JD Wiest
With the reality of a world-wide pandemic well upon us, many of us will be wondering how we can keep training and improving without the possibility of structured classes or instructional institutions to guide our practice. With the prevalence of information, and the amazing diversity of sources and disciplines readily available to us through books, manuals, Wiktenauer, social media and YouTube, the focus of this installment is going to steer away from any specific exercises or drills, and instead highlight the different mindsets that you can bring to your personal training to get the most out of your time studying and practicing on your own.
There are five mindsets that I want to highlight: technical efficiency, speed, flow, power, and focus. When you understand these five basic principles you can take one basic action, say an oberhau or a stringere technique, and you can create a dynamic practice around that single action.
Technical efficiency is an essential element of every martial artist’s individual practice. Regardless of whether you’re adding to an existing routine, or just trying to supplement missed class time in the wake of the current situation, it’s a key to achieving the goals you set for yourself in your journey. Technical efficiency can be achieved by simply slowing down your movements and refining every detail of the action or play that you’re practicing Tai-chi is an example of a highly technical approach to practice). Take for example the zornort play, which is something I imagine as a practitioner of KdF you’ve probably practiced a thousand times by now (regardless of skill level), but your form and technique can still be improved by breaking the play down into its component parts, and working on the intricacies that make it a dynamic part of the Liechtenauer tradition. Are you leading with your sword? How’s your edge alignment? Is your stepping fluid or is it cumbersome? Do you hesitate before you wind, or can you perform the action at random with fluidity? These are little elements, technical elements, that you can bring piecemeal into your practice of one technique and extend your practice for hours but are the first step to mastery. This can be done with any technique from the Zettel to the Opera Nova, just pick out a series of actions you have a desire to work on, dissect them into their essential parts, and perfect them.
Speed may seem self-explanatory but let me assure you there is a lot more to speed than just how quickly you can perform an action. At its core, speed is just that, how quickly you can perform an action, but in practice someone who is fast is not only quick, they are efficient, controlled and fluid. This all starts with technical efficiency. Why? Because another aspect of speed comes from being relaxed and poised. A clear mind, and a relaxed body are faster than clouded mind and tense body. So, in order to better develop speed, you work the same technique over and over again until you’ve become intimate with that technique and minutia of its details, then you start working them a little bit faster, which brings you back to step one, in that you’re working the technical details you discovered in the prior step at a faster speed, and you continue in this cyclical progression until you reach the desired speed you’re aiming for. This creates a familiarity that allows for both physical speed and mental speed under pressure. One great way to check in with your progress is to alternate speeds between the speed you’re working on and the speed you started at. This will ensure that you’re keeping the technical efficiency mindset as you work toward your desired outcome.
Flow is a little more ambiguous, especially for beginners, but this will resonate well with those who have experience sparring, in that flow is generated from a sense of enemy, and it requires that experience to provide its inherent benefits. Imagine what it was like when you first started taking the techniques that you’ve been drilling into sparring and tried to pull them off against an opponent with more experience than you. It almost seems like they’re telepathic, reading your every move, but you can’t seem to get a beat on what they’re doing because they move so well and transition smoothly between attacks. As you gain experience, you start to understand these elements, and when you revisit drills, you start incorporating the lessons of your past bruises into further drills. Eventually you get to their level, and then it’s you who’re fighting a new student, and exploiting the robotic nature of an individual whose been doing a repetitive action without the framework of a fight to guide their movements. This dynamism of movement highlighted in this example is flow and it’s the abrasive that helps smooth out the rough edges of technique focused drilling. In personal practice flow can be achieved by throwing out the rigidity of technical efficiency and pushing yourself to move in a more natural way, perhaps with a little more speed than you’re comfortable with. Another great way to practice this is shadow boxing, which is just fighting against an invisible enemy, imagining them parrying your blows and reposting with cuts and thrusts. [s4] Both examples will help you find the next steps to work toward in your training and give you new insights on elements of technical efficiency and speed to progress toward, which will allow you to start into the cycle again.
The next element of personal practice and the last of the core physical elements of training is power. Power is last because it takes a clear understanding of the previous elements be able to safely and efficiently utilize power. Ironically, power is the easiest thing to utilize unsafely, and the hardest to master safely. We’ve all heard of the raging bull, the buffel, the untrained peasant who swings their weapon furiously, right? These are representation of the common man, not the master, yet every fencing master and manuscript writer talks about striking with the full power of your body. The anonymous writer of MS 345 Classense Ravenna, or the Anonimo Bolognese frequently talks about thrusting with the entire power of the body and his later contemporary Achille Marozzo says at one point to cut your opponent with such force that it will travel from their shoulder down to their feet. Power is a very real and necessary technique to master, but first one must understand the previous three elements and how they safely and efficiently inform our goal of power generation. Power when properly applied is more than just striking with force, it is striking with force, at speed, in control, with technical proficiency, and is done with an element of understanding that applying power in a technique requires further strength and fluidity to recover from regardless of the techniques success. Power is not something that is used continuously, it is used in a directed and meaningful way, and to develop the ability to do you this you’ll have to alternate between doing actions with strength and power and doing them with flow. To go back to our zornort example power can be applied in the initial zornhau, but to be performed well, the cut must end in a guard. In drilling this is represented by stopping a stationary fixed position, perhaps, when in the reality of combat this guard only represents a safe decision point that must be acted upon immediately, indes, with fuhlen. When you put the full play together, you’ll find that each element requires a different measure of power. The cut is powerful, the thrust is done with a firmness so that it can succeed but not a rigidity that prevents you from being able to progress through the play. When you break that down you can see where we’re headed, we’re going back to the beginning, back to technical efficiency, speed, and flow. All these elements build upon one another and enrich our training.
The natural conclusion of this discussion ends with focus. Focus is the uniting force of all these elements. In the beginning it can be a mindset that you assign for a specific training session, say focusing on technical efficiency or power, but as you practice these elements, and incorporate them into your training, it will become a whisper that stems from your subconscious that will inform your dills and provide them with depths you never imagined. This is the same focus that Yogi’s teach their students when they emphasize the breath as much as the physical postures of Yoga, and you apply can the same principle by seeding the afore mentioned elements into your personal study of Western Martial Arts. It’s a subconscious checklist of technical elements that exist outside of the textual framework you study but are woven through those very techniques, and will provide you with an excellent foundation for achieving whatever it is you set out to accomplish on your journey. Thus, focus is a mindfulness that we bring to our practice that highlights either one element or all the elements of dynamic training listed above, but always focusing on one of these five principles to refine our technique and provide pathways to technical mastery.