself books that show the restraint of multiple armed attackers and where the defender always escapes without so much as a scratch. Unfortunately such images are complete bollocks.

Martial arts training is great for many things, but it doesn’t give you magic powers. In fact the more you train the more you appreciate how vulnerable you are to being hurt by an attacker regardless of their skill level. I have heard it said that you can no more fight without getting hurt than you can swim without getting wet.

Boxers know this from day one, but many martial artists will insist on teaching differently. So in every community centre we have ‘self -defence’ classes that create a false sense of security. If the instructors were to be more honest they would call them ‘fighting lessons’ but then there would probably be rather less uptake.

Some of what these lessons teach is downright dangerous:

Elegant disarms from a knife attack: As an exercise we once practiced some of these with dummy knives smeared with soot. By the end of the session our arms and torso were literally covered in the stuff – each mark indicating a potentially lethal cut or thrust. In a real situation, if you fight someone with a knife you will get cut. Most serious practitioners will say, don't take them on unless your life depends on it.

Restraint techniques: All those locks and throws that prevent you getting hurt without actual hurting the other guy. The police, who quite rightly are subject to restrictions on the force they use, are taught them. But the police also usually outnumber the attacker and have back-up available. I am sure some frail and ancient Aikido mater after a lifetime of practice can restrain an 18 stone drunk prop-forward with an arm lock. But this takes a degree of precision in a stressful situation that you won’t achieve after a course of one-hour lessons at your local community centre.

Even for a trained person, when in a stress-charged situation, the only realistic way to remove a threat is to neutralise it by battering your opponent into such a state that they can either offer no resistance or you can run away.

But I still wouldn't fancy explaining that one in court...