“I’m really trying…”

This can have more than one meaning – and therefore what’s in your head is really important.  Are you ‘trying’ to attempt to do something with failure already written into it?  Are you seeing it as difficult and frustrating?  Are you ‘trying’ because you think it’s difficult or hard’?

These are all responses that we commonly get from students and the problem can lie with our upbringing, as a child we are constantly told that we must ‘try’ and are told off for ‘not trying’, my school report often said ‘must try harder’, meaning that I needed to put in more effort and often, as long as we put that extra effort in, we were rewarded whatever the result.

And so it goes on, in sport and in Martial Arts, the harder we ‘try’ the more we are rewarded for effort.  So much so, that in some Martial Arts the students end up moving like a car with the handbrake stuck on, agonised expressions on their faces and desperate ‘spirit shouts’ sounding like they are about to vomit or screaming like a Banshee with a wooden stake up its backside!

Fighters are born and made better.

Many people are born fighters even if they and their families and friends don’t realise it, many martial artists think that they are made, but a good coach finds those instincts and brings it out in them.  Some people will just never have that instinct in the first place and will spend their life as a victim and/or too weak and lazy to fight.

Just look into a persons eyes, watch how they move, not what they are doing, but how they move, you can tell a lot about someone from just these two things.  Nurture teaches us to hide our fighting animal, and the more civilised we are the more we hide it behind good manners and little rituals – but if you look deep enough you can see who has it and who doesn’t.  People say ‘the worm has turned’ but the worm only turns if the capacity was there in the first place, otherwise they’ll just roll over and die – and history has a long list of those.

Some people make great sportsmen – but that doesn’t necessarily make them a fighter, you can be both, or not.  A fighter wins. A fighter just ‘goes’ for it.  The Martial Art, style or technique is the training that will bring about the instinctively trained movement, but the fight is in the eyes, heart and spirit.  A Lion or Tiger just ‘goes for the kill’ when it hunts, it wants it’s dinner, it doesn’t care how it looks, it just kills.  The human animal is aware of the social constraints and when released still has that capacity to straight for the jugular using instinct and cunning and can also with training restrain with a hint of the capacity for greater violence.

Most ‘sparring’ is sexual preening, it’s a game where no one is in any real danger, everyone just wants to look good.  Instructors trying to recreate a ‘real’ situation will get people shouting swearing and dressing up in padded suits….. – but it’s still your mates and ain’t nothing like the real thing.  It’s only when the chips are really down that the animal is released and the eyes, spirit and heart will come into play.  

Whenever I mention the world ‘arousal’ in our training we inevitably get lots of smirks and sniggers because it’s a term that most ‘normal’ people only associate with sexual activity, but understanding arousal is very important to the Martial Arts practitioner.  The terms that Instructors tend to use are too blunt, they talk about ‘adrenaline dump’, ‘anger’ ‘aggression’ and ‘freezing’ when it’s far more complex than that.

Arousal can be trained at many different levels and can make a considerable difference to performance under stress and the learning environment.  Wikipedia explains arousal as:

“Arousal is a physiological and psychological state of being awake or reactive to stimuli. It involves the activation of the reticular activating system in the brain stem, the autonomic nervous system and the endocrine system, leading to increased heart rate and blood pressure and a condition of sensory alertness, mobility and readiness to respond.

There are many different neural systems involved in what is collectively known as the arousal system. Four major systems originating in the brainstem, with connections extending throughout the cortex, are based on the brain’s neurotransmitters, acetylcholine, norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin. When these systems are in action, the receiving neural areas become sensitive and responsive to incoming signals.”