Martial Movement Seminar

Hi everyone!

Most of my seminars are part of the 50 States Challenge, and I teach at them for charity.  But this one is something different.  I've been invited to do a joint seminar with fellow martial arts blogger Pat Bolton of IMOK Karate.

And you're invited, so save the date!

Saturday, March 7, 2020 from 1:00 to 3:00

We'll be at 55 South Gammon Road in Madison, Wisconsin, which is the Lussier Community Education Center gym.

If you'd like to come, drop Pat an email at imokkarate@gmail.com.

We're trying hard to make the seminar style-agnostic, so it doesn't matter what kind of martial art you do--just bring your enthusiasm.  We're going to cover biomechanics, joint health, power generation, applying forms/kata in self defense, and conditioning.  And just because it seems somehow impossible or just morally wrong for me to be involved in a project like this and not introduce a little Martial Journeys weirdness, we're also going to do some of this nonsense.

Here's the official flier, which you're welcome to print out and display if you like:

Please come!  I would love to meet you in person.  Email Pat to register here.

Understanding School Bullying Policies

I know in my last post I assured everyone that I had a Takeaway Technique for you, but I'm putting that off yet again.  It is coming, I promise, but today I'm taking a quick detour to talk about bullying policies.

Oh, high school, how I don't miss you.  Photo Credit.

In the United States where I live, schools' policies about bullying vary between school districts and individual schools.  Private schools especially are likely to have their own school-specific policy, but even in public schools there is no guarantee of consistency from one school to the next.  Most anti-bullying policies sound good on paper, but in practice some are better than others.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are working for a school and have been tasked with writing a school's bullying policy.  Obviously, you don't want bullying to happen at all, but you recognize that it will happen, and what you write determines how it will be handled.  So, how should it be handled?

Ideally, if you are in that position of power, your primary goal will be to minimize bullying and protect the victims.  However, this is very hard to do with a policy.  How do you create a blanket statement for how bullying will be punished fairly?  How do you handle cases that are not clear-cut as far as who the instigator is and who the victim is?  What do you do if the school misjudges who is the aggressor and instead punishes the kid who was only trying to defend himself?  What do you do if the parents of the students involved don't agree with how the school has handled the problem?  And, what happens if your policy seems fair on paper, but eventually an edge case comes up where everyone can see that a bully is behaving egregiously, but according to "the letter of the law," he has done nothing wrong?

Creating a fair and effective bullying policy can get especially murky when the bullying is not physical and occurs in digital spaces that are less visible to teachers and parents.

Violence is incredibly complex (and bullying even more so because it is not always physical), so creating a policy to handle bullying can be daunting.  One solution is to make it vague, giving educators and administrators more leeway in handling specific cases.  This comes at a price, though, because educators and administrators are often already stretched very thin.  This gives them an extra workload, and a high-pressure one at that.  What happens if they make a mistake and mishandle a case?  What happens if the case is handled fairly, but the bully's parents disagree and threaten to sue?  Can the school afford to pay damages?  What will happen to the quality of education if the school has to pay out a massive settlement?

One way to protect against this is to minimize transparency.  The school probably already has a policy to protect the privacy of students' personal information including grades and disciplinary record.  By expanding the confidentiality policy, you can ensure that the victim and the victim's family don't learn of how the situation was addressed at all.  All you have to say is "We are conducting an investigation and will respond appropriately."  The parents will have to take your word that the situation is being addressed sufficiently.

With this kind of policy, the school is protected and the students' well-being is entrusted to the adults who can address the situation on a case-by-case basis.  So, is this policy effective?

Hopefully.  'Cause this is awful.  Photo Credit.

Hopefully, under a policy like this, the teachers and parents will handle any situations well.  Usually the school and its employees have the best of intentions, but when it comes to resolving issues, the policy will protect them but not help them.

If you are the victim, the parent of a victim, or the instructor of the victim, it can seem like the bully has more rights than those who actually need protection.

Suppose a larger boy corners one of your students in a bathroom stall and physically attacks him.  What should your student do?  If he physically defends himself in a school with a zero tolerance policy, he'll face the same punishment as the bully.  The school doesn't have to determine which kid was in the wrong and just suspends both of them for fighting.  Telling students to never fight under any circumstances puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the victim who must choose between enduring the abuse until an adult arrives, or physically defend himself against school rules.  In order to physically defend himself, he not only has to stand up to a bully but also the school itself.

So in this case, should your student put up with physical abuse until an adult intervenes?  The worst bullying tends to happen when adults are not around, so he might endure a lot if he doesn't fight back.  If he goes this route and trusts the system, what if the system doesn't stop the bullying, or even makes it worse?  That can happen if a bully is punished and wants to retaliate against the victim for reporting them.

In this case, the victim and the victim's family most likely won't be allowed to know anything about how the situation was addressed.  They might ask for the bully to be removed from the classroom or otherwise denied access to the victim.  This is extremely unlikely to be allowed.  A far more common solution is to offer to remove the victim from the classroom.

Understandably, this option is not popular with victims.  A kid who has been bullied extensively probably has very poor self esteem and is at least somewhat socially ostracized.  Having that kid sit at their own separate lunch table or stay in the classroom at recess is not going to be good for that student's social or mental well-being.  And if the victim turns down this kind of "help," well then gosh, I guess the bullying wasn't that serious after all!

Adults enforcing the social isolation that the bullies intend to cause is not exactly a solution.  Photo Credit.

Not every school is like this, and not every situation plays out like this.  In fact, this is more of a hypothetical worst-case-scenario.  (Not really, it certainly does get worse.)  But if you encounter a school's bullying policy that seems ineffective, frustrating, or just makes no sense, try thinking of the policy as a tool to protect the school rather than a tool to protect the students.  If it suddenly starts making sense in that light, at least you will have an understanding that will help you in future interactions with the school.

How to Vet Someone

We have to trust people in our lives.  There's no getting around it.  You trust the other drivers to stay in their lanes.  You trust your doctor to prescribe you the correct medication.  You trust your spouse to behave responsibly with the kids.  And the good news is, this trust is usually reasonable and soundly placed.  But sometimes we can end up in bad situations because of misplaced trust.

Never trust anthropomorphized punctuation marks.  photo credit

The answer is not to be perpetually suspicious of everyone.  That is no way to live.  But there are some things you can do to be safer.

Trust Your Gut

Your first line of defense is your initial interaction with the person.

Your brain can hold on to seven details (give or take) at once.  That means at any given moment, you are ignoring the vast majority of the details around you.  It's called Miller's Law, and if you'd like to read more about it as it pertains to self protection, I can highly recommend Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker.  But for now just understand that you have a biological limitation of considering only a few details at once.  In order for you to function as a person, your brain has to efficiently choose and filter those most important details quickly and accurately, discarding the rest.

A side effect of this phenomenon is that you can have a visceral reaction to a person or situation and not understand why.  If you feel a gut-wrenching fear when meeting a stranger in a public place, you might not know why.  Some people will tell themselves that because they don't know why they feel that way, they're being foolish, that there is nothing to worry about.  We all have social conditioning toward being polite, which is usually a good thing, but it can sometimes make us less safe.  That fear was caused by something--maybe the person was dressed far too warmly for the weather in a way that could easily conceal a weapon, or maybe the person was standing too close, or maybe the person parked right next to you in an otherwise empty parking lot, or maybe someone is just too determined to give you help you didn't ask for.

What if they just pose for creepy-looking stock photos?

Your brain won't necessarily remember those details.  You probably also won't remember the air temperature, what color his shoes were, or what the floor was made of.  Those details weren't important, so your brain filtered them away.  The important detail was that you were facing a threat.

If a coworker "creeps you out," or the guy you've hired to mow your lawn inexplicably makes you uncomfortable every time you see him, you want to take those warning signs seriously.  Trusting your gut will do a lot toward making sure the people you let into your life are worthy of being there.

Look Them Up

This section will probably be less useful to those who live outside of the United States, but there may be similar resources in your country.

So, they didn't creep you out or raise any red flags when you met them, and now you're considering bringing this person into your life.  The idea is to do a little due diligence before giving someone access to you or your family.  If you need a pet sitter, if you have a new boyfriend, if you're signing your kids up at a local martial arts school, etc., you will need to trust a person who you don't know very well.  But if the person has a criminal history, you can probably find out.

A history of domestic violence is a solid predictor of future violence.  photo credit

A quick note before using any of these tools--If you are looking up this kind of information for employment purposes, the laws are different and more restrictive.  Check your state laws before doing a background check for employment purposes.  You can still do it, you just have to do a little extra work.

1.  Federal Searches

First there are the federal tools, which you can use in any state.  The first is the National Sex Offender Registry.  This is a free resource that lets you type in a name.  Alternatively you can search by location, which is handy if you are moving to a new neighborhood.  The other federal tool is PACER, which allows you to access public court records such as criminal convictions.  Some of its features are not free, but you can search for names without paying a fee.

2.  State and Local Searches

The next thing to do is to check their local public records.  This is another one that requires some caution as the laws are different from state to state regarding which records are public.  In general, you can look at your own records, or you can look at someone else's records if they consent to it.  Some states make the records public regardless.  My home state of Wisconsin does this, and you can type any name into this website to look for criminal convictions.  Many states have similar tools, and a quick internet search should tell you whether your state or territory is one of them.  Barring that, you can visit the local police station and court house.

If the person has lived in more than one state, you'll have to check multiple states to get a complete picture.  There are some commercial services that will do this for you, but their accuracy varies.  You are better off doing the search yourself, if you can.  But if you don't know all of the states a person has lived in and you want to check the entire country, it may be worthwhile to use such a service.

3.  Internet Searches

The easiest but least reliable method of looking someone up is to just do an internet search.  But it's dubious... if you type my name into Google, for example, you are likely to find a whole lot about the much more famous television personality of the same name.  You could find me by adding "Martial Journeys" to my name, but you would only see my professional life.  It would be very hard for you to use Google to find my Star Trek Dresden Files crossover fan fiction.  Mostly because I never wrote any.

Or did I?  I didn't.  photo credit

But if I did, you probably wouldn't find it unless you knew to look for it.  So it's hard to know whether your new babysitter runs a dog-fighting business on the side, or is prominently involved in a hate group, or whatever, unless you specifically thought to check for those things.  And you can't check for everything.

However, there are a few things you can do to make the process a little less useless.  First, search for their name and any aliases you know of.  Try a search for their name and add either their profession or the state or city they live in.  See if you can find their social media accounts.  Do a Google Image search and click the "visit website" option to see what the related content is.

Taking a few minutes with a search engine to try to vet someone before you let them too deeply into your life can save you a lot of pain down the road.

One Last Note:  Find a Balance

One thing that we as martial artists (especially instructors!) have to remember is that balance is important.  Training in martial arts should make your life better.  If you make yourself so nervous and so cautious of everyone around you that you are unable to relax and enjoy your life, you might live longer, but it won't be much of a life.  If you are so carefree that you obliviously walk right up to a threat and end up in some trouble, that is obviously not right either.  You need to find a balance.  There's no need to vet every single person you encounter.  But for the big, high stakes question marks in your life and your family's life, it's often worth doing.

Training is an Engineering Problem

On April 13th, 1970, an oxygen tank blew up aboard the Apollo 13 spacecraft.

This caused a quadruple system failure--something the astronauts hadn't been trained to handle because it was assumed that if four systems failed at once 200,000 miles from Earth, it would be impossible for them to survive.  But on their doomed lunar mission, that is exactly what happened.  The astronauts and ground crew had to find creative solutions to problems no one had anticipated.

This is not where you want to be when everything around you starts to break.

At one particularly dramatic moment in the Apollo 13 movie, the engineers on the ground are given the instructions, "We need to make THIS fit into THIS using nothing but THIS."  The actor then dramatically dumps a box of junk onto the table, and everyone gets to work.  (I'm paraphrasing, the actual quote from the movie is here.)

They needed to make round lithium hydroxide canisters fit into holes designed for square canisters using only what they had with them in the spacecraft.  You can read all the gritty details here, but for now just understand that if they could not do this, three people were going to die of carbon dioxide poisoning.

This was one of several engineering problems they had to solve to get the astronauts home safely.  The academic solution would have been easy.  Just design and manufacture an airtight seal of the appropriate dimensions and place it over the hole.  Of course, that wasn't an option for the crew of Apollo 13.

That is the quintessential engineering problem--making something work despite far less than ideal conditions.  But even though we usually think of engineering problems in terms of technology, it's often useful to apply the same thinking to other problems.

Apollo 13 liftoff.  It was a marvel of engineering to even get this far.

My broad use of the terms "engineering problem" and "academic problem" come from The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, (which is excellent reading or watching, by the way), where he explains raising his kids after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.  His professional background was split between academics and engineering, so those were the two ways that he knew how to solve problems.  He said that if he approached raising his kids as an academic problem, he would certainly fail.  He would objectively be a terrible parent because he would disappear from their lives at a young age.  But by approaching it like an engineering problem, knowing that he won't be there for most of their lives, how can he plan for it and give his family as much as possible for the future before he disappeared?

I find this thinking to be very valuable because most problems are engineering problems, but very often people approach them like academic problems.

One example that comes to mind is when a coworker complaining to me about one of our bosses.  He had a laundry list of faults about how this boss was terrible at his job and bad for the company, but there was no one higher up in the company willing to take any action against him.  My coworker complained to me that he should not behave this way.  And he was right, no one in that role should behave that way.  But oxygen tanks shouldn't explode, and fathers shouldn't die when their children are young.  Sometimes you have to deal with things that should not be, and build a solution under less than ideal circumstances.  My coworker and I had to make a round peg of a boss fit into a square hole of a company using nothing but the tools and skills at our disposal, because it was an engineering problem.  Was it fair?  Of course not.  But neither are quadruple system failures or pancreatic cancer.

Most workplace problems are engineering problems.

Once you start classifying problems as either academic or engineering, they become a lot easier to solve.  In my case, I started seeing engineering problems everywhere.  Difficult training partner?  Engineering problem.  Opening a school on a shoestring budget?  Engineering problem.  Siblings not getting along while I'm teaching?  Engineering problem.  Scheduling issues?  Budget issues?  Personnel issues?  Engineering problems.  As an added benefit, once you start looking at your engineering problem in terms of the tools you have to solve it, it becomes less of a problem and more of a puzzle.

Applying this thinking to your training can help you improve more efficiently.  The first time I encountered this, it was before I had ever considered academic problems or engineering problems.  I was a high school student on a volleyball team.

There were a couple star players on the team, but most of us were beginners and our coach had to teach us all the basic skills.  At one practice she showed us how to dig for a ball that had gone flying off away from the intended target.  It was difficult--dive after the ball, propel yourself along the ground with your free arm, let the ball bounce off your hand instead of the ground--for the small chance that someone else would be able to rush in and return the ball over the net before it hit the floor.  Long before we felt comfortable with the skill, we stopped working on it.

It's really hard! photo credit

Our coach explained that she was only introducing us to the skill, that she didn't want us to get good at it.  She said that at our level, our practice time was far better spent on core skills, learning our basics well enough to prevent the ball from flying off unpredictably in the first place.

It made sense.  We were (mostly) novice volleyball players with a limited amount of practice time.  Approaching it as an academic problem, we would have been doomed to failure--objectively unskilled players at the end of the season.  We could certainly get better as the season progressed, but it was not realistic for us to master every single skill.  But our coach approached it as an engineering problem (although I doubt if she would have called it that) and looked for how to make the team as successful as possible using only the players, tools and time available to her.

Martial arts training is also an engineering problem.  Real life violence is infinitely more complex than a volleyball game.  Even dedicated students seldom practice, say, five hours per week.  But even with that much training, it is not possible to master every single skill that might be useful in a violent encounter.

Here is a very incomplete list of potentially useful skills:
- the punching skills of professional boxer
- the kicking skills of a taekwondo Olympian
- the throwing skills of a judo master
- an equivalent mastery in every weapon, improvised weapon and firearm
- an equivalent mastery in awareness and de-escalation skills
- an equivalent mastery in active shooter and bomb threat situations
- an equivalent mastery in crowd psychology

That is the academic solution--to prepare for everything you might need.  But it's not possible.  Even if you did not sleep, there would not be enough hours in the day to attain all of those skills to that high of a level.

Training doesn't look like an engineering problem, but it is.

So how do we look at this like an engineering problem instead?

1.  Define the goal.  

If you are training to win a judo tournament, you can probably skip all that boxing stuff.  If you're training purely for self defense, there's a lot of footwork and complex kicking that a high level taekwondo athlete would need but you can safely ignore.  If you're trying to pass your next belt test, you can put other skills on the back burner while you focus on promotion requirements.  Being clear and honest with yourself about what the goal is should help a lot.

2.  Prioritize what is common.

If you've got a tournament coming up, maybe it's legal to throw a kick to the head in the middle of a double back flip, but you are far more likely to face a garden variety roundhouse kick.  So practice defending and countering a roundhouse kick.  Depending on the rules of the tournament, roundhouse kicks are usually more common than other types of kicks.  Punches are usually more common than ridgehands.

Self defense training, in my opinion, is where this goes wrong most often.  It's easy for us as martial artists to fall into the trap of thinking that certain techniques are widely taught, so we stand a reasonable chance of facing them in real situations.  The fact remains that no matter how widely an arm bar is taught, we are far more likely to face a push or a punch than an arm bar.

3.  Prioritize based on the progression of the event.

Just like when I was playing volleyball, there are decisions to be made about how much time to train for preventing a bad situation and how much time to spend on recovering from that bad situation.

This is going to make some people mad, but it's true.  If your goal is self defense (again, see #1), you are better off prioritizing preventing bad things from happening.  Prevent going to the ground by learning to end the fight before it goes there.  Prevent getting in a physical altercation by learning to de-escalate.  Prevent needing to de-escalate by avoiding a situation before it has the chance to turn tense.

Not getting into a fight is a skill!  It might not be as fun to work on (Is your goal to have fun?  Nothing wrong with that!), but if you are training because you are truly concerned for your safety, this is where you need to spend the bulk of your time.  Don't ignore your physical skills of course, but your training time is better spent learning how to not need your physical skills.

4.  Work on principles.

You can train more efficiently by working on principles rather than techniques.  If you understand what you can do when an arm is extended toward you, it will matter a lot less whether the person is trying to punch you, push you, grab you, and so on.  If you deeply understand how a hinge joint works, you can exploit its limitations whether you are manipulating someone's arm, leg, finger, or toe.  It is a more difficult way to teach and learn, but ultimately it is more efficient than trying to ingrain a myriad of specific techniques to handle different but similar situations.  That's the academic solution--to know the exact answer to the exact situation.  Violence is just too complex to learn that many techniques.