Opportunities and Liabilities

In every­thing we do, there are oppor­tu­ni­ties and lia­bil­i­ties. Recognizing them at the appro­pri­ate time can mean the dif­fer­ence between life in death in cer­tain cases; in other cases, it can mean get­ting a good park­ing space.

Shukumine broke down some of the com­mon chances and cau­tions with regards to fight­ing. As with every­thing else in Taido, we are well-served to extrap­o­late these con­cepts to other are­nas. First, i’ll just give you the list.

8 Kyo - Chances to Attack

• Just before an attack
• Just after a move
• Just after a missed attack
• During a loss of balance
• During a loss of attention
• During a short­ness of breath
• By recog­ni­tion of pattern
• By recog­ni­tion of fear

5 Suki - Weaknesses

• Failure to main­tain a calm focus
• Failure to keep your mind and body pre­pared for action
• Failure to breathe cor­rectly and be aware of your body’s feedback
• Failure to choose your actions carefully
• Failure to move freely and adapt to your environment

These Suki and Kyo, oppor­tu­ni­ties and lia­bil­i­ties, bring up some inter­est­ing points regard­ing the nature of com­bat and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Below, I will go into a lit­tle greater depth and explain the appli­ca­tion of these points in com­bat. I will also be dis­cussing a few favorite exam­ples of appli­ca­tion in more peace­ful situations.

Let's begin with the opportunities:

Just Before an Attack

Anticipate attacks and strike just before they are ini­ti­ated. For a brief period, your oppo­nent will be con­cen­trat­ing on attack­ing and will dur­ing an attack and will be unable to respond to your move­ments. How do you know when your oppo­nent is about to attack? Non-verbal communication.

Communications sci­en­tists tell us that as much as 80% of our in-person com­mu­ni­ca­tion has lit­tle to do with the actual words we say (even in writ­ten com­mu­ni­ca­tion, there are non-verbal con­sid­er­a­tions. To take the exam­ple of this web­site: why am I writ­ing this? What do I hope to accom­plish? How do I choose my sub­ject mat­ter? The answers to these ques­tions can tell you a lot about how to read what I write here. Understanding my non-verbal cues will allow you to learn more from what I write than sim­ply what I have writ­ten). Facial expres­sions, “body lan­guage”, and deliv­ery method can tell us a lot about what other peo­ple are really say­ing (as opposed to what they want us to think). In a fight, non-verbal cues could include shift­ing weight to free a leg for kick­ing, repo­si­tion­ing to allow access for a favored attack, some kind of tele­graphic tick or breath pat­tern, or the visual focus on a spe­cific target.

However, one should be care­ful in attempt­ing to inter­pret these cues, as expe­ri­enced fight­ers are well aware of them and will some­times exploit them to lead your aware­ness astray. For exam­ple, one may set up a visual feint by gra­tu­itously look­ing in the direc­tion of an opponent’s leg. When the oppo­nent moves to pro­tect against the per­ceived threat, his head will become more vul­ner­a­ble. The wide use of this tac­tic is one of sev­eral fac­tors that leads many fight­ers to advo­cate never look­ing into the opponent’s eyes (another major fac­tor being that eye-to-eye con­tact sig­nif­i­cantly increases emo­tional response to that per­son and results in such phys­i­o­log­i­cal changes as increased heart rate and shal­low breathing).

Outside the ring, we can still attempt to beat other “to the punch” so to speak. Talk of early birds and such may also have a place in this dis­cus­sion, but explain­ing the obvi­ous is not among my strengths, so I pre­fer to make the exam­ple of a meet­ing dur­ing which oppos­ing argu­ments must be con­sid­ered before mak­ing an impor­tant decision.

If we can attempt to under­stand the per­spec­tive of the oppos­ing side, it will be eas­ier for us to antic­i­pate their argu­ments and deflect them. We can even begin to dis­solve their objec­tions to our argu­ments proac­tively by struc­tur­ing our dis­cus­sion in such a way as to “cover all the bases” and present our sup­port­ing evi­dence in the course of mak­ing our points. When we make cer­tain state­ments, we can watch the facial expres­sions of those on the other side of the table. When we make a state­ment that they are pre­pared to attack, we can often find a hint of a smile or a more con­fi­dent pos­ture emerge. When prepar­ing to speak, most peo­ple will shift their weight a bit, take a big inhale, and begin to open their mouths a bit before actu­ally speak­ing. The tele­graphic habit can allow us just enough time to make a telling remark or bring forth pow­er­ful sup­port for our ideas. These are just a few ways in which we can antic­i­pate and “attack” out­side of a com­bat environment.

Just After (or even during) a Move

Begin to counter as soon as your oppo­nent begins to attack. If you can throw the attack off-balance or cause it to over-extend, there is a good chance to strike. Do not wait until your oppo­nent has fin­ished and is already prepar­ing to move again. This keeps you for­ever on the defen­sive, in which case your only hope of win­ning is by supe­rior conditioning.

In the early por­tions of a match, it’s com­mon to see fight­ers test­ing each oth­ers’ responses with feints and changes in dis­tance and tempo. Usually, this takes the pat­tern of: [sud­den move to see how you will react] fol­lowed by [wait and watch for your reac­tion (which is gen­er­ally pre­sumed to be defen­sive)]. This is a golden oppor­tu­nity to take the ini­tia­tive away from your oppo­nent and drive in with a deci­sive attack at pre­cisely the moment he expect you to be flinch­ing or retreat­ing. Since he will be focussed on the “set up”, you will have a brief chance to move counter to his awareness.

We also have in Taido a ton of tech­niques that simul­ta­ne­ously pro­tect the body’s vital areas and deliver strikes toward the oppo­nent. Many sengi, most hengi and nengi, and even a few ungi and tengi can be used skill­fully as counter tech­niques when begun dur­ing the opponent’s attack. Taido’s strat­egy to change the axis of the body works espe­cially well when attempt­ing to employ this opportunity.

In a less “sport” envi­ron­ment, this approach still has com­bat appli­ca­tion. In fact, I see this as a par­tic­u­larly good response to a sucker punch. The rea­son it’s called a “sucker punch” is that your chances of see­ing it com­ing are slim-to-nil. If you do see it, chances are it will be too late to avoid com­pletely. It’s a sneaky, under­handed tac­tic that has ended many fights before one party was even aware it had begun.

Assuming that we are going to get hit by the time we see the punch com­ing, we are still not help­less. We can make some effort to reduce the dam­age we receive from the attack of course, but often­times this “flinch reflex” just serves as the invi­ta­tion the aggres­sor needs to pounce fully into his attack. A bet­ter course of action upon notic­ing the rapidly-approaching sucker punch is to launch a simul­ta­ne­ous counter attack. In the case of an inside hook from low (a noto­ri­ously com­mon sucker tech­nique), an imme­di­ate retal­ia­tory punch on the same side of the body can some­times effec­tively block the opponent’s attack in addi­tion to strik­ing him. Even if his punch con­nects cleanly, you are still at even odds now since you have struck as well.

Just After a Missed Attack

Strike as soon as the tech­nique has missed, but before any follow-up. Take advan­tage before your oppo­nent real­izes that the attack has failed. In some ways, this is very sim­i­lar to the pro­ceed­ing exam­ple. However, the exe­cu­tion is a lit­tle different.

In this case, instead of coun­ter­ing just after the oppo­nent moves, we are wait­ing until he has fin­ished his unsuc­cess­ful attack to strike. In many cases, the oppo­nent may be over-extended or off-balance, pos­si­bly even slightly con­fused as to how he man­aged to miss. This is a brief win­dow of oppor­tu­nity for us to move in.

As an exam­ple, let’s looks at some­thing less overtly com­pet­i­tive: high­way dri­ving. Let’s say you are dri­ving on the free­way (not exces­sively fast, but not grandma-speed either) in mod­er­ate traf­fic. Suddenly, two cars imme­di­ately in front of you smash into each other as a result of one dri­ver becom­ing dis­tracted while attempt­ing to change lanes. He then “cor­rects” by steer­ing hard in the other direc­tion. The other dri­ver instinc­tively pulls away from the col­li­sion, open­ing a space between the two vehicles.

Right at this moment is your only chance to pass safely between them by quickly accel­er­at­ing. Slamming on your brakes will only risk being hit from behind, and stay­ing put is not safe either because, just as both dri­vers first reacted away from the col­li­sion, the pres­ence of other vehi­cles and the desire not to turn things into a pileup will inevitably bring them back to cen­ter. If you pass up this brief chance to escape to the front of the acci­dent, you risk being brought into it your­self when the two cars re-converge. (Of course, once you have secured your own safety, it is your civil respon­si­bil­ity to stick around and see if it will be nec­es­sary to assist by call­ing an ambu­lance or pro­vid­ing a state­ment to the police. However, at least you can be grate­ful that you won’t need an ambu­lance yourself.)

There are many other instances when action imme­di­ately fol­low­ing an event (not nec­es­sar­ily an attack) is advisable.

During a Loss of Balance

Attack when your oppo­nent is in an awk­ward posi­tion or by chang­ing the direc­tion of move­ment to upset his bal­ance. You must attack quickly dur­ing this brief period of vul­ner­a­bil­ity. The key here is tak­ing the ini­tia­tive before the oppo­nent can regain his bal­ance and composure.

Though not spe­cific to loss of bal­ance per se, I want to address a par­tic­u­lar strat­egy as an exam­ple here that works on the same prin­ci­ple. In ten­nis, one com­mon strat­egy is to draw your oppo­nent to one side of the court and then drive the ball hard to the oppo­site cor­ner. You can also do this in jissen.

Most Taido tech­niques can be grouped into two major mechan­i­cal classes based on direc­tion: frontside and back­side. I was first exposed to this notion when I used to try per­form­ing tricks on a skate­board. Any trick that was exe­cuted against an imple­ment (a ramp, rail, stair, or other obsta­cle) in front of you was called “frontside”. If the imple­ment was behind you, it was “back­side”. Almost every Taido tech­nique is decid­edly either frontside or backside.

Examples of back­side tech­niques which place the oppo­nent behind us and attack in the direc­tion of our backs (in left-lead stance, this would be those tech­niques that include some clock­wise motion) include sen­tai, sen­jogeri, ebigeri, sui­heigeri, some karami, many throws, sokuten­geri, and back­ward tengi. Techniques that keep the oppo­nent where we can see him are frontside. Some exam­ples of frontside tech­niques are most ungi, sha­jogeri, some harai, some nengi, many grabs and joint sub­mis­sions, and for­ward tengi.

So what does this have to do with loss of bal­ance? By pay­ing atten­tion to which class of tech­niques our oppo­nent tends to use (and almost every­body has a favorite. So much so that you can usu­ally tell sim­ply by watch­ing some­one per­form unsoku happo which type of move­ment they pre­fer), we can throw off his most com­fort­able pat­terns by forc­ing him to move in the oppo­site direc­tion. If the oppo­nent tends to throw back­side tech­niques, it’s in our best inter­ests to stay in front of his chest. If he likes to move frontside, we should strive to stay behind him. Everyone has a com­fort zone, and pre­ferred method for mov­ing through it. We can exploit this to cause our oppo­nents to lose bal­ance, or at least to lose acclimation.

A fighter who tends to throw a lot of hengi and sengi will tend to point the toes of his front foot to the inside. In extreme cases, the fighter’s foot­work will reveal most steps lead­ing from the out­side of the foot, toward the heel rather than the toe (or actu­ally, knee as it should be). Such a fighter will likely find it dif­fi­cult to move frontside, partly for rea­sons of habit or incli­na­tion, partly because his foot­work and stance don’t really sup­port it. Stay in front of these guys and pull them to that side. 90% of the time, they will move to put you at their back, where they are more com­fort­able. Knowing this puts you at an advantage.

During a Loss of Attention

Take advan­tage when your oppo­nent loses atten­tion or con­cen­tra­tion. Any dis­trac­tion, such as uncom­fort­able cloth­ing or ambi­ent noise, can be used to your advan­tage. This oppor­tu­nity also man­i­fests in the clas­sic “hey, your shoes are untied” trick from all the old movies. In a fight, your atten­tion should be on the here and now of what your oppo­nent is doing. If his atten­tion wavers, he is writ­ing you an invi­ta­tion to attack. However, be care­ful that you don’t fall for the feigned loss of atten­tion (sim­i­lar to mis­di­rec­tion men­tioned in first point, above) at which some fight­ers are expert.

Be sure to keep in mind that we don’t have to sim­ply wait for our opponent’s to get dis­tracted before we can act. We can man­u­fac­ture dis­trac­tion. One par­tic­u­larly devi­ous exam­ple of this is what corey myers did lead­ing up to the grap­pling matches for the amer­i­can Taido 30^th anniver­sary tour­na­ment. For about a month before the com­pe­ti­tion, corey wore the same uni­form each night for prac­tice. Not so bad, except that he didn’t wash it once dur­ing that period. In fact, he once wrapped his jacked up in a plas­tic bag and set it on the dash of his car all day in the sum­mer sun.

Now just try to imag­ine how that gi smelled. Corey was long since immune to it, but his oppo­nents were gasp­ing. The dis­trac­tion his smelly uni­form posed his them no doubt helped corey find oppor­tu­ni­ties to uti­lize his con­sid­er­able grap­pling skills in the tour­na­ment. Sun tzu would have been proud.

This is also one mech­a­nism by which pick­pock­ets and mug­gers prey on their vic­tims. In crowded areas, a per­son may “acci­den­tally” bump into an intended vic­tim and use the mis­di­rec­tion as a chance to grab for a wal­let or purse. The dis­trac­tion of the bump is often pow­er­ful enough that the vic­tim doesn’t even notice until he attempts to pay for din­ner. A com­mon tech­nique of mug­gers is to pre­tend to ask for direc­tions, or a light for their cig­a­rette, or the time, etc. While you are dis­tracted by their seem­ingly inno­cent ban­ter­ing, they sucker punch you.

During a Shortness of Breath

Press on when your oppo­nent shows signs of fatigue. This is pretty self-explanatory really. When we feel winded, we are slower to react and more vul­ner­a­ble to psy­cho­log­i­cal issues. Also, as the body is slow to react dur­ing deep inhala­tion, use this oppor­tu­nity to strike, even if the oppo­nent isn’t actu­ally short of breath.

In the real world, we can also apply this prin­ci­ple to take advan­tage of fatigue or loss of momen­tum on the parts of our oppo­nents. Finishing what we start, “going the extra mile”, “see­ing things through”, etc. Are all exam­ples of tak­ing advan­tage of our endurance, be it phys­i­cal or psy­cho­log­i­cal. When we can out­last oth­ers, we will be able to accom­plish more. Hence, as pac­ing is impor­tant in a phys­i­cal event, set­ting goals is impor­tant to real­iz­ing our dreams.

By Recognition of Pattern

learn your oppo­nents pat­terns and use them to you advan­tage. Watch for favorite attacks and strong/weak sides. Just as I pointed out above with ref­er­ence to fight­ers’ ten­den­cies to favor either frontside or back­side move­ments, we can often learn to read their favorite moves and pat­terns if we pay atten­tion. Since Taido spar­ring makes heavy use of com­bi­na­tion tech­niques, this is espe­cially applic­a­ble in jis­sen, where play­ers will tend to sting tech­niques together accord­ing to a con­sis­tent and per­sonal pat­tern of favorite combinations.

The appli­ca­tion of this idea out­side of fight­ing is best summed up by the cliched say­ing “those who do not study his­tory are doomed to repeat it”. In this case, his­tory does not have to mean that class you hated in high school. It means know­ing what you have done and apply­ing an analy­sis of this to what you intend to do. Learn about your­self and try to under­stand what basic dri­ves com­pel you to react to your envi­ron­ment in the spe­cific man­ner in which you do. I highly sug­gest keep­ing a jour­nal for this reason.

Almost as impor­tant as learn­ing your own pat­terns is learn­ing those of your fam­ily, friends, ene­mies, cowork­ers, clients, and any­one else whose actions effect your life. Knowing what you can real­is­ti­cally expect of other peo­ple in var­i­ous sit­u­a­tions is a pow­er­ful abil­ity, and it can be gained through rec­og­niz­ing their patterns.

By Recognition of Fear

Test your oppo­nents reac­tions to your move­ments. By forc­ing a defen­sive posi­tion, you have the advan­tage. Be mind­ful that fear makes peo­ple unpre­dictable, and many injuries occur when one party is fright­ened out of ratio­nal action. However, this point needn’t be lim­ited to actual fear, but also to moments of fear­ful reac­tion, such as the flinch. If you move and your oppo­nent blinks, there is a high like­li­hood that you can take advan­tage of this ten­dency to attack while he is taken aback by a sud­den or unex­pected move.

Examples of this are also plenty in life off the court and can include star­tling some­one to catch them off guard, attempt­ing to sell life insur­ance to fam­i­lies who have just suf­fered the loss of a loved one, and all sorts of other things that we tend to think of as devi­ous or under­handed. Fear manip­u­la­tion is the ter­ri­tory of crooks, swindlers, bul­lies, and politi­cians. And it obvi­ously works very well.

And now for the liabilities:

Failure to Maintain a Calm Focus

Do not allow your­self to become con­fused or dis­tracted. This point has been ade­quately dis­cussed in var­i­ous exam­ples above.

Failure to Keep your Mind and Body Prepared for Action

Weak kamae invites attack. If the oppo­nent senses an open­ing in your phys­i­cal or men­tal defenses, it will be dif­fi­cult to defend. Furthermore, your over­all phys­i­cal and men­tal state can either be a help or hin­der­ance to you abil­ity to accom­plish your goals and avoid set­backs in life. Your phys­i­cal and men­tal health should be of the high­est pri­or­ity in your life, so take steps to ensure that your own weak­ness isn’t hold­ing you back.

Failure to Breathe Correctly and be Aware of your Body's Feedback.

Pay atten­tion to the con­di­tion of your body. Do not overex­ert your­self to the point of injury. Your breath is a pow­er­ful tool for effect­ing your body’s state. Slow and con­trolled breath­ing brings feel­ings of calm and con­trol. Fast, erratic pant­ing makes you feel ner­vous and unable to cope. In moments of stress, proper breath­ing can help to remain in con­trol of our emo­tions and per­for­mance. In addi­tion, pay­ing atten­tion to our breath and gen­eral bod­ily sen­sa­tion allows us to tune in to our health and poten­tial prob­lems before acute symp­toms sig­nal that we have begun to harm ourselves.

Failure to Choose your Actions Carefully

Don’t guess. Errors in judge­ment will leave many open­ings for attack. Look before you leap, etc. All too often, I see peo­ple who spend their entire lives sim­ply react­ing to exter­nal events. Advertisers know the power of our emo­tions to make us act, and they exploit warm, fuzzy thoughts of happy, beau­ti­ful peo­ple doing things we wish we could do to sell us things we prob­a­bly would real­ize we don’t need if we would just think first. Don’t just react; really look at what is going on and chose your own best response to the situation.

Failure to Adapt to your Environment

If you can­not change your ideas and adapt to the sit­u­a­tion, you will be con­trolled eas­ily by your envi­ron­ment. If you can­not learn to deal with change, you are going to have a hard time cop­ing with the goings on in your life. If you are attached and tied down to ideas, peo­ple, and places, you are going to find your­self feel­ing trapped and suf­fo­cated. You must learn to let go of the things that bind your life and adapt to the curves and twists that the uni­verse has in store for you. If you can do that, you can be assured of con­tin­ued hap­pi­ness and contentment.

Negative Repetitions

One very inter­est­ing thing that Shukumine men­tions at the end of his dis­cus­sion of the seigyo 5tai (five meth­ods of con­trol, from Taido Gairon) is that we should prac­tice not only con­trol­ling our oppo­nents, but also being con­trolled by them. This is over­looked by even the most skilled fight­ers. If we don’t prac­tice allow­ing our part­ners to use these strate­gies on us in prac­tice, we will not we able to tell when our oppo­nents use them in matches. It’s very impor­tant that our mar­tial art prac­tice also include what those in weight train­ing cir­cles call “neg­a­tive reps”.

Negative rep­e­ti­tions are the eccen­tric phase of a muscle’s work cycle — the con­trolled relax­ation after con­trac­tion. In lift­ing, it’s a com­mon mis­take among begin­ners to assume that they need only con­cern them­selves with, uh… Lifting. Actually, one of the keys to train­ing lift­ing is low­er­ing, and many weightlifters spend even more time work­ing slow and con­trolled neg­a­tive reps than they spend on actu­ally push­ing the weight. While this works on totally dif­fer­ent prin­ci­ples than what I am dis­cussing in terms of Taido, it’s a good con­cept to under­stand. Without going into the phys­i­ol­ogy of mus­cle growth and work accom­mo­da­tion, just under­stand for now that bring­ing the weight back to zero is con­sid­ered at least as effec­tive for build­ing mus­cle as sim­ply lifting.

So too in Taido, we can learn a great deal about our weak­nesses by allow­ing part­ners to con­trol us by exploit­ing them. When we impose our will on our part­ners, we become skilled at attack and tak­ing ini­tia­tive. When we allow our part­ners to impose their will on us, we become skilled at defense and regain­ing the ini­tia­tive when we make mis­takes or face a highly-skilled oppo­nent. Think about ways to bring this neg­a­tive rep­e­ti­tion con­cept to your jis­sen training.

Now, use it

Hopefully, you are now think­ing about how a few of these pat­terns have man­i­fested in your own life, both on the court and off. Recognizing pat­terns at work is one of the first steps to being able to change them. As you become more and more aware of the pat­terns as they occur, you will have greater power to change your course of action. Just as rec­og­niz­ing an opponent’s pat­tern of move­ments can allow us to sub­vert his inten­tions in a fight, rec­og­niz­ing our own pat­terns allows us to sub­vert our less-productive instincts and habits. It is said that we are our own worst ene­mies, uncon­sciously sab­o­tag­ing our­selves at every turn. Being aware of our own self-destructive pat­terns allows us to live lives fuller and freer than we are used to.