SW Portland Martial Arts Blog

For most of us, it’s difficult to take criticism. We’re wired to take it personally. Clear pointers about technique get garbled inside our heads and we turn them into moral judgements. It makes the already challenging task of trying something new even more difficult, maybe impossible.

How do we solve this dilemma? As usual, there’s no perfect answer, and there’s not even a single answer, but there are some ideas that over the long haul appear to work for most people. As coaches, we try and deliver corrections in technique as just that – about the technique and not about you as a person. We’re trying to point out a more effective way, not to deliver a moral judgement. As a student, try and take corrections as steps to efficiency, rather than personally.

Yeah. Great don’t take things personally. So easy, right? Wrong. After all, it is you making the mistake, right? And since it is you doing the thing wrong then the responsibility falls on you and therefore you are wrong. Maybe. Even if it your brain convinces you that this is the true chain of consequences, it doesn’t mean you are wrong in some grandiose sense. It means you’re wrong about this one technique and (more importantly) you can fix it and be right.

Troublingly, even if you correct something in practice, you’ll almost certainly find you keep doing it wrong when the pressure increases. So it goes. It takes a long time to ingrain good (or bad) habits. Be patient with yourself as a student and we promise to be patient as coaches. Together, we’ll improve your technique and heck, maybe it’ll get easier to be wrong (and correct the problem) in the future.

It’s much easier in the grappling arts to tell when you’re out of position: you’re on the bottom, getting crushed, and unable to move. Sure, it’s not always super obvious, but after a couple weeks of training, folks generally figure out which positions are the bad ones and they start connecting them with getting tapped out.

In striking, it’s a more difficult thing to see. You get hit, and it just seems like maybe the other person is faster or better or both (and maybe that’s true.) So how do you get someone out of position in striking?

Alex showed us one way yesterday: alternating targets. We learned a combo that alternated between the body and the head, thus forcing our partner to continually shift their defense until they were out of position. Once they were out of position, we threw a strike or kick to where it would be most difficult for them to defend.

Interestingly, this got me thinking that though being out of position in grappling seems more obvious than striking, it is actually achieved in much the same way as the combo we learned yesterday. If you can get your partner’s defense bouncing between two or more possible threats, that is often when a sweep or reversal or another submission presents itself.

The final conclusion then might be: if you can get your partner’s defense to shift between two or more possible attacks, they are more likely to put themselves out of position and open an opportunity for you to deliver a clean attack.