More Thoughts on Paul Porter's "The Bellatrix System," Part II - What To Leave In, What To Leave Out

 

One of the recurring problems I see in the Bellatrix book is the problem of too much and not enough.  That is to say, the book is comprehensive to the point of being overwhelming, but for large portions of it, how to train the movements described is simply left to the reader as an exercise.  When the level of detail given is, for instance, the proportion of weight that should be on each foot, that's a dangerous assumption.  The more prescriptive the methodology the more it becomes incumbent on the author to explain how to get to that point.  The Bellatrix System is nothing if it is not prescriptive.  There are blows, variations on blows, and more blows taught, without near enough discussion of how to train those basic movements.

This criticism opens me to the accusation that I've ignored his chapters on training and slow work; I haven't, and in fact I've read them five or six times each.  They're very good.  So is his section on how to train a flat snap.  When he includes "how to train (x)," he has just as much to say as where he talks about how to deliver the same technique.  The problem is that he doesn't embed this how-to-train advice in the chapters, but rather segregates them.  This results in the situation where I've seen multiple people recommend the book without also including physical feedback as an explicit part of the training routine.  Given Paul Porter's own military background, and the known fact that if you don't tell Private Snuffy something, Private Snuffy doesn't know it, this is inexcusable both on the part of the book, and those giving the advice.

This is especially frustrating to me because when he does it, he does it so well.  I've taken to acting through at least a hundred shots of the chapter I just read, slowly, because I have the physical vocabulary to make sense of that.  Because of this, I can look at the book and say yes, it does work.  The problem, though, is that this book is routinely recommended as a means of training for new fighters needing a breakthrough, and unless they already have that physical vocabulary, it's a bad gamble.  He's an excellent teacher, good enough that his directions can be understood if you already speak the same language even when he isn't physically present.  He's even good enough that he can lay down effective descriptions of teaching methods - and I wish that his "how to teach a flat snap" had been available when I was trying to learn, it would have saved me a year of bad habits.  But he spends a lot of time on variations of movements that are effectively meaningless if you haven't learned the base movements, and superfluous if you have, because you'll figure them out pretty quickly on your own, instead of teaching how to learn the basics.

Simply describing them is insufficient - my own experiences trying to learn a flat snap show that - and having a teaching methodology in addition to a description of how to execute the shot would have made this book much more useful both for initial students, and for students not of his fighting, but teaching, style.  Any idiot can learn to win tournaments, while also destroying their rotator cuffs and knees; it takes a very special kind of idiot to learn how to teach other idiots, and that's what Paul of Bellatrix's biggest impact on the game has been.

I just wish that we got more of that how to learn this in this book.