A Brief Meditation On Pain And Injury

I watched Ninja Assassin last night. It was entertaining in an overwrought and hyper-violet fashion, but Rain gives one of the least convincing MA performances I've seen in awhile. All the money they spent on CG-enhanced fight scenes couldn't hide the fact that he handles a sword poorly; the numerous, nameless extras they got to portray the assassins-in-training were far more convincing.

But that's all secondary; what I talk about is the role of pain and injury in training. The movie's flashback sequences depict the routine infliction of non-lethal injury as a standard part of the assassins' curriculum. Much of what is shown would be, I suspect, counter-productive in real life (e.g. severely lacerating the soles of a student's feet), but it got me thinking about pain and injury in a more general fashion.

People, as a general rule, tend to avoid pain. This is true of martial artists as well; we may be more accepting of pain as a consequence of training, but we don't seek it out either. The question that arose in my mind, after viewing the film, is how much we avoid pain for its own sake and how much we avoid it as a harbinger of injury?

The typical pain of training is transitory; you'll feel fine half an hour after practice. Knowing this makes such pain easier to ignore, embrace, and/or endure since the pain is, in some non-trivial fashion, "all in your head". But the pain that accompanies real injury is more than that; it signals that you've damaged yourself to some degree and may not be fine when you get home. Injury has real, long-term consequences, so it's generally wise to pay attention to such signals.

The complication, from the perspective of training, is that there isn't a bright dividing line between pain that should be tolerated and pain that should be heeded. Instead there is a vast, grey swath of land that varies considerably from individual to individual, one which we tend to navigate, with good reason, conservatively. I suspect that most people never develop a sense of the amount of pain they can, or should, tolerate in practice. They don't know how much of a beating they can take (or deliver) and still come out OK on the other side.

As a consequence they may unduly restrain themselves, forgoing actions which might have been beneficial to them. Or, less commonly, they may overdo it and unintentionally injure themselves. Neither outcome is desirable, which demonstrates the value in being able to accurately judge the limits of endurance.

Which brings us back to the role of pain and injury in training. A comprehensive curriculum will assist the student in navigating the "vast grey swath" that I referred to above. For those who consent to it this could quite legitimately include the infliction of various degrees of physical injury. Such a practice would serve two functions:

• Acclimatize the student to pain in general.
• Assist the student in establishing the boundary between minor and serious injury.

It's not terribly difficult to see how this might be achieved in practice. The training regimen might, for example, include the use of makiwara, decreasing the amount of padding as the student progresses. Sparring could be made more realistic by reducing/eliminating padding and/or relaxing rules about contact. And so on, all with the idea of gradually increasing the amount of superficial injury to which the student is exposed.