What hurts, teaches

Quae nocent docent ("What hurts teaches")
~ Adages of Erasmus Erasmus (under 31. I, I, 31. "Malo accepto stultus sapit" in Latin text )

Last week while I was sparring in my kali (stick fighting) class, I took a blow to the middle finger of my left hand, resulting in a finger sprain: a swollen, stiff, bruised finger that hurt whenever I tried to bend it.

The lesson I could have learned from this was that maybe I should try something with less risk of injury! But this would have been the wrong lesson. After all, in learning to use any martial art effectively, sooner or later you are going to be injured. If there is no risk of injury, there is also no way of truly gauging the effectiveness of your defensive technique.

This is the problem when we encounter pain, difficulty or struggle when we are learning anything. Is it a signal for us to give up? Maybe the first lesson that 'pain' teaches is a lesson about ourselves, about our tolerance for discomfort in the pursuit of what we purportedly wish to learn. The pain doesn't come with the lesson presented to us on a platter; more often we have to look for the lesson.

Some of the things that I learned from my experience:

• I chose to spar with less protection, using more heavily padded sticks, whereas I could have fought wearing more protection including padded gloves and heavier sticks. So lesson one: sometimes what appears to be the safer option is actually the riskier option.
• I couldn't have been struck on the hand unless my hand was in a position to be hit. So lesson two: keep my empty hand out of harms way (or at least use it effectively to ward off an attack) when defending myself.
• I wasn't even aware that my hand was exposed as a target. So lesson three: Be mindful of where all of your body is and what parts are exposed to attack.

All of these are useful lessons that will stand me in good stead the next time I fight.

However, the experience contained further lessons.

Since I couldn't bend the finger completely under its own power, as part of rehabilitating it, I've had to carefully force it to bend using my uninjured hand. This hurts a lot! But the choice is between experiencing some pain now and rebuilding flexibility while the healing process is taking place or risking not regaining full function. So sometimes short term pain is necessary to prevent future harm.

Pain isn't my teacher of choice. But by listening to it, I may prevent even greater pain in the future, as well as becoming more effective in one of my chosen martial arts.

Worthy opponents

Without the aid of a worthy opponent, who's not really an enemy but a thoroughly dedicated adversary, the apprentice has no possibility of continuing on the path of knowledge.
~ Carlos Castaneda Tales of Power

There is another reason to love our enemies: They force us to become smarter. The riddles they thrust in front of us sharpen our wits and sculpt our souls
~ Rob Brezsny Pronoia


Last year, apart from starting Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I also started learning Kali (Phillipino stick fighting, also known as escrima or arnis de mano, a martial art possibly related in the distant past to the silat of Indonesia and Malaysia.) Whereas BJJ is empty hand and mostly horizontal, Kali uses weapons (sticks and knives) and is mostly vertical.

One of the key things we do in Kali is sparring, and what I have found is that I learn more from sparring with a superior opponent than with someone I am more evenly matched with. When you have what Castaneda calls "a worthy opponent", you have to stay in the moment and fully alert, you know when you get hit, so you get more experience in learning to evade a serious attack and you learn from watching your opponent what worked when they attacked you, so you can see whether the same approach may work with another opponent. As a result your skill grows: in effect your opponent becomes the whetstone against whom you sharpen your edge.

And while this is a clear lesson in martial arts and in competitive sports and games, it is also true of learning in general. If you are able to just phone in your performance then you tend to become complacent. But when the result is in doubt, you have to stay focused in order to have any hope of victory.

Often your "worthy opponent" is your personal best. For example, if you have previously been able to bench a particular weight at the gym, then if you add 5 kg to that weight, it may become a more worthy opponent and it is the "struggle" against that opponent that increases your strength. If you are learning a language then if you set yourself a target of learning 10 new words a day when previously you have only managed to learn 5 new words a day then you have to find new strategies in order to succeed against this more worthy opponent, and thus become a more effective learner.

The flip side of this is making sure that you are yourself a worthy opponent: you must compete hard enough so that your opponent has the opportunity to learn from you. If you go too easy, your opponent may acquire habits and patterns that will fail against a stronger opponent or in a life-or-death situation. Instead, you must give them the opportunity to test for themselves what works and what doesn't. Unless your opponent has the opportunity to fail, they can't have the opportunity to honestly succeed.

While the examples I have given above have mainly regarded competing, they also apply in other contexts. For example, if you learn a partner dance such as salsa or modern jive, the women are often told to follow what their partner leads, not what their partner intended to lead. This is the only way that a guy can learn what works and what doesn't in leading a woman in particular moves on the dance floor; it is only by trying and not getting the result they expected that they can modify what they are doing until they succeed. In this case, even though the situation is one of cooperation, the woman can still act as a "worthy opponent".

The two take ways lessons here are:

• always seek a worthy opponent if you want to improve since a worthy opponent acts as a mirror of your faults and weaknesses and makes it clearer what you need to work on.
• seek to be a worthy opponent for others so that you help them to build their skills in turn.

Surfing the Edges

Far from slighting the hard parts, we need to embrace them.

~ David Perkins Making Learning Whole


In anything we wish to learn, there are things that we can do easily and things that we find difficult. And there are edges where with a bit of effort we can turn difficulty into fluency. It is these edges that provide us with our greatest opportunities for improvement.

If you only do the things that you are currently able to do easily then you won't increase your skills. Instead, it is better to adopt a strategy of stretching and then consolidating.
You first work out what edge you want to work on, and then use focused and structured practice in order to increase your facility on that dimension. Once you have pushed this edge out further, you then work on consolidating your new gains. (If you solely focus on stretching without consolidating, whatever skills you have acquired may collapse on contact with the reality of actual performance.)

If the skill is a physical skill then there are many edges you can work on including:

• physical capabilities such as flexibility, speed, stamina, smoothness, balance, agility
• broadening repertoire (extending the range of techniques that you can draw on)
• deepening technique (becoming more aware of the finer points of a technique and refining your performance.)
• flexible performance (increasing the range of entries into a technique or the range of techniques that can flow from a given technique)
• varying context of performance ( learning to function under pressure or in adverse circumstances or in circumstances where a technique is ruled out.)
• exploring the limits of a technique (when it will or won't work, when it can be made to work, how it can morph into an alternative if it fails.)
• increasing control ( intensity, stopping, starting, shifting in mid-technique)

These 'edges' can pertain to activities as diverse as martial arts, performance arts and sport.

In relation to yoga, Ganga White puts it this way:

"Every yoga posture has different levels and intensities of engagement, and every body has its own limits. You can learn to adjust and modulate these levels or edges, in order to get different effects and benefits out of the asanas. This technique was also pioneered in yoga in the sixties by Joel Kramer, who called it "playing the edges". I use the term "surfing" because it implies flow, balance, adjustment, and enjoyment - while riding on a wave of energy. Learning to surf and to experiment with many different types of edges can add beneficial dimensions of subtlety to your practice" (from Yoga Beyond Belief, p.95) 

Parallel edges can be found for other skills you may wish to learn such as learning a language, mastering laboratory skills, programming a computer, editing graphics...the list is endless.

The key is to know what your performance edges are and being committed to working on them. Doing so is a surefire way of enhancing your skills in any area in which you wish to excel.

The Proof of the Pudding: theory vs practice

Let us imagine a pilot, and assume that he had passed every examination with distinction, but that he had not as yet been at sea. Imagine him in a storm; he knows everything he ought to do, but he has not known before how terror grips the seafarer when the stars are lost in the blackness of night; he has not known the sense of impotence that comes when the pilot sees the wheel in his hand become a plaything for the waves; he has not known how the blood rushes to the head when one tries to make calculations at such a moment; in short, he has had no conception of the change that takes place in the knower when he has to apply his knowledge.

          ~ Soren Kierkegaard ("The Storm" in "The Parables of Kierkegaard")


The first time I sparred in my Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class, it became immediately clear that there is a huge difference between the cleanness and neatness of applying a technique in class while you are learning it and when your partner isn't resisting much versus trying to apply a technique in the 'heat of battle' were everything seems to be happening at once and you are trying to defend against your opponent's attacks, counter your opponent's defenses and initiate attacks of your own. Out of a dozen or so 'fights' I 'won' two: one with an arm bar and the other with a figure-four lock (Americana) (which is my favorite lock in terms of level of pain.)

So what did I learn?

Firstly, I learned that the fitness required for a class and the fitness required for a fight are two different things; in a fight you tire quickly so it is important to both conserve energy and to end the fight as quickly as possible. The next day, delayed onset muscle soreness taught me that I needed to strengthen by inner thigh and latissimus muscles.

Secondly, I learned the importance of drilling technique until its correct performance becomes automatic; otherwise self-defence becomes just flailing about with all thought of effective technique flying out the window.

Thirdly, I learned that I needed to become more aware of what was happening in the moment, of openings my opponent was leaving that I could exploit, and of the imminence of a particular kind of attack that I would need to defend against to avoid being beaten.

Most of all, like the pilot in Kierkegaard's parable, I learned that all the theory you learn on land doesn't prepare you for the reality of being at sea.

Honor the process, trust the process

A farmer worried that his seedlings were not growing fast enough. So one day, he pulled up the seedlings to make them look taller. Returning home looking very tired, the farmer told his family what he did. His son ran immediately to the field to find all the seedlings had withered.
~ Mencius (Meng Zi)

One day Mullah Nasruddin wished to learn playing zurna (a kind off shrill pipe) and visited a zurna player. "How much does it cost to learn playing zurna?" asked Mullah Nasruddin.
- Three hundred akche (coin) for the first lesson and one hundred akche for the next lessons, asked zurna player.
- It sounds good, replied Mullah Nasruddin. We may start with second lesson. I was a shepherd when I was a young boy, so I already had some whistle experiences. It must be good enough for first lesson, isn't it?
~ Traditional folktale

It is very easy to become impatient when learning a new skill. It may seem that we are taking forever to get anywhere as we continue to clumsily perform the rudimentary elements of the skill. However, it is important to honor the process. Th properly develop a skill, we need to lay a proper foundation for building our skills further and this takes time and focused practice targeted to the elements of the skill that we currently struggle with. If instead, we try and short cut the process, like Mencius's farmer, we may short circuit it instead.

This also means not assuming that we already know the basics and so skipping over bedding down the basics. Maybe we do have some experience that is relevant. But if we assume, like Nasruddin, that our experience in playing a whistle years before provides a sound basis for learning to play the zurna now, we may fail to notice critical differences, subtleties and complexities in the new skill. Instead, we need to have the humility to understand that we may not yet know enough to know what it is we do not know. We need to pay attention even to what we think we already know if we are to be fully open to genuine learning. In the spirit of the Zen story, we cannot pour tea into our teacup if it is already full of preconceptions.

The flipside of honoring the process is trusting the process.

We need to have confidence that if we do the work then we will reap the rewards. So even when we seem to have plateaued and are struggling to make progress at all (and may even feel that we are going backwards), we need to remain confident that beneath the surface we are building connections that will ultimately bloom as improvements in our skills.

This shouldn't degenerate into a blind faith. If we put the right causes in place then the desired effects must occur, but we still need to be alert to the possibility that we are not practicing correctly or not frequently enough or with the right focus or that we are practising the wrong things. If so, we must adjust our approach accordingly.

We only reap what we sow, so it is important to sow the right seeds and to do so in the right way. If we focus on getting the process right, results will follow. The key metaskills to hone are patience and persistence in the face of difficulty. Results will then follow as a matter of course.

---

"Patience Helps New Words Grow" (China Daily 11/18/2006 page10)

A little knowledge...

....is a dangerous thing, so the saying goes and this is true when we begin to learn something new.

Consider tennis: the rules are not particularly complicated and there are only a half dozen or so different strokes to use. But if a person had a few tennis lessons and 'learned' the different strokes and the rules in say eight lessons, no-one would expect them to be able to play even a half decent game of tennis.

But I had to catch myself from making the opposite assumption after my first few lessons of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ). Having had a few lessons doesn't mean that I am now capable of defending myself. I have 'learned' a few techniques, but I suspect that it will take a long time before they feel natural and I can apply them in a real defensive situation. What has really happened is that I have been exposed to a few techniques that I have yet to master, and which I have yet to learn to apply in conjunction with other techniques I am learning and to apply against someone who is resisting them and strenuously attempting to apply the same techniques to me.

One of the huge advantages of BJJ is that you know the techniques work since you experience them both from the perspective of practising them and from the perspective f having them applied to you. This is quite different from some of the striking arts, such as karate, where you never know whether a punch or a kick would really be effective in an actual self-defence situation since you don't ever have the experience of being on the receiving end of an effective punch or kick. But the danger with BJJ is the danger of thinking that because you know the technique and know it works then it will work for you in a self-defence situation. This is where over-confidence could become dangerous: even knowing how to apply an effective technique, you still need to have a realistic view of your ability to apply it in a real situation.

In Self-insight: roadblocks and detours on the path to knowing thyself, David Dunning mentions the case of driver education in schools and how to the extent that it is linked to accident rates, the tendency is more towards increasing accident rates than reducing them because of over-confidence:

...after Quebec mandated formal driver education, the accident rate among 16- and 17-year-olds went up, not down - causing the mandate to be repealed...One key contributor to this paradox may be that training young drivers in emergency maneuvres gives them a false sense of security. On the day of their training, they, indeed, may know how to control a skid, but their skill atrophies over the time where they might have to use that skill in the future. However, left with the impression that they can handle most, if not all emergency situations, they take chances tey should not take.

Confidence may rise faster than competence, partly because we tend to become more comfortable with something as we become more familiar with it, yet familiarity may have little relationship with actual skill.

I'm not totally opposed to over-confidence: sometimes we can only improve by attempting things that in reality are beyond our current level of competence.

However, where our confidence outstrips our competence in the real world, rather than in a learning situation, it may indeed be a dangerous thing.

What will you remember when the class is over?

Memory is a fragile and deceptive thing. We go to a class, we 'learn' something new and exciting, but when we go to try it a few days or a week later, we find our recall is fuzzy and we can't do it.

After my first Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class, I realised that I could barely remember how to do some of the things that had been covered. In the course of an hour we had gone through a takedown, a choke and a sweep with a change of guard, but although some details stood out, most of the details were fuzzy. Admittedly, this was my first class, so a lot of what we were doing was unfamiliar so I didn't have the base knowledge to connect what I was learning to. But I knew that if I wanted to learn this martial art then I would need to take additional steps to lock in what I was learning.

So the first thing I did was search on Amazon for instructional materials suitable to my level. I looked at what books and DVDs were available, what they contained, had a look at previews to see if the level of detail would meet my needs, and looked at the reviews to see how helpful other people had found them. I ended up ordering two books from Amazon to help me.

One was a beginners book (Saulo Ribeiro's Jiu Jitsu University) which took a very structured approach to covering not just the how of the technique but also when it was and wasn't applicable, what counters there were to it and what to do about those counters. In other words, this book embedded the description of the technique into a context of use and I thought that this would make the techniques I was learning easier to remember. Since BJJ is in some ways a physical analogue to chess, in that it involves moves and counter moves, this book was equivalent to a chess discussion of tactics like forks, discovered check etc.

The second was a book more centred on the strategy of the martial art (Renzo Gracie & John Danaher's Mastering Jiu Jitsu ). In the same way as a chess game has an opening, a middle game and an end game, this book focused on the overall strategy of a fight, the objectives of each stage and on the need to plan a few moves ahead.

Strategy and tactics. Two things which provide a context and a structure for individual techniques and which I hope will help me more easily remember what I am learning and to revise it between classes.

The other thing which I realised was that I needed to be totally focused in class in order to learn as much as possible, and to write down the names of the techniques immediately after class so I could revise them later.

However from past experience, at least in the short term, I've found that in any class that teaches three things, if I try to focus on learning all three then the chances are I won't properly remember any of them. Whereas if I focus on learning and remembering one thing and on just getting the gist of the other two, there is a good chance that I will retain at least that one thing. I don't know whether this is a personal limitation or something that applies to most people, but I've found that it is generally true of dance classes I have done and discussing it with other dancers leads me to believe that other people find this to be the case as well.

So if you want to progress in a class that involves any kind of physical techniques, I would suggest the following:

• Pay close attention during the class
• Seek to master one thing and to get the gist of the rest, at least for the time being
• Make a note of everything that was taught in that class immediately after the class
• Find one or more good references so that you can revise between classes
• Try to build a structure and a context into which you can fit what you are learning

If you do these things you will find that you retain more and make more rapid progress in your chosen area of learning.