There's a popular story--and it IS just a story--that the term "southpaw" originated in baseball. According to the story, old baseball diamonds were built with home plate to the west, so that a pitcher's right hand was on the north side and the left hand faced the south. So any left-handed pitcher used his southern "paw" to throw the ball.
This idea has been thoroughly debunked, but if you ever heard it and believed it, don't feel bad. This myth has been around since at least 1908 when baseball writer Tim Murnane had to explain that he used the term "southpaw" because players were left-handed, not because their left hands sometimes faced the south. To say nothing of the fact that baseball diamonds didn't all face the same direction in the first place! Moreover, in the mid 1800's when the term started to appear in baseball, it was used to refer to any left-handed player, not just the pitchers.
There are slightly older accounts of the term being used in boxing than in baseball, and that may very well be where the term "southpaw" began to be used to refer to a person. But before that, the term was more widely used to refer to a person's left hand, with the first recorded usage being in 1813.
No one is really sure why a person's left hand became known as a south paw. The best guess out there is that it's because south and left were associated with the devil and/or general badness. Traces of this remain today when we might describe a person's uncharacteristic poor decision as having their judgment go south, or refer to the devil on our left shoulder when we're not proud of our motivations in a particular decision.
The stockiest of stock images.
For us as martial artists, the difference between left-handed and right-handed students tends to be small. A right-handed student may have an advantage when it comes to forms, because most of them were created by and for right-handed practitioners. In a similar vein, there is this disturbing suggestion that being left-handed significantly increases your chances of dying in combat, because the tools that can save your life are made for right-handed users.
On the other hand (no pun intended but I'll go with it), a left-handed student may have an advantage in sparring other martial artists because both lefties and righties tend to get more practice against right-handed sparring partners. Left-handed people only make up about 10% of the population, so statistically speaking, 90% of the partners and 90% of the practice will be against right-handed opponents. Which explains why left-handed fighters are so dramatically over-represented at the professional levels in combat sports. 17% of professional boxers and almost 19% of professional MMA fighters are left-handed--they're almost twice as common as they are in the general public.
So being left-handed can make a fighter just a little bit more dangerous than their right-handed counterparts. For combat sports like boxing where the term may have originated, more dramatic language can translate into ticket sales. All those devilish connotations could have been to a fighter's advantage. It's not hard to imagine a clever wordsmith playing up a left-handed fighter's devastating and maybe even diabolical "southpaw" power shot.
But imagination aside, we know that calling an athlete a "southpaw" didn't come from baseball but rather from a term for an actual left hand. And if you thought otherwise, well, that myth has been duping people for over a century, so I guess we're in good company. But let's not propagate it!
The most common way to train basics is to practice a technique for some number of reps on one side, then switch feet and do the same number of reps on the other side. But there are a couple other schools of thought out there. And which one is best depends largely on what your goals are.
Approach #1: Train Your Side
One school of thought is that you should prioritize the side that you are most likely to use. You see this a lot in sports. If you're an elite sparring competitor, you've probably come across this idea quite a bit. Almost everyone has a "strong side," which is especially easy to see in, say, boxing. Fighters are known for being orthodox or southpaw. If you're not likely to switch your stance, you'll get more benefit for your training time if you practice from the stance that you're going to use.
And while that is a great idea for winning, it's not such a great idea for overall health. When you train asymmetrically, you condition your body asymmetrically, which can lead to muscle imbalance, posture problems and injuries. This phenomenon is especially obvious in fencing, which is an extremely asymmetrical sport. Fencers typically hold a weapon in one hand without ever switching. They also spend a lot of time in what is basically a back stance. If you think about where you're sore after some intense stance work, you can imagine why elite fencers tend to have larger calf muscles on one side. But often they'll also have more developed muscles on their entire back leg and on their weapon arm, and even on one side of the torso. Muscle imbalance, besides looking kind of freaky, can give you some pretty significant joint pain and even interfere with your movement.
Which is why a lot of martial artists, including myself, prefer...
Approach #2: Train Both Sides
If your conditioning is symmetrical, your body will develop symmetrically. (This is kind of a lie. There are other things that can cause muscle imbalance, and in fact most people have some minor asymmetry, but for the most part this is pretty safe to say.)
So if you throw the same number of punches on both sides, you'll stress the muscles on both sides of your body equally and strengthen them equally. Same deal for kicks and throws and stance work and anything else we do.
But there's one downside to this, which is why some people prefer...
Approach #3: Train Your Weak Side
Very few people are truly ambidextrous. You probably have one side that's more coordinated than the other. If that bothers you, the natural solution is to give the other side a little more practice.
And there are some good reasons to do that! But here I would caution people to be careful and think about what exactly you NEED your weak side to do. If it's just a dislike of the idea that one side is more skilled than the other, maybe consider that it's not that big a deal. No matter how much you train, you're unlikely to ever have exactly equal skill on both sides of your body. And if you try, you could end up training your weak side disproportionately enough that you develop some of those muscle imbalance problems.
One way to get around this is to work your technique in an easy, relaxed way. You can fix very many technical details without physically working all that hard. And since you're not pushing the limits of your strength/speed/flexibility/etc., you're not forcing your muscles to adapt. Don't get me wrong, you need to stress those muscles some. But doing some very light finesse work and then blasting a target 10 times on each side will cause a lot less muscle imbalance than blasting a target 500 times on one side and 10 times on the other.
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Good luck with whichever approach is right for you!
Everyone wants their strikes to be effective, by which people usually mean "hitting hard." But it's possible to have a "hard" strike that is ineffective, because what happens when a punch or kick lands is more nuanced than just how much muscle and effort is behind it. To fully understand this, it's helpful to think about exactly what happens during an impact.
When something runs into something else, one of three things will happen:
1. Something is going to break.
2. Something is going to bend.
3. Something is going to move.
When you strike water, will it break, bend or move? It depends.
Actually you're very likely to get some combination of those things, but usually whatever happens will be primarily in only one category. Which one you get (like almost everything in the martial arts) is just a matter of physics.
I was going to get mathy about this, and then I found this article by Dan Djurdjevic. That article is objectively better than what I was going to write in every way, except that mine would have definitely included cat pictures.
I pass a million physics classes to get my degree, and yet my competitive edge as a martial arts blogger is still cat pictures.
Striking vs. Pushing
If I throw a kick (or any striking technique, for that matter), I might be striking and I might be pushing. It is impossible to tell just by looking at the technique thrown in the air. It depends not only on how the technique is thrown, but also what is being hit.
Let's say you're doing a front kick to a large practice pad. If you are striking, even if your strike is excellent, it probably won't impress many onlookers. Take that same technique to a human body, and you'll break bones (Category 1: Something breaks). But against a pad, the foam inside deforms a bit, and very little comes of the impact (Category 2: Something bends). The pad is doing its job--protecting the pad holder from injury--at the expense of making the kick appear ineffective. Oh look, Dan Djurdjevic did an article about this, too! He even used front kick as an example! I DON'T EVEN NEED TO BE HERE!
Where was I? Right. It looks ineffective. It actually IS ineffective, against the pad at least. The kicker was throwing a technique intended to break something, but the pad only bends. Nobody went to the hospital, so it didn't work! That's the price of safety. Everything has to be modified so that it doesn't work. That doesn't mean it's bad training or bad technique, only that you need to be aware of how and why it didn't work. In this case, it didn't work because a pad was used for safety. The kinetic energy has to go somewhere, and somebody thought it would be better for that kinetic energy to go into bending a pad than into breaking a person. (I know, crazy, right?)
Now let's say you're throwing a very similar kick against the same large practice pad. This time, you throw your kick and the pad holder staggers back several steps. This looks impressive to onlookers, and they applaud you for your excellent technique, all except for the guy who immediately calls his agent to jump-start your career as the next Chuck Norris. Impressive, sure, but this is not a strike. It is a push. (In fact, in our style, we call this a push kick instead of a front kick, and maybe in yours as well.) Without the pad, this same kick would deliver very little damage to the pad holder, but still move them roughly the same distance (perhaps a little farther, because none of the kinetic energy being transferred would have gone into deforming the foam in the pad).
So, which is better? That depends entirely on what you are trying to do. If you are trying to do damage, you need to strike. If you're trying to create space, you need to push. It's important to train both.
Training strikes and pushes
Heavy bags and practice pads are great for training pushes, because you get a lot of feedback as to your effectiveness. If your pad holder takes two steps back instead of one from your roundhouse kick, you know you are delivering more kinetic energy into your push.
Strikes can be trained on pads, but you get more performance feedback from board breaking. If you can break a one-inch pine board with your technique, great! If you can break it while it is only held securely on one side, even better! If you are pushing instead of striking, that board is just going to move (Category 3) instead of break (Category 1). Breaking a board that is completely unsecured (being dropped and punched out of the air, for example) is even more challenging. But if you can do it, you know you have a good strike that is not pushing at all. Again, though, if you take that same technique to a heavy bag, the onlookers will yawn, except for that one guy who calls his agent to say never mind, that he was wrong about you being the next Chuck Norris.
Plus when you put your foot through perfectly good lumber, you tend to feel pretty good about yourself.
Striking and Pushing vs. Deforming
So, Category 1 (breaking) and Category 3 (moving) both have their uses, but what about Category 2 (bending)? Bending is more complicated. Bending can be as simple as squishing a pad, or as nuanced as changing an enemy's structure.
If my kick to the knee twists his leg such that it is no longer supporting his weight and he falls over, he has neither been pushed back (Category 3) nor taken substantial damage (Category 1). I've changed his structure (Category 2) to create an advantage for myself. The same is true if I strike the groin and he doubles over, putting his head at an ideal height for a knee. (Technically he's probably driving that motion rather than being moved into that position by my kick, if you want to split hairs, but the bending happened all the same.) If I strike to the face and he leans backwards with his groin unprotected, that is also beneficial bending.
Strikes involved in joint locks and escapes from joint locks will be mostly bending impacts.
The other side of the coin
Having an understanding of how a strike can break, bend or move is helpful for optimizing your techniques, but it's also helpful for keeping yourself from getting injured. You can use the same idea to defend yourself. This comes in two flavors:
- If someone is trying to strike you, and you know what their goal is (break, bend, or move) you can manipulate your own structure and movement to try to make their strike fall into a different category.
- If you're the one initiating the strike, some of that kinetic energy can still go into you. You generally don't want to be the thing that is doing the bending, moving, or especially breaking.
Here are some specific examples of how managing these three types of strikes can keep you from getting hurt.
1. Protective equipment of any kind is meant to turn breaking (Category 1) into bending (Category 2). Heavy bags, handheld targets, sparring protectors, floor mats, foam padding on weapons, etc., all exist entirely for that purpose. (Well, and to appease insurance companies, but that's another topic entirely.) When the impact happens, the majority of that kinetic energy goes into deforming the pad instead of deforming the person, making everyone a lot happier at the end of training. This is also why car hoods are designed to crumple in an accident, why you would rather slip and fall on a carpeted floor than a marble one, drummers don't like to hit concrete with their sticks (crediting Casey Grillo with this observation--never tried it myself!), why gym shoes have rubber soles, and why buildings in earthquake-prone areas are designed to sway. Bending is just plain healthier than breaking.
Protective gear takes your percussive kinetic energy and uses it to squish the pad instead of injure your partner or yourself.
2. If you've been trained to exhale when holding a bag for a strong kick, that is another example of making something bend instead of break or move. In this case, the thing that's bending is your lungs and your stomach, and it hurts a whole lot less than getting the wind knocked out of you. (Actually, there's a lot more to it than just converting kinetic energy into Category 2 here, but that's definitely part of it.) Learning to time your breathing can absolutely help protect you from the bad kind of impact.
3. Once when I was training in Korea, I was sparring against a guy with the stereotypical taekwondo build--tall, skinny, long legs that can hit you from clear across the room. It was full contact rules, so I didn't hold back when I knew I had him lined up for my side kick. That would have been fine, but I didn't anticipate him moving forward into my kick at just that moment. For a moment I thought I was going to snap him in half like a twig. But in an impressive feat of athleticism, he completely reversed his momentum and went with my kick. He tumbled a comical distance across the mat, halfway across the fairly large training floor. But he stood up completely uninjured, having converted my striking impact (Category 1) into a displacement impact (Category 3). Being able to "go with it" can prevent a whole lot of damage to your body.
Because the other option is just trusting your pads.
4. Grandmaster Park cautioned me about teaching punching too early because of how difficult it is to punch well. Ideally, when you punch, you're delivering your kinetic energy into your target. But if your technique is off by even a little bit, that kinetic energy can go into you instead. The most common examples I've seen of this are when the thumb is not positioned correctly or if the wrist is not straight. If your thumb is protruding out in front of your knuckles so that it hits first, that kinetic energy is very likely to just break your thumb instead of breaking the other guy. The same goes if you have your thumb tucked inside your hand. If your wrist isn't straight and your arm isn't aligned properly behind your fist, your Category 1 breaking impact can get turned into Category 2 bending impact, which can be really awful for the tendons in your wrist. There are lots ofreasons to make sure your technique is correct. Just because something seems like an inconsequential aesthetic detail doesn't mean that it actually is.
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I hope this has been helpful for understanding the different ways that striking techniques can be effective. If you are properly categorizing your movements as breaking, bending or moving techniques, you're already a step ahead of those martial artists who see no difference.
About This Project (and introductions for some names you're going to hear a lot in this post)
Before I get into anything else, let me start with Buddy Rich. Depending who you ask, Buddy Rich was either the best drummer who ever lived, or one of the best on a very short list. What is less widely-known is that he was a black belt in Goju Ryu karate. If there was ever any authority in the world to talk about the overlap between drum set and martial arts, he would be it. He once said, "I'm the first guy in this business to take karate seriously as a way to stay in shape." And if he wasn't also the last, I have not been able to track that person down in time for this project.
But I'm pretty sure Buddy Rich is not doing interviews with martial arts bloggers these days. (Although if I managed to interview Zombie Buddy Rich, that would pretty much cement me among the most interesting martial arts bloggers, 'cause you can bet Zombie Bruce Lee would be next.) Fortunately, when you can't interview Buddy Rich, you can interview a Buddy Rich look-alike. I promise this is not quite as crazy as it sounds, so bear with me.
This project started one day when I was mindlessly surfing YouTube being extremely productive while just having YouTube on in the background. I saw a music video with a drummer doing cool stuff. Of course any professional musician making a music video is very likely to sound cool and even look cool, but what caught me off guard was that this guy moved cool. I was professionally intrigued. It was fascinating to watch the economy of movement, the fluidity and intent of his movements.
I had two takeaways from this experience. First (to borrow a phrase from Paul Wilson over at Karate Café) I basically have a "karate crush" on a drummer. That will definitely get me laughed out of some circles.
Laugh all you want, but first tell me you don't wish you
had this guy's fluidity.
Second, it occurred to me very abruptly that drummers and martial artists probably spend about an equal amount of time thinking about hitting things. I thought there must be quirks of biomechanics that are common between the two, and details or ideas that drummers and martial artists could learn from each other.
Drumming and martial arts have been part of the human condition for pretty much as long as there have been humans. There has never been any culture on Earth without music and drumming, and martial arts have been around since the first time a caveman punched another caveman in the face. These are two disciplines that are so intimately connected to who we are as human beings, that it seemed inevitable that there would be some overlap.
Going on that idea and not much else, I signed up for drumming lessons. Opening my school has meant that my "martial journeys" are going to have to be more metaphorical than literal. The sea is calling me, but I can't travel right now. I also took to heart the advice of some martial artists who I greatly respect, especially Master Do Ki Hyun when he said that a martial artist should "read a lot of books" about anything and everything because "the more knowledge you have, the better you can understand your martial art." He even learned two styles of dance to improve his taekyun. Sensei Kris Wilder expressed a similar sentiment when he harped on the importance of exploring outside of your field. He talked about how it can open doors for you, and how at worst it's just going to be an interesting dead end.
This is how Kai Andersen got a really weird student. I'm the last in the line of people who will ever be amazing drummers, but Kai has been more than patient with me. He has been teaching drum set for 15 years and playing since the 7th grade. He has been in bands since then, and still is. He plays just about any style of music, but might give you a dirty look if you mention country music. He also has a degree in journalism, and works for a radio station.
Is this photo in black and white, or are Kai and his drums just covered in that much ice? It's winter in Wisconsin, so you can never tell. Photo credit.
So that just leaves one last introduction—the drummer from the video that inspired this whole project. That was Casey Grillo, who is most famous for his work with Kamelot over the past 20 years, but he can and will play anything. He started touring at the age of 16 with Debra Dejean. He owns a custom drum head company and used to teach drumming. He's also apparently willing to be interviewed for martial arts blogs. I caught up with him when he came to Madison playing for Queensrÿche. Coincidentally, he also bears some physical resemblance to Buddy Rich, which will be important later.
Casey Grillo is almost as blurry in this picture as he is in the pictures I took
myself. Thanks Jon Freeman for rescuing my blog from my terrible
photography. Photo credit.
Turning off all the snark for just a moment, let me say thanks to all the people who helped make this project possible, but especially Kai Andersen, Casey Grillo, Bekah Simmons, Ruth Hansen, Iain Abernethy, and my students.
1. The Intangible Skills, Character Building, and the Pursuit of Excellence.
The first people I interviewed for this project were martial artists who had dabbled in drumming. When I asked them what they felt the overlap was, their answers tended to be along the lines of discipline and patience toward practice, the value of hard work and perseverance, and the like. Originally I hadn't intended to include any of these answers in this post, because to quote Mark Law's excellent judo book, Falling Hard, "We can declaim that self-discipline, initiative, confidence, and courage are all fostered by judo, while we neglect to remind ourselves that these are also the very qualities required to be a successful bank robber." Intangible skills like these are valuable in practically any pursuit, and can be pursued in practically any field. For this project I was more interested in gems that might not be learned elsewhere.
Drumming and martial arts are both harder when cats are involved.
But then again, so is everything. Also, yes, that is where I practice.
Who will trade his hi-hat for my boxes?
I changed my mind when I saw how much the drumming community emphasizes these things. I was a little worried asking an extremely accomplished drummer like Casey Grillo about what he is still learning. That wouldn't be an insult in the martial arts world, but what about drumming? My fears were unfounded and he (like everyone else) emphatically told me that no one ever is so good that they can't get better. My favorite example of this came from something Buddy Rich said at the age of 69, shortly before he died and long after he had first been heralded as "the world's greatest drummer." He said, "This is something that you have to become dedicated to it. ... It is something that you learn constantly. I'm still learning." There are a lot of martial artists (myself included!) who hope to be saying something similar at the age of 69.
In a similar vein, I listened to this list of lessons learned from interviewing hundreds of great drummers. It's worth your time even if you have no interest in drumming, but martial artists will find familiarity in items like "everything takes time" and "hard work and consistency are the differentiators," as will harping on ideas like the importance of being humble and having a great attitude.
2. Broad Physical Skills and Technique Development
The physical overlap between drumming and martial arts seems to come down to who you ask--if it's a drummer who does martial arts or a martial artist who plays the drums.
Buddy Rich was dismissive of the idea that karate could influence drumming technique, because the movements require different muscles. Certainly that makes sense, in the same way that you wouldn't practice punching to improve your kicking. He did say, however, that martial arts training was good for his drumming by improving his overall health, stamina, energy, and his speed. Those are curious points because each item in that list resonates with something he was known for--his back problems and multiple heart attacks, the way he would end a performance being drenched in sweat, and the kind of speed that caused problems for the video technology of the day. He had the same problem as Bruce Lee, where he was just too fast to be recorded well. In Bruce Lee's case, they could slow him down and get a decent result. But a lot of video of Buddy Rich looks very choppy because the frame rate was just too slow to catch what he was doing.
Whoa, there are pictures of Buddy Rich in the public domain? Yay! Photo credit.
Casey Grillo had a similar take on physical activities and their overlap with drumming. He uses long distance running for conditioning "because for being able to play double bass fast for long periods of time, the running definitely helps." He also suggested that activities like kiteboarding can improve balance, which is also helpful to his playing.
At my level, I'm not very physically active when I'm drumming, so I don't think my martial arts experience has had that kind of impact on my playing. The only physical overlap that I have noticed was a fill that was giving me particular trouble. I was getting my hands tangled up together until I associated the fill with a tai chi movement that would get my hands out of each other's way. Then the fill straightened itself out.
Other martial artists who have taken up drumming mentioned similar experiences, saying that drumming was easier to learn because martial arts had already taught them coordination and some measure of limb independence. Kai said that this is consistent with what he's seen in his other students who train in martial arts.
The most fascinating thing about this to me is that anyone who was a martial artist first and a drummer second felt that their martial arts background helped them with their technique and nothing else. Then Buddy Rich, who is the only person in this case study who was a drummer first and a martial artist second, seemed to strongly believe the opposite. It's natural that when people learn a new skill, they take what they already know from elsewhere to help them with it. I wonder very much what Buddy Rich was like as a martial arts student. I'd love to be like a fly on the wall during one of his lessons and try to see how much his drumming influenced his martial arts training.
3. Martial Artists Use Rhythm. A Lot. (No, really a LOT.)
The notion of martial artists using rhythm is not a new one. We usually don't call it rhythm--we call it timing. But if it quacks like an eighth note...
Quacks like an 8th note! I'm HILARIOUS! Or something.
After starting with drums, I've started seeing exactly how prevalent rhythm is in everything we do. It's so much more than just when a technique should land. Every single movement, even just parts of a technique, has a rhythm to it.
One example that shocked me early on was while I was teaching a student who was struggling with a speed drill that every taekwondo practitioner will recognize--hopping in between roundhouse kicks.
This is a common way to build speed for sparring,
later replacing the hop with more advanced footwork.
For my struggling student, I did the normal process of breaking down the drill in different ways to try to find something that clicked for him, but nothing was getting through. The way his feet moved reminded me very much of how my sticks moved when I first tried to play a simple beat. This particular student had played the trumpet for years, so I was sure he could handle a slightly more nuanced rhythm lesson. I had him hop on one foot and count eighth notes (for those not musically inclined, this is usually done by saying "1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and") and let his other foot only touch the ground on the "ands" and hit the target on the numbers. It wasn't a magic bullet, but it helped him a lot.
4. Managing Looseness and Tension
In my (granted, limited) experience, pretty much any drummer will tell you that it's important to stay loose and relaxed. But if you press them, a lot of them (including Casey and Kai) will admit that tension has a role to play, too, but they don't put a lot of thought into that tension. That mirrors the martial arts world fairly well, in that looseness has such an important role to play in movement and power generation, but so does tension. We don't usually emphasize tension, though, because tension is easy. It's developing that looseness that's hard.
Fortunately, I got some good advice on this. In drumming, getting that looseness seems to come down to four main pieces: warming up, mentality, breathing, and practice. (Sound familiar? I hope so.)
Warming Up - As far as I can tell, there's no standard way of warming up in the drumming world. Some people do stretches, others work rudiments as quickly as they can, others play simple patterns to a metronome, and so forth. Kai emphasizes the importance of being hydrated. Basically, it's as all-over-the-place as warm ups in the martial arts world. But practically everyone agrees that warming up is essential to playing well, by having that looseness and the fluidity and speed that comes with it.
Mentality - Kai especially had a lot of interesting things to say about "mentally getting into that space where you can stay relaxed." What martial artists might describe as focus or discipline, Kai described like this: "I think it's a serious conversation you have to have with yourself constantly. I always tell everybody ... you constantly have to keep yourself in check. Constantly remind yourself, because otherwise you get excited and just lose your technique. So I think a lot of that is having a real good internal dialogue with yourself pretty much constantly while you're practicing." If you're a martial artist and have never fallen into the trap of tensing up when you're nervous, concentrating, or even just losing your fluidity because you're focusing on something else, you are definitely in the minority. One common pitfall is clenching the jaw--something I've never done in martial arts, but I catch myself doing a lot as a drummer. Weird.
Breathing - Casey told me that some drummers have specific breathing techniques, but the people I talked to didn't. Still, they agreed that breathing was important for staying fluid. They didn't think about their breathing. The important thing is to make sure you're not holding your breath. Unfortunately, it's pretty common to start holding your breath when you're concentrating.
Practice - Of course, a lot of it comes down to repetition. When movements are familiar, they are more efficient and comfortable. When I asked Casey about his fluidity, he told me it came from playing in a Top 40 band, four hours a night, six nights a week, 50 weeks a year, for 15 years. (Casey, if you're reading this, I don't say this very often to people who aren't martial artists, but you are way better at hitting things than I am. I guess this explains why.) Maybe take that thought and throw a few extra kicks today.
15 years x 50 week/year x 6 nights/week x 4 hours/night x 60 minutes/hour x maybe averaging 300 strokes per minute = Maybe I should be getting my own reps in instead of doing math. 300 kicks per minute, though? Photo credit.
5. Being Smarter About Overuse Injuries
One thing that the average martial artist could probably learn from the average drummer is a healthier attitude toward repetitive stress injuries. I'm not talking about the injuries that come from the punch you didn't quite evade or the breakfall that went badly—I'm talking about the joint pain that comes from repeated incorrect movement. This is something I've ranted about in the past, and I will scream it from the rooftops until the day I can't tie my belt anymore: your art should make you stronger, not weaker. There are times to be tough, but a repetitive stress injury is not one of them. I've seen students, usually testosterone-poisoned teenagers, respond to my caution toward injuries with "I ain't scared of nothin'!" To which I reply, "Well, try to develop a mild fear of doing permanent damage to your body." More often, though, students bear it silently and an instructor has to be very attentive to realize anything is wrong. I've seen students, usually older adults who learned their stances from someone else, respond to a correction with an awed, "I don't feel any pain at all when I do it this way!" To which I reply, "You're not supposed to! Your technique shouldn't injure YOU. It should injure the OTHER GUY."
Drummers don't seem to have this problem. If a drummer's back, hip, wrist, or whatever starts hurting, nobody seems to think the solution is to just toughen up and keep doing the same thing. I was told in a very early lesson that if something hurts, even if you're doing it "correctly," you need to change it. We could use more of this attitude in martial arts, where instructors sometimes rigidly adhere to stylistic details that are not healthy or safe for some body types.
6. Thinking Ahead to Optimize Solo Performance
Whenever I do an interview for Martial Journeys, there's no telling what's going to happen. I'm going to relate a somewhat personal story here. At one point Casey said that when he's playing he's thinking not about what he's doing but about what he's about to be doing. When he said that, I had a sudden flashback to when I was training seriously for forms (kata) competition.
Yep, that was me doing my thing.
I took silver at Nationals twice before I grudgingly had to accept that there was no gold at the end of this rainbow and I would never do any better. But back when I was training that seriously and at the top of my game, that's exactly how it was for me, too, all the time. Once a movement was done, it was completely inconsequential. Even when it was in progress, once I was committed to the movement, it was too late to change it, so it was a waste of mental processing power to think about it. I was always thinking at least one movement ahead of where I was.
I don't train that way anymore now that I'm not competing. My limited training time has to be optimized for my current situation and new goals. But remembering it so vividly in the middle of doing an interview was a gut punch. Getting all nostalgic would have been exceedingly unprofessional, so of course I just finished the interview. But if that hasn't haunted me for days weeks… anyway, I'll round out this bullet point by saying that thinking one step ahead is a good way to train for solo performance.
7. Larger Muscles vs. Smaller Muscles
One thing that absolutely floored me over the course of this project was something Casey Grillo said in his instructional DVD. (It's out of print, but my Google-fu is strong and I was able to buy a copy. Tracking that down was no small feat, probably my greatest accomplishment in drumming. But this story ends with Casey finding out I was looking for it and even agreeing to be interviewed, so I can't complain. Anyway, I digress.)
Here's the thing that shocked me in the DVD, where he's talking about playing fast double bass:
"Basically, the feet are floating, and you're using your ankles instead of your legs when you play double bass. What happens with most players is they ... use their whole legs and they are pounding back and forth. ... So what's happening with the floating feet technique is we're not using our leg, the full leg, we're using our ankle, and it's just basically moving back and forth, and it's making a really fast motion. ... This, for me, is the fastest way to play, and I don't get fatigued, ... And what you should do, you should play with this ... and see what muscles it's really working. If it's working your bigger muscles, you probably don't want that."
Wait what?
In martial arts, if you use your smaller muscles to power your movements, you are going to at least have a bad day, and maybe even some significant injuries. My first thought was that he must be conserving energy by moving less of his body. Of course you'll be less fatigued if you move only your feet and not your whole leg. But no, his whole leg moves when he plays. I can't say I understand exactly what he's doing, and I don't have enough bass drums to even try it, let alone learn it.
I can't show Casey's DVD because that's copyrighted
material, so thanks Ryan Alexander Bloom for making this video of similar movement publicly available.
So I ended up approaching this from a very academic direction. Preferring large muscles over small muscles was something that I thought was a universal principle not just in martial arts, but in body movement in general. But here I've seen a glaring exception to that rule, and I wondered if there are any similar exceptions in martial arts that I had overlooked. Maybe there's some weird joint lock or something where you're not displacing much of your own body or the other person's, and it is better to use smaller muscles to drive the technique? For the life of me I can't think of one. Even so, I don't think it was a waste of my time to really think about and analyze the muscles I'm using for various movements. In fact I'd say it's a valuable exercise for anyone to try.
8. Balance and the Importance of the Throne
So a drummer's seat is called a throne, like you're going to rule the world from the center of the universe or something. Martial arts instructors don't get to laugh at this, since we get paid to be called sir or ma'am and have people bow to us while we yell stuff at them.
Snark aside, the way drummers talk about the throne often reminds me of tai chi. The throne is a drummer's connection to the ground, and it's the source of the drummer's balance. Drummer and biomechanics expert Brandon Green says, "Really we should be building our drum set entirely around the drum throne." Casey Grillo hauls his throne all over the world because he won't use any throne other than his own. He also devotes an entire chapter of his DVD to the importance of the throne and how it contributes to very nuanced balance work--such that just moving one arm to a drum on the opposite side of the body can shift the drummer's weight enough to disrupt the balance and pedal work.
You can only train in tai chi for so long before you hear some variation of this blurb from the Tai Chi Classics:
"Tai chi is rooted in the feet, powered in the legs, directed in the hips and expressed in the hands."
In both drumming and martial arts, the untrained eye focuses on the extremity that's doing the hitting. We see a hand doing some intricate work with a drum stick the way people see us twisting our hands around to create a joint lock. What the hands are doing is important, but that movement all starts closer to the core. It's the rest of the body being in the right position that makes that intricate hand work possible. And that body positioning comes from being properly balanced, and the balance comes from being properly rooted to the ground.
9. Using Rhythm to Manipulate an Opponent
Some pretty standard Lesson 1 stuff for learning to play drums.
Some of these are more difficult than others. With my limited musical background (a handful of instruments I played for 1-2 years each as a kid) it was very strange to me that playing the exact same beat but delaying a bass drum hit by a fraction of a second could make such a huge difference in the difficulty. Moreover I learned from Kai that this wasn't just a quirk of my experience, and in fact the ones that were hard for me are hard for most beginners.
I absolutely loved what Casey had to say about this phenomenon (after a quick detour to encourage me just because I mentioned that something was difficult--class act). Basically, he explained that rhythms are more difficult when you put things in between other things. "You're filling in gaps. ... There are these subdivisions." He was pointing to some 8th notes and 16th notes in my lesson book. "And you can divide it way more than that. You can have 32nd notes, 64th notes, basically you have 64 notes in a measure, it's pretty stinking fast. And you can take some away. Like these 8th rests, you can put a little rest in between those, a little bitty gap." Essentially, the difficulty comes from the speed and/or complexity that comes from subdividing and inserting something in between those subdivisions.
This reminded me greatly of something I heard from Ruth Hansen, a martial artist who has dabbled in drumming. She recalled her first tournament sparring experience like this: "She came at me throwing continuous rear leg roundhouse kicks. It was my first tournament, so in the moment I didn't know what to do. Later it was obvious; strike between the rhythm of her kicks. I couldn't, at the time, because I was standing wrong, my feet too far apart to change up my own rhythm."
I like this example because it is simple, but advanced tournament fighters use the same principle. If you can land your scoring technique while your opponent is in the middle of a transition, they are especially vulnerable. This inevitably involves sneaking your technique in between whatever movements your opponent is doing.
So, the way you make a rhythm difficult for a drummer is the same way you make things difficult for your opponent--by getting in between.
10. Establishing and Breaking Rhythm
Taking this idea one step further, it's easier to score your points if you are the one who sets up your opponent's rhythm.
I happened across this fascinating quote by drummer and author John Lamb:
"You should define rhythm according to how the brain and the body changes when you listen to rhythm. And to make a long story short it's actually pretty straightforward and really well studied in the field of music therapy. ... Basically when we listen to rhythm, when we listen to music, our brain synchronizes to the music ... [it's] a bit of a simplification, but we start to think in time with the music. And so rhythm isn't a thing that we have. There's no metronome in the brain that keeps perfect time. Instead, it's something that we're in. It is something that is by definition shared."
This is extremely useful information to competition fighters. If you can synchronize your opponent's brain to your rhythm, how much easier would it be to get your points? A lot.
Bill "Superfoot" Wallace had a very effective way of doing this. It's not a terribly unique strategy, but he was uniquely good at it. (If you go to his seminar, he'll break it down in all the gritty detail, but for our purposes I'll just give you the broad strokes.)
First he would skip in and throw some kick, not intending to score and intentionally coming up short. Then he'd immediately fall back to a comfortable sparring distance.
He would then skip in and throw the exact same kick again, but this time a little deeper so that his opponent would have to move. This is enough to establish the pattern. His opponent is now in this rhythm: watch the skip, watch the kick, evade; watch the skip, watch the kick, evade.
On the third time, he would spring the trap. He would skip in and kick according to the established rhythm, but it would be a different kick. If his opponent was expecting a roundhouse kick to the right side of the head, he might evade by shifting to the left with his hand up on the right side of his face. But if the attack is now a hook kick coming to the left side of his head, his evasion will do him no good and he'll eat the kick.
There are a lot of good fighters who do this, or some variation of it. As a general rule of thumb, if someone reacts the same way twice, there is a very high probability that they will do it a third time. Build your rhythm with your opponent, and once they are in your rhythm, you know what they will do and when they will do it. Hit them where and when they are vulnerable. Easier said than done, of course, but this is the principle of how it works.
11. Another Take on Forms/Patterns/Kata
People practice forms in a lot of different ways for a variety of purposes. Some take it seriously strictly as a self defense textbook, others focus on performing for competition, and some enjoy it just as a solo workout. Others use it as a connection to the great martial artists of the past, in a way that Sensei Iain Abernethy explains far more eloquently than I can:
"When we read a good poem, or listen to a good piece of music, we can connect with the thoughts and emotions of the people who produced those works. It's more than letters on a page or vibrations through the air. Good art can profoundly connect two human beings in a shared experience. Kata is similar. When we move in the way the past masters moved, when we connect with them through their work; we gain the opportunity to feel what they felt and think what they thought. We are walking in the footsteps of the past masters when practicing and studying their kata. It's much deeper than just mimicked motion."
Drummers don't do kata per se. It would be very unusual for a drummer to try to completely copy another drummer's movement, right down to their look and mannerisms. But wouldn't it be interesting if somebody tried it? If a skilled drummer tried to copy a great drummer of the past as perfectly as possible, to "move in the way the past masters moved" and connect with that past artist in a way that martial artists sometimes do but drummers usually don't? Wouldn't it be cool if I could interview someone who did that? I'm just kidding, I totally did. Here's Casey Grillo auditioning to play Buddy Rich in a movie.
What Casey Grillo is doing here seems very kata-like.
Casey wasn't doing this as a learning exercise, but he ended up learning nonetheless. The experience caused permanent changes to his drumming. "That was my first time ever playing traditional grip." He still mostly uses matched grip, but now he has another tool in his toolbox, and it comes out sometimes. But there was a more sweeping change to his playing as well. "Also I tilted my snare like Buddy to try to make it more authentic like him, and that was the first time I ever did that. ... That's the way I do it now. I just did it for the video, but after I did it I thought, 'Wow, this kind of makes sense.' It just stayed like that. I started tilting everything else now, too. ... It's more comfortable. I can be more on top of the kit instead of leaning back."
Seems like there's something to be said for "walking in the footsteps of the past masters."
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This series will be continued with Drumming-Inspired Martial Arts Training: Martial Arts and Drumming Part III.
This week I'm stepping away from my usual fare of talking about travel, teaching, and learning, to touch on the topic of levels of contact.
As a color belt, I attended a school that taught both light contact and full contact sparring. The rule sets were completely separate, and while most people preferred to specialize, I just loved sparring and didn't much care what the rules were, as long as I had someone willing to spar me. I had trouble with that at one point when one of my seniors got kicked in the face by a wild horse and told everyone that the resulting injury was from sparring me. Which is a lot funnier now than it was then.
I guess that's a compliment? Thanks to jdj150 for making the image available for reuse.
I think there's a silent perception among a lot of martial artists that if you ask someone to lighten up their level of contact against you, you'll be seen as a wimp. People may very well think that about me, but I'm not too proud to say they can think what they want. I'm an unapologetic stickler for keeping contact light when those are the agreed upon rules. Hitting hard has a time and a place. Save it for full contact matches.
Foot-induced nap time is also fun.
For me this attitude had its roots in competition. I loved to compete, but the adult female color belt divisions were not deep. I'd be envious of the men's divisions that had sizable brackets, when I had to count myself lucky if I got two fights for my entry fee. My instructor was adamant that I couldn't fight in the men's division, even though sometimes that meant I got sent home with a trophy just for being the only person in my division to show up to the tournament. I desperately wanted there to be more women competing in sparring. When I did have opponents, sometimes I had a significant size or experience advantage. I started to take pride in my very light, accurate taps that were enough to score the point but carried no risk of driving one of my few female opponents from competition.
I remember one tournament in particular. I was a head taller and two ranks up on my opponent, who had never been to a tournament before. She was scared to death of me, and said so. I assured her that she would not get hurt in a light contact match. I defeated her soundly while keeping my word--light taps only. I was happy to see her again at another tournament a few months later. Sure, I could have hit a lot harder and gotten away with it, but if I made it such an unpleasant experience for her, would I have seen her again? Probably not. There'd be one less person on the competition circuit and maybe even one less martial arts enthusiast. Regardless of the score, I wouldn't call that a win.
Sometimes you're on the side that has nothing to prove.
Beyond the desire to make sure I never drove a competitor away from competition, there was a very practical reason for the very light contact. In competition, I'm not trying to defend myself in a life-and-death situation. I'm trying to score a point. Using the minimum level of contact necessary to score that point means that I'll never get penalized for excessive contact. Sure, I might get away with hitting harder. I might even get away with hitting a lot harder. But why bother leaving it up to the judges' discretion? Those light taps were an efficient way to win.
But the biggest reason I became such a stickler for light contact came about a year later. I was again at a tournament, this time fighting a friend from the same school as myself. The match was stopped for the tournament organizer to make some announcements, and I was completely turned away from my friend. When I looked back, she was curled up in a ball on the floor and unresponsive. That was the end of that match.
It was days later when I finally learned what had happened. During the match, I kicked her in the head with my regular very light tap. It would not have affected a healthy person in the slightest, but unbeknownst to her or anyone else, she had cancer. The doctors told her that if she had been kicked any harder, it probably would have killed her.
As you might imagine, I felt awful that I had hospitalized my friend. She told me not to carry any guilt. She said that if not for that head kick, the cancer might have continued silently killing her for a long time before any medical tests were done. As it was, they caught the cancer late in Stage 1. If it had progressed to Stage 2 before they caught it, her chances of survival would have been much lower.
