One important aspect of Guided Chaos is that all movement should be natural, not contrived or difficult. What is natural movement? It is efficient movement, in terms of energy, space and time.

Think about something simple you do all the time, out of habit. Does it require lots of energy or strain? Could you think of a way to do it "better" than how your body has naturally done it unconsciously for years?

For example, say you're standing and I ask you in which direction the bathroom is. I bet you'd gently raise whichever arm is closest to the direction you wish to point, and your entire body would adjust slightly to make your arm point in the correct direction with maximal skeletal support and minimal muscular effort. If someone happened to be standing in the path of your pointing arm and you were not aware of this, s/he would likely get a hefty whack or poke, due to your natural looseness and body unity. You would NOT keep your body stone still and strain to contort your far arm across your body to point in the right direction. That would look weird and would not be comfortable. 

Likewise, when you do something mundane with your hands, say preparing breakfast, you naturally do it within your "work space" and move efficiently to bring things into your work space. As you prepare your breakfast, you'll use both hands in coordination at a comfortable distance in front of you to get things done with minimal effort. If you need to reach for an ingredient or utensil to your right, you probably won't use your left hand to reach for it. You'll use your right hand, and your whole body will shift to minimize the amount of "reach" and effort your right arm must exert. To do otherwise would feel weird.

When you're practicing contact flow, move your body such that your left hand stays on your left side, your right hand stays on your right side, and the action remains mostly within your natural work space. If your training partner tries to push your hands out to your right, shift and turn your body such that you keep your hands in front of you, neither hand crossing over your center to where it doesn't belong. If your training partner tries to cross your hands over each other, move your body such that they don't cross. Incidentally, if you've worked with Lt. Col. Al, you've probably had the experience of getting your arms crossed over each other and tied up while he strikes. Most likely, you actually caused that to happen yourself, by reaching across your own body unnaturally rather than moving your body to keep things as they should be. Al is just VERY good at taking advantage of that (as are all the GC masters--they just tend to capitalize on different mistakes given their natural proclivities and your bad habits). 

Think about it: If both of your arms are on one side of your body, how can you protect the other side, against your current training partner or another who might suddenly attack you? This applies even when striking with your elbows. If your elbow is up to strike in some kind of horizontal slashing or thrusting motion, make sure the hand attached to that arm does not collapse past your center to the other side of your body. All that does is wrap your arm around yourself in a constricted and vulnerable way, reducing your elbow's reach and skeletal support and tying yourself up, "gift-wrapping" you for the enemy. If that arm is under pressure, move your body to nullify that pressure rather than allowing your arm to collapse into an unnatural position.

Incidentally, in contact flow, if you are not close enough to actually hit with your elbow, it should hang loosely from your shoulder, pointed towards the ground, rather than flapping in the air like a chicken wing, adding unnecessary tension to your shoulder and exposing your body to attack, as well as setting itself up for locks and breaks.

Please do not interpret any of the above as absolute "rules" ("Never let your hand cross center! Elbows should always be DOWN!"). They are general guidelines to improve your body unity, efficiency and natural movement in contact flow. Note that you do NOT keep your hands in better position via force or resistance. Instead, you move your body appropriately to keep it in better position relative to your hands. This body movement comes from the legs, not from the waist or shoulders. Your training partner can push your hands wherever s/he wants to. It doesn't matter, as your body will naturally move to keep your hands and arms in natural, comfortable positions relative to your body. And you'll see that the better this happens, the more your training partner will "accidentally" run into dangerous parts of your skeleton (striking ridges like palms, edges of hands and elbows), fully supported by your loose, unitized motion.

Happy moving!!!

  

Many people seem to be obsessed with learning to hit HARD, as measured against heavy bags, pads and other inanimate objects. That's all well and good, but is only tangentially related to hitting EFFECTIVELY for combat.

Hitting inanimate objects and hitting combative people are different things.

John once said that he had many students who could hit quantitatively harder than he could. Many of his larger, sturdier students who had also gotten a firm grasp of balance, looseness and dropping could get a greater effect on a heavy bag or pad than John could. However, that did NOT translate directly to ability to effectively hit people. For all their raw hitting power, they could not manage to land an effective hit on John, while he could land lethally effective hits on them at will. As John put it, such students had the equivalent of .44 Magnum striking power that they could kinda place in the general vicinity of the target sometimes, while John had a .38 Special that he could always place right under their chin, or in their ear, eye, etc. (I protested that John's striking was more like a .357 Magnum in that analogy.) 

The difference involves more, however, than just accuracy and the ability to place hits properly and with lethal power on a wildly moving person while remaining unavailable to his movements. 

Effective hitting has more to do with sensitivity than with any other attribute. There's a certain qualitative "touch" to effectively hitting all different parts of the human body. You hit a person's cranium differently than you hit the back of his neck, differently than his jaw, differently than his floating rib, or solar plexus, or arm, etc. And you hit the same place differently depending on angle, movement, balance, tension, etc. It's not just a matter of power level, striking tool or penetration. It's an indescribable qualitative "feel" for the human body, its movement and density that can be learned only subconsciously and only through lots of experience in touching people (ideally lots of different people) in a combative context with the right attitude at low intensity, i.e. in slow to medium speed contact flow.

It is impossible to learn effective internal striking without training partners. Inanimate objects will not only never give you the "feel" for the moving human body, but the feedback they provide will actually create bad habits and invalid ideas about your hitting if you don't get regular contact with actual live people. To get maximum "satisfaction" from hitting bags, pads etc., you actually need to do things (with regard to tension and balance) that you do NOT want to do in order to hit people effectively.

Hitting effectively is like hitting baseballs. In hitting a baseball, if your timing, accuracy and swing are perfect (or perfect enough) and you hit the ball right at the sweet spot, it feels effortless, yet the ball goes way over the fence. Similarly, effective hitting should feel effortless. This is a major change for people used to hard-style martial arts or who generally have a "no pain, no gain, max effort!" outlook. It takes faith in the Guided Chaos training method to let go of the desire to feel intense feedback within your own body. If your internal measurement of how "hard' you're hitting is how much tension and effort you feel in your muscles and joints as you hit a heavy bag, you'll have to completely let that go if you want to learn how to hit effectively. 

Ideally, in contact flow you will learn about hitting from actually hitting people (at reduced speed) as well as from being hit by them. This has to be done at reduced speed. Too much speed won't allow you to feel all you need to feel, plus people will get hurt. Getting hit in a combative context (i.e. during contact flow movement, NOT just standing there and letting someone hit you) teaches your subconscious a heck of a lot about how to hit effectively, as well as how to get out of the way, as long as you accept and move with it with the right attitude (see previous blog post about training partners). Hitting your training partner in contact flow (again, NOT just having him stand there as a target) teaches you a lot as well, as long as you're moving at a constant speed and not trying to "add" anything to your hitting in terms of speed and tension.

Remember that hitting is part of the flow, it's not a separate thing. As you move, the basic principles (balance, looseness, sensitivity, body unity and freedom of action) should imbue all of your movement. At certain points, parts of your skeleton will collide with parts of his. After the fact, you can call these "strikes" or "hits" if you will. However, any attempt to plan or "form" them BEFORE they happen will just screw up your training. Amidst the chaos of real lethal violence, you likely won't know which of your movements will become strikes, or deflections, or off-balancing, or whatever, nor to which targets. Train properly and your subconscious will develop the necessary "touch" to make every movement what it needs to be on the fly.

Once you start to get a feel for internal movement and striking, you realize that if you can touch it, you can destroy it, from any angle, to any target, with just about any part of your body--as long as you don't try to force the issue.

Balance, looseness, sensitivity, body unity, freedom of action, being unavailable yet unavoidable, accuracy and precision in movement are all much more important aspects of effective hitting than what effect your hits have on inanimate objects. 

And in any case, never expect any particular hit to have any particular effect on the enemy. You must continue to move with what is until you are able to safely escape or get a better weapon in hand to facilitate your escape.

Happy Hitting!!!