Martial Art’s striking technical contents are usually divided under the following categories:
Stances;
Strikes;
Parries;
Stepping actions.
Focusing on the strikes, parries and stepping actions, it is the purpose of this article to present an innovative and justified strategy of how to properly sequence the learning of these techniques.
Looking at the variables that need to be learned and perfected when practicing an art’s or sport’s technique, it is usual to divide them into two groups: internal (inner body) and external (outer body) coordination skills.
The inner body coordination skills usually focus on perfecting a movement in order to produce faster and, sometimes, more powerful movements as well. On the other hand, the outer body coordination skills focus on developing the athlete’s skill to apply a given technique on an outer “object”, with varying placement in space, and sometimes also in motion as the technique is executed.
Although much can and needs to be said about these technical variables, I’d like to introduce you to a third and usually neglected group of technical variables: the task oriented execution mindset.
By this I wish to state that, instead of continuing to look at Martial Art’s performers as people who simply perform “motor-actions” (biomechanical / inner body coordination focused movements), it is beneficial to start looking at them as actors who perform emotional-goal oriented actions.
I use the word actors in order to try to transmit the concept that these performers are people who, under a certain context, go through specific emotions as a result of certain needs (tasks) required to attain success in the given context.
Making a long speech short, Martial Arts exist because Human Beings go through conflicts during their lives. When these conflicts arise, at least one of the parties is trying to hurt the opposite. If diplomacy and an escape are not possible, both parties will feel the emotional strain of the conflict situation, which will develop in both the need to survive. In order to attain this goal the success criteria resumes itself to being able to hurt the opponent (offense) without getting hurt in the process (defense).
Going a little bit deeper in this analysis, to hurt an opponent one needs to strike him / her, on a preferably fragile body part (but which isn’t always available or attained). This already entails being able to coordinate the offensive action with the opponent’s body position in space (height, distance, movement) – outer body coordination skills. Additionally, the strike should have as much force as possible to damage that chosen target. This, on the other hand, has to do with inner body coordination. A balance must be attained between these two variable groups, since no one is effective with low impact strikes that hit the opponent, nor with powerful strikes that miss the opponent. However before being able to attain either the outer timing, distance and coordination skills or the inner power development skills, one must develop the movement itself.
This movement creation is guided by one’s pain inflicting motivation and highly influenced by both one’s own body and also the target’s characteristics.
To illustrate this point, if a target is placed at the same distance (0,50m) of several performers of different height (and thus different limbs’ length), and the performers are instructed to strike the target without moving, very short people (possibly kids) will probably need to kick, while normal adults will use and straight arm punch and a very tall person (2,10m) will probably use a hook strike.
At the same time, if we have two targets, the face and the throat, performers will be induced to develop striking with a fist for the face (since the face is very wide but with strong bones) and with an open hand to strike the throat (since the opening is sometimes too narrow for the fist but the target isn’t hard enough to hurt an open hand fingers strike).
Thus, there is a task logical mindset that should be present when developing strikes, so that they are understood and not memorized, which will make the execution instinctive and fluid, with one knowing his / her body and focusing on the opponent’s characteristics. Just like in normal daily living. Don’t make training unnecessarily hard. Develop the strikes’ movement with a target that teaches you its application logic.
Now, going back a few paragraphs, I stated that’s one’s combat success is dependent on striking the opponent without getting hit. Therefore, one is motivated to evade and / or intercept (block or redirect) the opponent’s strikes. Again, the opponent’s characteristics, as in strikes’ trajectories, will influence our defensive movement creation. If the strike is coming from above we’ll need an ascending parry. When the strike is coming from bellow, we’ll need a parry to the side, and so forth.
Thus, only after developing the defensive movements centered on a combat specific application parameter, does it become relevant to work on the timing, distance or power components of the strike.
Having said this parries need strikes to be developed, meaning that one need to first develop the strikes and then the parries (or at least one strike and its corresponding parry, but never the parrying movement without the reference of the strike it is intended to be applied against).
As for the stepping action, in terms of performance software, these are mere actions intended to place ourselves in our desired offensive or defensive distance.
Therefore, both offensive and defensive stepping movements should be developed after creating the striking and parrying movements, as it is a pre-requisite to understand the distance that suits us in each of these task groups, in order to set our motion requirements, that instinctively lead us to the stepping movements.
Hence, one can either develop all the strikes and parries statically, and afterwards their corresponding stepping movements, or develop the strikes and their offensive stepping actions , followed by the parries and their defensive stepping actions.
