SCA Combat Curriculum Development - Skill Focus - Mental Preparation

Mental preparation consists of all of the intangible training required to be successful in a field.  In the case of SCA combat, this includes everything from meditative techniques or clearing the mind to just knowing what "hold" means.  Like physical conditioning, mental preparation is mostly an artifact of other training.  It is possible to construct drills specifically to train some mental skills, such as measure and targeting, but they rely on other skills for execution - a walking drill where one opponent throws a shot as soon as the other comes into range, in order to teach measure, still requires a shot thrown, for instance.

Mental skills, as I define them, include both the basic combative mindset and knowledge of the rules, and things like measure, tempo, and timing, which are intangible but must be trained nonetheless. Even at this overview level, it would look like there is room for confusion - tempo and timing? Yes, tempo is the pace of the fight, and timing, as I see it, is the identification and exploitation of openings.  Since in my head, all fighting is a tango, tempo is the beat; timing is knowing when to dip your partner.  Measure, as defined here, is more or less the spatial management of the fight - if he's ten feet away, he's out of range unless I've developed some truly insane iaido crossover technique that makes my reach ten feet thanks to sudden movement, and I can relax my guard until he closes, and conversely if I can reach him three inches further away than he thinks I can, I have an edge.

So much has been written, mostly in difficult, abstruse language, on the subject of mental preparation that I am not going to spend a lot of time talking about it.  Japanese sources tend to spend much more time talking about this (partly because most of our surviving SCA-period Japanese manuals were written by men who were all friends with a particularly influential Zen monk, Takuan Soho, and Takuan himself was very comfortable with martial arts metaphors); rarely is it addressed directly in a western fechtbuch because western writers were less interested in moral improvement than in technical improvement, since they had a whole mass of Church doctrine already for moral improvement.  There are, of course, knights who wrote on knightly virtue - Geoffroi de Charny, Ramon Llull, and Ulrich von Liechtenstein come to mind - but very rarely were authors on either side of Eurasia particularly good at saying how to reach those states, and their virtues were often not strictly combative virtues even though they had battlefield application.  Fiore, of course, discusses audacity and foresight very briefly, same as he discusses strength and speed very briefly, and he doesn't spend a lot of time discussing how to get there - just that, by implication, they are trainable, as opposed to his open boasting of "practice these plays and you'll be a badass."  Again, there is a great deal written about measure, tempo, timing, et cetera in rapier manuals of the later period, and much of it is absolutely adaptable, but it has to be adapted, not taken wholesale, because the dynamics of the fight are very different, even when someone like di Grassi states that cutting is totally a thing, and very often what we learn from those books is what the thing is, not how to learn it, teach it, or do it - I have Capo Ferro open as we speak just so I can verify this, and while I find his discussion of measure informative, I do not find it instructive.

"Oh, hello there - did someone say 'mental discipline' and 'fighting'?"

The greatest single exception to the model of "do as I do," to my mind, is Ignatius of Loyola.  His Spiritual Exercises, though they are obviously and explicitly rooted in his Catholic faith, are also a meditative program rather than simply a list of questions and musings.  One of the problems I've had with, for instance, Charny's book is that it's very easy to read a passage, go "huh, I'll have to think about that some more," and then not think about it some more.  This is due obviously to no fault of Charny's, but it limits its use as a training tool, and my purpose is to develop a training curriculum.  Loyola, on the other hand, gives a program of instruction; agree with it or disagree with it, Loyola's Exercises can be adapted to pretty much any mental problem.  I do not say they should - there is a lot of emphasis in some of the Exercises on metaphorical self-flagellation, which can have the opposite effect of strengthening a mental resource - but they show that, during the SCA period, there were fighters (Loyola developed them while convalescing from a wound) thinking seriously about the issue of cultivating mental discipline as well as physical training.  There is also quite a bit of use to keeping track, even in something like pell work, of the times you did better than you did before, which is one of Loyola's more helpful suggestions.

So much for the period sources on training your brain to fight - what about the SCA Period ones? Paul of Bellatrix? Sort of like conditioning, he gives it a chapter or two, in places, and some of his described drills are obviously meant to do precisely this, like the two-person stick-tag drill is clearly meant to teach measure and a sense of how the sword moves, but he doesn't go into great depth about it, because, as elsewhere, training brains is different from training bodies, and he is primarily focused on training a body because he assumes that if you're reading his book you want to fight in the first place.  Guy Windsor spends a lot more time talking about it in his Theory and Practice of Martial Arts, and Windsor's general approach, to me, reads a whole lot more like Loyola's - take stock of where you are, decide where you want to be, and focus on the things that move you toward that.  The difference is mainly that Loyola's version of "where you are" is rooted in sin and judgment, and Windsor's... isn't, and Windsor spends a good deal of time talking about the dangers of beating yourself up rather than just acknowledging and moving on - from bitter personal experience, convincing yourself that you're bad at something doesn't help you get better at it.

You will note that at no point here have I started talking about what to watch in combat or zanshin or "no-mind."  That is because, while they are absolutely valuable mental skills, they are also so far above the entry level fighter at whom this curriculum is directed that they are less than useless to try to teach at first.  They will come as other skills are developed and will develop organically.

How do we train these skills, then?

First, we have to know they exist and that people can do them.  There's a story about Yagyuu Munenori, that when Tokugawa Iemitsu was convinced that the old swordmaster wasn't teaching him his super-fancy top-end moves, he whipped a spear at him, and the old man did exactly what he was trying to teach his student, and Iemitsu was upset that he hadn't been taught that.  Munenori's answer was "No secret, only practice."  It helps, occasionally, to watch someone do something amazing, and to understand that the way they did it was by drilling it.

Second, we have to identify the easy gains, and do them.  The very easiest gain of all is just knowing what the rules are.  Eventually they seep into the bones, but at first you have to know them.  What's a legal strike zone? What does "hold" mean? What are the armor requirements?

After that, we try to create a training brain and a fighting brain, and try to have at least some overlap in the Venn diagram between those two things. Of the two of them, the training brain is far more important; a fighter who is convinced of their superiority every single time they step on the field will never improve.  The two must be exercised regularly until the overlap is near, but not totally, complete.  The training brain is just the classic "open mind" - show up ready to learn, try to learn something, and practice it.  The fighting brain is where most of the combative-mindset development takes place.  Obviously, that's not always great for training, but it's important to cultivate the idea that you can step on the field, you will survive the encounter, and you can win, even if you don't this time.

Third, we build a mental skill into each drill, either directly, or as the focus of the drill.  Typically, once the basics of a drill are working well, I announce that I'm going to change an element, then do that slowly, to allow conscious reaction.  That then gets sped up, until it's executing at near full speed and power.

Fourth, as with conditioning, this is a process, not a one-time thing.  Every single mental skill developed, whether that is the cultivation of virtue, learning to read the measure, or games with tempo, needs to be drilled regularly.  Swordcraft is a skill that rewards practice; no one is born a swordsman.

In summary, mental preparation..

1. Covers every intangible aspect of fighting preparation.
2. Applies at every level of combat.
3. Includes:
   
• Basic knowledge - know the rules!
• Combat skills - measure, tempo, timing
• Combative mindset - "here to fight" or "the way of the warrior is death"
• Cultivation of virtue - whether chivalric or Fiore's four or...
  
4. Features in both period and modern sources for training material.
   
5. Can be trained.
• Hard to train in isolation.
• Usually trained in conjunction with a physical skill.
• Training is a process, not a single step.