Sparring vs. Fencing

I am making a distinction between "fighting," "sparring" and "fencing." Most people understand what figthing is, but they don't understand that sparring is the best thing that ever happened to martial arts:

• A fight is for keeps. Two people go at it to see who's best. There's a permanent record of who won, and who lost. Fights help to keep martial arts schools in check, to make sure their teaching methods are effective compared to other schools. For example in a submission grappling tournament, how well the participants do against each other gives us some feedback on how effective their schools are at teaching submission grappling.
• In sparring, you set a time limit for the round, and practice against each other for the duration of that round. You do not stop and talk about every little move that works in the round, you keep going continuously. Sparring isn't super competitive, you might work on advanced techniques you are not good at yet, even if it means your opponent does better against you. Sparring is the most important activity when it comes to learning moves you can use in a fight. For example in a submission grappling school students will typically spend half the class time wrestling against each other trying to land submission wrestling moves. A beginning student might land some moves on a more experienced student who is practicing moves they aren't good at yet. 
• Fencing is a perversion of fighting and sparring, where every time someone lands a successful technique, judges or the fencers themselves pause to discuss what happened and credit whoever "successfully" executed the technique. In martial arts there are many kinds of forms and two person drills, and fencing is a type of two person drill. Fencing is very problematic because people so often and easily mistake it for sparring. Sparring is the the single most important martial art exercise. For example if a submission grappling class only worked on position escapes and never had full sparring rounds, their students would never become competent grapplers.

This great evil of fencing instead of sparring or fighting in the martial arts takes many forms, be it light-contact karate point fighting, "calling kill shots" or judges separating fighters after each successful blow in Renaissance weapons tournaments, or honestly even in Olympic-style fencing. In fact I think Olympic style fencing is where this whole problem begins:

I think that the evils of fencing spills out into all other forms of "fencing" as well, be it Kendo or people trying to learn to fight with real swords:

The worst part is that many of the people who should know better, the folks proclaiming to teach the "martial arts" side of weapons, are some of the worst offenders. The justification for stopping as soon as the successful technique lands is that supposedly it would kill the opponent so quickly and instantaneously that it is unrealistic to assume the opponent might keep fighting back. This is a very naive view:

Consider how much of this ARMA tournament is actually spent trying to land blows, and how much of it is instead spent walking around and getting commentary from spectators... very problematic considering how much pretense there is in their stylized technique:

Where in the ancient training manuals does it say to stop every time you think you might have landed a good blow? When fencing replaces fighting or sparring it promotes the following bad habits:

• Posturing and Ego.
• Wasting sparring time by walking back to corners and getting to breath and have bad cardio generally.
• Stopping when you think you got a good hit in.
• Stopping when you think they got a good hit in.

Look at how pathetic this becomes when it is applied to unarmed martial arts:

In today's world with full contact tournaments of many different kinds, there simply is no excuse for adults acting like that in the name of martial arts.

Contrast that to people who are actually taking sparring and fighting in weapon martial arts seriously:

Very legitimate competition going on there, very unlike those "fencing" videos above. Consider how superior the technique is at Dog Brothers Gathering compared to any of the fencing above:

Now Dog Brothers is pretty much a fight. People who spar (not fight) in the same martial arts outside of competition use safety weapons or armor instead of wood vs. flesh: 

On the ARMA website they have a rant about how padded weapons are obsolete, yet as you see in their video above, their fighting and sparring is terribly inadequate, not sparring at all, just fencing.

At Tres Espadas we use a wide variety of safety weapons to do a wide variety of real sparring with, so we can test out martial arts techniques from numerous cultural origins, and to develop new techniques:

Fencing is expressly forbidden at Tres Espadas. That is because fencing is the worst thing that ever happened to martial arts.

Bauernwehr: Ubiquitous Chef's Knife

Most dark ages peasant knives were about the size and shape of a modern chef's knife. This is the "knife" part of the halberd, bow, and knife peasant fighting style I described in Pleasantry of the Peasantry:

Typically the size (and shape) of a modern chef's knife, they were sometimes the size of a machete. The Tres Espadas logo has a Gladius, a Cutlas and a Kukri, all of which have machete and large knife variations:

At Tres Espadas we have a very high emphasis on learning to fight with the large knife (Bowie knife or chef's knife,) and in fact it is the first skill set we suggest beginners learn:

Just as the bauernwehr above was ubiquitous in the dark ages, chef's knives are ubiquitous in domestic kitchens throughout the USA (and many other parts of the world.) The bauernwehr was considered the critical home defense tool of it's day, and the founders of Tres Espadas see the chef's knife to be a critical home defense weapon in today's world. It is one thing to praise the 2nd Amendment's supposed guarantee of home defense through firearms, it is another thing to encourage universal home defense through the study of chef's knife self-defense techniques.

Most indoors confrontations are close range. Knives can have significant advantages over guns at close range:

Most homes don't even have a gun. Of the homes with guns, few gun owners actually go out and practice using their weapon at the firing range, meaning they are almost completely incompetent with the weapon. Of those who actually bother to train with their guns, fewer still go hunting, do Airsoft, play paintball, or do any other training against live targets who don't want to be shot. (The founders of Tres Espadas do know gun owners who take their semi-auto rifles to the range frequently and have been on highly competitive paintball teams, but we think this level of training represents far less than 1% of the gun owners in the USA.)  People seriously interested in home defense should give chef's knife self defense techniques serious study:

If you are a skilled gunslinger, the one other thing to consider about the chef's knife besides its ubiquity is its silence. Almost anything you do with a gun makes noise, where as a chef's knife can be handled very quietly. A well trained and prepared knife fighter at close range can take a home invader without altering other possible armed accomplices he may have.

4 Star Scale: Cycle of Excellence

One person's opinion is only worth so much to another person. For me, when it comes to general quality, a simple "good" or "bad" is not enough detail. However a 1 to 10 scale gives a lot of subjective options and precision without giving us much more information than simply "good" or "bad." For this reason, I have a strong preference for a 4 star scale when asserting general quality something. Here's what the four stars mean:

1. One star* means something is bad. If we are talking about food, it is unpleasant to eat. If something is bad or unacceptable, we don't need to know just how awful it actually is, knowing it is not good enough, is good enough.
2. Two stars means that something is passable. If it's food it is edible, but not particularly good. The four star scale doesn't need an odd-middle scale for neutrality, because two stars IS the neutral rating - passable, but not especially tasty. If you say that something is "good, but not very good" that caveat means you are really talking about two star quality.
3. Three stars means something is very good or excellent. Notice that with food you either really like it or it is just edible, basically no space inbetween. Most of the stuff you "really enjoy" is three stars.
4. Four stars is for that which stands above other excellent things as favorites, classics, incredibly focused, uniquely enjoyable or particularly amazing in some way. This is the food that is so good you have to tell your friends about it (or maybe so good you are tempted to hide it from them.) It is not important how amazing you think something is, if it is amazing we know you think it is above and beyond most other excellent things. Four stars however does not mean perfect - nothing is perfect, because your perfection will have flaws for someone else, so don't be exclusive about the four star rating, if something is truly great, give it the four stars it deserves.

*Note there are no "half stars" in this system. When averaging multiple people's opinion, round. So if two people give a movie 4 stars, and their two dates give the movie 3 stars, (for an average rating of 3.5 stars,) that rounds to a 4 star movie (because it really entertained 4 people and amazed half of them. When converting Likert scale to 4 star scale, subtract one level and count both 0 and 1 as 1 star, and see the last sentance of #4 above.)

The farther something rises, the farther it has to fall. When something achieves 4 stars, often serious risks have been made, new things have been tried, or great effort has been focused on achieving a specific vision. This means truly amazing things are on the verge of being horrible, bad, one star. The "cycle of excellence" means that one star is just as close to 4 stars as 3 stars is, this goes in a loop, or cycle. For example with food, a truly amazing dish was probably at higher risk of becoming an inedible mess than simply very good food. The implication here is that if something is universally loved without critics, it is very likely 3 stars rather than 4, because one person's 4 stars could easily be another's 1 star.

Note that when it comes to efficiency, the sweet spot to aim for is 3 stars. For example with food, if you prepare a 3 star meal everyone is happy: some find it simply edible, others find it amazing, and most are pleased with their simply excellent meal. Beyond this attempting a 4 star meal would have required more effort and resources. The cycle of excellence suggests that very good is the ideal, responsible thing to achieve, and that amazing masterpieces are more risky (that some may not even find edible.)

On this blog I have already used this rating system to evaluate martial arts and individual levels of racism. I have used it with children to evaluate the severity of various usage of profanity, and I often demand feedback on meals I have prepared for guests based on the 4 star scale. Do the world a favor and make the 4 star scale as ubiquitous as possible.

Back Exercises

As a Tai Chi guy, people often ask me what exercises I know of that can help with back muscles. So here are my recommended exercises for strengthening the back, listed here in the order I would start trying these in if I were you:

0. First and foremost, do not do things known to strain your back. If getting arm-bar slammed bugs your back, don't get arm-bar slammed. Stop pushing 10 grocery carts at a time.

1. At least 15 minutes of standing meditation. Focus your mind on your breathing and intentionally relax the most tense parts of your back:

2. Stretches:  Tight legs leads to a tight back. You should stretch after standing meditation anyways. If you don't have any serious stretching you are already into, I strongly recommend you take up doing a deep squat stretch (in addition to other common stretches,) the easy kind of deep squat with your back straight, your feet out 45 degrees and your heels on the ground, like the first stretch in this video:

3. If you do pushups right, they basically work your whole body. Besides strengthening the back pushups help a lot of muscular support systems for your back such as your core, shoulders, neck and upper legs. A good minimum goal for everyone is one set of at least 20 pushups: 

4. Cardio: a leisurely stroll through the park is not cardio, but power walking, jogging and running is. Playing around in the swimming pool is not cardio, but doing laps in the pool is. Simply put you need to be doing 30 minutes of cardio, five times a week if you want your body, including your back, to feel like it is at optimal health.

Rating Racism

Everyone has biases against those of other ethnicity. The question is what do you do about these biases? How effectively you approach this question determines, in my view, just how racist you actually are. Using a simple scale of 1 to 4 stars, here's how I would categorize an individual's level of racism:

1. One star are people who have a high level of awareness of their own cultural biases, they actively work to keep their own biases about groups of other ethnicity in check, and they actively use any privilege they have to keep their environment as friendly to people of all ethnicity as possible. These are people with a solid intellectual understanding around racism and actively work against racism. The best historical example of this is Dr. MLK Jr., the one with the holiday in most of the US.
2. Two stars are friendly people who focus on treating everyone equally, but who aren't particularly focused on issues of ethnicity. They openly recognize racism as a problem in our culture and address issues around racism as soon as possible before they become more problematic. Without meaning to, these people will frequently make minor social errors like bringing up others ethnicity in casual conversation.
3. Three stars are people who generally feel racism isn't a significant issue in today's society. These people are often out of touch with their own cultural roots, and have given very little thought to how their ancestor's behavior influences their behavior today. They frequently make major errors around diversity issues without realizing it, creating potential lawsuits against their employers. The vast majority of people who say "I am not racist" fit into this category.
4. Four stars are people who are overtly racist per say. For example they may exacerbate racial conflicts for political agendas, or belong to groups that have recently been known for being unfriendly towards specific ethnicity. These people are either very defensive of social errors they make, or they are making comments that are intentionally offensive. For example someone with a tattoo that identifies them as unfriendly to certain minority groups is most likely in this category.

The vast majority of the USA are 3 stars racist. The next largest group is 2 stars, then 1 star, and 4 stars racist is the smallest but yet incredibly common category. The number one thing that seems to reduce racism IMHO is education level, though I have certainly met more than a few PHD's who still fall into the 3 star category, and I have met 1 star activists who did not have much more than a GED level of education.

See also: http://youtu.be/_f4oHtXHHYQ?t=11m55s

History of Internal Martial Arts Styles

There's a lot of explanations of what the relationships between the various internal martial arts are, with lots of stories about ancient masters and inclusions of styles so obscure you will never encounter them. I am going to try here to summarize it in a way that only mentions common styles and their relationship to each other. First, understand what Tai Chi is:
http://bfgalbraith.blogspot.com/p/what-is-tai-chi.html

Tai Chi comes from "Wudang Quan," which refers to the old Toaist Martial Arts, just like "Shoulin Kung Fu" refers to old Buddhist martial arts. Wudang Quan is practiced as a style today, and generally looks like a very fast and athletic form of Tai Chi:

Older forms of Wudang Quan also gave birth to the following martial arts styles, starting in the 1600's:

• Chen Tai Chi
• Other old-school Tai Chi like Chen but not Chen, like Wudang Dan Pai, Zhang, etc.
• Hsing-I (a very linear style with a high emphasis on strikes)
• Pa Kua (a very circular style)

In the 1800's Chen Tai Chi was mixed with Hsing-I and Pa Kua and highly standardized by the Yang Family, forming Yang Tai Chi. This became the most popular of all of these arts, and was spread far and wide in China. Yang Tai Chi then in turn gave birth to other styles of Tai Chi:

• "Wu Shu" Tai Chi (has a low emphasis on application and sparring, and a high focus on aesthetics.) This is often called Yang Tai Chi but real Yang Tai Chi has a high focus on application and sparring, and its forms are focused on application rather than on performance aesthetics. Unfortunately this is the most common type of Tai Chi today, and is the style that gives Tai Chi a bad name.
• Chi Kung is exercises originally taught in the Yang Tai Chi, but in Chi Kung no thought is given to application, sparring, or performance, it is only a set of fitness & meditation exercises.
• Sun Tai Chi heavily elaborates on the movement in Yang Tai Chi, expanding it into more of an elaborate kung fu style.
• Wu Tai Chi  emphasizes application and sparring, it is a natural evolution of Yang Tai Chi and is most common style of Tai Chi besides Wu Shu Tai Chi.

All of these above 9 Tai Chi related martial arts are still practiced somewhat commonly today. The Japanese founder of Aikido was a student in China, and had exposure to at least one of these above martial arts there, and Aikido is the Japanese variant of the decedents of Wudang Quan, heavily influenced by various traditional Japanese martial arts.

Yi Quan comes from Hsing-I, and is highly abbreviated and focused on "the basic essentials."

In summary there are two general historical categories of internal martial arts. First are the styles that came before Yang Tai Chi: Chen Tai Chi, other old forms of Tai Chi, Wudang Quan, Hsing-I and Pa Kua. Second is Yang Tai Chi and those that developed at the same time or later, including Wu Tai Chi, Sun Tai Chi, Aikido, and Yi Quan.

Five Fight Factors

Martial Artists success in fights is multi-dimensional, and doesn't come down to any one attribute:


There are 5 factors I look at in a martial artist to gauge their probably success in a conflict; skill, strategy, size, stamina and spite:

• Skill is where martial artists excel. There are two considerations here: variety of skill and depth of skill. Keep in mind there's no such thing as a technique mastered outside of full contact sparring, so when considering the variety of techniques someone has, consider their sparring practices and what variety of techniques they often spar with. How perfected a technique is depends on how strong of opponents they are sparring and how much resistance can their technique overcome consistently.
• Strategy covers those techniques not normally practiced in sparring, such as eye gouges and groin kicks, but also running away, using the environment to full advantage, situational awareness and so on. Non martial arts related activities such as team sports, study and gaming can build strategic thinking. If a nerd waits for you to use the urinal and comes out of the stall with a mechanical pencil between your shoulder blades, you just got outsmarted through strategy.
• Spite is having an aggressive mental mind set that will assist you in doing what has to be done to win. Some call this "will to win," but there are many motivations and reasons to lack empathy that can increase spite in a conflict. Spite means you can't let yourself lose, there is too much on the line for you to let up on your opponent for any reason. Spite is your mental mindset beyond skill and strategy
• Size matters a great deal in self defense. The two sizes mentioned in professional fighting are the two dimensions to pay attention to: body weight and reach. People who are larger than you are harder for you to hurt, and it is easier for you to be hurt by them, just because of simple physics. However superior reach gives your opponent options you simply don't have: this is obvious at striking range where you can easily be "out reached," but even on the ground grappling they have a wider variety of places they can grasp you than your grasping options, and often can land submissions on you that you can't do on them.
• Stamina or in other words physical conditioning also plays a key factor, for two reasons. Most obviously the longer a fight goes on, the more stamina comes into play, and can completely determine the outcome of a fight if one fighter has poor conditioning. Less obviously and more importantly, the more stamina a fighter has, the more they can train and spar, and the more rapidly they can build skill.

Age can take its toll on all of the above, as less techniques become safe to spar with, strategic options decrese, wisdom overcomes mental brutality, bone and muscle density decay, and effectiveness of working out in the gym declines. Keep this in mind:

However some martial artists age faster as fighters than others, and that mostly comes down to how serious and frequently they are injured. One fighter might retire from MMA competition because of permanent injury in his late twenties, while another might not start competing until his early thirties. It is important to spar full contact, but it is also important to spar safely.

Let's take Brock Lesnar for example. With a background in real wrestling and money for the best private coaches around, Lesnar had formidable technical skill in the ring. Strategically he focused on exactly what was likely to win against each individual opponent, maximizing his personal advantages. He maintained a bully like fearless attitude that enraged critics and dominated in the ring. At six foot three and 286 pounds, he had superior body weight and reach. His stamina and conditioning is the stuff of legend, considered extreme even in the world of professional fighting.

From 2008 to 2010 he was the MMA fighter to beat, but then his health soured and he went back to professional wrestling after a few less impressive fights. The following is pure fiction portrayed by Lesnar, but illustrates the five fight factors: