This week I’m going to be testing for my second degree black belt (the rank of “ee dan” in Korean) and I feel compelled to create a post, if only to remind myself of how I’ve trained, what I’ve learned, and how I’ve changed since earning my first degree in February of 2019. As I look back on the last four years, I would place my efforts in four categories: Technique, Fitness, Self-protection and for lack of a better title, History and Philosophy.
Technique
Not long after earning my first degree (the rank of “il dan” in Korean), I really began to notice how little attention many of the students at my dojang, especially the younger ones, paid to technique. Here I use the term technique to mean the punches, kicks and blocks, specific to our style. At times their execution of a technique was so sloppy as to make it difficult to know what they thought they were doing. This was especially apparent while watching them perform their hyung, or as we call them at the dojang, “patterns”.
A pattern is a long sequence of techniques designed to teach a kind of flow between them. If techniques are the “words” of a particular martial arts style, then a pattern is a “sentence” and not every sequence of words makes a nice, flowing sentence. Every belt rank is associated with its own pattern and the length of the sequence, as well as the difficulty of the techniques involved, increases with rank. Even two relatively simple techniques executed in isolation can become more difficult when executed sequentially.
I’ve always felt that having a black belt should mean that one has achieved a certain mastery of the techniques. How can one understand a style without understanding its techniques? And by understanding I don’t mean solely in the cerebral sense of being able to describe a technique with words. I mean understanding a technique with your muscles and joints and in the context of your own body with its own history and limitations. I committed to a goal of arriving at my ee dan with good technique.
My striving for good technique started by paying deep attention. I was, and still am, constantly asking myself questions like:
- Do I feel balanced or awkward? Are my feet too close together? Am I over-extended and leaning too far one direction or another?
- Is there a way to move or position myself so as to gain more power?
- Is there a way to move or position myself so as to improve the range of motion?
- What is my limiter for this motion? Muscle strength? Flexibility? Balance?
I jotted notes in my training log regarding trouble spots and made a point of focusing more on those areas during subsequent training sessions.
At times I filmed myself and analyzed the videos. I found videoing myself to be invaluable in identifying flaws that were otherwise completely invisible to me.
Sometimes I would practice certain troublesome motions in slow motion to further identify the weak points and develop the necessary muscle strength, control and balance. For a while I practiced patterns while blindfolded in an effort to improve my balance and to feel the position of my body more.
In my basement training space, I started training with pieces of tape on the floor to help me achieve more precise foot positioning. I spent a long time with a single long piece of blue painters’ tape on the floor, trying to learn to throw a rear leg swing kick, land in a side stance and not overshoot the landing, and then launch into a spinning kick of some sort. Foot position also factors into patterns in that, depending on the pattern, feet come back to the same positions during the pattern and also end where they start. I put small pieces of electrical tape at the starting foot positions for patterns and am always conscious of where my feet are supposed to be while I practice the patterns.
Finally, progress simply isn’t possible without a lot of repetition. For example, like many people, I found the reverse swing kick to be very difficult to learn. For a time, I set myself a goal of doing tens of reverse swing kicks every day until I felt that I’d developed a respectable reverse swing kick. I lost track of how many reverse swing kicks, left and right side, front and back leg, I threw.
After a time I came to recognize certain elements of the style that I didn’t agree with, and also recognize details that were missing and should be included. I made a conscious choice to tweak my techniques according to these insights. It was during these periods that I really began to understand this famous quote from Bruce Lee.
Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own.
－Bruce Lee
I credit the COVID pandemic for giving me the opportunity to work on my technique as much as I did. When, for months and months on end we were not training at the dojang, I was making an effort to train consistently in our basement. This gave me the flexibility to choose what to focus on, to focus on it longer, and to focus on it so much stronger than is possible when attending class several times per week.
Fitness
I’ve long been frustrated, when training with a class at the dojang, at how winded I can become after a few executions of patterns, compared to the majority of other students in the class. It’s easy for me to feel bad about myself for being the “old guy” who’s always last to finish his pattern or speed drill. Part of this disparity is due to trying to maintain good technique; it requires substantially more effort, at least before some mastery is achieved, to perform proper technique than it does to perform sloppy technique. Certainly another part is due to my age; it’s hard for even a relatively fit man in his 50s to compete with a teenager. Finally, I don’t think genetics are on my side. As I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, I’ve always been better at endurance sports. Martial arts, on the other hand, is more similar to HIIT training － bursts of high intensity effort separated with short recovery intervals.
I’ve also noticed that heat seems to sap my strength more than it does others and maybe more than it did when I was younger. Our school only wears a heavy, formal uniform top during testing events and belt ceremonies. This makes testing during the summer months even more challenging.
I’m not going to lie. The thought of performing alternating patterns and speed drills for the first hour of an ee dan test has sort of terrified me for years now. And let’s not even think about the sparring and air shield drills that follow. There have been many times when I’ve been convinced, thoroughly convinced, that there was no way that I would be able to complete an entire ee dan test. Or at least, to complete it in a way that meets my personal standards.
I’ve worked hard on this aspect of fitness in the last four years, and I again have COVID to thank for creating the circumstances for real progress. Three times a week I train a full set of patterns (there are 18 by the time one is ready to test for ee dan), trying to maintain a sustainable pace. In the last several months I’ve dialed up the difficulty by adding speed drills into the mix, interleaving a full set of patterns and speed drills. I’ve clung to the belief that with every session, and perhaps in proportion to the pain, my HIIT fitness improves by some small amount and that after months and years, lots of small amounts will sum to something substantial. Something noticeable.
For the last year I’ve also only trained while wearing my full uniform, trying to condition my body to better tolerate the heat. This has garnered some funny looks, and the occasional question, and I respond by telling people that I’m aiming to train under the same conditions that I’ll be testing under. My anecdotal evidence so far suggests that I am getting better at tolerating the heat.
Strength training with both free weight and bodyweight exercise has also been part of my routine for the past three years. I’ve written a bit about this elsewhere on this blog and its addition to my training has been at least partially motivated by the idea that it would improve my martial arts performance. And it has. I observed that not long after adding leg exercises in various forms, especially squatting exercises, my thighs didn’t burn nearly as bad during the il dan orange pattern. Chest and shoulder exercises have improved my technical stand-up.
I’m now reasonably confident that during my test I’ll perform at a level that I’m satisfied with － or at least at a level that’s not embarrassing. It won’t be easy. It definitely won’t feel good. But it will be so much more than what I imagined several years ago would be possible.
Self-Protection
Around the time that I attained the rank of il dan, I started to think critically about the self-defense aspects of our art. It wasn’t that very senior black belts at our school(s) were saying things that didn’t seem true. In fact certain things they said, like the effects of the adrenal response, opened my eyes and gave me a place from which to start my research. But there was this sense, this unspoken implication, that in learning a martial art we were learning self-defense. This notion permeates many of our drills and is reinforced at times with anecdotes of people, some of them former students, using martial arts to defend themselves in a parking lot or alley.
My research, which progressed over the course of a couple of years, led me to understand how so many martial arts practitioners confuse martial arts, self-defense, and combat sports. As Ian Abernethy so clearly explains, these three things are separate but overlapping disciplines. Through my research I also learned that I should expand my concept of “self-defense” to include among many other things, the reading of people, places, situations and that the collection of those things might better be termed “self-protection”. I learned that fighting is what happens when you’ve made a string of mistakes in avoiding a conflict and now the only option left to you is violence.
It was during this period that I discovered combatives, a collection of techniques intended specifically for self-defense situations. These aren’t secret techniques － they have a modern history of being taught to military recruits because they don’t require years of practice or a preternatural flexibility to perfect and they’re intended to end confrontations quickly. My interest in this has deepened and this summer I was really fortunate to be able to travel with Sebastian to Virginia and take a combatives class from Kelly McCann and his crew.
I consumed books and online courses devoted to explaining the various types of violence, learning about social and asocial violence. I read books on the psychology of violence, predators, and victims. I read about where violence occurs, where predators hunt and how they select their prey. And importantly, I learned how to not present as prey.
I began experimenting with my own behavior. I worked on getting more comfortable making eye contact, holding a person’s gaze long enough to be confident but not so long as to appear creepy or aggressive. I practiced breaking that gaze in a way that did not communicate subservience. Based on my reading of other research, I experimented with different ways of walking and standing that subtly, and probably mostly unconsciously, signal to others a confident command of one’s situation and environment or alternatively, allow one to fade into the background.
Treating it almost like a game, I also practiced becoming more observant of people and places when out in the world. I took note of people in parking lots, what they were doing, where they were headed and identified the so-called “natural lines of drift”. I would try to describe how they were walking and holding themselves and assess how engaged they were with their surroundings. Overweight or fit? Walking fast or slow? Looking around or at the ground or worse, at their phone? In stores, hotels and theaters I made a point of locating the exits and thinking about exit routes. In restaurants I would glance around at the patrons just to see if any stood out in some way. Regulars? Groups? Alpha males? These games were never motivated by fear or paranoia, there were simply ways to make something like an ordinary trip to the grocery store a little more interesting. And besides, it’s fun to train Jason Bourne-level skills. I’ve found that the practice has now almost become a habit.
I also informed myself about the relevant self-defense laws in my home state, namely the Castle Doctrine law and the Stand Your Ground law, and discovered that there is a language that one should use when describing a violent encounter to law enforcement offices that centers on the concepts of Intent, Means, Opportunity and Preclusion. I began to wonder if these ideas are ever discussed in martial arts schools.
For a short period, our dojang’s owner and chief instructor entertained the idea of a certificate program for our students which would introduce the concepts I’ve mentioned here, and a few more. I created and shared a detailed outline consisting of around ten modules with suggested exercises to develop and test skills. Unfortunately interest waned and it was never developed into a complete program.
History and Philosophy
The last category in which I deepened my knowledge on my way to ee dan was in martial arts history and philosophy. I wanted to understand where martial arts, as a majority of people practice them now, come from. What made something a martial art as opposed to just a fighting system. Was I a martial artist? (I would not have said so, though I’m not completely sure why.) I had seen phrases like “warrior mindset” associated with martial arts. What is that and do I have it?
I learned that, according to at least some sources, the creation and development of Shaolin Kung Fu in China was motivated by a desire to improve the fitness of meditating monks. Fighting was a secondary concern. For the styles that took root in Okinawa and Japan, there was a period during which soldiers started teaching civilians, using the practice of techniques that originated in a martial context as a vehicle for developing and improving a person’s integrity, discipline, and grit. This was the time during which the “bujutsu” systems, skills intended for use only in battle, gave birth to the “budo” or “martial way” systems. Karate-Dō My Way of Life, the autobiography of Gichin Funakoshi, the founder of Shotokan Karate, was a particularly interesting view from the 1800s.
It would have been nigh impossible to avoid reading something either authored by, or written about, Bruce Lee and his philosophy, given how prolific he was and how deeply he thought about these things. I was inspired by the story of his fight in Chinatown, Los Angeles, California, arranged to settle his dispute with the other Kung Fu masters over his teaching of Kung Fu to non-Chinese people. Even though he won that fight, he was deeply disappointed with his own performance and that experience set him on the path to developing Jeet Kune Do. I love the questioning of assumptions and the evaluation of facts against one’s own experience that lies at the heart of Jeet Kune Do.
Among the books about martial arts philosophy that I read, Bruce Lee’s ideas resonated with me the strongest. I especially benefited from his description of our relationship to challenges in life. He believed that it was not the size of the obstacle, the size of the challenge, that’s important. We have to stop thinking like that. The important part is our response to the challenge. A clear understanding of this is perhaps the first and most important step to overcoming obstacles in life and growing from the experience.
From my study, I feel that much of the “personal development” aspect present in the early days of teaching budo has been lost in many modern schools. After opening class with a recitation of the school’s pledge, little, if any, time is spent on this, especially when it comes to adult classes.
Conclusion
So there it is － something of a summary of my path from il dan to ee dan. I’m mildly anxious about how I’ll perform during my test this week, and the “mild” together with the “anxious” are probably healthy. It won’t be fun. It will be exhausting. But as I reflect on it now, I see that regardless of my performance, I feel a certain satisfaction with the integrity that I’ve shown the process and with my own response to the obstacles along the way.