PACIFIC WAVE JIU-JITSU

6 Tips for Getting the Most Out of Martial Arts Conferences

Aug. 04, 2011 By: Lori Filed in: Psychology & Success
This weekend I’m teaching at a yearly martial arts conference put on by the Canadian Jiu-jitsu Union in Sicamous. I’ll be one of 6 different instructors from 3 different styles teaching at the event. Martial arts conference training is different from your every day classes at your home dojo. There are a number of things that can throw you off in terms of what you’re used to, so here are some tips I have for getting the most out of these things:

1. Be prepared. Bring an extra uniform, water bottle, first aid supplies, and any other equipment you might need for the weekend. Make sure you’re familiar with the schedule and locations so that you’re on time.

2. Introduce yourself. Tell your partner your name, who your instructor is, and what style you study. Smile and be friendly with people you’re training with, especially when training with someone with a lower belt. It’ll help put people at ease, plus you’ll start forging relationships with the greater Jiu-jitsu community.

 



3. Be aware of equipment differences. When you’re training with people who come from different dojos and different styles, they may use different types of uniforms or equipment. For example, people in Can-ryu Jiu-jitsu usually wear groin protectors so we make no bones about making contact to each other’s groins. That being said, people in other styles of Jiu-jitsu or even other dojos don’t necessarily wear groin protectors, or maybe only the men wear them while the women go bare. People might also wear lighter uniforms, which may not be able to sustain heavy abuse from throwing grips or other techniques that require the use of the gi. Communicate any differences that may be relevant to what you’re working on.

4. Be more cautious training with people you don’t know. There is always a few more risks involved in training with people whom you don’t know, especially when they are from different styles. Everyone has different levels of experience, different knowledge of techniques, different levels of pain tolerance, different injuries. So when you’re training with someone you don’t know, go slower and use more caution. Communicate openly, asking questions like, “Are you comfortable with this breakfall?” or “How is this level of contact, speed, etc?”.

5. Don’t overdo it. Martial arts conferences often put you in a position in which you might train more than you’re used to. Make sure you go at a pace you’re comfortable with. If you need to skip a session to let your body recover, by all means, do it. There’s nothing worse than coming away from a conference with an injury that could have been prevented with common sense.

6. Keep an open mind. When exposed to different instructors and styles, you’re going to be taught things that are new or completely different from the way you may have been taught at your own dojo. Keep an open mind and make an honest effort to learn. Allow your cup to be empty so that it can be filled. Besides, instructors rarely favour people who think they know it all and/or ask loaded or smart-alleck questions.
Have you any other tips you’d like to share? I’d love to hear them in the comments! 🙂

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Pressure Point of the Day: Lateral Femoral

Jul. 27, 2011 By: Lori Filed in: Motor & Pressure Points | Self-defense | Striking & Sparring

In the Police Pressure Point System developed by Professor Georges Sylvain, founder of Can-ryu Jiu-jitsu, the lateral femoral area is not actually a pressure point but a motor point. The difference is that an attack to a motor point can result in a motor dysfunction when struck, while a pressure point only causes pain. In the case of the lateral femoral area, when attacked, it can result in a motor dysfunction in the leg, making it difficult to stand on or use it. It can also be quite painful.

The lateral femoral is centred on the outside of the thigh, around midway between the hip and the knee, where the nerve is closest to the surface of the leg. The nerve affected is the lateral femoral cutaneous nerve (see area in red on the right in image below). Please note that the centre point in which the effect is greatest can vary from person to person, but a strike to this spot within about a 5″ diameter will still affect most people.

The best way to utilize this motor point for self-defense purposes is to deliver a penetrating strike to the area with a hard surface, such as a shin, knee, baton, etc. When striking, it is best to leave your strike on the target for 3/4 of a second (known as T.O.T. or “Time On Target”) to allow the fluid shock waves to transfer from the striking surface into the nerves for greatest effect. This is principle is generally true for all motor points.

Probably the most widely known way to attack the lateral femoral is used in Muay Thai and MMA, commonly referred to as a leg kick. The following video demonstrates a foolhardy boy who volunteers to take a full force leg kick, demonstrating the effects (*Note: If you find verbal profanity offensive, do not watch this video.)

In my early training days, when I was young and stupid, I didn’t think that a leg kick using the shin could be as effective as a knee strike. To prove the point to a Taekwondo black belt friend of mine, I volunteered to take a leg kick to the lateral femoral at 50% power. I didn’t fare much better than the fellow in the above video, hitting the ground like a sack of potatoes, gasping in pain. The full story of this embarrassing anecdote is in in chapter 10 of my book, Weapons of Opportunity.

In Can-ryu Jiu-jitsu, we teach the above leg kick, but we also like to use our knees to strike the lateral femoral. Knee strikes to the lateral femoral can be useful for law enforcement for controlling an unruly suspect that is causing trouble while being escorted. It’s nice because it is a low-level force option that doesn’t generally cause injury. That being said, my favourite self-defense technique that uses the lateral femoral is against a side headlock before the attacker gets it fully applied. See the video below for a quick demo (not our greatest film work, but you can get the idea).

If you decide to train strikes to the lateral femoral, or any motor point, it is safest to limit the amount of power you apply on your partners, otherwise you’ll find yourself short of volunteers to receive said strikes. We stick to around 5% power (or less depending on the partner) when training, enough that your partner will feel it when on target so they can provide feedback on target location, but not so much that they’ll experience lingering pain or difficulty using the leg for the rest of the night. This is the amount of power I used in the above video.

One last note on the lateral femoral is that it may not be effective against people who are drunk, high or in the middle of an adrenaline dump. When in these states the responses of the subject’s nervous system don’t always register the effects of strikes to this area. They may feel it after they have sobered up or have come down from their adrenaline dump, but that isn’t useful if you need the effects in the moment, so in this situation, it may not be a great choice.

What’s your favourite way of using the lateral femoral? Please feel free to share in the comments. 🙂

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My Top 5 Martial Arts Related Movies

Jul. 19, 2011 By: Lori Filed in: News & Reviews

Almost every martial artist has a list of favourite martial arts movies that they have a soft spot for, ones that excite and inspire them in their training, or psyche themselves up for an upcoming test or competition. I have my own top 5 list that I will share with you here (in no particular order). Bear in mind that these are not necessarily movies with the best fight scenes (I’d have to make a separate list for that), but ones that I actually enjoy watching from start to finish.

1. Supercop. This was the first Jackie Chan movie I ever saw. Being the first, it’ll always have a special place in my heart. It also features my favourite female Hong Kong action film star Michelle Yeoh, who manages to rival Jackie Chan in terms of martial grace as well as jaw-dropping stunts.
2. Mulan. Back when I first got my first degree black belt, I was asked to do a martial arts demo for the opening of this Disney film. I really didn’t know much about it until I saw it after the demo, but it really resonated with me as a woman having trained mostly with men. Some think Disney movies are a little cheesy, and perhaps that is true, but I really liked the spirit behind this movie and seeing a woman being more than the typical princess as is often the case in Disney children’s movies.
3. The Matrix. I was totally blown away by this movie the first time I saw it in the theatre. It is a favourite for almost every martial artist I know, especially ones that are programmers. I think people like it because many of them secretly wish they had some sort of latent special abilities that they just need to unlock. A lot of martial artists also like the zen-like philosophy that is peppered throughout the movie. And of course, the martial arts fights were pretty legendary at the time. I also like Trinity as a strong female lead (which led to my getting a Trinity costume for Halloween one year).
4. Hero. I first saw this movie back when I was doing a 3-week Taichi training program in Beijing. Not only is there a lot of traditional martial arts philosophy in this movie, it is rather beautifully filmed. The use of colour and scenery is spectacular, especially in the fight scenes. The fights themselves aren’t the most amazing I’ve seen in a movie, but the film as a whole is both breath-taking and inspiring.

5. Equilibrium. This movie is a new addition to my favourites, having only watched it for the first time a couple of years ago. I love this movie for its innovative approach to gun combat, which manages to blend it with the kind of movements and action we have come to love in martial arts fight scenes. The movie uses the concept of a gun kata, which I’ve never seen in any other film. Check it out:
The movie itself is a fairly standard 1984 style sci-fi movie, but the above concept just makes all the action so awesome to watch. Here is the official trailer if you’re interested:
Now over to you. What are your favourite martial arts related movies that you go to for inspiration? I’d love to add more to my own list. 🙂

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How to Tweak Your Side Breakfall for Really Hard Throws

Jul. 13, 2011 By: Lori Filed in: Throws/Takedowns
Some of my intermediate students are starting to deal with being thrown harder than they did when first started learning to be thrown with Judo style throws like major hip throws (O-goshi), shoulder throws (seioi nage), etc. Last night I took the time to emphasize a few tips that I have gleaned over the years through general experience, as well as a few that our Shorinji Kan brethren have shared with us. I’d like to share these tips with you in this blog.

1. Relax & breathe out as you fall. While we teach this point right from the beginning, you notice how important this becomes when you start getting thrown harder. Breathing out (similar to a heavy sigh) helps you to keep relaxed, which is better for dispersing the energy when you make impact. When you hold your breath or clench the muscles in your body, the energy stays contained in your body, making you feel the impact more.

2. Don’t grab the thrower. Everyone with a little experience knows they’re not supposed to do this, but when you start getting thrown harder, you sometimes revert back to an earlier state of learning, instinctively grabbing the thrower to minimize their speed of the throw. When you do this, it causes your legs to come around and hit the ground ahead of your body, preventing you from landing evenly so as to more fully distribute the impact. Rather than grabbing, you can add a little resistance by letting your arm drag subtlely across the thrower’s back, causing friction that can slow the throw down ever-so-slightly, giving you just that little extra bit of time to control your descent.

3. Keep your bottom leg straight. As you’re swung over someone’s body in a fast, powerful throw,the bottom knee can swing twist funny as you are swung through the air aggressively if you’re not careful. You can also tweak your knee on impact. This happens more often if you keep your bottom leg bent. By keeping your bottom leg straight, you engage all the muscles that stabilize the knee making it safer to take hard throws.

4. Keep your bottom foot engaged. Engaging your bottom foot serves to draw your ankle away from the ground while bulging out your outside calf muscle, which helps minimize the joint’s impact when you hit the ground. There are a couple of ways you can do this. Curl your toes back turning your foot away from the ground (like the foot position used in a side kick – see below). If you have bulbous ankles that tend to stick out more, however, you might find this method makes it worse. In this case, curl your toes back and stick out your heel (like the foot position used in a back kick).


5. Keep your bent knee pointing straight up on impact. If you are swung around hard in a throw and your knee is not pointing up, your knee will have a tendency to twist across your bottom leg, twisting your back and potentially crush your testicles (if you train without a cup). Keeping the knee straight up on impact reduces the chance of this. If you have a tendency of slamming your legs together when thrown, this technique will also help reduce the risk of that.

6. Catch more of your impact with your bent leg. By curling your toes back and pointing your foot with your bent leg (like the foot position used in a front kick), your bent leg can serve as a spring to “catch” more of the impact of the throw. As the ball of your foot touches down, it can be used to subtlely cut down the impact of the rest of your body. It can take time to develop this skill but it can make a big difference with practice.

 

7. Keep track of the ground. Keeping track of the ground as you’re thrown doesn’t make much difference when you’re thrown correctly, but it makes a huge difference you take a bad throw. By knowing where the ground is, you give yourself a chance to orient your body to it. If you’re in the midst of a bad throw, you can make adjustments in the air so you hit the ground the best way possible. It can take time for your body to learn to do this intuitively, but keeping an eye on the ground gives your body a reference point from which it can learn and adapt.

8. “Hit” the ground! As you gain more experience, you should strive to become more and more active in your breakfalling technique, rather than just letting yourself be thrown. Attack the ground with your body, aligning all of the above principles. Actively slap the ground with your breakfall arm with gusto. When doing side breakfalls (the ones used when being thrown from hip throws, shoulder throws, etc), this action helps to rotate the body in the air causing you to land more on your side rather than your back. This is an important aspect of honing your breakfalls for hard throws, because if you don’t “hit” the ground, the ground hits you.

 

In addition to these tips, be sure to let your instructor know if you are noticing any pain when you’re being thrown. It’s not supposed to hurt so don’t just grit your teeth and bear it. By letting your instructor know where it hurts they can give you feedback to fix your breakfall so you need not endure any pain. Got any further breakfall tips of your own? Please feel free to share in the comments. 🙂

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Celebrating Solitide: 6 Benefits of Taking a Personal Retreat

Jul. 06, 2011 By: Lori Filed in: Health, Nutrition & Safety | Philosophy & Culture
Last week, I went away on a personal retreat at the Saltspring Centre of Yoga (SCY), located on one of BC’s beautiful gulf islands. Getting away like this, by yourself, is a wonderfully healing for the body and mind. People go on personal retreats for a wide variety of reasons. Here are some of the benefits you can gain from taking one: (more…)

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8 Day-to-Day Habits to Improve Mental & Physical Health

Jun. 27, 2011 By: Lori Filed in: Health, Nutrition & Safety | Philosophy & Culture | Psychology & Success

Everyone wants to be healthy and there are a wide variety of practices that one can undertake to contribute to good health. Many people, after feeling their health take a downward slide over a period of weeks, months, even years, say to themselves, “I’m going to make some big changes and get healthy again!” But all too often, they try to do too many things or tackle such huge goals that the lifestyle is too difficult to maintain.

I wouldn’t say that I do everything possible to be as healthy as I can be, but I do have consistent routines that make it easy to maintain a consistent state of health that I’m happy with. I believe that if you really want to be healthy and stay healthy, you have to adopt day-to-day practices that aren’t overwhelming, ones that you can easily commit to maintaining. Then you can keep adding more as you successfully adopt them into your routine. (more…)

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The Difference between Panicking & Choking

Jun. 22, 2011 By: Lori Filed in: Psychology & Success | Self-defense | Tests & Preparation | Weapon Training & Defense

I’ve been on a bit of a psychology arc for the past couple of weeks on this blog. I started with a discussion on what it means to choke and followed up with a discussion on the importance of ‘will to win’ in the martial arts. This week I’m going to discuss what happens when you panic, which is often confused with choking. They are, in fact, very different animals.

As previously discussed, when you choke, you over-think your actions. You bring yourself back to a beginner’s mindset, mentally planning all the details of your moves. If you have moved beyond the explicit learning of a beginner and moved on to the higher level development of implicit learning, you lose your grace and fluidity of movement, as well as the quick reactiveness that comes from relying more on your intuitive mind.

Panicking, on the other hand, is quite the opposite. When it occurs, you stop thinking, reverting to base instincts. You experience perceptual narrowing, often focusing on one single thing. This is one of the reasons multiple attacker situations are so dangerous. People who don’t have experience dealing with these types of situations experience physical symptoms of perceptual narrowing, including tunnel vision and auditory exclusion. They focus entirely on one attacker and then are blindsided by the person’s buddies. Another common example is dealing with a knife attack. Even people with some training have been known to make the mistake of grabbing at the knife as it comes at them, focusing on the blade as the primary threat. There are, of course, better options, such as using physical barriers, creating space, controlling the arm holding the knife, etc. But when panicking, many people only see the knife, so that is what they try to grab, despite the inherent dangers of doing so.
I’ve also seen people panic on belt tests. For example, I might ask a candidate to do a technique again, telling them that they’ve done something wrong. The stress of this makes them panic, so what do they do? The exact same technique performed incorrectly in the exact same way of course! These people usually say afterward that they knew as they were doing it that they were making the same mistake again, but felt like they just couldn’t stop themselves.

So what can we do to prevent panic? Train lots… then train some more. Create training situations that allow you to experience higher levels of stress. Train to deal with multiple attackers. Train to deal with knives and other weapons. Though most dojos wouldn’t dream of doing it now for liability reasons (nor am I endorsing it as a practice), historically some dojos even used to use real knives in training (doing all movements slower and with far more control of course) just to give students the experience of dealing with the psychological stress that comes with a real knife.

People with a lot of experience tend not to panic, because when the stress suppresses their short-term memory they still have some residual experience built onto useful instincts they can draw on. The more you train, the less likely you are to panic. Choking is always a potential hazard though when stress rears its ugly head. While panicking and choking often look the same to the outside observer, they result from very different things going on inside your head. I hope this article helps you recognize the difference.

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How ‘Will to Win’ Affects Martial Artists

Jun. 13, 2011 By: Lori Filed in: Psychology & Success | Tests & Preparation

Last week, I discussed choking while performing in the martial arts and how it is very different from lacking ‘will to win.’ This week, we’ll take a closer look at ‘will to win’ and how it affects martial artists.

Having motivation or the “will to win” is an important aspect of martial arts, not simply ones with a competitive emphasis. In the context of self-defense, having the will to win is huge.

Having the will to win is being in a psychological state that can help push you past your usual barriers and summon up strength and/or creative use of your skills that you never knew you had in you. It’s what gives a mother the adrenaline dump to move a car that has her child trapped. It’s what makes a prisoner of war tell himself stories aloud to overcome the crippling loneliness and despair months, even years of human isolation. It is amazing what obstacles humanity can overcome when instilled with the will to win.

For a martial artist, will to win is what makes a woman able to fight off a much larger attacker by doing something completely unexpected with devastating effects. It’s what gives you the energy to keep fighting when completely exhausted. It’s what keeps you from freezing in fear when faced against a deadly weapon or multiple attackers.

People without will to win often defeat themselves before they’ve even begun. They see obstacles as insurmountable and, as a result, don’t try or make a lack-lustre effort that is doomed to failure. And when failure occurs, they use it to justify their negative judgement of the situation.

Most martial arts in some way try to instill will to win in its participants. Some do it through competition. Others do it through tests, be it formal tests like belt gradings, or training tests that put you under pressure, like martial arts circles or high stress sparring against multiple attackers. In either kind of test, you can be pushed to your mental and/or physical limits to help develop the will to win to push past tiredness, nerves, disadvantaged defensive situations, etc.

In our dojo, we don’t do competitions, but we do use both formal tests and training tests (like the ones previously described) to instill will to win in our students. In what ways are you pushed to the limits at your dojo?

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Choking While Performing in the Martial Arts (Or Anything!)

Jun. 07, 2011 By: Lori Filed in: Psychology & Success
Back in 1995, I tested for Shodan over the course of a 6-hour grading along with 20 or so other candidates. It was a long, exhausting test, but I performed well consistently as I proceeded through the test… that is, until I got to the portion covering basic yellow belt curriculum. Midway through that section, I was grabbed in a basic bear hug. I had defended against this bear hug countless times over the course of my years of training leading up to that moment. But at that moment, I paused. I paused just long enough to let the pressure of the situation sink in; all the people watching, all the high-ranking black belts overseeing the grading, the importance of the event. At that moment, the defense I had previously hardwired into my body wasn’t forthcoming. I started go through it in my head like I used to do as a complete beginner. Fortunately, the examiner overseeing this segment of the grading saved me from myself by yelling, “REACT!!!” And react I did. My hardwired skills took over and I didn’t have any other problems for the rest of the grading. (more…)

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Odour Management for Martial Artists

May. 24, 2011 By: Lori Filed in: Health, Nutrition & Safety

Summer is approaching fast and with the hot weather usually comes an increase in dojo odour issues at even the best schools. It’s always difficult to bring up hygiene problems with students directly; no one likes to be told that sort of thing. It’s embarrassing! So hopefully this article will help martial arts students and instructors drop hints indirectly via Facebook, Twitter, etc. (more…)

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