Toward a Theory for Instruction in Martial Arts from Original Sources

Note that this is very much a work in progress, and is based on a combination of factors.  I discuss the Heihou Kadensho below, which is the foundational book for at least one extant martial art; it is very important to note that I am not trying to advertise myself as a teacher of Yagyuu Shinkage-Ryuu, but rather to apply the lessons of studying a period manual to an unconventional case as a demonstrator.  If you want to learn the Yagyuu school, there are a number of places in the United States that it can be studied, including at least one where the instructor has the full authorization to teach a branch school rather than being a satellite school of a higher branch.  I am in no way advocating for replacing them with me, and would in fact view this with something like horror, because they've put four hundred and fifty years of thought into their approach, and such a body of knowledge deserves careful consideration for its value that I am simply not equipped to replace.

The first thing to understand about martial arts is the definition of "martial arts."  Martial in this context involves everything from pankration to boxing, and from escrima to Le Jeu de la Hache; its key component is an understanding of how, when, and why to deliver damage to a target.  How, when, and why are equally important questions; this is where the art comes in.  I tend to think of things as tactical problems, for which multiple solutions may exist.  Most of the work of determining these solutions is craft, in the sense that its particular techniques can be trained and honed as, for instance, the craft of acting or sculpture, but as a body they are an art because the correct technique is always situational and determined at least partly by individual preference and taste.

The second thing to understand about martial arts is that there are only so many ways to move through a given space using a human body as the engine behind it, and inevitably there are similarities between approaches.  There are doubtless ways to launch a sword with one's legs, and there is the infamous case from Fiore of the scholar who throws the pommel or the sword at the master, but these are such bizarre edge cases that they are not a fit subject for an entry-level discussion, which this is.  Thus, for instance, it is entirely possible that I will fall back on my understanding of Fiore or another source to explain what's going on in a text that I don't fully understand, not because they share a theoretical underpinning, but because I see a possible parallel explanation.

Having established what martial arts are for the sake of this discussion, let us turn our attention to "original sources."  In this case, I mean a period manual, ideally with illustrations, rather than an instructor (you are, if you are reading this, considering being an instructor).  So far in this text I've identified at least three - Heihou Kadensho (Yagyuu Munenori, 1637-ish); Le Jeu de la Hache (unknown author, 1400s); and Fiore dei Liberi's seminal Il Fior de Battaglia (first version about 1400).  The reason I have particularly emphasized Fiore and Yagyuu, and the reason that Fiore is seminal, is that we have illustrated versions (in Fiore's case, four separate illustrated manuscripts!) of their texts; in both cases the illustrations are quite possibly from their own hands.  It is entirely possible to use what I am describing here to try to teach what I think of as "library-book karate," provided that your fundamental understanding of the mechanics of the material is sound, and the place where I tested much of what I am discussing was Paul Porter's The Bellatrix System, a modern SCA "fechtbuch," because I didn't have to mess with trying to learn to read Italian or Japanese to test it.

This brings up a point in dealing with original sources - very likely they are not in a language you already know.  Sometimes this is minor; I can read Italian well enough to understand paragraphs of Fiore at a stretch if I need to (I've tested this by blind-translating Guy Windsor's From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice Fiore transcriptions, then comparing them to Windsor's translations, and am satisfied enough), but I cannot read calligraphic, medieval Italian on the original page or scan.  Sometimes this is very serious indeed - I know maybe fifty kanji reliably, and the textual history of the illustrations we have for Heihou Kadensho is itself an important factor in its reliability (the commentary on the illustrations in many cases was written more than a century after the illustrations).  Thus, very often for the purposes of teaching the art we are going to be working from translation.  Understanding the quality of the translation is a key component of determining how useful the text is.  As an example, until I started reading "queue" as "butt-spike," Le Jeu de la Hache was almost unreadable to me; similarly, I have a friend who has been working through the exercises of Figueireydo's montante drills, and atajo and altibaxo were huge stumbling blocks because the translation she was working from used the terms assuming a more technical audience than she could provide.  I've mentioned Guy Windsor here; I view his work The Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts as essential reading for this purpose, and Windsor, who got a doctorate the hard way by translating period fencing manuals into English and then into movement, has a great deal of good to say on the subject in his Theory section.  Much of what I am distilling here is from that; the reason that I am writing "towards a theory" rather than "a theory" is because there are lessons I have not fully absorbed or committed to there, but view as valuable nonetheless.

There is one more point in all of this - instruction.  The purpose of this theory is not "how to read a manual," but how to teach someone to hit people.  There is a severe difference historically in eastern and western approaches to pedagogy, and the scientific study of how we learn is very much a new science.  Typically the western approach, as I've learned it over the years, is to lay out, explicitly, what the lesson is supposed to be, to go through the steps of the lesson, and to go through a number of variations, past which "the remainder is left as an exercise for the student."  In practice, that bears a striking similarity to how most eastern martial arts are also taught, with one major difference: the explicit lesson is often not elaborated, but approached indirectly and the student left to draw their own conclusions.  In both cases there are deep-seated philosophical underpinnings; Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas have a lot to do with how western teachers started, and the entire summary for the eastern approach can be laid out as the saying of Confucius that if a student cannot be shown one corner of the square and find the other three, he cannot be taught (there's more to it than that, but that's kind of the point of that bit of the Analects).  Personal experience says that sometimes the most effective lessons are the unexpected ones generated by the intuitive leaps in the middle of a planned lesson; therefore, my general approach is to go into a lesson or drill with a plan of what I intend to do with it, and then allow the practice to develop organically when those leaps happen.

The frequency of those leaps, and whether or not the leaps should be the focus of the class, is proportional to the skill of the likely students.  For a raw beginner, it is much more important to drill them on the fundamentals required to perform the activity without injury to themselves or others, because nothing kills student participation faster than breaking your students.  Unfortunately, this means that raw-beginner instruction is often excruciatingly boring.  For that matter, all practice is excruciatingly boring occasionally, but at the beginning students often want to race to the "boot to the head" moment.  Thus, it is important, especially initially, to provide a structured lesson with a clear beginning, middle, and end; for morale purposes, it is often important to include some form of interactive "this is what you accomplished" at the end of the lesson.

So - the first step in instruction is to work through the material yourself.  This includes reading, critical analysis, and where needed, solo step-through of the movements illustrated or described to try to come up with a reasonable explanation.  The good news is that we live in an information golden age, so often the "solo" part can be done with a partner; I was the guinea pig on my friend's Figueireydo work-through, I've been the guinea pig on a Fiore walk-through, and I've used my kids as a guinea pig for Porter and Windsor's methods, for example.  Often you can simply look up videos of someone else's work on the subject and compare their interpretations.  This has certain dangers - there are a number of published historical martial arts "scholars" whose work is dangerous or badly misled - but it will give you an idea of someone else's thoughts on the subject, and at least considering their thoughts will help refine your own.  A thorough reading, including acting it out, will develop an understanding of the underlying philosophy of the work - to use Heihou Kadensho as an example, the apparent lesson of the Yagyuu school is that the best way to win a fight is to read your opponent's actions, and react before they even know they're acting, not as a "gunfighter" or quick-draw artist, but because of reading their tells.  Similarly, Fiore's overwhelming message is to gain control of the opponent's ability to act, then worry about killing them.  Porter's is that the best defense is a good offense.  The point could be developed on any other number of works, but you only get there by a good, dense, close reading, including developing and working through example problems yourself.

Next is to extract the thing that a student most needs to know about the system.  In the Yagyuu system, that might be "let them come to you," in Porter it is "throw a flat snap with authority."  Develop a drill that practices that, strictly at first, but with the room to elaborate and vary the drill.  The drill, as a drill, should stay fairly simple so that the skills being practiced are tightly defined, but each iteration of the drill should teach a variation on those skills to broaden the skillset.  Eventually, the drill set will evolve to include multiple drills - a drill for closure and wrap, under Porter, or a drill for each of Fiore's guards, or a drill for variations on the simple attacks taught in Heiho Kadenshou.  Developing the drills, and having a general idea on how to elaborate them, is critical for developing both the initial "what to learn" and the opportunity for those intuitive leaps; many of the most useful drills I've run have been a result of the intuitive leaps mid-drill.

I personally like Guy Windsor's four-part drill model, based loosely on the structure of a folio of Fiore - attack, defense, counter to the defense, and potential counter-counter.  This is four "beats," which is few enough to remain simple, and enough to allow sufficient complexity and variation.  I would normally say movements, but the first few drills, until everyone is sufficiently grounded in the material, are likely to be static.  For instance, for Porter, my fundamental drill is flat snap-punch block-snap-(spoiler), where spoiler is anything that spoils the second attack, but that drill can be done static or moving, with target variations, and so on.  With four beats, there is enough for an instructor to make corrections, but not so much that the student gets overwhelmed trying to learn the steps.

One of the most important lessons here is not to try to do too much at once.  My son, for instance, is very fond of punch block-counterattack as a single movement in combination with a step.  There are too many places for that to go wrong; for a drill, the goal is to do one thing at a time, then shave the slices of time required to do each of them to the point that they are functionally simultaneous.  It is important, then, that drills start slowly to make sure that the fundamentals are sound - slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.  Smoothness, consistency, and proper execution are far more important than raw speed; with sufficient repetition, the body just learns to do it at combat speed no matter what.  As an example, despite not being an infantryman at the time, I was the only one in my company able to disassemble and reassemble a rifle in under a minute, not because I was a wizard, but because my hands simply knew the movements by heart.  Since I could do that and carry on a conversation, I suspect I can still do maintenance on an M16 under combat conditions, just because I had done it so much that it was second nature (in fact, thinking about it, my hands naturally twitch to pop the receiver pins, coming on twenty years later).  This is an example of the slices of time required to do each individual action being shaved as thin as I could, though not as far as it can be.

This is especially important in a system like Heihou Kadensho, where counterattacks are the core of the system, because learning to manipulate the timing of a fight is so crucial.  Thus, rushing into a counterattack, and not working on studying the first attacker's movements as they approach, is a potential danger in the drill.  Drills are where process matters; results matter much more in free play or tournament.  I've spent a good deal of time talking about drills, but there is one question which drills don't do a great job of answering: "Yes, but does it work?"

That's where sparring comes in.  Personally I believe that sparring belongs early in a system's teaching, because I'm an engineer and a theoretical solution to a problem doesn't do much for me when it can be verified experimentally (the Nobel committee agrees, incidentally - it's why Hawking wasn't eligible as long as black holes were strictly theoretical).  However, my experience is also that people have a hard time focusing on their lessons when they are sparring.  This is one of the cardinal sins of the SCA as a purveyor of martial arts - that we like to go out to fighter practice and hit each other, not say "today I am only going to count the point if I take his sword offline with a dagger first."  If lessons are to be applied during sparring, a coach or teacher, who has helped impart that lesson and can remind the student, is a critical performer, and should ideally not be one of the people on the field.  Reality is that sometimes you only have two people to work with, so they will have to stop and go "so what just happened?"

The basic steps of a program like this are: read your material; understand your material; drill your material; practice your material; do your material.  They go from abstract and theoretical, to concrete and specific, back to abstract; this is intentional, because the doing should be the foundation for further understanding.  Windsor describes it as a spiral, other sources as a series of concentric circles.

Because a lot of the terms used in that list look like they overlap, perhaps a little explanation is needed.  The difference between drill and practice are that practice, in addition to my standard definition of "do it with supervision," drills are meant to work out the specific movements and techniques, while practice is meant to establish what that means in a less controlled environment, while "do" simply means the controls are as far off as they come.  That could be anything from a tournament, which is a very limited set of "as far off as they come," or the much more arduous process of absorbing the lessons into other aspects of your life.

This, obviously, does not go into the questions of when and where to apply the lessons - but those are very much experiental, and my own opinions on when and where the metaphorical sword should be drawn are very much my own.  I wrote this, after all, because I am a journeyman fighter; I am competent in the tools of my trade and can score a point against people in my rough cohort consistently enough not to consider myself completely incompetent, but I don't want to be a journeyman.  I want to master that craft.  Similarly, understanding what one wants from a combative environment is a key component of engaging; it is also a question with at least as many answers as there are people to answer it.  That, though, is left as an exercise for the reader.