Soft Skills vs. Hard Skills in the Martial Arts

There is a tendency to teach hard skills - structure, technique, footwork, et cetera - when teaching new students, with the idea that they have to understand those before soft skills - measure, timing, touch, and decision-making - can be of any use to them.  I believe this approach is mistaken.

There are practical reasons for teaching it this way - knowing when to throw a punch is less useful than knowing how to throw a punch, to use the most basic example - but I increasingly believe that the two skillsets need to be taught in parallel.  Let's use an example from my experience.

Fiore's first master and first two plays of the longsword in two hands goes from a crossing at the point, breaks sword-to-sword contact, and thrusts.  It's dirt-simple, but as I keep hearing in shinkage, it is simple, it is not easy.  It's also almost all soft skills.  To teach that as part of a series to otherwise untrained students, the hard-skills component is:

Start far out.  Throw a mandritto fendente (yes, I see your hand - that means descending blow from right) with intent to hit, with a passing step (yes, I see your hand - that means your back foot passes so it's in front).  Defender parries and swords meet at a tip or near-tip crossing.  Either player can at this point allow the other to think they've "won" the bind, break contact, and thrust.  To do this, you have to know how to throw a blow, how to step, and how to thrust - all structure, technique, and footwork items, and all things that are individual things to iron out and smooth to perfection.  What are the soft skills?

First, what is "out of range?" The two combatants have to know what their range is, and the attacker has to have a sense of where to launch from.  The defender, in turn, has to have an idea of timing and measure in order to make the parry in the first place, and cross at the tip specifically, because that is this particular play.  Both attacker and defender need to develop a feel for blade-on-blade contact and leverage, and a sense of their opponent's timing so they can slip the crossing and thrust.  They need to be able to evaluate whether this play is even practical from their particular position, or if they need to reposition or choose a different course.

Thus, in the very first play, the one that is basically a quick-draw contest because neither player has an advantage at that crossing, we have both hard skills and soft skills, and because so much of that play is devoted to twitch-muscle decision-making, most of the skills are actually soft.  Misapplication of soft skills puts the two combatants too close and makes the play just not work.  Crossing swords from the wrong side, same effect.  Mis-timing the thrust, or mis-reading pressure on the blade, same effect.

So how do you train them in parallel?

I have come to believe very heavily in partnered drill, because there are limits to visualization and partners offer a completely different set of feedback.  It is difficult, for instance, to match a pell's timing, and working with a mix of partners allows someone to understand the minute variations in measure and timing (my son, for instance, has much longer arms and legs than I do, but a slower tempo).  Unfortunately, partnered drill works best in a structured training program, and this is not always an option.  That may be because of lack of partners, lack of time to develop the program, or even something as absurd as always having an odd number of people.  Hard skills are easier to teach and practice solo, because the body gives its own feedback and it is possible to make small discoveries without a partner.  There are many fine SCA knights, including at least one duke of my acquaintance, whose entire training program was basically solo training, and who are mostly self-taught.  Their hard skills are generally so fine-tuned that they automatically close soft-skill gaps.

Nevertheless, I believe that having a teacher or study partner is better than not having one, all else equal.  If you are going to do a dedicated program of study, you have to know the thing you are studying, so in the play above, I would of course do mechanics and footwork, but I would also focus on a couple of mutually reinforcing soft skills to pay attention to during slow work and drills, and discuss why they make a difference, in addition to discussing what right looks like.  For instance, in the Fiore play above, turning it into a drill with new combatants, I would focus on measure and "feel" - the sense of blade pressure and leverage - because that play only works at a tip crossing.  That way they get a mechanical discussion - keep your weight-commitment options open on the thrust, make every cut like you mean it - and also a soft-skills lesson that they can immediately see.

This is also where training in variations becomes important: teaching a rigid form of "it must be done this way" or "this is what the play says" doesn't actually capture the spirit of Fiore very well; Fiore's entire philosophy involves training to recognize the moment, make the decision in the moment, and execute the decision, not training to the playbook.  Therefore, training variations helps teach discernment about that moment.  What happens if the swords cross from the opposite side? Can the thrust still work? What happens at different leverage on the blade? What does that feel like? Personally, going into a lesson, I have a few variations thought out ahead of time, but I like to tell students to come up with their own, with my recommendations.

While it absolutely is vital that martial artists learn the "hard" skills, few people study martial arts so they can be the world's greatest at throwing a static punch; they study martial arts so they can learn the secrets that the "soft" skills encapsulate.  Teaching both, together, from the very beginning, will help students cover the ground between where they begin, and where they want to end, faster.