The One Secret that the Masters Don't Want You To Know!

by Mike

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Or we could just give it away because it's not skin off our teeth: the secret to being an awesome martial artist is nothing other than, you gotta work at it.

You'll need competent instruction of course -

Over at the Karate Thoughts Blog, Charles Goodin had something quite interesting to say on the subject of experts making things look easy:

The assumption is that the expert is doing something hard and is just making it look easy. In fact, because of his understanding and skill, what he is doing is easy... to him. He makes it look easy because it is easy.

In this case, easy is the result of doing something umpteen thousands of times. Perhaps owing to a mystical significance I'm not aware of, 2000 seems to be the magic number. To paraphrase Dave Sim, you have 2000 bad reps in you. Best to get them out of the way quickly so you can get on doing good ones. The best part of that is, you have 2000 bad jabs, crosses and hooks (or whatever) in you. Then you have 2000 bad jab, cross, hook combos in you. Then you have...you get the idea.

To toss another cliche on the pyre, "practice doesn't make perfect - practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect."

Perfect of course means different things to different people.

Mark Cuban points out that "the best equity is sweat equity."

Well, there's the secret...I suppose we can't sell it now. Ah, well.

Glossary: A miscellaney of slang related to being knocked out or beaten up

We've already discussed being rocked, KTFO and doing the fish dance, but here are a couple other terms that you might hear in relation to taking punishment.

Sparked out: A British term for getting knocked out, especially in spectacular fashion.

Slothed up:  One of the more unfortunate terms - being slothed up refers to being so severely beaten that one's face puffs up and they resemble Sloth from The Goonies. Example: "It was hard to watch Sakuraba getting slothed up against Arona."

Lit up: The person getting punched is the one being "lit up" - the person doing the punching "lights [the other fighter] up." Example, "Damn, Wanderlei got lit up by Belfort at Ultimate Brazil."

Talking to his [dead] ancestors: A semi-famous line announcer Michael Schiavello used to describe Mach Sakurai after getting lit up by Marius Zaromskis at Dream 10. Mach wasn't quite out, but neither was he lucid. He was definitely not in any condition to continue the match.

Glossary: Flash KO & Drop/Dropped & Slip/Fall

Drop: A fighter is dropped any time a they are hit and fall to the ground. Sometimes it's serious, sometimes not. Getting dropped will result in a knockdown in certain sports that use the 10 point must system (boxing, kickboxing, etc., although not often under MMA under unified rules....) will deduct a point from the dropped fighter's score for the round.

Many times a fighter will be hit while in a position of poor balance and pushed or punched and will fall. This is a result of their poor balance and not the opponent's aggression and will be ruled a slip or fall which does not count as a knockdown and therefore no point will be lost.

Boxers or kickboxers may refer to a Flash Knockdown where the boxer is dropped, but immediately stands back up, often before the referee can begin his count. Some rulesets require a standing 8 count in this event.

A Flash KO is a KO where one fighter is rendered insensate, but quickly regains his faculties. In an MMA match, a savvy attacker can often force a TKO stoppage by pouncing on the dropped fighter and throwing a flurry of punches. While the punches might not be effective in damaging the opponent, they have the effect of keeping the fallen fighter from regaining a good defensive position and intelligently defending himself, forcing the referee to stop the contest.

Your progress with the Visualization exercises?

Have you been working on the visualization exercises? If so, please let me know how you're doing.

I'm getting ready to draft up Part II and want to see where everyone is (parts 2 and 3 delve more into the Neuro-Lingustic Programming aspects and can get a little woo-woo but the parts are somewhat interchangeable, so I'll go where people's interest seem to lie).

Email me: mike at whywenothithard dot com.

That should keep the spambots at bay....

Online Interval Timer

The nice people at speedbagforum.com came up with a handy little interval timer. I set it to do some tabatas and for MMA rounds and, while the thing is pretty buggy on Firefox, it worked all right on Safari.*

Perhaps of limited utility since you need to have your computer present, but there are some sample tracks you can download and burn over here. 

* How many things can you say that about?