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This section is reserved for the fighting men of yesteryear.  The boxers and wrestlers, brawlers and boom battlers of yore who lived, trained, and fought tough.  We hope these stories entertain and inspire you in your own quest to be the best fighter you can be. 

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"I'm a former wrestler and am working on a Blue Belt in Jujitsu.  It's amazing the differences in styles from Brazilian to western wrestling.  I have your ABC series as well as Beyond BJJ.....they are great.  It paid for itself when I tapped my BJJ instructor with 7 years experience with a crown crush and then a sky-box arm-bar."

--C.L.T.

An Except from The Book of Essential Submissions: MY EMPIRICAL DATA ATE YOUR DOGMA

If you are going to step inside a cage or a ring, which would you rather have: Advice based on tradition and opinion or, advice based on evidence? Let’s be honest as we answer this question, you are offering yourself up for definite bodily harm as everybody gets hit in a fight, good fighters just don’t get hit as much.

Do you want hearsay? Strategies and tactics uttered out of habit that have, perhaps, not had much practical thought placed behind them? Do you want to train or drill ideas that might be more related to a different environment than the one you are entering? This is your body you are putting on the line, wouldn’t it be wise to arm yourself with the best information available?

I’m going to gamble that your answer will have you err on the side of evidence over what might simply be dogma. If at any point in your training you confront a bit of evidence (evidence, not advice) that butts against what you have assumed to be correct all along, well, that’s terrific. You’ve learned something. Discard the under-performing tool and get to work incorporating the new tool. This sort of going with the evidence stance has nothing to do with personal likes or, dislikes, allegiances or alliances, respect or disrespect, it’s just a simple acknowledgment of truth.

All advice, from all sources is usually offered with good intentions as, for the most part, people are well-meaning but, if at any point the advice fails the evidentiary test then it’s gotta go bye-bye. Allow this quote from the late Michael Crichton to fuel this perspective: “Intentions are meaningless, all that matters are results.”

I bring up the need for non-dogmatic thinking because the sport of MMA has had a curious history. Unlike most other sports, some branches of MMA have come to us from avenues that allowed their sport/art to become cloaked in a bit of crypto-mysticism or, strict codes of unwavering lineage and/or tradition stopping just short of oaths of fealty reminiscent of medieval vassals and lords. These two stances stifle honest questioning and experimentation, the hallmarks of progress.

Other sports, operate in a train-drill-practice-scrimmage-play the game- learn what you did right or wrong-incorporate those results into your training- and then play again continuum. These sports are using the objective empirical method whether it is called that or not and, we all think that they are wise to do so. It’s not just the scientific method it’s good common sense.

We’ve all seen old films of early football or basketball games or, Olympic competition and we marvel at what was and respect these pioneers for their accomplishments. But, you can’t help but notice that games and individual events have evolved since the “old days.” Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe swam beautifully in the Olympics of yore but, how do you think they would stack up against the Michael Phelps of today (baked or not)? How would a 1930s era college football team fare against a team of today? These are subjective questions, I know, and we can quibble and offer, “Well, if they had access to the same training opportunities and the same resources as we have today” argument…but, that proves the point, doesn’t it? 

They didn’t have these resources and or opportunities available to them. They were providing the data to foster the astonishing improvements and performances we see today. To paraphrase Isaac Newton, these athletes of yore are the giants upon whose shoulders we stand today.

No other sport would hamstring itself with blind obeisance to an outmoded tactic, strategy, or tool. When Jim Corbett began dissecting the Great John L. Sullivan with the “new technology” of the jab, traditionalists didn’t suppress the jab and insist that we go back to the old way, boxers the world over took a look at early film of Gentleman Jim and eagerly adopted the jab as their own.

In the 1968 Summer Olympics, Dick Fosbury took the Gold in the high jump with what has come to be known as the Fosbury Flop. Prior to Fosbury’s innovation, athletes had cleared the bar with techniques such as the straddle, the Western Roll, the Eastern Cut-Off, and the scissors-jump. Previous high-jumpers were landing either on sand or low matting and therefore had to be a bit more careful in their landing. The advent of deeper foam landing surfaces allowed for a bit more carefree technique on the landing and Fosbury’s flop evolved to exploit this change. Fosbury’s Flop wasn’t discounted or ignored; it was quickly adopted and incorporated by other athletes.

And that’s the way it should be, whether in sports, business, or, everyday life. Always evolving, always adapting, always paying attention. Always willing to slough off what pays low dividends in favor of that which pays high yields.

Let us clarify that high yield goal even further. We want high yields based on safe investments. We don’t want our training to echo the current economy where projected high yields were based on risky investment tools that ended up paying, well we know where that got us. We want our training to be safe vehicles that still pay high returns. We don’t want to be the gamblers with “a system” visiting the Bellagio Casino in Las Vegas hoping  for a bit of Lady Luck based on something we caught in the film 21.

No, we want to be the Bellagio itself. We want house odds at all times. You want to be the Bellagio that only offers game that it knows that it will win more often than not. As soon as the casino customers start pulling more than we do on an individual game then that game either has to be tweaked or it’s gotta go. Casinos stay solvent over the long haul; gamblers don’t. Be the Bellagio. 

In our goal to be the Bellagio we’ve got to know what wins fights. We’ve got to know what gambits get us into trouble. We’ve got to quantify offense and defense in a qualitative manner that allows us to build hierarchies of utility. We’ve got to separate the wheat from the chaff and recognize that what might be “Black Jack” in one version of combat sports might just be “bust” in MMA. To shed this casino metaphor and move to the concrete let’s look to the Omaplata submission.

The Omaplata (coil lock or leg-wrap DWL to the wrestlers among us) is a high-percentage submission in jiu-jitsu competition and submission wrestling tournaments. How does it stack up in MMA? Well, out of the 640 fights examined for this study, the Omaplata was attempted 48 times and finished 0 times.

0 out of 48 attempts in 640 bouts. These bouts were comprised of the cream of the crop of competitors: fantastic jiu-jitsu players, excellent wrestlers, formidable kick-boxers. Athletes that, in all probability, had a better than average working knowledge of how to set up and utilize this submission that serves so well in other arenas and yet in MMA, we can now look at the numbers and see it as the under-performing investment tool that it is--at least in this arena and as it is being set-up as of this writing.

This is the sort of information that informs this primer. Just as we have statisticians in other sports informing strategy, tactics, and draft picks it is time we turn this empirical tool upon this sport that we love so dearly and allow the results to spur us forward. To allow us to evolve and with that evolution we can start seeing innovation ala Dick Fosbury and Jim Corbett that will give us new strategies and tactics to factor into our equations. Until then, we need to make sure that the equations we are working with now are accurate.

FEEDBACK VERSUS ASSUMPTIONS

Let’s open our discussion of today’s topic with three quotes that provide greater service to my argument and with far fewer words than I will:

The above quotes, all from recognized and lionized legitimate authorities, albeit in different areas of combat; agree that strategies and tactics experience entropy when stress is applied. And to combat sports enthusiasts/martial artists, stress is usually expressed via striking. These observations may seem absurdly obvious to all of us but, there still seems to be a contingent that while nodding in agreement with the above quotes of wisdom still proceed with training modes that diametrically oppose the offered dictates.

Combat arts/sciences are contact sports/endeavors, no ifs, ands, or buts about it but, it is still mighty common to encounter no-contact training drills or, even more ludicrous, non-contact sparring exercises. Sometimes you encounter the slightly better approach of, light contact drills or light contact sparring (this still has its place—more on that later). This zero to light contact approach is a bit puzzling and not readily encountered in other contact sports.

I mean, aside from flag football, you don’t see football practices even at the Pee-Wee football league level conducted in zero contact formats. Every football practice may not be all out but, there is still the understanding that one will don safety gear and hit with at least some contact as that is the nature of the sport. To be frank, I can think of no other contact sport or sport of risk (one that may offer bumps or bruises) that has entire methods of approach devoted entirely to “not actually doing the sport.” When we avoid contact or lighten contact to an absurd degree are we even still practicing or participating in the sport we claim to be? Are we wasting our time? Catering to illusions? Or, as the quotes offer, are we making plans that have little basis in reality.

Please, do not assume that I am making an argument for all out, full-on contact for each and every training session, that would be a mistake on any athlete’s part as the body will not permit that level of abuse day-in, day-out. But, I am making the case for some level of contact on all drills and sparring sessions. To do any less is simply mime and miming being in a box or walking against the wind is not the same as actually being in a box or walking against the wind, it is merely mime, a game of pretend that plays at reality without confronting reality. 

Contact alters plans, approaches, and assumptions at all skill levels. Cases in point, simply observe any pre-fight smack-talk interview in MMA competition. You know the pre-taped lead-in to the fight where we see the competitors in a seated interview with a rocking and rolling camera telling us how they are going to assert their will, do this, do that to their opponent. These taped pieces are basically a bit of theater or mental puffery to sell the fight but, how well do these confidently pronounced plans hold up when reality hits them in the face? Well, at least 50/50 odds, of course, as there is always a winner and a loser but, the odds are even lower than that as often even the pronounced plans of the winner seldom resemble what the victor predicted would happen. If the best fighters in the world who already do use the wisdom of contact find their plans going to hell at least 50% of the time how much worse will the lesser fighter with a zero-to-low contact training modality fare?

Contact allows us to hone our skills faster, with greater precision. Contact from day one of training (scaled contact for course, there is no need to beat down rookies) makes better athletes from day one. Contact is positive feedback—always—even when you think it’s negative, it’s not. You can be told time and time again to keep your hands up or some other bit of advice but that gloved fist in your head-geared face will do far more for your hands-up education than any coach’s persistent admonishments. Contact allows us to separate tactical wheat from tactical chaff. Contact allows us to prune technique, adjust approaches. Contact allows us to challenge our assumptions under live fire drilling conditions and finding out the truth in a drill is far, far better than finding out in reality.

ON YOUR TOES VS. FLAT-FOOTED

Here’s an image that is easily called to mind—picture a fighter up on his toes, dancing around the ring or cage. Some of us may be picturing Ali at his prime shuffling just out of range, evading blows with grace. Others may see George St. Pierre and one of his step-back and sprawls versus a double-leg shot; the way he lightly bounces out of range and then adds the sprawl as the icing on the cake. 

Now call to mind a fighter loading up what is most assuredly a KO shot. You may picture one of Chuck Liddell’s many highlight reel worthy overhands or, Mike Tyson in his prime climbing his way to the heavyweight belt with punishing hook after punishing hook.

Let’s play the imagination game one more time-picture two fighters in an aggressive clinch. Perhaps Randy Couture and one of his beautiful crushes against the cage or Anderson Silva applying control before banging a knee.

Now that we’ve got those three images bouncing around in our skulls, let’s manipulate the images from the action. Ignore whatever strikes are being thrown or evaded, and move your mind’s eye to below the waist. I want you to picture the fighters’ feet, not necessarily their footwork but their stance. If this is harder to picture, by all means take the time to view a quick fight or two where you do nothing but view the fight from the waist down. What you will see in well-conditioned fighters is almost universal: A fighter in defensive or evasive mode goes up on his toes (actually the balls of his feet) and the fighter launching the strike, or controlling the clinch, more often than not, is flat-footed. Which foot position is better? Let’s digress for a minute or two.

We human beings are one of only three animals that walk on our heels (the heel-to-toe gait); we share this trait only with bears and great apes. Whereas when we run (if we are running with good form) we run on our toes, like other animals. (There are some very good arguments that we are perverting good running form via running shoes that permit banging the heel in our running stride but let’s save that discussion for another day). Turns out our switch between strides, that our two heel-walking brethren don’t share, is rather efficient. Running on our toes is far more efficient than running heel-to-toe (again another day) but, let’s look at that walking stride as that will bring us back to the fight.

Researchers at the University of Utah checked walking stride efficiency by placing subjects on a treadmill and having them walk in one of three manners: Tiptoe, balls of the feet first, and heel-first. Efficiency was measured by oxygen consumption which is a benchmark of measuring human energy consumption. Those who walked heel first expended 53% less energy than those who walked on the balls of the feet first stride and 83% less energy than those who performed the eccentric tiptoe walk. So, in a nutshell, for maximum efficiency: run on your toes/balls-of-the feet, walk heel-to-toe. Got it? But what’s this got to do with fighting?

David Carrier, the author of the University of Utah study postulates that one of the reasons for the heel-toe gait in human beings is related to our species’ “relative aggressiveness.” (As for anyone who doubts our “relative aggressiveness” please rejoice in the irony that I am a human of presumably average intellect taking pains to compose an essay on how to smack other human beings more efficiently and this essay is being read by other human beings with an assumed equal or greater intellect who possess the same interest in smacking other human beings more efficiently). According to Carrier, we, like our great apes cousins “are able to apply larger forces to opponents during fighting” when our heels are firmly on the ground.

So, it seems we evolved to run on our toes for speed and ease of directional transition (think evading) and, if David Carrier is correct, one of the reasons we use the heel-down gait is for greater base during aggressiveness. Even if we do not accept whole cloth, Mr. Carrier’s speculation we can recall from our waist-down fight observations that fighters on the defensive track do indeed, for the most part, move in a heels-up manner. Whereas, the aggressor in the fight (aggressor being defined as as whoever is throwing the strike, or controlling the clinch at any given moment) does indeed seem to go heels-down.

We often see the wrong heel-orientation manifest itself as a defensive fighter who is clocked is often described as being caught flat-footed (defensive with the wrong base-orientation) and we see fighters inside a clinch on their toes get easily taken down, or fighters trying to throw bombs from a twinkle-toes position (on the balls of both feet) lacking power. With David Carrier’s studied speculation in mind in addition to our own waist-down fight observations we might be able to surmise, broadly, that heels-up for evasion and heel’s down for offense is a wise way to go.

NO PAIN, NO GAIN?

We’ve all heard that phrase in reference to sports training and I think we’re all fairly certain that we understand what it means. That four-word phrase stands as a sort of cognitive shorthand for all sorts of pertinent concepts; ideas such as discipline, the more you sweat in training the less you bleed in combat, fights are won in the gym not in the ring, the secret is in the drill, and the 1% concept we outlined in a previous column. No pain, no gain and all of its slogan relatives point towards one way to growth, i.e. gain, and that path is work. And as the phrase states baldly, that work ain’t gonna be fun.

I bring this phrase up because we are all familiar with it and the thought process behind it but, if we are completely honest with ourselves, how often do you see this phrase being embraced to its full meaning? I wager more often than not that we see lip service paid to “no pain, no gain” in most training regimens and instead we see the participation in the sport in question (in our cases, MMA, submission work, and/or street work) take the place of training and we pretend that this is sufficient pain. Au contraire.

Sport specific training, whether that be technical work, strategic drilling, what have you is, yes indeed, vital to developmental excellence but, in sports that have such grueling competitive conditions (and that competitive conditions mindset holds just as true for street work as it does for combat sports competition) this sort of training is simply not enough. The sport specific training only approach may cut it in sports/games with low metabolic demands, say golf, or table tennis but MMA, submission wrestling, street work are all contact sports and contact sports eat energy voraciously, sap strength left and right. Technical-training-only will not suffice to forge excellence. In a previous column we outlined the 1% concept that showed that high-performing athletes in many fields spend approximately 1% of their time actually playing or practicing the game for which they are renowned. This concept is mirrored in the coaching programs of the vast majority of contact sports, whether they be football, rugby, boxing, wrestling, MMA, et cetera, the prep work, the conditioning work is the primary concern. Top trainers in all contact sports utilize the pyramid method where the base and middle sections of the pyramid is conditioning work and it is only the capstone of the pyramid that contains the technical overlay. This is the "Iceberg Concept”, it is the vast body of work beneath the surface veneer of the sport that does the damage.

If so many of the best and brightest across pertinent fields (contact/combat sports) esteem hard, hard work then why is this elementary concept embraced by so few? My guess is that we all know the answer to this—because it’s hard. It’s not what attracts you to the given sport in the first place. When people watched Jerry Rice on the field they wanted to be him playing the game not be him when he’s putting himself through his own personally devised legendary punishing training sessions day in day out. When fans watch George St. Pierre compete at such a high level, they covet his skill and want to possess that while not necessarily at the same time embracing his champion’s ability to push himself in training so hard that he might need to relieve himself with a “comfort bucket” only to immediately rinse his mouth and go back to work. High level performance requires high level effort and to be quite frank most individuals choose to purposely ignore this fact.

There may be another reason for eschewing hard work, a reason that lies deep inside our brains, one that we conveniently allow to convince us that we are putting in the effort and going for the pain. Your body’s pain perception process is known as nociception. It is not to be ignored—you need pain to know when to get off that sprained ankle, to get your hand off of the stove, and, yes, when to tap. Without nociception, chances of survival are low. Those unfortunate few born with congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA) are a danger to themselves because of faulty nociception. Those children afflicted with CIPA can appear normal at birth but at first dentition the trouble starts (they can chew off their own fingers without being aware). The CIPA afflicted seldom live past the age of 25 due to the accrual of injuries and/or infection from unperceived injuries.

Nociception is good, we need pain to know when to quit and/or alter our behavior for our own safety. I know this seem antithetical to our “no pain, no gain” argument but we can actually use our scientific understanding of nociception to halt, rest, alter course when real pain is present and make gains when “false pain” is being signaled. False pain?

Pain receptors are spread throughout the brain in what is known as the pain matrix. Each portion of the matrix signals information about a different aspect of the pain: location, intensity, duration, type of pain (burning, throbbing, sharp). The pain matrix then signals the feeling of distress to do what the CIPA-afflicted cannot do, react to the pain in concordance with its severity. This feeling of distress is signaled in the anterior cingulate cortex and here’s where a bit of falsehood can arise. The anterior cingulate cortex cannot differentiate between physical pain (punch, sprained ankle, burn, et cetera) and emotional pain (broken heart, hurt feelings, anxiety, et cetera). We can use this knowledge of the inability of the anterior cingulate cortex to differentiate to see if we can stand to turn up the heat a little bit more than we might imagine.

We’ve got to ask ourselves whether we avoid working as hard as we can (should) because of an actual physical roadblock or, are we (actually our anterior cingulate cortexes) interpreting our anxiety about pushing so hard as an excuse to stop? Is our racing heart and shortness of breath as dire as we might think or is some of that a mis-read by that iffy portion of the brain? Our species colonized the globe in a variety of extreme climates without modern conveniences and endured hardships unimaginable to those of us in a comfy enough position to read text on screens or in the pages of a magazine. Our bodies are remarkably resilient, astonishingly strong, and able to withstand enormous workloads. Great accomplishments are made possible only by dint of hard work, in other words, no pain, no gain. By all means, at the first sign of real pain—deleterious pain-- stop and assess. Stopping for discomfort? Probably not acceptable. Stopping for false pain? Ditto. No pain, no gain—yep, accurate with the exceptions of true pain.

SPRAWL-AWAY

So sorry about that title but it does describes the theme of this combination workout/drill to a tee. We use the following drill-set to seat both aspects of the defensive sprawl-- the positive and negative nature of the movement. The positive portion of the sprawl is the aggressive descent (hips striking the shooting opponent). We should always be sure to aim the hip strike against your opponent’s head, shoulders, or upper back—no lower. Hip-strike any lower and you are providing opportunities to be submarined in some variety and taken down all the same. Also, be mindful of being absolutely scrupulous of the hips-only contact, keep your chest off of your opponent; chest-laying reduces the weight your opponent has to carry and we don’t want that do we? Also (at least in this drill) resist the tendency to place over- or under-hooks upon the sprawl. Hooks are handles for the good shooter to reverse your sprawl. So, at least for today, no hooks.

Now, for the seldom addressed negative portion of the sprawl—the pop-up (returning to your feet). Usually, the sprawl which does indeed wind-up with both of you on the ground is merely the prelude to a ground fight (and there’s nothing wrong with that) but I want to call your attention to the fact that if your opponent shoots he is telling you that at this stage of the fight he would be more comfortable on the ground; so much so that he makes an energy intensive shooting gambit. It is with this intelligence in mind that I advise training a speedy pop-up. This strategy entails you increasing his shooting energy expenditure with an aggressive sprawl (he’s forced to carry more weight than he wanted and at velocity) and rather than allowing a brief ground stall to catch his wind—hit your pop-up for a return to the environment he just demonstrated he wanted to escape. Once in his second choice environment you can exploit his reluctance to an even greater degree as he makes the shaky transition from ground to feet.

Often the barrier between a good sprawl and a good pop-up is fatigue—that of the sprawler. It is in the spirit of improving aggressive sprawling, fast pop-ups, and the conditioning specific to these skills that the following drill is offered. As sprawling and popping-up are major energy drains we will artificially and forcefully drain that energy all the more as the drill increases energy demand the deeper you move into it-- this replicates the entropy encountered in late rounds. OK, enough exposition, on to the drill-set.

The drill is optimally performed top-to-bottom minus the “rest” gained by staggering from one portion of the drill to the next.

25 SPRAWL BURPEES

25 RECIPROCAL SHOTS

25 SPRAWL BURPEE PULL-UPS

25 RECIPROCAL SHOTS

25 SPRAWL BURPEES TO PLYO BOX

25 RECIPROCAL SHOTS

25 WEIGHTED SPRAWL BURPEES

25 RECIPROCAL SHOTS

Upon completion you will have performed 100 total sprawl burpees in their hideous permutations, shot 100 times, and popped-up (or at least staggered to your feet) 100 times. Call it a day and hit the showers, you’ve earned.

WORK H-A-R-D AND FIGHT LESS?

What? Paradoxical title, huh? Well, which is it? Let’s look to two, also, seemingly contradictory personalities outside combat arts/MMA, wide-receiver Jerry Rice and renowned inventor Thomas Edison, to bring together these seemingly contrasting ideas. First, let’s talk about Jerry Rice, who was selected for the Professional Football Hall of Fame this year.

Jerry Rice is considered one of the best wide-receivers of all time if not the best. Just how good is Jerry Rice? If you look at the records he holds for total receptions, total touchdowns, and total receiving yards, how much better is he than the 2^nd place winners in these areas? Care to take a guess? 5 % better? 10%? Either of these would be impressive as we are used to small margins in sports; I mean, after all, the difference between Gold and Silver in some competitions is 10ths of a second. Jerry Rice exceeds his closest record-holders by approximately 50%. Astounding achievement but we could go on and on about his other achievements in play, attendance records and the like but, today let’s concern ourselves with what made him so good at what he did.

You’d guess that what makes one of the greatest football players of all time great at football is, well, playing lot’s and lot's of football. Seems only logical, right? Consider this, the pro teams Jerry played for seldom ran full-contact scrimmages for game prep (most teams do not) to prevent injuries. This means that the primary “playing” of the game occurred in the weekly contests. Let’s look to some numbers to figure out how much one of the all-time great football players actually played football.

First, a recent analysis reported that in a televised pro football game the average time of actual play (all commercials, times-outs, huddles, simply milling around the field on the clock was minused out) comes to 11 minutes per game. 11 minutes in a game that’s supposed to run a strict 60 minute clock—and this is the pro-level. Back to Jerry—zero to little full-contact scrimmages for training but let’s assign a 20-30 hour per week in-season for light scrimmage play and then consider the 303 pro games he played in his career. If we take the approximate scrimmage time totals (around 20,000 hours over his pro-life at 11 minutes of play per hour) and 303 hours of game time and cut that to the actual playing time (11 minute average) per game we see that even one of the greatest athletes in the game didn’t actually play all that often. That 303 of pro game hours becomes 55 hours and change in game time over the course of his entire career. Some estimates put Rice’s actual playing time at 1% of his overall physical output. 1%--keep that in mind.

So, if it’s not necessarily the playing time that made Jerry Rice great, then what was it. Rice was/is legendary for his work ethic. A football season is less than half a year and when the team was assembled, all agree that Rice’s work ethic was second to none but what is perhaps more telling is the work done in the off-season. His trainers and fellow players alike agreed that what made Jerry Rice the astonishing athlete that he was on the field was what he did to himself in the off-season. The off-season work was designed to specifically address his needs on the field--he wanted to out-jump, outrun, out-muscle, and out-move men who were often bigger than him. How did he prepare for this? Not by playing football but, rather, via an ominous series of wind-sprints, weight training, plyometrics, trail running and the like. His personal regimen was so daunting that fellow players chose to ignore his invites to train along with him more often than not and when they did, well, let’s just say few asked for a second round. Rice’s off-season training was so rigorous that when fans wrote to ask what Jerry did in the off-season to stay so peak the trainers would lie for fear of injuring the inquiring fans.

Jerry Rice’s work ethic and intelligence to design a program that specifically addressed his needs as they pertained to his sport is a common story among greats of all domains. Olympians, chess grandmasters, world-class musicians and many other top performers spend more time in preparation, more time in training, more time in refined, focused, deliberate practice than they ever do playing their game. And one other thing they all have in common—they all agree that it’s not fun. It’s nothing but pure OD work.

The kind of work required to excel is hard, hard, hard and often has very little to do with the game/sport/domain in question. In the realm of combat sports, we can analogize from what the greats in other fields have demonstrated time and time again that time spent in hardcore conditioning is never wasted. Time spent drilling the tiniest details again and again is never lost. The time spent refining technique over and over is money in the bank. Focusing only on scrimmage/sparring may have the unfortunate effect of reinforcing what we already know and, in effect, locking us in stasis. To move to the next step we have to step it up. We have to work h-a-r-d and that brings us to Thomas Edison from whom we’ll borrow a quote: “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” Let your genius express itself confidently on the mat, in the ring, inside the cage, on the street by spending 99% of your time on hardcore W-O-R-K.

BOTTOMS UP?

Today, a few contrarian words on hydrating (guzzling water). Let’s get right down to it--Skip rehydration during exercise, it compromises performance. If you are not competing at Leadville or running a standard marathon, chances are your water bottle is an affectation or a road-blocking accessory. With that said, even endurance athletes are in no likely danger of dehydration. On one day of the 2003 Tour De France, Lance Armstrong (weighing in at 160#) lost 13.2 pounds (!) at the end of a tough 1 hour (!) section of the course. Despite this level of dehydration, he finished the day in second place and was none the worse for wear the next day as the human body is remarkably efficient at re-hydrating.

A little skeptical? Good. A few more ideas to ponder.

Two more for fun…

Skipping hydration is a tough one for many to drop as we’ve had this myth for some time—springing from the “drink 8 glasses of water a day” recommendation. It helps to understand where exactly this idea came from. The recommendation came from a 1945 National Research Council paper but, what failed to catch on was the second half of the same sentence that contains the recommendation. The remainder of the sentence reads: “most people get this from solid food in the diet.”

Yep, food is primarily water-broccoli is 90% water, an apple-84%, meat, unless cooked bone dry, is 75% water. Food is meant to be your primary hydration medium.

Our species evolved as prey animals—predators waited at watering holes, and there may be days between watering holes, and the watering holes may very well be fouled with animal wastes so, we evolved the means to extract water from solid food efficiently.

Fluid consumption during exercise (or immediately prior) is not necessarily wise for other reasons. The act of drinking causes blood/energy to be diverted to the stomach to absorb the water, ignoring the diversion of energy during work time, this additional fluid (blood + water) adds to the increased carrying capacity effect—you drink 2 cups of water and feel sated but, an approximate matching amount of fluid (blood) is added leading to a feeling of fullness that detracts from athletic performance. Want more?

A state of mild dehydration enhances cognitive performance. In other words we think a bit better and a bit more quickly in a mildly dehydrated state. This finding makes evolutionary sense as, in the past; we didn’t necessarily have water sources at our immediate disposal. Instead, mild dehydration signaled us to turn all of our faculties to locating water when scarcity was a problem.

So, as a rule, put the bottle of water down. Chances are you, me, and everyone we know gets enough water. Hot day, pre-exercise have a mouthful or two but beyond that, save the guzzling for when the day is done and chances are, even then, you need far less than you think.

TOO PERFECT?

John von Neumann--that name might ring a bell. Von Neumann was a brilliant mathematician and thinker of such regard that he is, rightfully, considered one of the most brilliant minds of the 20^th century. Some of his work led to developments in both the computer and the atomic bomb but, it is his development of what is known as “game theory” that he is, perhaps, most known for.

Von Neumann was able to see the order in things where most only saw chaos and he was able to give voice to this observed order via mathematics. Von Neumann was also an avid poker player and he decided to tackle this game of chance that is further cloaked in deliberate lies and deceptions (bluffs). He sought to use his beloved mathematics to accurately predict successive hands and ultimate outcomes in the game of poker. He began his work on his theory of poker in the 1920s and was not finished until he published, in 1944, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior co-written with the economist, Oskar Morgenstern.

The time between inception and culmination (over 20 years) gives us an insight into how difficult even von Neumann found the task he set for himself. After many false starts he settled on only a two-player game to reduce complexity and had each player play ultimately rational hands—in other words, how a brilliant mathematician like John von Neumann might play as opposed to how actual poker champions (some of whom are very non von Neumann like—Amarillo Slim comes to mind) might really play.

The mark of success for any instructional work is its utility, how well, how easily someone can take the instructed material and apply it to the actual situation it claims to reveal. First, be aware that game theory is used quite successfully in other realms: economics, diplomacy, et cetera—here, we are concerned with what von Neumann originally set out to conquer-poker. After more than a few attempts by many enterprising poker champ wannabes and mathematicians with an eye on Vegas, it wasn’t until 2000 that we actually saw von Neumann’s poker theory (as it is strictly described) go head-to-head with a world champion.

Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, a prodigy of sorts with degrees in computer science and a deep background in mathematics went head-to-head with poker legend T.J. Cloutier at the 2000 World Series in Vegas. To prepare, Ferguson had steeped himself in von Neumann’s work, spent countless hours memorizing probabilities and other aspects of game theory as it relates to poker and in the end—did it pay off? Well, yes, Ferguson won that tournament as well as many more. So, does this winning streak validate game theory? Turns out, not necessarily. The “degree of win” and number of wins according to other mathematicians seem more chalked up to chance and bona fide poker skill rather than the added value of the hours and hours of game theory study. The most generous estimate of the added value of game theory to his poker play was perhaps a 2% advantage.

OK, so what does this long-winded mathematics and poker discussion have to do with combat training? It seems that a casual observation of some combat instructional material makes assumptions along von Neumann’s lines, it assumes two perfect combatants, two rational combatants engaged in a rational fight that evolves along predictable lines. You know, this sort of thing “He does this, so you do that” all neatly packaged and cut and dry. Don’t get me wrong, there is value in this sort of approach, particularly for novices as it introduces them to probabilities and counter-probabilities in offense and defense. Where the problem might come in is as skills develop there might be an assumption to accept the perfect call-and-response drills as a simulacrum for reality.

Fights, both for sport or survival, are not readily predictable creatures—if they were, audiences for combat sports would disappear as one could easily read stats and know the outcome as a foregone conclusion. It seems that if a mind as brilliant as von Neumann’s took more than 15 years to complete a “perfect” poker strategy, and that it took another 50 years for a single player to bring that strategy to fruition that only scores marginally above chance at best then we might need to assess our own “perfect” scenarios.

We already see successful inroads to this sort of cast off of perfection when we see grapplers training to strike, strikers to grapple. But what if we take this idea further and allow chaos/feints (deceit/bluffing)/irrationality to leak into the training system not merely at the advanced levels or only during scrimmage but from the outset. It is with this distrust of perfection that we advocate chaos drilling from the earliest stages in our self-defense work (Outer Limits Drills); that we use blended drills (Down & Out Drills) always with contact, that purposefully overload and allow (cause) the drill deviation to occur to force/educate the ability to deal with “surprises” from day one. This sort of drilling better readies the fighter for actual conditions. We do a disservice to ourselves when we drill in a perfect environment that does not exist in reality.

In other words, learn to bluff and keep your poker face when things don’t always fall your way. Rolling with the cards as opposed to controlling the cards gives you almost exactly the same shot at staying in the game as a perfect strategy and, this is done with far less work.

PRE-FATIGUED ROUNDS

Today, I offer a conditioning circuit that combines strength-endurance training with combat work. The idea is to complete each strength challenge and then immediately gear up and hit the prescribed drill round. After each round, pull the gear off and head to the next challenge. In essence, it’s a short workout day but, trust me, it will feel looooooong.

BENCH PRESS 135# 50 REPS followed by

One 5-Minute Round of Boxing.

CLEAN & JERK 95# 50 REPS followed by

One 5-Minute Round of Shooting Double-Legs or Low Singles.

DB BURPEES 30# 50 REPS

Follow the DB Burpees with

One 5-Minute Round of Sprawling.

3-MINUTE PLATE SHELF 45#

Follow the Plate Shelf with

One 5-Minute Round of Pummeling for Clinch Control.

2-ARM GET-UP 45# 50 REPS

Follow the 2-Arm Get-Ups with

One 5-Minute Round of Escaping from the Bottom (Vary top saddle, cross-body, lateral press, head & arm, et cetera).

Lie down, cry a little and call it a day.

GRUNT IT OUT? 

You’ve heard karateka kiai. You’ve heard boxers forcibly exhale through their noses while punching. You’ve heard Olympic weight-lifters yell/scream through a lift. You’ve heard tennis players grunt upon making contact with the ball (in some cases so loudly that Wimbledon officials want to call for a ban on grunting). So, is there anything to this grunt/scream/yell thing? Turns out there just may be but, it depends on how you grunt as to whether or not you reap any positive effect. Also how the mechanism behind why it works is a little surprising. 

First, let’s discuss what does not occur in the grunting process. Some have postulated grunting allows the athlete to focus; to eliminate distractions. At first glance, this explanation sounds good but if grunting/kiai/what have you were merely a distraction-elimination aid why not more kiais during a chess game or, at tasks of manual dexterity such as the old board game of Operation? No, psychological focus works along different lines, it may be assisted by ritualized grunting but, distraction elimination seems to be a secondary or tertiary goal.

Those of us who have played at any activity where maximum physical exertion is called for will probably intuitively answer that grunting makes us “stronger,” provides more “Oomph” to the lift, takedown, or strike. Is this true? Turns out, probably, yes. The mere act of tensing one set of muscles in one part of the body can assist a muscular task to be completed in a separate muscle set—this is called re-enforcement. Bruce Lynne, a physiologist at University College London points out that merely asking a test subject to clench the muscles of their jaw improves muscular reaction time in the legs. So is this an argument for constant muscle tension to aid performance? Not necessarily.

As anyone who has progressed from novice status in any sport to an intermediate or advance level or, those who coach novices can testify—the beginning stages of learning a physical activity are plagued by too much tension. We must remind ourselves (or the student) to relax, to find the technique in the bio-mechanics not to fight the technique or to “muscle it.” So does that mean the re-enforcement technique is erroneous for upper-levels of skill? Nope. The key turns out to be when you tense and what you tense. Tensing at the wrong time can lead to less than stellar performance. You can test this by setting up a barbell for dead lifting—place 2 ½ times your bodyweight on the bar and lift twice with a grunt/yell, twice with no grunt/yell, and twice more with the grunt/yell timed 2 seconds before your lift. Odds are you’ll find the grunt with the lift the most successful, the no grunt (but probable abdominal tension) second on the preference scale, and the oddly-timed grunt in last place. It’s an informal experiment but I still recommend you give it a shot.

To test why carrying constant tension is a less-than-optimum idea simply put on the gloves and box/kick-box for three rounds carrying your shoulders in a constant state of flexed/tension. Chances are even the thought of this experiment is fatiguing. Wasted energy is not conducive to top-level performance.

The tennis players, boxers, weight-lifters, karateka have the timing right. It is the tension applied at the moment of greatest exertion that seems to contribute to an increase in power (some studies show as much as a 40% increase with most others coming in at less than that but an increase is still an increase). These athletes are also correct in finding the balance between tension and relaxation that separates novices from the experienced—relative-relaxation before moments of exertion and then applied tension. They are also correct in the area of the anatomy to be tensed—the abdomen or, core musculature.

As we’ve already seen, merely clenching the jaw can increase muscular response but how much more so if we clench musculature directly related to the physical exertion? Striking an opponent requires not merely the strength of the fired limb but the back-up of the core to really fire that shot; the same holds true for returning a hard volley in tennis. Tightening the core in a heavy lift helps prevent “spinal wag” or, misalignments that lead to injury as opposed to strength gains. Tightening the core via grunting/yelling, the kiai is demonstrably useful but, it also important to discuss how we “grunt.”

Some tout grunting via the Valsalva maneuver, which is grunting against a closed airway. Named for Antonio Valsalva a physician who prescribed the technique to clear the Eustachian tubes and not for athletic performance. Grunting against a closed airway while also working against load (weight, striking, lobbing a ball) places undue additional stress on the cardiovascular system via artificially inflated inner-stress. In other words, grunting against a closed airway acts as a performance inhibitor by over-loading the cardiovascular system. But, on the other hand, a relaxed and open airway, by definition, offers no core tension, no assisting re-enforcement. The key is the happy medium of tensed core (tensed diaphragm and tensed pelvic floor—as if holding back a bowel movement) and an open airway—hence, quite audible grunting.

We combat sports athletes have one more consideration—we must grunt, yell, kiai through a closed mouth (parted lips are fine). If we are close enough to strike, we are close enough to be struck and an open jaw makes for an easier jaw to break and nobody wants that (see Ali vs. Ken Norton 1 for why you gotta keep that mouth shut). So, you wanna hit harder, slam that opponent with maximum force? Feel free to yell, grunt, scream to your heart’s content—you’ll be stronger for it.  Just time it right and keep your mouth shut while you do it.

SURFACE + ALIGNMENT = PUNCHING POWER

In past works we’ve labored the point of palm strikes versus the closed fist, and we’ve even tackled a portion of today’s subject—the striking surface of the fist but, now, let’s take the surface + alignment equation even further and show how a few simple changes can add significant power to your punches.

First, let’s do a quick recap, to roll the fist properly roll the fingers one-by-one into the palm beginning with the little finger and rolling inward to the index finger. Then, close the thumb over the second joint of your index and middle fingers. Give the fist a few squeeze pumps to insure that there are no kinks in the closed fist—these usually manifest themselves in the form of knuckle pain.

Next, let’s review the striking surface—we want to strike with the facing phalanges of the little, ring, and middle fingers not (I repeat, not) the knuckles of the first two fingers (index and middle). For details on why this is see our previous column “The Devil is in the Details” or our book Boxing Mastery.

Let’s next build proper surface-alignment. To surface-align any punch properly we use The Wall Test to check for structural defects in our punch end point. To perform a Wall Test for a jab:

The surface-alignment Wall Test should seat the wisdom of the prescribed striking surface now, we’ll move on to how to align the punching arm itself to add maximum power to your punches. Before we do so, keep in mind we are informing punch alignment with elementary bio-mechanics and not simply conforming to “Well, I was told to always punch with a (Horizontal/Vertical) fist” anecdote. A revised Wall Test at the end of this article will allow you to seat your own best alignment.

Before we punch with power let’s look to other areas where physical power must be expressed along similar planes of motion; to start, let’s look to the bench press. The bench press has you rest the bar on your palms as you grip the bar—you will notice that when you grip the bar your hand conforms to a quasi-fist position. As you press the bar you naturally feel the weight not equally across the entire surface of your palm but primarily along the outer-heel of the palm—this area of contact gives you the greatest alignment for pressing power. You will notice that with the closed fist this point of contact in the palm is driving through the prescribed fist striking surface thus allowing for efficient power transfer. In other words, punch as you would press.

You can use other pressing tests to allow your body’s natural intelligence to inform your punching-power alignment. Step before the wall again and place both hands on the wall, I give you the task of using all of your might to push the wall down. You will notice two things in the execution of this impossible task:

1. Your primary power alignment will again fall upon the bottom-outer heel of the palm behind the prescribed-fist striking surface and not towards the inside heel of the hand.
2. You, in all likelihood, have placed your palms on the wall in a fingers pointing up (horizontal fist) position and not fingers pointing outward (vertical fist position). By all means experiment with both palm placements but I think you’ll find that you generate the greatest power in the first placement.

Let’s look to one more strength/power exercise before we return to alignment-the lying dumbbell fly. In this exercise you lie supine on a bench with a dumbbell grasped in each hand. Extend your arms to the sides laterally and then, leaving your arms extended and bring the dumbbells to meet above your chest. You will notice that your palms are facing throughout the exercise and not rotated so that your thumbs face one another. This palms-in position informs us as to how best align ourselves for powerful hook punches. Again, by all means experiment with this, perform flyes in both hand positions and note for yourself where you are able to generate the most power.

Lastly, let’s return to the wall and re-align our punches. Place the contact surface on the wall for a series of jabs and/or crosses and align the body for power—drive with all your might checking for defects and positions of improvement. Next locate a wall with an extended corner and align your hooks with the proper striking surface (palms facing you) and again, hit your drive adjusting where necessary.

By using these simple re-adjustment tools and the experimental method you can find your own best striking surface, best fist position and your own best alignment for punching power. Once you have the muscle memory from the Wall Tests under your belt, it’s time to bang the focus pads and the heavy bag and turn up the power.

THE GORILLA AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL-VISION

We humans, are a curious species in ways too numerous to mention here so, let’s limit ourselves to one quirk today—our uncanny ability to see what we expect to see and rule out or simply be blind to what we don’t want to see (or don’t know to look for). I call your attention to a simple experiment that shows just how ridiculously tunnel-visioned we can be.

Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris of the University of Illinois Visual Cognition Lab concocted an experiment that seems borne out of many hours of viewing Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Simons and Chabris wanted to test for the hypothesis that when we pay attention to detail(s) we often miss things that are obvious to others (the old can’t see the forest for the trees proverb). This phenomenon is known as inattention blindness—in other words, rapt attention on pre-determined stimuli can lead to serious inattention deficits for stimuli outside your attentional set. Enough of my yakking, let’s allow Simons and Chabris’s experiment to do the talking.

The duo showed a video of a basketball game with the crowd plainly seen in the background to test subjects. The test subjects were asked to count the number of passes made by players on the team wearing white shirts. At one point in the video an assistant wearing a gorilla suit (yep, you read that right) walks through the middle of the game, stops in the middle of the screen and then walks out of frame. Keep in mind, the game never halts and there are more than a few passes that occurred with the gorilla suited accomplice partially obscuring the action. After viewing the video, test subjects were asked to report the number of passes, (most of which did quite well at this task by the way) and then they were asked about the presence of the gorilla. Approximately half of all test subjects never saw the gorilla.

What’s going on here is two things, the first—the aforementioned inattention blindness—the second is a bit of confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is a fascinating concept from cognitive psychology that says that we humans tend to search for and interpret new information in a manner that confirms our preconceived notions while at the same time discounting evidence that contradicts those preconceived notions—the old liberal/conservative divide with zero gray area in between. We are all subject to confirmation bias to varying degrees of irrationality that may differ from subject to subject. Confirmation bias can be seen in the amusing statistic that approximately 90% of the US population considers itself above average in intelligence and above average in looks. It’s nice to like yourself despite the mathematical impossibility of the proposition.

Let’s bring inattention blindness and the confirmation bias to our world of interest combat sports, MMA, and street-defense. We, being human, often view data (fight footage, assault accounts, et cetera) under the sway of both stumbling blocks. The strikers often see evidence for striking solutions where it may not exist, grapplers often look for submission answers where they just may be inappropriate, and street tacticians may often try to apply certain concepts or strategies where the ideas may simply be out and out wrong. In our last two books NO SECOND CHANCE and THE ESSENTIALS we argue (in both the street and sportive environments, respectively) that we should not allow ourselves to shape our research but rather to allow the research to shape us.

We must be ever vigilant that inattention blindness and the confirmation bias may allow us to distort what we see (or don’t see) leading us down literal blind alleys causing us to train for contingencies that don’t exist, or apply techniques or tactics that hold little water in the real world. We must always keep our eyes open and look, really look at what’s before us and see if there is, indeed, an obvious detail staring us in the face that may aid our training. By being aware of our shortcomings we can better compensate for these stumbling blocks and see, perhaps a bit more clearly, just what strategies and tactics might really be called for in situations where our health and safety are on the line rather than simply retro-fitting what might be an outmoded (or completely wrong-headed) game plan onto a situation full of “hidden” gorillas. In other words, stop looking for favorite trees in a forest, look at each and every one of them and always be aware that there just may be gorillas in the woods-- right in front of you.

UNDERDOGS TO PIT BULLS

In our book on reality-based self-defense, No Second Chance, we argue the case that we, as victims, must always (always) fight back. In addition, we argue that we must never concede—we never stop fighting, we never give up except in the case of property- where the decision is always life over property. We offer numerous studies to back up these assertions and we bolster the arguments with Predator Profiles that aim to open our eyes to the dire consequences that result if one does not fight back (or is unable to fight back).

I flog this horse of “fight back no matter what” because there is no subject more valuable than that of preserving your own safety/life or that of a loved one in the face of criminal predation. In the aid of being a broken record (I’m sure the “broken record” cliché is on its way out in the era of iPods) I’d like to call our attention to the results of a 10-year longitudinal study examining the effects of fighting back against a violent attacker but…first a digression into fight matchmaking.

In sportive combat (boxing, MMA, kickboxing, and the like) the best matches are those made between comparatively equal competitors. Same weight classes, similar skill sets, similar athletic attributes, and the like make for an interesting fight where each fighter has a 50/50 shot of success plus or minus a few percentage points. These are tough fights to call or place your bets on because the variables are equitable. What makes these well-matched fights so interesting to the spectator is the toss-up nature of where the victory will fall. When the fighters are less evenly matched (60/30 odds and the like), and the outcome is almost a foregone conclusion it’s easier to know where to place your money but, perhaps, a bit less interesting for the spectators. This sort of uneven match-up is bad matchmaking and most often boring viewing, but there is an area where bad matchmaking is terrific—and that brings us back to our opening subject.

66% odds for victory does not make for good sport-fight matchmaking but 66% odds for victory for victims of violent crime who fight back does make for compelling evidence to fight. The aforementioned longitudinal 10-year study surveyed 14, 246 violent crimes in which the victims fought back. The 14, 246 crimes break down into 733 incidences of rape, 1,278 sexual assaults, and 12, 235 events of standard assault. Fighting back reduced the chances for crime completion by 66%. Damn good odds for fighting back. But, we’ve got to be realistic, fighting back does assume that there may be injury in the course of defending yourself so we’ve got to weigh “wounded in the course of protecting yourself” against injury rates for those who do not fight back. Unfortunately, this study did not examine this factor but, two other studies did.

In a study of 3,206 women who were the victims of sexual assault it was found that women who fought back were ½ as likely to be injured. 50%, while even odds, is still in the competitive category. Let’s look to one more longitudinal study, another 10-year survey, this time of 27,595 violent crimes of all classes. This study found that resisting led to less injury than experienced by those victims who did not resist.

So, now we’ve got 50/50 odds on injury for those who fight back on the one hand and less injury for those who fought back on the other. The odds now skew from 50% to +50% in favor of fighting back. Stack that on top of a 66% chance of stopping a violent crime in its tracks and your odds-maker will tell you that that’s as close to a sure bet as your going to get in the face of chaos.

Even with these numbers providing us with a bit of good news inside the context of violence, we’ve got to remain ever aware that we are never ready. We never have the upper-hand as the predators of the word always get to choose the time, the place, the when, and even the if of the attack. We, the civilized humans of the world, the prey animals, never get to dictate any of these parameters. The best we can do is to reduce predator-choice-selection by exercising good prevention habits and perhaps engage in context-oriented self-protection drills centered around chaos but, if (and I sincerely hope it never happens to you or any of your loved ones, readers) if it does happen…the odds say you have a good shot of transforming yourself from an underdog to a pit bull by sheer dint of choosing to fight back. Choose today, right now, to fight back. Choose to do whatever it takes to protect your own life or that of a loved one.

WHAT LITTLE GIRLS KNOW

Therapeutic Touch (TT) is a purported form of therapy devised by Dolores Krieger, Ph.D, R.N., in the 1970s. Krieger, also on the faculty of New York University’s Division of Nursing, laid out her thoughts on TT at length in her 1979 book Therapeutic Touch: How to Use Your Hands to Help and to Heal.

If the educational pedigree of Dolores Krieger and/or the name Therapeutic Touch leads you to envision images of scientifically trained healing professionals using some form of hands-on-therapy to assist ailing patients, well, you have made a natural assumption. Unfortunately, your assumption is incorrect. TT, as described by Krieger and her followers, is a type of “medicine” wherein the “practitioner” moves their hands over the patient without ever touching them. The “practitioner” instead “senses” the patient’s “energy fields”, “prana”, “chi”, “qi” or any other homonym for thoroughly debunked nonsense and then “re-directs” the “blocked energy” to “heal” the patients.

Not quite what you’d expect from educated professionals, huh? The next time you have an actual ailment, which would you rather encounter at the emergency room, an experienced professional certified in trauma medicine or, someone who waves their hands over your compound fracture? I’ll drop the facetious tone for a moment and turn to the brilliant Emily Rosa.

Despite the seemingly obvious asinine nature of TT and numerous de-bunking efforts, it took the ingenious efforts of Emily Rosa to expose TT for the sham it is. At the age of 9 (9!), Emily constructed a test that would allow TT Practitioners to prove whether or not they could do what they claimed they could do. TT Practitioners claim they can sense an individual’s energy so; Emily fabricated a cardboard screen with two holes in the screen. The TT Practitioner would then place a hand through each hole in the screen. On the other side of the screen, unseen by the test subject, sat 9-year-old Emily Rosa. Emily would then hold one, both, or no hand at all over the hand(s) of the practitioner at the distance prescribed by the TT Practitioners themselves. The TT Practitioner without benefit of seeing the “patient” would then state in which of her own hands she felt the energy resonating. Brilliant experiment—keep in mind, if there is anything to TT they should be able to “sense” the energy coming off of Emily’s hand(s).

Emily tested 21 TT Practitioners, 10-20 times each and a score of 50% would be expected by chance alone. The TT Practitioners scored 44%---Ouch! That’s gotta hurt! Emily’s study was lauded by the American Medical Association, as well it should be. Hats off to Emily!

So why do I bring this study up in a martial arts publication? Before I answer that, let me say that the nurses who utilized TT before the de-bunking, were educated professionals doing what they were trained to do and they pursued this farce with nothing but the best of intentions. Any and all participation in TT after the de-bunking is nothing short of irresponsible and potentially malicious as we are discussing patient’s health and pocket books. Again, prior to de-bunking, we have well-intentioned people being fooled by charlatans and/or mass conversion reaction. We’ve all been fooled, misguided, and simply out-and-out wrong in our lives, it’s what we do in the face of better evidence that defines our character.

OK, what can Emily Rosa tell us about combat arts? You’re probably way ahead of me—“energy fields”, “chi”, “qi” and other such buzzwords sound familiar? Massimo Polidoro and Luigi Garlaschelli are our Emily Rosas in this story. They became intrigued by the “no touch knockouts” promulgated by George Dillman and his cadre. Our two heroes in this story approached Leon Jay, one of the practitioners of the “no touch knockout” system. They found Jay to be polite, courteous and open to the testing process—sincere kudos to Mr. Jay.

The testing proceeded along these lines: Jay would demonstrate the “no touch KO” on his own students who responded in tremendous fashion by, well, being “no touch knocked out.” Then Jay attempted the same KO techniques on Garlaschelli and…nada. Can you imagine Mike Tyson’s left hook only working on boxers he knew but on no one else? Yeah, me neither.  

Hmm? So what’s going on? Was the “no touch KO” debunked? Is Garlaschelli a qi-less human being impervious to bad ju-ju? What about the successful demonstration on Jay’s students prior to the non-student test? It worked on them so, why not again? And again is exactly what the experimenters tried—this time the student stood behind a dark bed sheet so that he could not see when Jay was directing the “no touch KO” his direction. The results? With no visual cue to work from, the student remained “untouched,” unharmed, and a bit confused.

Mr. Jay remained a gentleman after the test despite the negative results (again, kudos to him). George Dillman, on the other hand, when questioned about the experiment in an interview for National Geographic’s television series Is it Real? Had this to say: “The skeptic was a total non-believer. Plus…I don’t know if I should say that on film. But if the guy had his tongue in the wrong position in his mouth, that can also nullify it. Yeah. In fact you can nullify a lot of things, and you can nullify it if you raise your two big toes. If I say I am going to knock you out and you raise one toe, and push one toe down, I can’t knock you out. And then if I go to try again, you reverse it. If you keep doing this I won’t knock you out.”

Wha? So, let’s get this straight? If you don’t believe in knockouts you won’t be knocked out. If you put your tongue in the right spot you won’t be knocked out. If you alter the configuration of your toes you won’t be knocked out. Back to Mr. Tyson, do any of us think that our surviving his left hook has to do with whether or not we believe in its power or the positioning of our tongues and toes? Again, I think not.

TT Nurses and “no touch knockout” adherents are simply good people paying close attention to “experts.” Their own good nature and civility towards “expert” opinion led them down a non-existent path and these good people deserve compassion and understanding as we’ve all be duped at some point in our lives. But…those who knowingly propagate this nonsense in the face of good evidence telling patients that TT is “therapy” and/or advising good people how to perhaps defend their lives one-day with “no touch knockouts” well, that is shameful irresponsible behavior.

We would be wise to emulate the wise among us even if the wisdom comes in the form of a 9-year-old girl. Thank you, Emily.

PARRIES, ARMCHAIR QUARTERBACKS, & THE CAGED DEFENSE

We’ve all done it—you’re watching the game on the big screen and you see a pass come from waaaaayy back that the receiver just doesn’t see. You’re thinking how could he possibly miss that? Is he blind? I’m not even there and I saw it from the very beginning. Sometimes you’re watching a fight and you see a fighter holding his hands up but, perhaps, in a bit of an open guard and he just keeps getting peppered with punches, the jab in particular. From your viewpoint, right there in your living room, you’ve got no problem seeing the other fighter load up and launch so, what’s up with Mr. Jab-Eater? Is this guy, suffering from nerves? (Probably, a little bit and that’s a wise thing, too). Is he under-trained? Out-classed? Or, is he simply plain old slow?

Well, the answer can be a bit of any of the above but, some new research from the National Academy of the Sciences demonstrates that something else may account for why we armchair quarterbacks and sofa corner men have so much “better” perceptual speed than the pros we yell at onscreen. The study’s authors (Andrew E. Welchman, Judith M. Lam, and Heinrich H. Bulthoff) used Bayesian motion estimation to solve this puzzle and, the root of the problem, it seems, lies in our armchair perspective.

By that, I mean spectators have, by dint of being spectators, sideline seats—that is profile perspectives on the event in question (and from here on out we’ll assume the event is a fight). Whether observing fights on TV or, witnessing drills in the gym we spend far more time in profile to the action than we spend in the path of the action. Consciously or not, as the brain observes the action it is making estimations of the speed of the given projectile—fist, football, what have you. The profile perspective allows the observer to witness the entire arc of the projectile, a longer exposure to the motion and, thusly, calculate when a block, parry, catch can and should be timed. The brain then stores these presumptive calculations for later use in the event you are on the receiving end of the given projectile.

Now here’s where the problem arises. The study shows that when we are in the path of the projectile our spectator calculations that had benefit of the entire traveling arc are rendered inaccurate. How inaccurate? Well, the study shows, inaccurate enough to get you hit more often than not. This sentence from the study itself shows us just how dire this situation is: “Given the importance of sensing motion for obstacle avoidance, it is surprising that humans make errors, reporting that an object will miss them when it is on a collision course with their head.” This study now makes sense of why we are so terrific in “seeing it all” on the sidelines but less than stellar when we are the target.

OK, that’s the science, now; let’s look at just how these empirical results can impact our training. Given that we are horrible estimators of the speed of incoming objects we might just want to discard any defensive response that requires outside-in or, inside-out work and by that I mean parries of any and all sorts. Parries presume formidable reaction speed--parries are always reactive and never proactive as they must, by their nature, “respond” to stimuli. Parries presume precognition—yes, we presume that a strike will come in our direction but, we will never predict with certitude just when and/or what that strike might be. Parries presume the opposite of what the aforementioned scientific research demonstrates.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not quibbling with the short cuffing motions we see in professional boxing but, what I am referring to are the sweeping movements that assume that profile perspective speed is the same as bullseye perspective speed. But, even with this allowance for cuffing might there still be a safer alternative that hedges the bet for a nervous system as poorly adapted to judging incoming projectile speed as a human being’s? Probably so, and it’s a basic as it can get.

“Keep your hands up.” That is a common admonishment from boxing coaches past, present, and more than likely, on into the distant future. Keep you hands up is heard from trainers all over the world. Keep you hands up is, more often than not, lesson one in any contact oriented combat sport and if it isn’t lesson one or, at least lesson two, you might want to question that instructional tack. Now, even with this preponderance of good advice (Keep your hands up) we still see a large percentage of fighters discarding Lesson Numero Uno but, at least we now have an understanding of why that might be. Human beings are horrible estimators of certain events, that’s what keeps many of us playing the lottery despite horrible odds and, it seems to be what leads us to believe that we’ll “see that punch on it’s way in and do something about it,” evidence to the contrary be damned.

Keeping the hands up, shoulders hunched and tight, chin down, shortening the torso, forearms parallel and close—this “caged defensive” position forms a defensive shell that eliminates the need for parries. Keeping the hands up and head and body in the described alignment allows your positioning to form a defensive cage that places less vulnerable targets (forearms, shoulders, forehead, et cetera) in the path of incoming projectiles. If we do possess formidable reactive speed then cuffs and even parries launched from this cage position will have to travel much less distance to be effective but, if we build a solid defensive cage we forgo the need for much of the cuffing, parrying gambits. We cheat our defense towards the inherent weakness of poor predictive incoming speed and keep obstructions placed between us and the strike and only violate the integrity of the cage defense to launch our offense. An offense that is always scrupulous about returning to the cage after each and every strike.

By making ourselves aware of a glitch in our hardware (poor predictive incoming perspective speed) we can wetware update with the defensive cage and quickly get back to the job of going offensive. The more time we spend ignoring the facts and on trying to override a hardwired glitch the more training time we waste and the more jabs we will eat and the more the armchair corner-men will wonder how we could be so blind.

THE MYTH OF RANGES

There is a school of thought (actually many schools of thought) within the combat arts/sports that posits that a fight (any fight) can be examined and then deconstructed into specific range delineations. These ranges can, well, for lack of a better word, range from as few as four ranges to as many as ten ranges. Keep in mind; we are talking about unarmed confrontations in this range discussion. I’ll be honest, I cut some slack to the range-believers who err on the side of lower numbers but the higher we go the more it seems like intellectual hair-splitting or post-workout shoot the bull musings than reflections of reality.

Let’s define a couple of the more standard range ideas before we begin to look at what actually occurs in a fight. The more grounded range theories (the lower the number the better, remember) state that there are four ranges in a fight: Kicking, Punching, Trapping, and Grappling. These are fairly self-explanatory but for clarity’s sake and at the risk of boring you let’s define them all the same.

Kicking Range: You and your opponent can reach one another with a kick but not a punch.

Punching Range: You and your opponent can reach each other with punches but are not yet within clinching or, grappling range.

Trapping Range: You are and your opponent are close enough to use a series of hand immobilizations to launch inside striking attacks.

Grappling Range: Yes, it’s all self-explanatory at this point.

Some of the higher range-number systems include Long Punching Range (jabs and other straight punches), Close-Punching Range (Tight hooks and uppercuts), H-K-E Range (Head-butts, knees, and elbows); Grappling is separated into Upright and Ground Work. Some make allowances for the Grounded situation (one fighter is down the other is on his feet), some include Blind Spot as a range (simply maneuvering behind your opponent), and you may even come across the Psychological Range (which seems to me more of an attribute or, characteristic of the conflict than an actual distance measure).

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the allure of fine-tuning fight analysis to such a degree that we can disentangle the various violent threads and therefore have a more complete understanding of the game/sport/altercation in question. But…I ask you, are we simply adhering to arbitrary designations that bear little resemblance to reality? Is much of this range talk merely playing semantics with proxemics? And, perhaps most importantly, if there are indeed ranges does the study of them as separate entities do us more harm than good?

Let’s tackle the more sensible (by my way of thinking) four-range system first.

Range One-Kicking--yes kicking can and does occur in a fight but we do not simply see it at an outside range (there’s that word) where the longest limb supposedly holds sway. We see kicking in the middle of punching exchanges, we see short choppy kicks delivered inside the clinch, we see heel chops used by grapplers on the ground, and, of course we see devastating kicks delivered by both fighters in a “grounded” range. So, where exactly does the kicking range begin and end? If it can present itself anywhere is it really a range?

The same can be said for Range Two-Punching. Antagonists punch while on the ground, they punch inside the clinch, and yes they punch while in some semblance of the standard definition of “punching range.” We also see competitors in today’s MMA punching from waaaaayyyy outside with the “Superman Punch.” If the punch is as ubiquitous as the kick in the fight and presents itself across a wide variety of positions and situations is punching, in and of itself, really a range?

The Third Range—Trapping. I’ve got to be honest, I just don’t see it. Yes, we have all witnessed some beautifully executed trapping demonstrations, drills, and even trapping combative responses but, these all seem to occur inside the constructs of an agreement. By that I mean, “We will fight within this trapping range and we will both agree that trapping is to be our method.” Where the rule-set is expanded, as we see in MMA or even security tapes, trapping, at least thus far, just isn’t presenting itself unless we broaden the definition to include punch muffling, arm drags, and other hand-controls used by grapplers. With this dearth of demonstration of the standard definition of trapping within the fight an argument can possibly be made that this may not be a range at all even by the accepted definition of range.

The Fourth Range-Grappling, is often relegated to merely groundwork or work inside the clinch but, we see many a talented competitor take a fast shot from the outside which would seemingly be boxing or kicking ranges. Just as we see strikes within “grappling ranges” we see grappling within “striking ranges.”

As for elbows, and knees and other similar tools, at first glance you would think that they are merely inside range tools (can’t get away from that word) but, we have seen too many flying knees from way outside and several knees and elbows on the ground end the fight to confine these formidable weapons to one launching area. Again, if each and every tool that defines a so-called range presents itself across all or, a majority of the other ranges is the concept of ranges valid? A more pointed question might be is the range concept doing a disservice to training for some.

I think it might be a disservice in some instances. If one accepts the concept of ranges (whatever number you choose) as dogma one will have a tendency to train in a segmented compartmentalized fashion, a sort of “We do this here and we do this technique if the fight is here,” and so on. It might be a bit wiser to accept a fight (competitive or survival) for what it is, an amalgam of chaos as one fighter seeks to assert his or her strengths upon the other in whatever manner they can manage.

I think it is wise, indeed, to work each aspect that precedes range in most of these range theories; that is, yes,  work your kicks, work your boxing, work your grappling, work your shooting, work whatever tools are most likely to contribute to your game or survival but, strive to lose the artificial construct of a range for each tool. By sloughing off these seemingly unsupported ranges of a fight and moving towards full-range integration (sorry about that word, again) we move closer to reality (or at least what exhibits itself most commonly as of this writing) and we just might unlock a bit more creativity in applying these formidable tools that have no need of a leash called “range.”

THE TRIANGULATION OF JUGULATION

Today let’s belabor the triangle choke—which is to say every single legal choke in MMA.  There are four ways to attack the head/neck of an opponent, well, the four ways grappler’s can approach the situation—strikers have the straight-forward method of smacking it hard with whatever tool happens to be handy at the moment. Actually, we’ll spend most of our time on one of the four classes but, let’s go ahead and define terms and then settle in on our target.

1. Face Locks: Despite the name this class refers to any grip that be can be taken on the head, face, or neck that does the job (tapping the opponent, of course) via nerve or bone compression but does not restrict blood flow, air flow, or place cervical vertebrae in jeopardy.
2. Cranks: Any manipulation of the head/neck that compresses, separates, or kinks the cervical vertebrae.
3. Strangulations: Any compression of the throat that restricts air flow and or places the hyoid bone in jeopardy.
4. Jugulation: Any compression of the throat that impedes or cuts off arterial blood flow to the brain via constriction of one or (preferably) both carotid arteries. (Yeah, I know although we are constricting both the carotid arteries and the jugular veins to do the deed it is the carotid restriction that does the damage—why the term is jugulation rather than carotidization I don’t know, rather than the relative inelegance of the word).

We want to turn our attention to jugulations today and make a sweeping statement—all chokes seen in MMA competition are jugulations and all are triangle chokes. Every single one—Triangle chokes (of course), rear naked/sleeper chokes, shoulder/arm triangle chokes, reverse lever/Darce chokes, you name it, it’s a triangle. Any choke instruction that neglects a single angle in the triangle formula is lacking in structural integrity. That statement/law is important, so important that I’ll repeat it:

Any choke instruction that neglects a single angle in the triangle formula is lacking in structural integrity.

All of the aforementioned neck constricting attacks are jugulations by dint of rule-sets as trachea constrictions are dangerous to competitors and normally outlawed—we do see face locks and cranks but, again, our attention, today, is on jugulations. Also, again, all jugulations are triangle chokes.

By definition a triangle has, well, three angles and these three angles are ideal for safe but, effective offense. (Safe in the sense that triangulations allow for a safe notch for the delicate hyoid bone). In optimum execution the three angles are applied in the following manner---

1. One angle across the left carotid.
2. One angle across the right carotid.
3. One angle across the back of the neck to prevent the opponent from retreating and removing the pressure of the first two angles.

We can see this triangulation of jugulation in each of the major chokes but, first, two more terms to define: short tail and long tail.

SHORT TAIL: The limb that encircles your opponent’s head/neck; in essence, the “offensive” limb.

LONG TAIL: The retaining limb; the limb that allows the short tail limb to lock in tight.

On to the triangulations of jugulation.

TRIANGLE CHOKE: Angle one is the inner thigh of the short tail leg (the leg to be tucked behind the long tail knee). Angle two is the opponent’s own biceps. Angle three is the calf of the short tail leg.

SLEEPER/REAR NAKED CHOKE: Your short tail biceps (attacking/encircling biceps) is angle one, your short tail forearm is angle two, and the hand/wrist/forearm of the long tail arm (the one behind his head) is angle three.

SHOULDER/ARM TRIANGLE: Your short tail biceps is angle one, his trapped biceps across his neck is angle two, your short tail forearm behind his head is angle three.

REVERSE LEVER/DARCE CHOKE: Your opponent’s own top biceps forms angle one, your short tail forearm is angle two, and your long tail upper arm is angle three.

We’ve done all of this rather redundant defining of terms and remedial angle highlighting to assist in diagnosing what sometimes goes wrong in jugulations. If you have a jugulation set and hooked but find yourself unable to finish, before abandoning the move or simply hanging on until lactic acid betrays you, run the angle one, angle two, angle three diagnostic check to make sure that you are indeed forming a triangle—often a simple readjustment of offensive geometry is just what the doctor ordered.

ARCHIMEDES’ GIFT

The Classical Greek philosopher and scientist Archimedes has the following phrase attributed to him: “Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.”  For our purposes as combat sports practitioners we need not move the world but angling a limb to a better position to submit would be nice.

It is an elementary observation to remark that the vast majority of submissions and/or submission set-ups utilize the principles of the lever (all three classes of levers) with arm and leg bars being the most obvious examples. Archimedes stated “equal weights at equal distances are in equilibrium, and equal weights at unequal distances are not in equilibrium but incline towards the weight which is at greater distance.” Let’s ponder Archimedes as it relates to a standard arm bar.

Although we are attacking your opponent’s elbow, his shoulder is the weight (and whatever collective muscle mass in the torso he can muster) is at one end of the lever and your retaining grip (hands or crooks of the arms) is the weight at the other end. Your hips against the back of his arm supplies the fulcrum. For the rough purposes of this example we will assume the weight/force at each end of the lever (his body and yours) are approximately equal.

In this case of equilibrium the lever will favor (to invert a phrase) whoever has the long end of the stick (in this case, the arm is the stick). Fulcrum placement (hips) is key, as we all know but, perhaps even more key than we give it credit. There are two schools of thought as to where to place submission fulcrums—one school posits placing the fulcrum directly beneath the joint to be moved (destroyed) while the other school adheres to a “just above the joint to be locked” strategy. According to Archimedes, which school is correct?

If we attack an opponent’s arm with our hips below his elbow and closer to his wrist, we are doing three things (all bad). One: We are applying a piss-poor submission attempt. Two: We give our opponent the advantage of leverage to pull his arm free. Three: We toss the laws of mechanical physics out the window.

If we place the lever directly in the middle underneath the elbow joint itself, we increase mechanical advantage but, might still be leaning towards a 50/50 game. At first glance, fulcrum directly underneath the elbow placement seems like the way to go, I mean, this fulcrum placement would seem to be ideal in adhering to the principles of the lever. But what we’ve got to consider that Archimedes didn’t have to concern himself with is the fact that we have a living fighting organism at the other end of our lever and not merely an inanimate object to be moved.

This living organism is also in the position to take advantage of mechanical leverage if it is provided and fulcrum-beneath-the-elbow placement may just be the window of opportunity that is needed to escape or stalemate your submission attempt. Let’s look at the initial reaction of those caught in an arm bar—they struggle to bend the arm to prevent the lock (wise move). Let’s now look to a standard gym exercise to illustrate what makes arm flexion easier (and yes, it’s all about the lever).

The Preacher Bench Curl allows you to support your arms over a slanted surface while your curl a barbell. As the barbell is curled there is less contact made from the upper back of the arms against the Preacher Bench as most of the fulcrum is transferred to the elbow. This “elbow dig-in” allows for some fairly impressive lifts. Now, we can experiment to see if changing the fulcrum decreases the amount of weight we can lift. We can do this via two experiments—gradually cutting off portions of the bottom of the Preacher Bench (I don’t recommend this as your gym may frown upon it) or, actual experiment. In the actual experiment, you gradually build up layers on the upper portion of the bench (positioning a few 2” x 6” boards should do the trick). With the mid-to-upper arm now the fulcrum and the elbows no longer in contact with the bench, the lift totals go down by a significant degree. Why? Well, you already know the answer to this—horrible fulcrum placement.

Back to the arm bar--once we move the fulcrum above the elbow, then we have something to work-- maximum mechanical leverage for the aggressor and decreased mechanical leverage for the defender.

Of course, the arm bar and leg bar are the most obvious examples of capitalizing on leverage but we should strive to examine every hook and see if there is a fulcrum to be manipulated, a “long end of the stick” to be grasped. By doing so we see that toe-holds are most effective at, well, the toes and not the laces, that rather than fighting underneath the chin to choke, we should move to the forehead to lever the chin off of the chest. The more you seek efficient fulcrum placement and “short end of the stick” grips the greater our ability to move, if not the world, at least the limbs within our grasp.

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS

According to some word-mavens the origin of the maxim “the devil is in the details” refers to the convoluted language that the legal profession started using to Baroque excesses in Victorian England. A contract that might look good on the surface may have a lot of bad tidings hidden in the fine print-the details. We’ve seen the same thing as of late with folks realizing that their mortgage contract isn’t quite as sweet as they once thought.

The devil is also in the details of the fighting arts. Let’s face it, there are only so many ways to kick, punch, elbow, knee, head-butt, choke, lock, crank, rip a human being. We’re not going to see that much more in left-field innovation unless humans suddenly sprout a new appendage we can strike with or attack. That really only leaves one place to go with innovation, creativity, and malicious ingenuity and that is towards reverse engineering.

We must turn our attention to the “known secrets” (oxymoronic, I know) and work to understand every familiar offensive and defensive technique inside and out. We must de-construct them, pull them apart if you will so, that we can better understand just why a jab is so effective. Why a bar and chancery works so well at a 45 degree and down angle but not nearly as well at a 50 degree and lateral angle. We’ve got to play with the shin kick and see whether we fire more pain receptors at 2 inches above the knee, 4 inches above the knee and, so on and so forth.

So, it’s not so much what’s new under the sun as it is using the sun to illuminate what’s already out in the open. Just as the fine print is what will bite you in that mortgage contract it is the minute details working in tandem that makes the rear overhand or chin hook crank from the intelligent veteran far more effective and devastating than that of the relative rookie. That rookie may throw something that looks exactly like an overhand or, he may slap on a chin hook crank and it may be uncomfortable but, there is often something missing—the detail work.

Let’s put a fine point on seeking devilish details by reverse engineering a punch to its fundamental essence—the weapon itself—the fist. There are more than a few schools of thought regarding striking with the horizontal fist, the vertical fist, the ¾ fist (natural position) but I want us to regress even further, taking nothing for granted, let’s examine the striking surface itself.

Again, we have a few schools of thought here, some aver that striking with the two-prominent knuckles (of the index and middle fingers) is the way to go, others proclaim that it’s not the first two knuckles but, the flat of the index and middle finger phalanges, and there is yet another school of thought (pugilism) that emphasizes the flat surface of the last three phalanges (middle, ring, and little finger). Let’s look at these three in a bit of detail evaluating the claims.

The Prominent Knuckle proponents point to the slight protrusions of these two knuckles and inform us that these knuckles allow us penetration power via the reduced striking surface. Striking surface reduction does indeed increase the likelihood of weapon penetration but, this argument seems to ignore what class of weapon the fist is—it is a blunt clubbing tool. If we want to increase target penetration why not forgo the fist and use the half-fist or the finger jab? We must also not forget the fact that more often than not, the fist will be impacting on hard surfaces (skulls) which will respond far better to blunt force trauma than they will the minor penetration gains made by the few millimeters of prominent knuckle. Punches to the body are also best served by wielding the fist as a blunt object than as a two millimeter penetration tool. Don’t get me wrong, many breaking enthusiasts (particularly those with makiwara-induced knuckle deformation) say there is much to be praised about the Prominent Knuckle approach; this may indeed be true for this particular aspect of the sport but, it seems to hold little transfer for the fluid conditions of the fight.

There is another aspect of the Prominent Knuckle approach that is a bit off, it is also the failing of the Index-Middle Finger Phalanges approach. It is claimed that the fist is in optimum alignment with the skeletal support of the forearm (the radius and ulna) if you emphasize either of these two alignments. Some go so far as to say if you site down your forearm and use your two-knuckles as a gun-site you’re in the correct alignment. If we follow this “gun-site” rule then only punches thrown with the horizontal fist and in a straight arm manner are considered viable, in other words, bye-bye hooks, uppercuts, overhands, et cetera.

The idea of proper alignment between fist and forearm is a sound one and fortunately there is a simple but effective test for verity. Stand before a wall and place your fist again the wall at full arm-extension in, first, the Prominent Knuckle alignment. Press into the wall with all of your strength, pushing from your legs and then, keeping the pressure on, rock your fist around on the surface. You will find that the wrist experiences a bit of instability (in some cases, discomfort) at some positions during the rock.

Now, align in the Index-Middle Finger Phalanges position and do the same. Here, the stability is a bit better but the rock still exposes some wrist instability thus rendering the “proper alignment” argument off-base. Now, let’s try the wall test with the Pugilist’s Fist, the flat of the last three phalanges (middle, ring, and smallest finger). You should find that even with full drive and rocking the stability is sound.

Now, whether you decide to try the Wall Test or not is up to you but, what I do want to emphasize is the “take nothing for granted” attitude. It is in our best interests as combat sports enthusiasts and self-defense proponents to not so much look for “newer and cooler” techniques all the time but, to take what we already know and make sure we really know what we know.

I want to close with a quote, feel free to substitute whatever combat sport you choose for the word ‘wrestling’ and I think you’ll find the truth remains the same. No less an authority, than the great Japanese wrestling competitor and coach Shozo Sasahara put a fine point on it when he said: “There are no ‘secrets’ in wrestling. Its history is far too long for secrets to remain undiscovered. It is mainly a question of learning correctly what is already known.” That sounds like another argument for finding the devil in the details.

TO BE FAST, GO SLOW

A common scenario: You learn a wicked new combination, let’s say, a jab to rear knee and then a lead whip elbow. You’re raring to go so you plant yourself in front of the mirror or banana bag or have your partner grab the focus mitts and you start blasting full steam ahead. Sometimes it’s a new grappling chain, you want to test that sweet new transition from cross-body to overleg ride to knee-pinch submission so you grab a partner and you both start clocking though this thing in record time. A fight is fast-paced so you reason that you should sprint out of the blocks in your training as well. This train with speed to acquire speed makes perfect sense, right? But, is it the best way to approach your training? Some new research suggests-- yes and no, depending on who you are and where you are in your game.

Researchers have discovered an apparent paradox between the speed-accuracy-trade-off and information costs. Huh? The speed-accuracy-trade-off can be generalized as the more time you take to contemplate a physical task before performing the actual task the more accurate you will be but…this only holds true for novices and/or new tasks. For example, novice golfers and expert golfers were asked to make a series of difficult putts. They each had 3 seconds to assess and then take the shot, as you might expect, the experts far out performed the novices at this task. The novices’ accuracy was negatively affected by the speed requirement. So, what happened when both groups of golfers were given a mandatory full 30 seconds to assess before taking their shot? The novices should improve their accuracy (which they did, significantly) but what of the already accurate experts?  Given even more time to assess they should do even better, right? Nope, as a matter of fact the experts fared far worse at 30 seconds than they did with only 3 seconds to work. Both groups were re-tested with mandatory 45 second interval—novices continued to improve and the experts futzed the putts left and right.

What seems to get in the way of the experts accuracy is the information cost. The information in this case was the lining up and judging of proper angle, speed, and ball contact. The novice golfers, with more time to assess, could bring full consciousness to the new task at hand and thus perform far better than they did at the 3 second mark. Experts, on the other hand, have already transferred skills from “conscious learning” to “ingrained response” which requires no conscious evaluation, in other words, the experts “over-thought” and “choked.” This same comparison of novices and experts was studied in a faster paced game—handball.

In the handball version of the experiment, the participants stood before a screen that projected a game in action. At random times the action would pause and the studied individuals were asked to point to where the ball would rebound next. At the 3-second mark the novices were wildly inaccurate whereas the experts were dead-on more often than not. At the mandatory 30-second mark the novices improved whereas, again, the experts devolved in performance. They then took the intervals to 45 seconds and then a full minute. The more time allowed, the better the novices performed and the experts, well, performed like novices.

With this apparent paradox of the speed-to-accuracy-trade-off and information costs we can reason that with each new combat skill set we encounter it might be wise to work it s-l-o-w-l-y as your patience will allow to permit you to consciously evaluate any and all aspects of the technique(s) in question. This slow assimilation will allow you to spot errors early and hone accuracy, power, and set the stage for speed. Only after the conscious mind has completely digested what is expected of it should speed be allowed to build (and it will build naturally).

But what of the expert athlete who chokes or is given too much time to think, how can we short circuit information costs and get him back to optimum performance? Well, there was a sub-set of the aforementioned experiments that re-tested the athletes (both novice and expert) at the extended times again but, this time, they were also assigned a task of performing simple math in their heads while assessing their shots. With this cognitive overload the novices performed like novices again and the experts, with their minds occupied, allowed “ingrained response” to do its sweet thing. With this in mind, the next time you feel off or experience “choking”, provide yourself with a task to get you “out of your head” This can be something as simple as humming a tune or mentally reciting state capitals, anything that will provide that conscious overload so you can go back to what you trained long and slow to do fast.

WHEN FEAR IS AN UNWELCOME GIFT

Many consider Gavin DeBecker’s book The Gift of Fear a classic in the realm of personal protection (and rightly so). In his book, Mr. DeBecker, makes a strong case for not ignoring the “gut reactions” we sometimes encounter in bad situations; I agree with his premise whole-heartedly but, I think that some may have taken the implications of Mr. DeBecker’s observations a bit further than warranted. By the way, these stretchings of Mr. DeBecker’s premise, I’m sure, are offered out of genuine concern and not malicious dishonesty.

We often hear anecdotal support for little “gifts of fear” in the form of personal or “I have a cousin” stories. These stories often take the form of: “Joe was at this bar and he had a bad feeling about this guy giving him the eye and sure enough before the night was done that guy tried to break a bottle over his head.” In my example story, fictional Joe’s “gift of fear” was proven correct and that would be the only reason for Joe (or his cousin) to pass along the story. But if we are to give credence to gifts of fear we must also give credence to all gifts of fear.

By this I mean, Joe’s story is passably interesting only because something occurred after his initial tingle of suspicion but, what if Joe experienced the tingle and the guy never went for the bottle? No story and chances are Joe would forget the fear-tingling incident ever occurred. As a matter of fact, most little tingles of fear we get are for naught (we’ll get to why this is in a bit). The nerves (fear) before a speech seldom signal that the crowd is going to attack. If everyone who ever experienced an “unsettling feeling” before boarding a plane acted on that feeling we would be looking at the collapse of the airline industry. I offer that, more often than not, our miniature gifts of fear are mistakes in perception and easily forgotten because nothing occurred.  We humans love a good story and may occasionally give too much weight to after the fact stories of precognition. Those far smarter than I label this logical fallacy “post hoc ergo propter hoc” (approximate Latin for “after this, therefore because of this”).

So, am I saying that we should ignore our gifts of fear? Not necessarily. But first a little about why we are so damn fearful.   The human animal evolved in an environment where there were many things to “be on the look out for”—venomous snakes, inclement weather (even mild inclemency is problematic in sparse or zero shelter), quadrupedal predator species, bipedal predators (competing humans), wounded but still dangerous kill, and a myriad other dangers associated with Paleolithic hunting and nomadic existence. In short, fear in this environment was (and is, when thrust back into these conditions) a necessary part of survival.

Time travel to now and, assuming that the majority of us live in fairly safe conditions, (I trust that if you have the safety and leisure to read this article life is okey-dokey for you at the moment) and we find conditions far different from those enjoyed by our Stone Age ancestors. Our current environment and conditions may be vastly different than what our Paleolithic forebears dealt with but our brains are essentially the same. Our brains still seek potential threats and hidden dangers (not a bad thing, mind you, with a little prudence—we’ll get to that). The problem is our Stone Age brains still look for threats in the past environment—more people are afraid of spiders and snakes than of driving or riding in a car when the odds far and away are in favor of the car injuring and/or killing you. More people fear the stranger when crime statistics show that you are much more likely to be harmed (assaulted, raped, or murdered) by someone you know. Our 21^st century lives are still influenced by Paleolithic concerns and these primitive concerns are often translated into little gifts of fear that may no longer have context. Context, by the way, is the key.

Environment, both physical and emotional, is our great context provider. Environment provides us with the cues or clues that inform us as to whether or not to be more alert to our miniature gifts of fear. Environment can let us know whether to stay alert or stand-down. For example, mobs can be dangerous and they can also be benign, the environmental context will assist you in determining how much credence to lend to any anxiety you may experience. A mob of educators at a teachers’ convention is one thing; a mob of Neo-Nazis at a rally is something altogether different. We can keep the physical environment example and alter the emotional environment. Picture the same Neo-Nazi rally where the Neo-Nazi focus is on a Neo-Nazi family picnic complete with sack races and a mass water balloon fight—doesn’t change the distasteful political stance of the group but, it does leaven your perceived threat a bit. Back to the teachers’ convention, let’s assume that mandatory merit pay has just been announced and tenure has been done away with and the teachers don’t seem to care for that a bit—a little different now, huh?

Physical and emotional environments will provide our context for fear cues. No, we should not ignore all fear cues but we must (if we are to be rational as well as safe) evaluate them for what they might possibly be—a remnant of a survival system from long ago that may not be relevant in the current environment. And we also must remember the human propensity to “remember the hits and forget the misses” (again: post hoc ergo propter hoc) when it comes to our little gifts of fear stories. Of course, this was all said much better by Mark Twain, and I paraphrase: “I’ve had many troubles in my life, most of which have never happened.”

THE FOLLY OF STYLE

Those of us who went through a stage of watching Enter the Dragon obsessively will recall the scene where we find Bruce Lee on a boat making a journey to Han’s island. He is approached by one of the other tournament competitors and is asked “What’s your style?” This hallmark question went on to be echoed in martial arts films too numerous to count and, in a case of life imitating art, martial artists the world over began to query one another with the same question. But is the answer to this question meaningful outside of polite curiosity? Have we inflated the word “style” in combat arts/sports to designate something far more than it actually does?

To address the question of style we must first define what style actually means. The common usage in martial arts denotes a particular mode of approach to combat situations whether in the sporting sense or street usage. We seem to think that simply by hearing the style tag we will be able to divine what the individual’s inculcated response will be in certain situations (and, perhaps to some degree, this is true). Those with a Tae Kwon Do style can be expected to kick well and those with a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu style can be expected to have a good ground game. But, no matter the answer, would the question be more usefully phrased as “What’s your sport?” Are we making what are essentially inapt comparisons when we ask what your style is? Yes, all combat can be characterized by one-on-one striking/grappling but are we getting at what we really mean by inquiring as to style?

Let’s look to other sports for a moment. A vast number of team and individual sports use a ball of some sort. If we hear an athlete proclaim that he plays a ball sport and we ask what his sport is, whether he answers football, tennis, rugby, jai lai, polo what have you, all we’ve learned is what individual sport he participates in, that’s all. In the context of ball sports we don’t immediately make the jump to “Oh, he plays polo and polo is better than tennis, but not as good as rugby" et cetera. Each ball sport is what it is within the context of its own rule-set and method of play and comparative judgments as to efficacy versus other ball sports are meaningless as we don’t (not yet, at least) have MBS (Mixed Ball Sports) where tennis competitors square off against volleyball players.

We don’t even see this sort of interrogative within individual ball sports; in other words, an individual sport such as football does not subdivide its mode of play so distinctly that it becomes a discrete entity unto itself. We don’t hear of Shaolin style football squaring off against Portuguese football.

Inquiring of a martial artist as to “what’s your style” informs us; simply, of what sport he plays and gives us a ballpark idea as to how that game is indulged. These side-by-side comparisons between sports only make sense in Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) where the word “mix” is what the game is all about. But even here as the sport evolves, we see less and less match-ups in the style-vs.-style sense and more and more blending of “style” where MMA becomes its own style/sport which is exactly as it should be. MMA has its own rule-set and mode of play and the strict rule set of any other combat sports are not necessarily all one needs to make the transition to MMA. After all, as effective as boxing, kickboxing, Muay Thai, wrestling, BJJ are in and of themselves, you no longer see a straight down the line participant of a single “style/sport” dominate.

This blending and sloughing off of stylistic pretensions is a good thing by my way of thinking. “Style” within an individual sport context with a restrictive rule-set is terrific and no real value judgment should come into play in a comparative sense. Tae Kwon Do players should not expect to do well in a BJJ tournament and vice versa and that’s just fine. But when we start allowing “style”, which is a compartmentalized way of thinking and acting, to make claims into areas where mixing and blending is paramount (MMA and self-defense) that’s where we see trouble. We would find it ludicrous for a tennis champion to assume that he can play defensive line in the NFL because his tennis game is so tight and vice versa again.

If we are to be concerned with style, I would urge you to think of it in the strict sporting context and to pursue your “style” as an expression of the sport you have chosen to play. If your goals are more encompassing (MMA/self-defense) then it might be wise to shed stylistic concerns and move to a technique-by-technique evaluation with no concern as to what style might have developed said technique. This sort of non-stylistic prioritization was espoused by Bruce Lee when he said “Absorb what is useful and reject what is useless”, or by my own inelegant “Don’t bring a badminton racket to a rugby game.”

MATTER OVER MIND

We all want to be confident. We all want to be good performers. We would all like to “know we’ve got the right stuff” to get the job done. With that in mind, I want to ask just how important is the “winning mindset” and in asking that question there might be an even more important question---is there even such a thing as a “winning mindset”? Because if there’s not, no need to waste time with it.

Granted, these are easy questions to ask but hard to answer as the realm of what’s going on inside the skull is subjective. It seems that the “winning mindset” camp is one full of contradictions and unquantifiable buzzwords that make easy analysis of efficacy somewhat difficult (whether this difficulty is by design or simply a by-product of nebulous subject matter, I can’t say). Consider the following quotes from fight commentators regarding well-regarded champions on differing evenings of competition. I’ve not supplied who provided the quotes nor have I offered who is being referred to so that we can see just how nebulous this “mindset” area of interest is.

“He’s a calm competitor. He never gets riled and that’s why he’s so effective.”

“He’s a fiery competitor and that’s why he’s so tough to get a bead on.”

“This fighter knows how to stay inside himself so he doesn’t over-extend his energies.”

“He knows how to stretch and go that extra mile.”

“He’s supremely confident and that’s why he’s hard to beat.”

“He’s never over-confident and that’s what makes him who he is.”

“He knows the importance of winning.”

“He doesn’t worry about losing.”

“He knows how to pace himself.”

“He always gives 110%.”

“He knows how to hold back.”

“He leaves it all in the cage.”

“He never gives up.”

“He knows that sometimes it’s best to live to fight another day.”

“He’s calm”, “He’s fiery”, “He’s relaxed”, He’s driven”, “He’s patient”, He’s hungry.”

Quite the schizophrenic psychological profile of winners, huh? Are we to believe the above mess of contradictions is an indication that champion mindsets are indeed something different or, are champions simply just like every other human being possessing different attitudes, personality traits, levels of enthusiasm, and confidence across a wide range of stimuli?

When a champion is defeated and we hear the phrase the challenger “just wanted it more” do we really think that’s what just occurred inside the cage? Do we really think the champion is tired of the accolades? The winning purses? The endorsement deals? If we really think that it comes down to attitude over aptitude would we be satisfied with taking two competitors who made weight and sliding them into an MRI and having them think about winning and then skipping the fight and awarding the win to who wanted it more?

If we do allow the two to go ahead and fight at the end of that fight is declaring that the winner “wanted it more” an accurate definition of why the victory occurred? If so, where do strength, skill, stamina, and luck factor into the equation?

If the wining mindset is so integral what do we think would happen in regard to a psychotic athlete who did very little training but simply “knew” that he was going to win? Where would you rather place your bet? On his opponent, the athlete who trained H-A-R-D and “hoped to do well”? Or, on the one who took the training lightly but had the “gut feeling” that “this day is his”?

The sure bet seems to be to place your money on aptitude over attitude. The winning mindset business is about the hyping of hopeful or wishful thinking, the stealing of a bit of your valuable training time to devote to mind games that demonstrate zero quantifiable effect in the actual arena. Hard work, discipline, patience, study, self-sacrifice, and other synonyms for the Nike slogan of “Just do it!” are far more valuable and time and again the true common denominators of champions. Not some nebulous mindset.

Lest you think I’m devaluing self-esteem here, on the contrary. Self-esteem that is spawned from honest effort, the accumulation of experience, knowledge, and long hard work is self-esteem backed with promise—concrete effort. Self-esteem based simply on “I know I can do this because I’m the best” seems a bit delusional and in some cases pathetic. Humans are goal directed organisms, we thrive in setting targets and getting from point A to point B: “I’m going to the store”, “I’m going to mow the yard”, “I’m going to train so-and-so hours per week.” And within that goal setting is the seed of dissatisfaction. A hint of “Hmm, things could be better.” “Something at the store will make my life better; my yard would look better mown” and “this many training hours will get me closer to honing this technique.”

This dissatisfaction is to some degree what drives elite competitors. It need not be dissatisfaction to the degree that you never enjoy your accomplishments but enough to keep you alert to what new benchmarks need to be attained, what aspects of your performance must be improved. By all means, pursue your training with engagement and the best attitude that you can muster but please do not accept that there is some magic set of positive affirmations or a cosmic pep talk that will suddenly imbue you with the strength to clean and jerk double your body weight or run through your opponents. The only formulas that matter are those that are grounded in hours and hours of old-fashioned, intelligently directed hard work. The results of that hard work seem to do what they do whether your “head is in the game” or not. When in doubt go Nike and leave the “winning mindset” fluff to the largest consumers of “winning mindset” material--the “winners” on Wall Street.

YOU CAN’T JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER (EVEN IF YOU’VE ALREADY READ IT)

We all like to think we’re good judges of character, we know who our friends are, who to trust, who not to trust, whether or not we’ve met Mr. or Ms. Right. These sorts of judgments are integral in everyday life allowing us to build, maintain, avoid and in some cases sever relationships. We use myriad cues as clues or insights into the “character” of others allowing us to make these judgments. We evaluate individuals by what they say, by what they do and in many cases (if we’re honest with ourselves) we consult our gut—our visceral response to the individual(s) in question.

These character evaluations are our own personal profiling program; profiling in the FBI/VICAP/Predator Profiling sense. For the most part, our skills are utilized upon well-meaning or, in worst cases, benign subjects, folks who mean us no physical harm. In the unfortunate event that our profiling skill must come into play in an actual life or death situation it would be nice to have a sense of just how accurate our profiling talents actually are. Before we turn to success rates of actual Predator Profiles let’s take a look at how well our profiling skills stack up in everyday life.

Let’s take two relationships as examples cases where our profiling skills should show the best results: Spouses and children. These two relationships are long-term and provide you with heaping mounds of clues about the individual(s) in question. As a rule, the more information we have about a given subject the greater our accuracy but, is that actually true?

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 43% of marriages will end in divorce--some place the number at closer to 50% others closer to 40%. Whatever the real number may be it is safe to say that approximately 4 out of 10 couples that profiled one another found, in their judgment that this person was so admirable and trustworthy that they wanted an intimate legalized commitment to them for the rest of their lives. But we can’t lose sight of the fact that that profiling assessment was, well, egregiously wrong. That still leaves 6 out of 10 couples who have profiled accurately—correct?

Still on the subject of spouses that have passed what is presumably the most in-depth of personal profiling tests, consider this, according to a study by K.G Anderson, approximately 3-4% of fathers in the U.S. and Europe are unknowingly raising children that are not their own (other studies put this percentage as high as 10%). Also, studies show that 50-60% of married men have at least one affair during their marriage with women coming in just a smidge behind at 45-55%. So, even within that 6 out of 10 that did not divorce we seem to find more than enough evidence for less than accurate profiling skills. Allow me one more example, this time regarding children and parents, and then we will turn to how this relates to assessing potential danger.

OK, so we may be a little less accurate than we might presume about detecting deception or erroneous behavior when it comes to adults but surely we are far better profilers/lie detectors when it comes to children, after all we are “smarter” than they, right? We’re adults. Imagine how much better our ability to perceive deception when the subject in question is our own child. M. Lewis and C. Saarni in “The Development of Deception” relate a fascinating experiment to determine at what age lying begins to manifest itself but, in doing so, they discovered a fascinating side result. First, the experiment.

5-year old children were, individually, led into a room and told to face a wall, and then behind their back the experimenter would inform them that they were getting out a fantastic toy that they were not to look at. The experimenter would then make an excuse to leave the room for a moment while the child was being observed and filmed from behind a 2-way mirror. Upon returning the experimenter would ask if the child peeked at the toy. The results, every single child peeked and every single child lied about peeking. But, here’s the side-result we want to concern ourselves with: when parents of the children were shown the portion of the film the showed the lie they were asked if their child were lying or not. Adult parents performed no better than chance at detecting the lie.

OK, if we aren’t that slick at judging deception and/or character when it comes to our closest relations, people with whom we have an abundance of time to evaluate, just how well do we fare when it comes to potential dangers from an individual we have very little cues/clues from? A seemingly difficult area to assess. Well, Dr. Stephen Porter authored an ingenious Canadian study that allows us a glimpse into how well we might do.

Dr. Porter examined how Parole Boards evaluated potential parole candidates and determined how well they did in their assessments. Please keep in mind that parole board members are experienced professionals used to dealing with predators and/or deviant mindsets and should therefore be far more adept at assessing deception and potential harm. These professionals are not going in blindly as we (the average citizen) might when confronting a predator; they have knowledge of prior offense(s) and a host of other data at their disposal. So, how did these professionals do?

According to the study, criminals with psychopathic tendencies (Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer fell into that class) were two and a half times more likely to be released than average criminals. On top of this, the psychopathic criminals were more likely to re-offend within a year than the average criminal but, let’s let Dr. Porter state this himself: “Psychopathic offenders are far more likely to re-offend, so they should be far less likely to be released.” And yet, the opposite tendency is what we see.

Psychopathic offenders are so skilled at delivering what the board wants to hear that they are more likely to be released. These individuals have been interviewed by trained psychologists, doctors, criminologists, and lawyers and Porter says these professionals are “generally no better than laypersons in detecting deception.” (And we’ve seen just how good at this we laypeople are).

So where does that leave us? I mean if we have trouble detecting deception in loved ones, and professionals whose job it is to detect deception perform no better than chance just what are we to say when we are told by self-defense “experts” that you should “profile” those around you for potential harm? We’ve all heard the “neighbor reports” in the aftermath of some tragedy: “He seemed like a nice normal guy.” We human beings simply aren’t quite as slick as we’d like to think we are when it comes to this judging a book business. But, we shouldn’t despair—knowledge is, indeed, power. If we accept the fact that we are all too fallible in this area perhaps we will learn to continually assess for clues rather than relying on initial judgments and then standing pat. We can learn to accept that sometimes the gift of fear is not a gift at all (more on this another day) and simply a misperception. We can learn to alter our profiles as each new behavioral clue accumulates rather than alter the clue to fit our profile. We can be smarter by realizing that we aren’t as smart as we think we are.

Jim Jeffries

Jim Jeffries, an early heavyweight champion, is the personification of tough with a capital T.  In a bout against Joe Choynski he was hit with a right hand so hard that his lower lip became wedged between his teeth (this was way before mouthpieces, folks) and his seconds had to cut it loose with a pocketknife between rounds so he could continue fighting.  In Jeffries's rematch against Bob Fitzsimmons in 1902, Fitz had loaded his gloves and cut Jeffries so badly that a flap of scalp hung over his eyes obscuring his vision.  Jeffries kept fighting and knocked Fitzsimmons out.

John L. Sullivan

This is the first of what will probably be many stories about "The Great John L." John L. Sullivan, was the last of the great bare-knuckle heavyweight champions.

Bare-knuckle bouts were never won by decision; they went on until one fighter dropped or gave up.

John L. Sullivan defeated Jake Kilrain in the last bare-knuckle heavyweight title fight in 1889.  That bout lasted 75 rounds, over two hours and 15 minutes.  The bout ended when Kilrain's seconds threw in the towel only because they were convinced that another punch from "The Great John L." would kill the challenger.

This Iowan legend started out as the proverbial sickly child. (He suffered from tuberculosis). He joined the YMCA to build up his body. He began with calisthenics and eventually switched to heavy dumbbells. His first sport was swimming but then he switched to wrestling and that was a perfect fit for this man with an encyclopedic knowledge of the game.

He won numerous amateur titles in his home state and this led to his being sponsored by the Chicago-Athletic Club which entered him in San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific Exposition Olympiad of 1915. At this event, Caddock won the middleweight amateur wrestling title and then the light heavyweight and the then the heavyweight title. Quite a feat.

Caddock stood 5’11” and tipped the scales at 190 pounds. He turned pro in 1917 and beat Joe Stecher for the World’s professional championship in two falls, the first after one hour and 22 minutes, and the second after one hour and 40 minutes. That’s some stamina, folks!!

Caddock’s knowledge of wrestling was so vast that he was known as the “man with a thousand holds.” We would all be lucky to know a tenth of what he knew.

No, not Jersey Joe Walcott, the light-heavy/heavyweight champ, but the great welterweight. Barbados Joe, was a double-threat, a champion wrestler before trying his formidable hands at boxing. He held the welterweight title from 1901 to 1904.

Joe fought in the despicable days when the color barrier prevented the majority of black vs. white matches. Joe racked up over 300 bouts in carnival boxing booths and 110 official fights. His pro career lasted 21(!) years with him often giving up weight to gain matches. To know how good this welterweight was, one only has to know that he fought the Prince of Fouls “Mysterious” Billy Smith in a bitter six-matches, he beat lightweight phenom Baby Joe Gans, he beat heavyweight Sam Langford, and he knocked-out(!!!!) the very tough heavyweight Joe Choynski who gave Corbett a run for his money. Barbados did all of this as a welterweight. Now that’s a legend in my book.

Joe Stecher was born April 5th, 1896 in Dodge, Nebraska. He grabbed the World Heavyweight Wrestling title once Frank Gotch retired. He held that title from July of 1915 until losing it to Earl Caddock in Omaha, Nebraska, on April 9, 1917. He snagged the belt again in 1920 and held it for a few months until Ed “Strangler” Lewis took it form him in December of that year. He regained it in May of 1925 only to lose it to Lewis again in February of 1928.

That’s a lot of back and forth title shifting and some have claimed that a few of the later matches were works. What all agree on though was that Stecher, not a big man by any stretch of the imagination, had the most wicked leg scissors in the game. It was said that he could burst a two-bushel sack of grain with his scissors, exerting up to 1,800 pounds of pressure with his legs. (Not a man who’s guard/bottom scissors I’d like to be inside of). It’s that kind of power. That kind of aggression that should be taken into consideration anytime you get an opponent between your legs. Think to yourself, “How would Joe Stecher treat this situation.” Ouch!!

Although a pro (show) wrestler, Matsuda had real skills. He held several pro/show titles but of interest to real scientific wrestling enthusiasts was his reputation as a “policeman.” A “Policeman” in the world of show wrestling was a performer who could actually wrestle and do some damage if need be. They would be employed to keep certain performers in line or to settle acrimonious territory disputes.

Hiro’s skills were such that he impressed no less a legend than Lou Thesz, which is saying a lot. Matsuda’s conditioning was said to be phenomenal. He was known to be able to wrestle an hour straight with absolute ease. A formidable feat as many of us know.

This powerhouse of a human being was born in Poland in 1889 and is generally considered to be one of the most powerful wrestlers/human beings of all time. Otto, won the Austrian wrestling title in 1903 and was considered to be the best Greco-Roman wrestler in the world, pound-for pound. (That’s Hackenschmidt included, folks).

Arco, was also known for his remarkable physique that the esteemed French sculptor, August Rodin, often utilized in posing sessions. He won the 1913 contest for the World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man. But perhaps Arco is best known, today, for his astounding feats of strength. Check out some of his lifts:

Clean and Jerk 279 pounds.

Lay-Down and Get Up with a 175 pound barbell in one hand extended overhead.

One more thing to mention about this amazing human being is that he performed these lifts at a height of 5’ 2” and a weight of 138 pounds. With that in mind, look at those figures again. Now, that is a legend in anyone’s book.

John "The Tiger Man" Pesak

When the second Ed "The Strangler" Lewis held the championship belt in wrestling, many tough contenders wanted a shot at it.  Lewis wanted to weed out some of the contenders, so he employed John Pesak as a sort of "policeman".   Pesak was not a heavyweight, he weighed around 180 lbs., but he made up for this disadvantage with speed, skill, and strength.  Some feel that he may have been the greatest grappler of all-time, but playing outside of his weight-class probably reduced his standings.  Pesak could be relentless; he broke the arm of Finnish champion Armas Laiten.  He also defeated Olympic gold medal winner Nat Pendleton in two straight falls, in under 41 minutes with leg locks.

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