Recently Iain Abernethy pointed out that some kata names sound like death metal bands. For most martial artists this would elicit a smile and a nod, but this blog is weird and you're weird for reading it. So for all my favorite weirdos, here is a fun little quiz. I'll present two phrases. One is a translation of a form name, and the other is a metal song. Guess which one is which, and see how many you get right!
(Quick side note: Some of these translations are disputed. Don't shoot the messenger, just have fun.)
Which is a form name, and which is a metal song? Click your answer to find out if you were right!
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.
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.
I've been posting rants, training articles, and general weirdness for so long, I figure some (most?) of you forgot that this is actually a martial arts travel blog.
What's the 50 States Challenge? Since most people probably forgot...
The 50 States Challenge boils down to three main pieces.
1. I travel to all 50 states and find a martial arts school in each state to host me.
2. At each host school, I teach something and I learn something to pass on to the next school.
3. We support a charity chosen by the host school.
And then I blog about the experience here, illustrating how much the different styles and philosophies of martial arts have to learn from each other.
If you've been reading my blog for more than a few seconds, you will not be surprised that it was not all seriousness. I wanted to get the full Arkansas experience.
Yelling at Yellville!
Rocking a little at Little Rock!
Wait, what?
This little resident of Toad Suck was still learning how to fly. He (she?) let me get pretty close before squawking a protest and hopping away.
It's okay, little guy. I can't fly either, and I've been training FOREVER in bird years.
One of my first stops was Beaverfork Lake, where I snapped this picture of an old bridge. It was built almost 150 years ago to cross Cadron Creek, where it stood until only a few years ago when it was restored and brought to this park.
<insert tortured analogy about building bridges to the past and future here>
That park was one of many picturesque places where I could have stopped. Arkansas has a lot to offer if you're into the outdoors. In June, it helps if you are not a wimp about the sun trying to kill you. I'm pretty sure at one point I was more sunscreen than person.
It looks like Buffalo River, but it's actually a pool of my sweat after training in the heat.
Buffalo River National Park is especially interesting in that within its boundaries is the Rush ghost town. It was once a thriving city because of its zinc mines, but as the value of zinc waned, so did Rush. There are still some buildings standing, though. Unlike most ghost towns, these buildings are protected by the National Park Service, so they are preserved better than most.
The houses were fenced off with signs everywhere forbidding entry. I'm sure it wouldn't be safe, and certainly the buildings couldn't withstand much foot traffic, but that didn't stop me from wanting to explore. I would really have liked to peek inside.
Then there's Pivot Rock. If you brave enough hairpin turns, you can walk a wooded trail to see these weird rock formations that have been a roadside attraction for over a hundred years.
One of the upside down pyramid formations at Pivot Rock.
In North Little Rock, there is a place called The Old Mill, which is neither old nor a mill. It's a replica built in the 1930's in the style of mills of the 1830's. It has a little fame by being featured in the opening credits of Gone With The Wind.
It might not be real, but it's pretty!
The park around it was picturesque as well, not to mention teeming with wildlife. There were ducks, geese, turtles, birds and fish everywhere.
Also not real: all the wood in this picture. They're sculptures.
Next up in my whirlwind tour of Arkansas parks was the one I was most looking forward to--America's only Taekwondo park.
This looks exactly like every picture I ever took in Korea.
The H.U. Lee International Gate and Garden is in downtown Little Rock, which by no coincidence is also the headquarters of the ATA, which practices Songahm Taekwondo. It is so much like parks in Seoul, that I felt like I was back in Korea, once again running around in oppressively hot weather with a camera, loudly announcing "I AM A TOURIST" in signs that everyone can read.
The park even had haetae sculptures on either side. These mystical dogs are creatures of justice trusted to protect the people from fire and natural disasters. They're also the symbol of Seoul, and you can see statues of them in places of importance throughout Korea.
Haetae! Who's a good boy?
Immediately past the gate, there are statues of taekwondo students bowing to greet visitors.
Students greet visitors to the garden.
I had a lot of busy feelings at this park, when I probably should have been feeling more tranquil. The feelings intensified as I came to the main display in the garden, a bronze bust of Eternal Grand Master Haeng Ung Lee and a giant lineage chart behind him listing the most prominent figures of Songahm Taekwondo.
I'm visiting a park honoring a style of taekwondo that I don't train in. My kwan doesn't have a park, and probably can't afford the $1.4 million dollars that these guys paid to get one. But if we did have a park, I would totally rather go there than here, so I guess I don't belong here. Except that THE WHOLE POINT of me being in Arkansas right now is a project about tearing down the walls between different styles and letting us all help each other. Focus, Carlson! Get some good pictures now, and mull over it later.
Having mulled it over later, it was the laser focus on one style of taekwondo, centering on one particular lineage, excluding figures of other branches whose achievements and contributions were equal to or greater than some of the names that did get listed, that made me feel weirdly unwelcome. By excluding other styles, I felt excluded, too, like this place is only for Songahm people. The cynic in me wonders if that exclusion could have been the intent, to improve the influence of their style by essentially creating a giant ad for it in the form of a downtown park. But I tried to enjoy the place in the spirit that it was probably intended--to honor something they care about and the instructor who made it possible, and welcoming visitors to share in something they love.
The centerpiece of the garden.
Despite my roller coaster of conflicting thoughts, I do recommend this place to any other wandering martial artists who find themselves in Little Rock, especially if the weather is nice and the sun isn't trying to melt you into a quivering puddle of sweat and sunscreen.
Very near the taekwondo park was a restaurant called The Flying Fish. Not to imply that I didn't enjoy my meal there, but the most notable thing was the Billy Bass Adoption Center. Remember those singing fish that were all the rage in the early aughts? Well, I found them. Like, all of them.
Walls and walls of retired singing fish. With no batteries, thankfully.
I left for home early on a Tuesday morning, when there wasn't much traffic on the rural highways, and it wasn't too hot yet.
From a scenic overlook on a deserted road.
Usually when I'm travelling for Martial Journeys, I am busy. I have more things to do than time to do them. I frantically rush from one spot to the next, trying to get the right picture to make a good blog post. But when I got here, I was done and headed home. I took a minute to just enjoy the view. It felt so weird to be on a highway alone, seemingly the only person for miles in any direction. I supposed that people didn't have much reason to be there at that hour. Except for me, and I was there enjoying that view because I do martial arts. It's been a weird journey.
Two down, 48 to go!
Of course sightseeing was not the main purpose of the trip. I'll get to the martial arts in the next post, but if you just can't wait to have more Martial Journeys in your diet, you can check out my podcast. I'll have a new episode out before the next blog post goes live.
A jegi (roughly pronounced "jay" like the bird and "gi" like the karate uniform) is a traditional Korean toy, similar to a shuttlecock. It's used to play a game called jegichagi (literally, "jegi kicking"). Legend has it that the game was developed from martial arts training. No one knows if that is actually true, but there's some evidence for it. Either way, there's no reason it can't be part of your training today.
Traditionally, the jegi was made with a 100 mun coin and hanji, handmade Korean paper.
Even though 100 mun might sound like a lot, this coin had so little value that in order to buy anything, you needed a lot of them. People would thread them onto strings like beads and tie off the ends, then they could drape the strings over their shoulders to carry them around. So even poor people had a lot of these coins lying around.
To make a jegi, the coin would be placed in the middle of a folded sheet of hanji paper. By poking a hole though the paper to match the hole in the coin, the paper could be torn into strips and pushed through the hole in the coin, resulting in a paper-wrapped coin with feathered paper strips coming out of the hole.
Making a Jegi
In the spirit of the people who played jegichagi so long ago, we're going to make them out of whatever materials that we have at hand. I like to use plastic bags, coins and string, but you do you. Like a Jedi's lightsaber, you will design your jegi to be one-of-a-kind, perfectly in tune with your connection to the Force, from only the purest Kyber crystals... wait, where was I? Oh, right, making a jegi.
If you don't have a cat but want a similar challenge level, you can toss your plastic bag into the air and cut your squares with a samurai sword before it lands.
1. Cut squares.
You want two squares of plastic, each about one square foot. For those who live in parts of the world that use a reasonable system of measurement, you get to make your squares 30 cm x 30 cm. You don't have to be exact, and in fact I encourage you to experiment with bigger or smaller squares and see what you like. Bigger squares means longer strips, and more air resistance, so the jegi will move more slowly through the air.
2. Pick your coin(s).
You can use any coin you like, or really any small object that has a little weight to it. You can also use multiple coins. The important thing is that you get the weight right. Too much weight, and your jegi will fall really fast and be difficult to use. Too little, and it won't move easily through the air and it will be difficult to kick it high. You can experiment to find your personal sweet spot.
I'm using a single penny. I like the weight it gives my jegi, and also we should get rid of pennies whenever we can. I should mention that this makes for a very light jegi, which will be difficult for traditional play but easier for martial arts training.
3. Fold everything.
There are easier ways to do this, but if your art is usually practiced barefoot, it's nice to have a little extra padding. If you want even more, you can wrap your coin in a tissue before following these steps.
a) Fold your squares in half and place the coin in the center.
b) Fold your coin into its own little strip along the folded edge.
c) Fold the strip a second time.
d) Roll it up.
4. Tie it off.
Take your string and tie the plastic down near the coin, so the coin is secure and can't slide out.
5. Cut the plastic into strips.
If you've been careful with your folding, it should be easy and quick to cut the plastic into strips, about 1 cm (half an inch for my fellow Americans) wide. If, like myself, you have the craft skills of a drunk toddler, you'll probably have to cut each strip individually. But success is a journey not a destination (or something) and eventually you will have a jegi.
Qapla'!
6. Feather out the strips.
You've got it! Even if you skip all this arts and crafts nonsense and just buy a jegi, you will have to do this step, which is to separate the strips from each other so that they can catch the air individually. Wait, you can just buy these things? And I'm here with my scissors and string like a sucker?
At this point, most humans would also identify this thing as a cat toy.
Let's Play!
So you have your own jegi! Now what do you do with it? Traditionally, jegichagi was played by kicking the jegi with the instep of the foot, trying to keep it from touching the ground, with the winner being the player who kicked it the most times before it finally fell.
I play it a little differently. My method is picking it up, kicking it once, chasing it to wherever it fell, and trying again while some old Korean guy starts laughing on the sidelines, proceeding to demonstrate how easy it is and offering some advice that is beyond my language skills to understand. Anyway.
Certainly you can play the traditional version of the game and use it to develop your hip muscles (or you can do that without the jegi).
There are also variations where you have to keep the jegi in the air using only a specific kick, or where you can't put your foot down between kicks, or where the jegi is kicked between players in a group. Have fun with it!
Let's Train!
If you're training barefoot, I recommend doing a few light practice kicks so you know how your jegi feels before you go nuts (or before handing off your jegi to a young student).
Pick a striking technique. Any punch or kick will work. Toss your jegi into the air and try to hit it with the technique you chose. Don't worry about where it lands, just try to make your hand or foot connect with the jegi. If this is your first time playing with a jegi, you will probably find this plenty challenging. Experiment with which techniques are easy and which are difficult.
Here are a few ideas, in order of difficulty:
Reverse punch
Front kick
Roundhouse kick
Side kick
Spin hook kick
I've never met a student who can reliably hit a jegi with all of those techniques. Even so, it's great for developing fast and accurate strikes.
Here are a couple of my younger students working their kicks on a jegi:
Lets Play AND Train!
Ever played a basketball game called Horse? You can modify the rules to play with a jegi.
One player issues a challenge. It can be anything from "I am going to punch it and not miss," to "I am going to kick it with a flying spinning roundhouse kick with my eyes closed and make it land perfectly balanced on your head while reciting Funakoshi's 19th precept in Klingon." The player then attempts whatever challenge they issued.
If they succeed, the jegi goes to the second player, who must attempt the same challenge.
If they fail, the second player does not have to attempt the challenge and instead creates their own challenge.
If you fail a challenge you didn't create, you get a letter. Your first letter is H, then O, then R, and so forth. Once you spell HORSE, you are out of the game. The last player in the game is the winner.
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.
Remember in that last post when I said I once wrote and lost an essay about what martial arts has to do with video games? Well, I found it. I wasn't even looking for it. But here it is, cleaned up a bit from its original form. Enjoy!
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Teaching Martial Arts and Making Video Games Aren’t All That Different (2011 Essay)
In 2005, I signed up at a new martial arts school shortly after starting a new job as a scripter and gameplay programmer at a video game company. I spent my days crafting engaging gameplay experiences among young, eccentric and irreverent creative minds, and I spent my evenings sweating in the reserved structure of the taekwondo school. At work I went out of my way to be just as irreverent as my coworkers, making sure use some spicy language for the benefit of a few coworkers who felt it necessary to curb their language and expression in my presence. After work, I had to flip a switch and turn it all off to be respectful of the martial art and the dojang where I trained. In the mornings, everything revolved around creativity and discarding old ideas just because they had been done before, but in the evenings old ideas were revered because they were traditional. I felt like every day I was living in two separate worlds that couldn’t be more different.
Several years later, I find myself thinking the opposite.
The project I was working on at the time.
Despite the many and obvious differences, teaching a martial arts class and scripting a video game level are both done with a goal of providing a fun and rewarding experience.
What most people outside of the game industry don’t realize is that like martial arts classes, video game levels are also learning environments. For each game on the shelves, the rules are slightly different. Those rules need to be taught to the player, or the player cannot enjoy the game. It must be obvious to the player that doing A will result in B. Since lengthy tutorials can be tedious and not fun, game developers find themselves in the same situation as martial arts instructors. Material needs to be taught, and it has to be rewarding or the student/player will not continue.
The first game I ever worked on. Let's just say it would be an example of something.
Immersyve, a consulting company that works with game developers (among other things), explains the psychology of what makes good games so engaging. They point to three key factors: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. They argue that when players can direct themselves and make meaningful decisions (autonomy), play the game with a high degree of skill as taught by their earlier experience with the game (competence), and enjoy interaction beyond themselves either socially or within the fictional world (relatedness), the game is engaging and players will return again and again.
In Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, Daniel H. Pink argues that whether we are in the workplace, at school, or in a recreational environment, we are most motivated when we have three key components: autonomy, mastery and purpose. He explains that when people are given the freedom to pursue things the way that they see fit (autonomy), can work toward being better at doing it (mastery), and are able to work toward something larger than themselves (purpose), they are most motivated and most productive.
Either that, or maybe it's cheesy corporate posters that motivate us.
While reading Drive, I couldn’t help but notice the similarity. (It was no surprise to me when later I found that the minds behind Immersyve and Daniel Pink both cite the same sources in psychological literature.) Moreover, I couldn’t help but think that it very accurately reflects my martial arts experience.
Autonomy is emphasized with every new open-world game that hits the shelves. But when we think about martial arts, we usually think about discipline and rigid compliance over autonomy. Even so, autonomy is successful in the dojang. Allowing students to choose their own goals, whether it is a rank, or a trophy, or a fitness level, or whatever else, is much more motivating than goals that are imposed by an instructor. (Or a parent! Great example of that here.)
On the other hand, mastery/competence is easy to see in both venues. Doing something well, or even just getting better at doing it, is rewarding. It’s true in practically every recreational activity in the world, but in martial arts, it’s not only true, it’s also often considered a particularly noble goal to do something well purely for the sake of doing it well.
Of course, getting a new belt is usually pretty cool, too.
As for purpose/relatedness, that is equally important to game developers and martial arts instructors. Players and students want to feel like they have gained something for their efforts. They want to be part of a community. They want to believe that their time was well spent and the result has value. This is much, much easier for martial arts instructors than it is for game developers, who are confined to virtual worlds. But the idea is the same.
I find this stuff fascinating. I hope some of you do, too.
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.
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.
