Snippet me Timbers

Since the inception of Youtube and other variants, the world has been flooded with small martial videos.   A large portion of these martial videos are made to generate interest or the cool factor and are not at all videos designed to specifically learn from.  I have frequently posted training videos in the last decade, so that my students could have reference material when they were hopefully home training. These are ‘learn orientated’ where I go through something slow like a kata or teach a foundational principle nice and slow.

A snippet is not a training video.  A snippet is merely a small portion of a seminar, usually under a minute.  As more and more people have invited me to teach at seminars, more and more of these snippets have been released and people will continue to do so.  I always find it crazy that the second one of these gets released and shared across the net, suddenly the keyboard warriors descend upon the video like half-starved vultures, bound and determined to save the world from the things they don’t believe are valid….from their limited perspective of this vast world we live in.

As an example, I was recently asked to teach at a dojo in North Carolina.  I had attended several seminars with the dojo owner and we had become friends.  We both attended each other’s classes at seminars in the past, and when we were not teaching we usually paired up to train in other classes.  He liked what I was doing, I liked what he was doing, and he decided he wanted his students introduced to Taika’s art of tuite after our paths had crossed numerous times and he had purchased and studied the Six Basic Principles of Tuite.  He requested I come and introduce the principles in an hour and a half short seminar. 

An hour and a half is no time at all to learn something as complex as the foundational principles that Taika Seiyu Oyata spent a lifetime teaching his students.  In fact, most of my guest appearances at seminars with multiple instructors are merely 50 minutes long.  When I have seminars where I am the solo instructor I tend to make that much longer if possible but quite often all I can get is 2-3 hours on a regular class night.  So this seminar was a very brief introduction. 

At one point during the class a particular technique was taught to further illustrate a principle, particularly the 3-dimensional attack principle used in Tuite, Kyusho and other aspects of Taika’s art.  During the course of this class, a pair of students were missing two of the principles in the execution of the technique.  After only 4-5 reps, that would be normal for any practitioner, never having trained in a particular manner before.  There were 14 people, so 6 other pairings to help, thus time was limited with each paired practitioners.  I did a very quick cleanup with them and a third party asked if I would repeat what I just did and said for his camera.  And thus, a 55 second snippet was born.

I have kind of gotten used to these moments now and they almost always play out the same.  The snippet gets uploaded to the net, you get a great deal of likes and shares, mostly positive comments, and then you have the few vultures in the world that are going to trash you for no other reason than you are not in their art, their circle, et cetera.

The most common things I see/hear are:

·       That is not a realistic training situation.

·       Nobody grabs in a fight, it just doesn’t happen.

Realism in Training

Now, I don’t know how these people train but in about 40 years of running around in the martial, self-defense and law enforcement training environment, I have never seen anyone successfully teach something new and immediately go to the ‘realistic’ mode.  What would you do if you showed up to a knife defense seminar and the instructor said, “I am only going to show you this defense once, and then randomly attack you when you are not looking with a real weapons.”  Oh, and we won’t give you any time to practice.  It sounds absolutely ludicrous but the Snippet Snipes act like this is what you should be doing, even though they have never trained this way and if they even are instructors themselves wouldn’t teach this way.

Tuite is difficult.  Taika told us, it is a difficult art to attain and thus you should start your students out early in the fundamental principles of it.  His plan, not mine but I wholeheartedly agree.  We introduce tuite to our kyu students within the first three classes.  There are a set of six basic principles that we like for our students to grasp prior to ramping up a little and even then, we don’t jump to realistic mode.  When we first start, they are just standing arm’s length away from each other trying to learn grips and angles of attacks.  They are just learning the basic physics, the science of what it takes to get the proper lock-up.  They are learning how to make it work from a position where they can more easily see their mistakes and correct them.  After they get the hang of that we increase the number of techniques, still from this same start position and every new technique will always start from here.  It is their root, base start position of learning.  This is how you teach new people. We don’t load a fully functional gun, hand it to one student, and tell the other go outside and when you come back in there will be someone in here with a gun and you have to disarm them successfully without dying in order to get your yellow belt.

After months of training in it, and totally dependent upon the student’s abilities, we progress to more and more realistic training.  It is never 100% realistic in that when you walk in the dojo door you know you will be training. The only way to go full-realistic is to put a ski mask on and attempt to mug your student as they are leaving the University, Church, the BBQ restaurant, the bar, et cetera.  Nobody expects the Tuite Inquisition!  We do speed things up later, go from different stances, random pushes, grabs, punches in the dojo, et cetera.  But only after they have the fundamental understanding which takes more than a handful of hours at a seminar.  My job at a seminar is to give you homework, not make you a master at whatever new idea I am introducing you to.

Nobody Grabs in a Fight……Ever

I’ll respond to this in three parts. 

One: You are wrong, it happens all the time, just because it has never ever happened to you doesn’t mean it isn’t a valid technique.  I was a security officer at Kmart and was grabbed and pushed all the time with my attempts to stop shoplifters.  In that 3 year time period I stopped about 250 people.   About a third of them would see the little kid before them and decide they were not going to jail, they would push, punch, and then run away.  I would chase and a ground fight would ensue. Without fail during these ground fights I would get grabbed.

As a cop for 27 years, all of my field time was in the bad parts of town, the inner city and the crack haven of south side.  I took lots of reports involving assaults and saw a lot that were involving pushes and grabs. The vast majority of Domestic Violence (not just man vs woman) calls I went on involved grabs and/or pushes.  As a general rule, people that know each other tend to do things like this rather than full on beat downs.  Most rapes are not stranger rapes, they are indeed people that know you.  Strangers fight more fists and feet but if they get on the ground then they usually grab.  Ten years into my career I became a Sergeant and had to approve every report for my entire sector each night.  So I had to read and respond to many more such events.  They do absolutely happen on a regular basis. 

I have always love this argument, the lack of logic in this argument based on ‘their own life’.  In Kansas City there are just shy of 500,000 residents and it swells up during the work day or specific events to upwards of 1.5 million.  Of all of those people in a given year, only about 14,000 are assaulted in Kansas City per the 2018 stats provided by the department.  Such a tiny percentage of the people are actually assaulted.  And yes I know, a lot of fights are not reported.  I frequently poll people during a seminar and find that very few have ever been in a street fight during their adult lifetime.  Kids, well, most kids get in some sort of scrap but as adults, the vast majority of martial artists don’t get into fights……ever.  The ones that do, and frequently, are the ones that work security, police jobs in big cities, bouncers, et cetera.  As I train cops worldwide to become police trainers I even poll them.  There are tons of ‘Mayberry’ small town cops that maybe get in a scrap once a year, as well as ‘Mayberry’ small town cops that work in meth infested areas that get in as many fights as inner city cops.  So if the slice of the pie worldwide or even just U.S. wide for most of my contacts is so huge and such a small teeny tiny percentage of people are getting assaulted, and such a small percentage of martial students are getting assaulted, how can you say it doesn’t happen.  I even had one person say they had perused ‘x’ amount of youtube fight videos and never seen it happen.  First off, they have not looked hard enough as I’ve seen it in videos.  How many people have their cameras rolling before a fight?  You rarely, unless it is a mounted building camera, get the full fight on video.  It is someone whipping their phones out once the first attacks and defenses were launched.  And this technology is all relatively new, the ability to record quality video on your phone.  Humans have been fighting since the first two knuckleheads reached for the same mastodon leg at the cave dinner table.

Two: Make it happen.  Taika taught as part of his art, a greater skill of manipulating the opponent’s body to make them reach out, open their hands, and grab.  This is a lesser known or shown part of his art because on the seminar circuit we are trying to squeeze in the fundamentals of how a wrist lock truly works.  That is all that is feasible during a 1-2 hour time slot.  Students had to stick with Taika a very long time and be proficient in the fundamentals before they would ever get these lessons.  Taika had a way of striking, punching and kicking that would loosen a fist, or cause the person to lose their balance.  The first step of this is learning what we call Dermal Redirection.  A falling person that is still conscious would reach out and he would position a part of his body into the hand. I frequently will demo some of these strikes but rarely have the time to teach in the blocks given as the people, even if repeats, have only trained with me for hours. When you are falling you reach out, a natural human reaction.  Usually this was a forearm you landed on when Taika struck you.  Hence, all the various forearm grabs we practice were prep work for this sub-art of the Oyata systems.  People always like the magical neck knockouts, but Taika would say that just a light fuzz-out was better because the opponent is still conscious and will grab you as they fall, if you are so positioned.  If they grab you, you can pin them with tuite rather than chase them.  They may grab your arm, your lapel, your hand or they may just open their hand to reach and you catch it just like you would when practicing a push catch.  “Same…same.”

Three: Everyone has things they are more skilled at than others whether it is this art, a hobby, or just life in general.  The two things I presume I am best at in Taika’s arts, based on the fact that I get asked to teach those the most, are straight baton (tanbo) and tuite.  Taika’s art was a combination of many things.  There are non-tuite related defenses and offenses as well.  Just because you saw a 55 second snippet of tuite and don’t truly understand it, doesn’t mean the other parts of the art are trash.  This is just a sample of what Taika taught.  He taught everyday hand to hand, he taught joint locks (wrist, elbow, shoulder, knee, ankle), he taught Atemi (creating pauses in your opponent later known as ooda loop by many), he taught Kyusho (and not the mass marketed over exaggerated TCM stuff on the market), he taught Kobudo, he taught Police Defensive Courses, he taught basic Self-Defense and many other aspects of the arts.  The pond is much, much deeper than a 55 second snippet could portray.

Realism

I also love when people start talking about realism in training and then their facebook profile is of them with a Nunti-bo, naganata, manji sai, kama, et cetera.  All these things you usually carry with you at the local Hy-Vee when grocery shopping.  (Side Note: Most of the Kobudo Taika taught had other purposes such as strengthening, learning to do a milking punch, learning to break-over your wrist.)  There are a lot of things we do that are about historical preservation, and well, just the fun of it.  A friend at a seminar I attended last year was teaching and made a very good point during his class.  It was an instructor level seminar so everyone there had multiple years.  He said, there are numerous reasons people get into this art.  Maybe they got scared.  They were bullied as a kid.  They were entering a profession that had a high likelihood of confrontation (police, probation officer, security, or military).  If you think about your current reason, it probably isn’t the same as your original reason.  A lot of us stay decades in the arts because we just find it cool in one manner or another.  I find it amazing that even after over 3 decades of training, that I still find getting better at discovering the body’s weaknesses and exploiting them, to me that is just amazing.  Even on his death bed at 81, Taika was still learning and wanting to train and teach while there in the hospital.

Save the World

What I do not understand is the Snippet Snipes who believe that it is their duty to save the world from things their slice of life perspective doesn’t agree with.  I see full training video and snippets all the time that I do not have the context to judge.  Some things might stand out as complete craziness but most often, if you truly look at a short video snippet from a seminar, you should realize that you don’t have the full context (and entire seminar recording) to make an informed decision on the validity of what is going on.

Another things that is frustrating is when people compare you to someone else in a most unrealistic manner.  I have had people say that wrist locks don’t work on them because so and so tried them and nothing happened.  Maybe so and so didn’t know what they were doing.  I’ve even had people tell me I am not Taika so I can’t do what he did, even though neither Taika nor I ever touched that person in their life.  So they have no point of reference to a comparison.  I don’t purport to be Taika or do my techniques exactly the way he did or believe I am anywhere near his equal.  That may be a goal, a lofty one at that, and I will endeavor to get there whether I even come close in my lifetime.  But don’t compare apples and oranges if you have never tasted either.

Numerous videos are forwarded to me for my opinion on a weekly if not daily basis.  If it is related to Oyata, I will give my perspective based on my experience.  If it is of something/someone I am not familiar with, 90% of the time I do not have enough information to save the world.  I just ignore it.  I might discuss aspects of it in our weekly shihan dai and usually we will gain some unintended knowledge by experimenting with someone else’s situation or setup for something that I only have a snippet of.  I think that is by far the better thing to do. 

Let your art grow from training rather than let your heart sour from poison.

Just my 2¥