Thank You, Sirs, For Teaching Me Humility

Yesterday I had the opportunity to work with a couple of advanced (7^th and 8^th degree) instructors who were visiting the school on a foundational aikido wrist lock. The 8^th degree was good. You couldn't even really see him apply the lock; there was a subtle motion with his hands and then all of a sudden the attacker was lying on the ground. That's especially impressive considering that us beginning students were struggling to get the lock at all even with completely compliant partners. You could at least see the 7^th apply the lock, but at one point he made me flop myself all over the floor just by twisting my wrist in different directions. Hence the title of the post; I occasionally forget that there are people out there who are not just better, but orders of magnitude better, than I am.

The lock we worked on was interesting. Way back in the dark ages I learned the same, basic wrist lock that everyone learns: Push the metacarpophalangeal joints of the hand in question towards the inside of the arm. When done correctly this places tremendous stress on the wrist and, pardon my french, hurts like a motherfucker. Of note is that the discomfort feels like its distributed more-or-less evenly across the wrist joint.

So the one we worked on was a little different and, perhaps, more effective. I say more effective for two reasons:

• A beginning student about ⅔ my size was able to successfully apply it against me a couple of times with minimal visible effort.
• It seems to hurt more with less physical force on the defender's part.

The difference is that the variant we worked on causes all of the discomfort at the outside edge of the wrist, in the vicinity of the head of the ulna. If all the force is being concentrated at one point rather than being distributed across the entire wrist joint that could explain why it takes less force to achieve the desired effect.

The complication is, of course, that the mechanics of the lock aren't obvious. As I alluded to above all the students ended up failing to successfully apply it as often as not. There seems to be a very small range where the locks works as intended; minor changes in hand/wrist position can cause major changes in efficacy.

As near as I've can tell, based on the lesson and self-experimentation, the basis of the lock is bending the metacarpophalangeal joints of the little and ring fingers towards the inner forearm. But I believe there are two additional pieces as well:

1. While maintaining pressure on the joints and keeping them at ~90° to the forearm, rotate the hand between 15-30° around the axis defined by the middle finger, towards the outer edge of the forearm. This should result in an increase in discomfort at the head of the ulna.
2. This is the part I still don't quite grasp. While in this position the hand needs to be rotated around the axis defined by the forearm. If done correctly it, too, hurts like a motherfucker. If not done correctly it doesn't hurt that much. I'm still trying to grok the difference between "correctly" and "incorrectly" in this case.

There are some other, macro elements in play as well, such as the position of the attacker's wrist relative to the defender's body (closer is better) and the angle of the arm grasping the attacker's wrist (vertical is better).

That I, and other students, were having trouble applying this lock in a repeatable manner represent a (minor) failure of pedagogy on the part of the instructors; they either didn't, or couldn't, show us how to get the lock consistently. Rather, when one of us was having trouble they'd either demonstrate the lock themselves or make subtle adjustments in the student's positioning which all of a sudden made the lock effective. I didn't find that either of these methods helped me find the small "sweet spot" for the lock. I would have appreciated something along the lines I described above, demonstrating the component rotations for the lock in sequence and showing how the application of each on in sequence increases the discomfort of the lock.

Cost-Effective Uniform Display

Moving a decade's worth of uniforms yet again finally convinced me that I should either do something with them or toss them. I decided that I wanted to frame them and put them on the wall, and then I went and looked for appropriate cases. Ouch... expensive... the local framing store wanted $300 per case, and a lot of online shops want $100. Too rich for my blood.

Eventually I found Pennzoni Display, which sells a decent case for ~$45. It's not archival quality, to be sure, but I don't need it to be hermetically sealed. It just has to hang on the wall and display a gi top, and it does that just fine.

More On Studio Y

I'm about a month and a half into study at the new studio and generally finding it to my liking. It's an interesting beast in that it bears certain hallmarks of a for-profit self-help program or multi-level marketing scheme; advancement in the middle ranks is specifically tied to boosting the school and, if I wanted to, I could spend thousands of dollars on seminars and specialized training programs. At the same time, however, there's a lot of substance to the program itself; they do most things at least as well as, and some things notably better, than other places I've studied.

Contrary to my initial assessment, the Studio Y program doesn't throw people into the deep end of the pool¹. Beginning level students start out with very basic material; I think I've officially learned a couple of punches and a couple of kicks. And there's instruction on how to punch/kick properly, combined with a modicum bag work, which compares favorably to Studio X. I'm starting to form the opinion that this sort of focus on the basics at early levels is the best way to promote long-term development.

I'm particularly enamored of their approach to forms. There's one main form, "Pal Gae" (pronounced "poll gay"; I'm guessing at the spelling), which everyone learns and which often forms the basis of warm-ups/calisthenics. Structurally the form is a relatively simple series of Bagua-style stances² and strikes, but its hard to do right. Performing each stance correctly, and transitioning between stances, is physically demanding; I (think) I'm getting better, but I've still got a ways to go before I'll be able to do the entire thing decently.

What I really like, though, is that it's clear why this form exists and why its a focus of practice. It wraps up essential conditioning and instruction into a concise package that works both sides of the body equally; whomever designed this particular exercise knew exactly what they were doing. Again, this compares favorably with other studios where many of the forms lack an obvious raison d'etre.

Now, on to the list of negatives. It's not apparent that they do any sparring; I've seen no evidence of it in the studio and no one has ever mentioned it. I don't think that's a huge deal for me personally; I like sparring, and think I'm pretty good at it, but I'm not going to suffer in its absence. However, I'm again starting to form the opinion that some sort of sparring is important for the development of beginning students. Some students are so concerned with hitting their partners, and consequently so tentative in practice, that it's hard for them to learn techniques correctly. I watched a number of newcomers to Studio X become better martial artists, in part, because sparring encouraged (or, in some cases, forced) them to get over their natural reluctance to punch people. There's at least one student at Studio Y who's obviously in need of this treatment.

The only thing which has really annoyed me so far, however, is the studio/s approach to conditioning. Here they really do throw students into the deep end of the pool; everyone does the same set of calisthenics, same number of reps, holds for the same count, and so on. And the instructors invariably spout the typical balderdash about mental discipline and "powering through". Really, people, no amount of mental discipline is going to allow the typical beginning student to do 50 pushups in a row, so why even ask them to try? Recognizing that this is high-touch, but there's a lot to be said for ramping students up in reasonable increments. In many respects it's almost exactly like weightlifting; you start small and work your way up.

If I ruled the world I'd have a separate class just for conditioning. The problem being that, if you're really putting 100% into the conditioning portion of class, you may very well end up too tired to get much out of the instruction proper.

In general, however, I feel like the pros vastly outweigh the cons. There's something to be said for having studied under a number of system; I really do feel like I'm getting a much better handle on what works and what doesn't.

---

1 It looks like the instructor showed me Koo Yung Bōp because he knew I had previous experience.
2 Which are taking me awhile to get used to; they're a lot different from the straight-ahead kung-fu that I've done in the past.

Koo Yung Bōp

Actions

• BS: Bow Stance
• FP: Front Punch
• IB: Inward Block
• LHS: Leg-Hanging Stance
• NS: Natural Stancer
• OHMB: Outward Horizontal Mantis Block
• PS: Palm Strike
• RBS: Reverse Bow Stance
• RPB: Rising Palm Block
• TS: T Stance

Regions

• A: Abdomen
• F: Face
• SP: Solar Plexus

English Translation: <something> Dragon Technique

A short, rank 0 form. Each motion/small group of motions has its own "step" which is used for instructional purposes. The form has a "right" and "left" section which are mirror images of each other.

SP ↑ BS PS		F ↑ PS	3
	↑
			Step 6
A ↑ RPB		A LHS ↑ RPB	Step 5
TS		PS	2
	↑
			Step 4
PS RBS			1
	↓ ↺180	OHMB
		LHS
			Step 3
rotate hand 180°		fist becomes HMH	Step 2
IB		FP	Step 1
			Right Side
	NS

	NS
	↑
F ↑ PS		SP BS ↑ PS	3
	↑
			Step 6
A ↑ LHS RPB		A ↑ RPB	Step 5
PS		TS	2
	↑
			Step 4
		RBS PS	1
OHMB	↓ ↻180
LHS
			Step 3
fist becomes HMH		rotate hand 180°	Step 2
FP		IB	Step 1
			Left Side

1: Right arm/hand remain extended behind the body following mantis block.

2: Left hand comes to waist, open and palm up.

3: Twist torso 90° to the right and lean over while delivering palm strikes.

Step 1: Blocking hand is open, palm faces right. Implied blocking surface is inner forearm. Blocking arm and punching first should be aligned with center line.

Step 2: I'm relatively certain this step exists purely for pedagogical purposes. In full-speed performance Step 1 would blend seamlessly into Step 3.

Step 5: Hands aligned on center line, left in front of right, elbows in. Trying to present as small of a target as possible.

Updated Typesetting Scripts

Found a couple of bugs, fixt:

• DocumentParser.pm: Expat was carping about unknown entities and automatically trying to expand them, behavior which has mostly been disabled. There doesn't seem to be any way to turn it off completely, so in some cases you may need to use the following workaround: encode entities as "&amp;<entity name/code>;", at which point Expat will expand the ampersand, leaving "&<entity name/code>;" in the resulting HTML markup. As a byproduct of the work to fix the entity problem it's no longer necessary to include the top level "<doc>...</doc>" tags.
• HTMLFormatter.pm: Fixed two-column layout.
• NotationParser.pm: The regexp for literals is now appropriately robust.

Studio Y First Impressions

Had my first class at the new studio a couple of days ago. The workout kicked my butt, I got to hit a heavy bag for the first time in forever, started learning a new short form... all good so far. This one is more formal than others I've attended and puts non-trivial emphasis on the hierarchy: different ranks bow in different ways, instructors are addressed using their full titles at the beginning and end of class, and lower ranks bow to higher ranks. The class itself is highly-structured as well which, given my complaints about the chief instructor putting up with too much at Studio X, is probably a good thing.

One interesting feature of system which the chief instructor pointed out to me is that they attempt to combine external (<something>-gong, I forget the exact phrase he used) and internal ("neigong") conditioning at the same time. I'll buy that provided that neigong is interpreted to refer primarily to cardiovascular conditioning. The first part of class consisted of, among other things, 50 high kicks with each leg, controlled breathing exercises, and 75 iterations each of 4 different blocks. All said and done we were moving more-or-less continuously for the first 25 or 30 minutes of class. Which, as I said, kicked my ass.

The first form I started working on, which I get the sense is beginner material for everyone, was also pretty challenging. I'm starting to notice a marked difference between systems synthesized in America (as represented by USSD) and those developed abroad (everything else I've done). The former has a very "crawl, walk, run" curriculum which focuses on basics first (how to punch, how to kick) while the latter throws the students into the deep end of the pool from the start ("Ok, now you pivot into twist stance while hook blocking and throwing a palm strike"). I wonder how representative my experience is? Do domestically-produced systems reflect a specifically American approach to pedagogy?

Also, apparently this new system uses a lot of herbs... y'all should know my feelings on that by now. I may have the opportunity to do some TCM debunking in the near future.

Studio X Post-Mortem

I've taken a new job, which means moving (yet again), which means I'll no longer be able to train at Studio X. This makes the third system I've studied, so I'm starting to get a feel for what I like/dislike in a studio. My history, briefly:

• I started at USSD (many moons ago), which taught a contemporary synthesis of karate/kung-fu (heavy on the karate).
• Later I studied Seven Start Praying Mantis at the Rochester Shaolin Academy.
• Most recently I've been doing the pure kung-fu system (along with a little tai chi) they teach at Studio X.

So, things which I particularly liked about Studio X in comparison to other places where I've been a student:

• Good warm-ups, based in part on the I Chin Ching. They've a basic routine for beginner's class and a more "invigorating" routine for advanced class (which regularly kicked my ass) which they stick to consistently. One of my big complaints about the other studios is that calisthenics tended to be "instructor's choice" and so often lacked any sort of rhyme or reason.
• Padless sparring. Nothing teaches you to finally keep your hands closed quite like jamming your fingers for the gazillionth time. Not wearing gloves also allows you to practice a greater range of techniques. Compare with USSD, where sparring was done in full pads, or the Shaolin Academy, which didn't really do any sparring at all.

Moving on, things I disliked:

• Low-quality feedback. One of the things that I liked about USSD was that I felt like I had an accurate picture of how I was doing. It might just have been the instructors I got to work with, but it felt like the standards of the school were high and praise was genuinely earned. I didn't get that same sense at Studio X.
• The chief instructor put up with a tremendous amount of chatter in class; sometimes it was hard for her to get people's attention. That's probably symptomatic of the studio's highly-informal atmosphere, but it could be annoying at times.
• Woo... woo... woo woo woo woo. There was a tremendous proliferation of woo and credulous repetition of MA apocrypha. I mostly just tuned it out, but I really wish that people would just knock it off already. Repeating the unsubstantiated feats of some grandmaster really doesn't serve any purpose.
• Rigid, lockstep schedule. Once you got to brown belt everything was taught on a calendar-based schedule. This month is form X, next month it's form Y, you'll be testing on the material at the end of the quarter. This is more of a personal preference than a generic criticism; some people might benefit from that sort of organization. Didn't work out so hot for me because I traveled a lot for work and was perpetually trying to catch up.
• Form-based curriculum. There wasn't a big emphasis on practical punching/kicking; we hardly spent any time at all working with pads. Which means I'm probably going to end up breaking my toes at the next studio until I learn how to pull them back again.

That's about it for Studio X. I've already identified Studio X+1; stay tuned for further adventures

Studio X: Rank 3 Short Forms Revisited

Source: short_forms_rank_3.xml

Short forms required for promotion from Rank 3 to Rank 4. Each of these forms starts from natural stance and has "left" and "right" halves which are mirror images of each other. The right half, which usually begins with a right-sided attack, is always performed first, followed immediately by the left half.

Actions

• BB: Bird Break
• BF: Backfist
• BS: Bow Stance
• CS: Cat Stance
• CSw: Circle Sweep
• DBB: Downward Backfist Block
• DPB: Downward Palm Block
• G: Guard
• HP: Horizontal Punch
• HS: Horse Stance
• IB: Inward Block
• IntB: Intercepting Block
• NS: Natural Stance
• OB: Outward Block
• RP: Reverse Punch
• RSH: Rising Sidehand
• SK: Snap Kick
• TH: Twist Hit
• UB: Upward Block
• XB: Cross Block

Regions

• C: Chin
• G: Groin
• LOW: Left Outer Wrist
• ROW: Right Outer Wrist
• T: Temple

Short Form 16

IntB		HP
HP		BS
	↻	OB
	HS <	HP →
IntB	↑ ↺
			Right
	NS

 

DBB		DBB
HP		IntB
BS		HP
OB	↺
← HP	HS >
	↑ ↻	IntB
			Left
DBB		DBB

Short Form 17

IntB	↑
HP	NS
	↑	OB
		BS HP
IntB	↑
			Right
	NS

 

HP BS
	↑	IntB
	NS	HP
OB	↑
HP BS
	↑	IntB
			Left
		BS HP

Short Form 18

CSw
← DPB		C ↑ RSH
↮
LOW ⇈ BB			1
		BS HP
IntB	↑
			Right
	NS

 

		SK
		CSw
C ↑ RSH		DPB →
		↮
		ROW ⇈ BB
HP BS
	↑	IntB
			Left
SK			2

1: This bird break serves multiple purposes. The immediate effect is to counter a grab of the performer's right wrist, but proper application also has the effect of a) pulling the attacker off-balance and/or forcing em to commit eir weight to eir front foot and b) turning the defender's torso to the left and bringing eir right hand to eir left hip. The defender can then uncoil to deliver a particularly effective rising sidehand.

2: Hands remain in guard position from the delivery of the sidehand through the delivery of the snap kick.

Short Form 19

		BS
RP	↑	SK
		CS
	↻	UB
	NS	BF →
DPB →	→
	HS <	HP →
IntB	↑ ↺
			Right
	NS

 

TH		T ↑ SK G
BS
SK	↑	RP
CS
UB	↺	UB
← BF	NS
	←	← DPB
← HP	HS >
	↑ ↻	IntB
			Left
T ↑ SK G		TH

Short Form 20

HP		IntB
		BF
		BS HP
IntB	↑
			Right
	NS

 

		SK DBB
IntB		HP
BF
HP BS
	↑	IntB
			Left
DBB SK

Short Form 21

	↓	UB
	Bait		2
		BS
	↻
	<	BF → G
	XB		1
	HS	IB
OB	⊙ ↓ ↺
			Right
	NS

 

CS		HP
UB	↓
	Bait		2
BS
	↺
G ← BF	>
	XB		1
IB	HS
	⊙ ↓ ↻	OB
			Left
HP		CS

1: Maintain outward block through this point. Inward and outward blocks should meet and form a transient cross-block.

2: Lean forward, leading with chin. The idea here is for the defender to bait the attacker into launching a strike at the defender's face.

Short Form 22

	↑	UB
		CS
	← ↻	IB
	<	BF → G
	XB		1
	HS	IB
OB	⊙ ↑ ↺
			Right
	NS

 

BS		RP	2
UB	↑
CS
IB	→ ↺
	>	G ← BF
	XB		1
IB	HS
	⊙ ↑ ↺	OB
			Left
RP		BS	2

1: Same thing as short form 21; transitory cross-block here.

2: One of the few times where it's appropriate to throw a reverse punch from bow stance.

Automated Typesetting For Analytic Martial Arts Notation

I've finally put together some code that makes it much easier to translate notation into HTML. I've used it to typeset a bunch of things already and it has greatly improved my efficiency in this regard. Briefly, here's how it works:

• Techniques are collected into Analytic Martial Arts Notation (AMAN) documents. The documents are XML-based and optimized for hand-composition.
• Each individual technique has a notation block which represents the notation proper.
• The entire thing can be run through a set of typesetting scripts to produce HTML suitable for stand-alone publication or pasting into a blog.

Details of the document format and notation syntax follows.

Document Format

Here's a small sample document which execerises all the features I've developed to date:

<doc>
    <title>Title</title>
    <commentary>
        A Demonstration of the AMAN document format.
    </commentary>
    <actions>
        OB = Outward Block
        SK = Snap Kick
    </actions>
    <regions>
        T = Temple
        S = Stomach
    </regions>
    <definitions>
        <definition name="block_kick">
            SK,,
            OB,,
        </definition>
    </definitions>
    <techniques>
        <technique>
            <format columns="2"/>
            <englishname>Technique 1</englishname>
            <phonetic>TEK NEEK WUN</phonetic>
            <commentary>
                A technique demonstrating the features of AMAN.
            </commentary>
            <notation>
                RP,,,1
                block_kick
                ,"Bow",
            </notation>
            <notes>
                <note id="1">
                    Extended explanation of annotation 1.
                </note>
            </notes>
        </technique>
    </techniques>
</doc>

The document is enclosed in a single element, "<doc>" in this case, which is required for compatibility with XML::Parser. This outermost element is ignored and can be whatever suits your fancy. Each document has the following attributes:

• title: A descriptive title.
• commentary: An optional, free-form text string describing the overall contents of the document.
• actions: A newline-separated block of <action symbol>/<description> pairs. This is one of the places where I've broken the XML standard a bit in order to make hand-composition easier.
• regions: Like the actions element but contains <region>/<description> pairs. This element is optional since a collection of techniques may not make use of region specifiers.
• definitions: An optional element enclosing one or more definition elements.
  • definition: The document may optionally include one or more definitions. These are named chunks of notation which can be interpolated into the techniques defined within the document. This feature is generally designed to assist with the transcription of longer forms which may have recurring sequences of moves.
• techniques: Encloses one or more technique elements.

technique Elements

Each technique element describes one technique, where "technique" can be read as "sequence of moves which the author wants to group together for whatever reason". A technique may be as short or as long as necessary and has the following elements:

• format: An optional directive use to pass formatting hints on to whatever typesetter you're using. The one which I've written, AMAN::HTMLFormatter, will produce a single column per notation block when columns equals 1, otherwise it produces a two-column, side-by-side layout.
• commentary: An optional, free-form text string providing commentary on the technique.
• notation: A block of AMAN; see description below.
• notes: An optional element enclosing one or more note elements.
  • note: A free-form text string with associated ID. This was specifically developed as a footnoting mechanism with the ID referring back to one or more lines in the associated notation block via annotation column. However, there's no enforcement of this relationship, so this is a good place for general notes as well.

notation Elements

Each notation element contains a block of AMAN in a parser-friendly (and, hopefully, human-friendly) format. This block contains one or more lines, each of which has a left, center, and right portion separated by commas. A fourth column containing a text string may optionally be included to annotate the line.

Each section (left, center, and right) of a line is composed of 0 or more atoms. These atoms may be any of the following:

• jump: A jump.
• release: Instructs the performed to release eir grip on eir opponent/weapon.
• A direction keyword indicating motion of the dan tien in the indicated direction. The direction keywords are: left, right, forward, back, forwardleft, forwardright, backleft, and backright.
• look (<direction keyword>): Indicates the performer should focus eir attention on the indicated region.
• <turnleft|turnright> [ ( <integer> ) ]: Denotes a left or right turn. An integer may optionall be included in parentheses following the keyword, indicating a turn of number degrees; 90° is assumed if this modifier is omitted.
• "<literal string>": Indicates that a literal string should be inserted into the notation block at that location.
• <action specifier> [ ( [ grapple|grip ] [ <diection keyword> ] [ <region specifier> ] ) ]: Describes a strike/block/grapple; most of the atoms in a technique will use this form. An arbitrary string of characters is assumed to be an action specifier if it is not a keyword or literal string. Each specifier may optionally be followed by a list of modifiers enclosed in parentheses:
• grapple | grip: May be used to indicate that the action is a grapple or a weapon grip; a standard strike is assumed if these keywords are omitted.
• <direction keyword>: Indicates the direction of application of the action. The default direction of application is assumed if no direction modifier is provided. Does not apply to grip actions.
• <region specifier>: An aribtrary character string denoting a region.

A complete grammar with a more detailed description can be found in NotationParser.pm.

Getting Started

The code and more details on how it works can be found here. The easiest way to get an idea of how all this works in practice is to take a look at the posts where I've presented typeset material along with source files:

• Studio X: Sparring Techniques: Rank 1 Revisited
• Studio X: Sparring Techniques: Rank 2 Revisited
• Studio X: Sparring Techniques: Rank 3 Revisited
• Studio X: Sparring Techniques: Rank 4 Revisited
• Studio X: Sparring Techniques: Short Forms Rank 1
• Studio X: Sparring Techniques: Short Forms Rank 2

I hope this is useful to y'all; have fun.