The Role Of Competition In Budo

 

Final of All-Japan Judo Championships in 2007   Photo Copyright Gotcha2. Used under GNU Free Documentation License.

There is a continual discussion in budo about the importance of competition. The argument for competition has two prongs. The first is that you have to learn to perform techniques under stress, and competition is the best way to pressure-test technique.  The second is that you have to learn  to deal with the unexpected and the only way to do that is in a competitive situation. I agree  that you have to be able to perform under stress and that you have to be able to deal with the unexpected.  If you’re not learning to do things when you are stressed, and you’re not learning to deal with the unexpected, you’re not learning budo.

I’ve heard a lot of people expound on the stress benefits of competition. The desire to win ramps up the stress, and in judo or full contact karate, the fact that effective technique can hurt, and may even leave you unconscious, ramps it up further. Add the frustration that builds when your adversary prevents your technique from being effective and the stress level can get pretty high. You can certainly learn something about stress in competition.

I know that for most of the time I was competing I found competition stressful. I would get anxious and it would become harder and harder to stay still and not fidget as the match approached.  I had to learn to apply breathing and relaxation techniques in order to control the stress so I didn’t become tense and lose my ability to move flexibly and quickly. 

Once the match starts the tension can get worse. The more skilful the adversary, the more frustration and stress. It’s a quick check on students getting cocky about the strength of their technique. It is one thing to practice a technique on a partner who isn’t resisting, and another thing to try to throw someone who is trying to throw you. The experience of learning to flow from technique to technique is great. The dynamism and volatility of competition are excellent experiences for many people.

As Rory Miller so eloquently points out in Meditations On Violence, every training methodology includes a fail. That is, there is always a way in which what you are doing fails, and specifically doesn’t mimic the real world. In competition, it’s that fact that there are rules limiting what you can do, and what your partner can do to you. The possibilities are artificially limited so people can compete with a reasonable expectation that they will be safe and healthy at the end of the competition. Just think of all the techniques that are excluded. Or the protective gear that is worn. Then there is the referee who is there to award points, but also to make sure no one does anything harmful.

This is a safe environment to train in. And the stress level never gets too high because we know it is safe going in. As much as it is a pressure-testing experience, the fact that we don’t have to worry about someone taking a shot at our throat or eyes, or attempting to destroy our knees or elbows means that we’re not experiencing anywhere near the pressure of dealing with someone who genuinely wants to harm us.

There are different kinds and levels of stress. I’ve never seen evidence that competition can rise to anywhere near the level of stress and fear and adrenaline dump that a confrontation outside the tournament area and outside the tournament rules produces. When someone swings a knife at you, the feeling in your gut is quite different from the one when someone is trying to pound you with the ground or choke you unconscious in a tournament. The fear and the adrenaline hit you  much harder. That doesn’t make competition useless; we just shouldn’t think it can do something it’s not specifically designed for.

 

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One of the best things about competition is that it is fun. We enjoy it, whether it’s a friendly match in the dojo where no one is keeping score, or it is a national level tournament, we enjoy competition. Competition is so much fun that people will come back to train again and again just so they can have the fun of competing, both in tournaments with medals and trophies, and in friendly bouts in the dojo. Competition is a great motivator for many people, but it’s not combat preparation and we shouldn’t pretend it is. 

There are lots of ways stress can be induced in training. I know the most stressed I’ve ever been in the dojo wasn’t some sort of competition. Some of the most intense stress I’ve experienced was the day my teacher swapped out his wooden sword for a metal one during jodo practice. I’ve made plenty of mistakes during practice that resulted in me getting whacked with a wooden weapon. Some of the bruises have been spectacular. When Sensei swapped out the bokuto for a metal blade though, I broke out in a sweat. If I screwed up, the consequences could have been a lot more severe than a nasty bruise. 

Other ways stress can be induced: Train into exhaustion. Ramp up the speed. Increase the intensity. Yes, even compete. Don’t imagine that any of these comes close to combative stress. The closest I’ve come to feeling stress equal to what I’ve felt in real confrontations was in kata practice. Paired kata training as is done in koryu bugei has consistently generated the most stress-filled training I’ve done. It can range from very gentle walk-throughs to adrenalin rush inducing intensity. It all depends on what your partner is giving you.

My koryu teachers have never given me more than I can handle, but they have been more than happy to give me more than I thought I could handle. They ask me to put as much as I can into practice, and sometimes that includes dragging me past the edge of what I perceive as my ability into frightening new territory. That’s part of their role. In koryu the senior is responsible for taking the losing role. It is the senior's job to control the speed and intensity of training so the junior gets as much from the training as is possible.

One of the complaints that people make about kata training is that you know exactly what is going to happen. In good training that is, and isn’t, true.I was strongly reminded of that recently. I was working with a senior teacher who would attack into any opening I left while doing the kata. I got whacked on the head with his fukuro shinai in places where it’s not called for in the kata. It was good kata training. He showed me openings I was leaving as I did the kata. In most instances I was too focused on one aspect of the kata and he attacked where my awareness wasn’t. 

Talk about inducing stress! My stress level went well above what I have felt in competition. It was a lot like randori because I never knew when he would spot an opening and fill it with his sword. Thank goodness it was a fukuro shinai; a bokuto would have left colorful bruises in a number of places.

This way of practicing kata is a great one, and it provides the same sense of uncertainty that competition does. In koryu kata practice, your partner is supposed to be trying to kill you. It makes sense that they would attack any opening you leave, not just move with the choreography of the kata. Uchi’s intention to attack you anywhere they can is important for making the kata practice as effective as possible. In koryu kata the role the junior person takes is the winning side, and the choreography of the kata on their side is the optimal set of techniques for the situation. That doesn’t mean the senior, in the role of uchi, should just go  along and forget about any attacks that are specified. In good kata practice, uchi is always looking for additional opportunities to attack. If the junior does a good job, there won’t be any. Since the junior is in the process of learning, they will make mistakes, leave openings, and get attacked. If you practice kata correctly, the planned actions are the logical ones. If you don’t, other options present themselves.  Or not.

The element of unpredictability and spontaneous action is what gives competition its real value, but the  stress level of competition isn’t any greater than many other exercises. Competition involves  learning to see openings and to close them. Learning to deal with unexpected attacks and how to prevent them. Learning to flow from one action to the next without pausing and without leaving openings. That’s where the real value of competition is. I just don’t think that it’s the only way, or even the best way, to learn these things. 

The rules that make safe competition possible also limit its value for learning to deal with spontaneous action. Too many options are artificially eliminated. Judoka get used to nothing coming at their faces and not having to worry about strikes. Karateka don’t have to worry about opponents closing with them. No one learns to deal with weapons attacks. No one learns to deal with asymmetrical situations where people are armed differently.

In competition everything has to be fair.  No one would show up for a competition where you don’t know if you or your opponent will be armed or unarmed, or even armed similarly. That wouldn’t be fun, and it wouldn’t be a fair comparison of skills. It would be much more realistic though.  And more dangerous!

I think that too much concentration on competition will render one blind to everything that is not allowed in competition. A little competition for the purpose of learning to be spontaneous and flow  isn’t bad. Too much focus on competition and you risk training the things that aren’t allowed in competition right out of your system. If you ignore all the stuff that isn’t allowed in competition, very soon you aren’t doing budo. You’re only doing sport. Kata training can fill in some of the gaps. Budo training doesn’t need competition to be effective.

 

Special thanks to Deborah Klens-Bigman, Ph.D., for editorial support.

Marti Malloy on Olympic Judo

Marti Malloy is the Olympic bronze medalist in Judo at under 57 kg.  She will represent the US again in Rio in a few weeks. She writes quite passionately about competing in judo here.
http://www.theplayerstribune.com/marti-malloy-usa-olympics-judo/

Budo Is Not Competition

Shiai. Photo Copyright 2015 Grigoris Miliaresis

Competition seems like the ideal place to test your budo. You can test your techniques against other people. Challenge your abilities. Polish your skills. See how you do under the pressure to win. Learn what it takes to be a winner. Learn how to be a winner with humility and grace. Learn to lose with honor and dignity.

Those sound like great benefits.  They are exactly the arguments used to support all competitive sports.

In martial sports competition, one person wins, and one person loses.

A problem with this paradigm that that most things in life, including conflict, are not games with clear winners and losers. There are far more situations where everyone involved can gain, as well as endless opportunities for everyone involved to lose. Life is not defined by a win/loss column.

When you see the world through the lens of competition, it’s a zero sum game. Someone wins and everyone else loses.  When you see the world through the lens of budo, it’s a non-zero sum world, just like keiko in the dojo. When we train together, you don’t have to get weaker and less skilled for me to become more skilled. We both grow in skill and strength and understanding when we train together.

Budo keiko offers many profound lessons that will not be found in the arena of competition, and defining things in terms of competition, in terms of winners and losers, misses a number of those points.  There a plenty of outcomes that aren’t covered by the idea that there is a winner and loser in every conflict.

I had this reinforced in a memorable incident.  I was teaching an evasion to a sword attack that involved stepping to the side and cutting up, under teki’s arm as it came down with the sword. I did my step to the right just fine and placed my cut under teki’s arm. I did so just at the moment her sword smacked me in the side of the head.  I had moved too early and teki was able to track me and adjust her attack.  The result was not a winner and a loser. It was two losers. Her attack would have killed me at the same moment my counter attack killed her. Not a very satisfying outcome. One fight, no winners.

That lesson that can come as a huge surprise if you’ve never focused on anything other than fighting in tournaments. Tournaments provided a very limited view of budo. They are safe, controlled duels. They follow rules. One person wins and one person loses. One of the problems with that arrangement is that in pretty much everything outside of competitive sports, nothing works out that cleanly.  Life is not clean and clear.  It’ messy and unfocused.

Remember that yin-yang symbol that is used to decorate so many dojo? Inside the black half is a drop of white. Inside the white half is a dollop of black. Things aren’t clear cut. In my example above, we both achieved the basic objective, and we both would have died doing it. Sports competition can give students of martial arts just as skewed a view of martial arts as watching action movies can. In competition, there are two options. You win and your opponent loses, or you lose and she wins.  Simple.

In real conflict there are lots more options. All parties end up so badly damaged that there are only losers. One side decides to give in for the sake of avoiding the physical conflict. All parties decide that the fight isn’t worth the risk and everyone goes off in a different direction. The police show up and everyone involved is arrested. There are a whole range of possibilities beyond “I win,” or "I lose."

Budo practice teaches a not just about fighting, but about recognizing all those other possibilities. I’m not going to say competition is entirely bad. It's great fun, and it gives people with too much energy a way to stay focused on something. I’ve seen that as a young judoka. The weakness is that we focus far too much time on competition and forget about the rest of the path. The lessons of competition seem tiny compared to all the other lessons that can be learned on the journey that is the study of budo. That in itself may be the first lesson.

It’s a journey, not a destination. Winning a match or tournament doesn’t mean much in the context of that journey.  You’re still trying to learn the lessons. When you start to study budo, and not just a martial sport, you’ll discover that there is a whole lot more to your budo than the stripped down set of techniques allowed in competition.  

I’ll start by using Judo as my example. Competitive judo prohibits strikes, a range of throws that endanger your opponent, a few throws where you can endanger yourself, gripping techniques that you can hurt yourself doing or that provide an unfair advantage, grips below the belt (don’t ask why, I still don’t understand the IJF explanation), attacks to any joint beside the elbow, throwing with an armlock, and numerous other things.

Even though these things are all banned in formal competition, most of them are part of the formal syllabus of Kodokan Judo.  Just take a look at the two videos below.

The Kodokan Goshin Jutsu and the Kime No Kata are both part of the Kodokan syllabus. Almost nothing in either kata could be used in competition. If you focus on competition, you miss all the rest. Competition presents too small a slice of the possibilities that are budo, and the possibilities that are life. In life there are lots of options beyond simple win or lose scenarios. Business people spend much of their time trying to fashion what they call win-win agreements, so that everyone involved gains something in the exchange.  They don’t always work out, but just being able to try for something like that seems a lot better than scenarios like a match where one person wins and one loses, or worse, tournaments, where there is one winner, and there are many, many losers.

Often the ideas of learning to be a gracious winner and accepting defeat honorably are mentioned as benefits of competition.  The weakness I see here is that outside of organized competitions, there are almost no opportunities to practice this lesson. Life doesn’t consist of of competitions with clear winners and losers. There are other lessons that I find useful every day though. The best people to be around aren’t the ones keeping score.  The best people to be around are the ones who don’t keep score. The ones who try to, in the words of Bill and Ted,  “be excellent to each other.”

One lesson of competition is to keep score.  The lesson of budo practice is that there is no score.  We all improve together.  I can’t improve my skills without your active support, and you can’t improve yours without my active support. If you and I are busy trying to keep score of who learns the most techniques, or who gets the most reps, or anything else, we’re not providing the mutual support necessary to truly improve our skills. That kind of practice is a lot more like life than any competition.

The other, discreet lessons of budo apply beyond the dojo as well. Budo teaches numerous lessons about ma’ai and timing. Ma’ai isn’t just for combat, and neither is timing. I haven’t gotten to all the places where an understanding of the principles of structure will serve you. Understanding ma’ai is about understanding the weakness or strength of a particular position relative to those around you.  It’s a fluid, constantly changing as the situation changes, even if you don’t move at all.  

Timing is important in whatever you do, from gardening to business. Structure too applies outside the arena of competition, mostly in place where being aware of strong, stable structures and weaknesses that can undermine them are critical to not getting hurt in physical, or not-physical, ways. Timing needs to be considered for anything you want accomplish, in or out of the dojo. Too early and you give away your objectives and strategy. Too late is, well, too late.

One of the most critical lessons of budo practice is that it’s OK if you don’t master these lessons today.  The goal isn’t to master anything thing right away.  In budo there is no illusion that we will ever perfect anything. We learn that there is no goal to reach. The point of budo is to improve a little bit every day. To be better today than yesterday, and be better tomorrow than you are today. This isn’t a goal because a goal is an endpoint, a place to get to and stop. With budo, there is no endpoint.

What you do every day is more important than what you do during any 5 minute match. It doesn’t matter what the match is.  Dr. Ann Maria DeMars is a former world champion judoka.  Let that sink in.  World champion. At some point, she was the best on the planet at what she did. Yet now she can write about how she completely forgets having done that. Whatever we do, it will quickly be in the past, and we can’t live there. Life is a journey, not an event. Each day we have to continue that journey.  With competition, we focus on the events and an artificial concept of a winner and a loser. With budo, we focus on the journey, of moving forward and improving every day. Working with our teachers and seniors and partners and juniors so we all are a bit better today than we were yesterday, and so tomorrow we’ll be a bit better than today.  We don’t stop at any event.

Competition is a limited view of the world. It’s a zero-sum game with clear winners and losers. Life isn’t a zero sum game.  Life is big and messy and so very unclear. In life, winning and losing isn’t decided by a set of rules. It’s more like a fluid range of success, and that success is much more dependent on not keeping score than it is about winning points. You have to work with the people around you, your training partners, so you all succeed and improve together. If you aren’t better today than you were yesterday, that’s probably the closest thing to a loss. You succeed when you and your partners are better people tomorrow than you were today.

Competition In Budo: A Guest Blog by Kim Taylor

Every few years I seem to go through a crisis and start looking for the benefit of budo. I read all the latest papers dealing with the ethics and psychological benefits of sport and martial art and think about it quite a bit.
My attitudes never change much, I just need the reminding I think. I'll do a bit of thinking here on the idea of competition in budo if you don't mind. 

First, kids like competition. They move from play to competition as they head toward adolescence and I think that competition is a part of their breaking away from home. It's a part of asserting themselves as individuals, a way to separate themselves from "the other" by "making their mark". 

So we do the tournament thing because the kids like it and they start and stay in the art. So the story goes at least.
Gradings are the same, a way to separate from the pack, a way to distinguish oneself. Kids love grading.
So goes the thinking, and there's me organizing gradings to go along with the seminar coming up. The thing is, I don't teach kids and I haven't been one for a couple of years now. I don't like tournaments or gradings and I find that most of the adults I teach are of the same opinion. Why is that? I think one usually grows out of competition. Adolescence doesn't last our whole lives, at least not physical adolescence. The time of serious competition also spans a very short period. Steve Nash just retired from Pro Basketball at 41. I was stunned to hear that he had still been playing. No wonder he can hardly walk. 

Competitive sport, despite the hype, isn't very good at making better people. The research says so, don't take my word for it, hit Google Scholar and read. Sport, be it martial (kendo, judo, MMA) or otherwise is about playing to the rules, beating the other guy and winning. It's really not about getting along with everyone, cooperating (except maybe with your team if it's a team sport) or dealing with real life... well maybe modern business where we must crush the competition and win that corner office. (What ever happened to being a good craftsman and selling stuff we make to people who actually need what we make?)

A martial art is, at it's heart, about life and death, it doesn't exist in a separate "playspace" like sport, it's connected to some primal stuff that goes pretty deep into our brains, fear and anxiety and stress and most of what we pay doctors to fix these days. Cooperation in the martial arts is absolute, except during the competitive parts. Training is cooperative, the attacker is the instructor, the defender is the student and the attacker never competes, only offers challenges the student can answer. Was it ever any other way in combat? We don't want to defeat our fellow soldiers, we want to have the best guy we can have at our side. If his shield collapses we pay the price too. We don't select soldiers for their fighting ability, we select for the ability to survive the training, then we train them. 

But we compete on the battlefield don't we? The politicians may think so, they may be playing the "Great Game" of empire or, nowadays, getting elected, but the soldiers only ever survive or die. They aren't playing to win they are fighting to live. There is a difference despite the confusion of metaphore and reality in the news broadcasts. 

One of the core benefits of the sword arts is the kata, and I am beginning to believe that's in the final move, the witholding of the killing blow. Kata is only ever cooperative, it's about moving together to higher levels of sensitivity and it's about the final sacrifice of the attacker (uchidachi) and the witholding of the blow by the defender (shidachi). What I guess I'm saying is that the closest sport comes to this is the coach, but coaches are focused on technique for winning. A focus on technique is constricting, not creative. You don't look for new ways to win at a sport, find one and the rules committee makes a new rule against it. You look for ways to exploit those rules, which is not very creative. Finding a new way to survive a sword strike? You have to be a pretty strict cultural-artifact type not to appreciate that. 

To make a kata-based art into a competitive sport is not something I can get behind, no matter how many kids we can attract to the classes by doing it. Performing a kata to win a medal is... a waste of good training time even if you're the most enlightened competitor out there. A full day of tournament with ten minutes of waving the sword around is not good time management. 

Kendo is a sport, let's admit it. The ZNKR spends large amounts of energy trying to fight that opinion and they declare the benefits to society and world peace, but when it comes down to it, the most expensive line item of most national kendo organizations is the team they send to the world championships. It's a real problem for the organization because the kids who are competing are driving the sport in one direction (they just wanna have fun) and the old guys are forever pushing back. I'm not alone in my concerns over competition being somewhat opposed to the benefits of budo. 

And grading? Colin Watkin sensei, Shihan of the Kage-ryu has explained the grading system to us few students. There is none. Your "grade" is survival on the battlefield.
OMG, so does 3dan mean that I "mostly" survive a fight? 

Musashi had 60 duels from age 13 to 27 and won them all. His own assessment was that he was lucky or they were kind of poor swordsmen. He spent the next half of his life trying to figure out how he could improve. 

Good enough for me, I'll leave the competition to the kids.

Kim Taylor
Mar 26, 2015 http://sdksupplies.com/

Training Hard And Training Well Are Not The Same Thing

We want to get the most out of our training.  We look up to people who train hard and constantly push themselves.  It seems obvious that the harder you train the better you will be.  In judo we respect the people who train harder, with more intensity than anyone else.  All that sweat dripping on the mat has to mean something, doesn’t it?

I was practicing piano and one of my weaknesses there struck me as identical to problems most of us have in the dojo practicing budo. All practice is not equal.  Some kinds of practice give far superior returns on the time and effort invested than other types of training.  Poor training habits and techniques waste time.  Worse, they can lead to ingraining bad habits and techniques which actually make us worse at what we are studying than we were before the training

I was practicing some etudes (French for, get this, kata) that are fundamental exercises for training the fingers on the piano.  These are the boring exercises everyone rushes through so they can get to the good stuff, the real music, the real budo.  Music etudes are like kihon waza practice in budo.  These are the fundamental movements that you have to practice beyond the ability to do them properly, beyond the ability to do them properly without thinking about them, to the point where you can’t do them incorrectly.

Etudes for piano : « FuseesLiszt » by Franz Liszt — Travail personnel. Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FuseesLiszt.JPG#mediaviewer/Fichier:FuseesLiszt.JPG

The tricky part is practicing them correctly in the first place so you don’t develop bad habits that slow you down later.  The first, most common, and biggest mistake with etudes and kihon waza is to treat them as mindless, boring exercises.  These exercises teach your body and mind the most critical foundations of everything else you will do.  If you try to rush them, or try to avoid thinking about them by thinking about your laundry or your job or your friends while doing them, you will likely be doing them wrong, and drilling this wrongness into your bones.

To do basics correctly as a beginner, you have to think about how you are doing them.  When you have stopped being a beginner, you probably don’t have to think about the basics when you are doing more advanced things, but when you are practicing the basics you still need to think about them.  If you don’t, you risk letting mistakes and poor technique slip in.  You also miss all the benefits that come from mindful practice. Be aware of what you’re doing.  As you are practicing basic techniques, look for things that can be improved.  In 100 repetitions you’ll be lucky if you have 10 that you love.  You’ll also be lucky if you only have 10 that you hate.  The rest will be somewhere in between.  The goal is to be aware of every repetition and to try and drag your worst reps up to the quality of your mediocre ones, and the mediocre reps up to the level of the best.  Like all of budo, this is a never ending activity, since as soon as you improve, you’ll start trying to reach a higher level.

Another pitfall on the practice path is rushing. If you’ve ever heard a young (or in my case not so young) musician rush through a section of piece, you’ve heard how wrong rushing can be.   Don’t rush your practice, even if you don’t have much time. Rushing through things is worse than not practicing. If you don’t practice, you don’t improve, but you also don’t pick up bad habits. If you rush something you are doing it at the wrong speed, which is just wrong. If you don’t have a lot of time, just do what you have time to do properly. When you rush, correct form is only the first thing that is lost. You also sacrifice the rhythm and feel of proper technique, and you lose the awareness of what you are doing. In this sort of situation, you’re training can only move backward as you reinforce bad form, bad timing and poor thought.

One of the most popular parts of Judo practice is also one of Judo practice’s biggest weaknesses. Randori, or Judo style sparring, is fun, so much fun that often students would rather do this than work on their basics. There are lot of things that can go wrong with randori though.  The first problem is all that fun. We are all susceptible to this one. It’s easy to spend all our time doing the fun parts of training, whatever it is, and neglect the parts that don’t grab our attention and gratify our hearts. This is true in all arts, even in koryu budo where there is very little sparring type practice. There are some kata that are just more interesting, and others that frustrate me until I am ready to scream because I just never seem to get them right.  

One particular form this trap takes is practicing what we are good at. We enjoy practicing things we are good at much more than the parts that we haven’t mastered yet. I love doing harai goshi  and tai otoshi  in judo because I do them better than anything else. That’s exactly why should limit my practice of them though. The fact that I can do them better than anything else should tell me how much more I need to be practicing everything else. Spend most of your time practicing what you aren’t good at. That’s where you’ll improve the most.

The second problem with randori and other sparring practices is the tendency for people to go faster and faster as the randori session continues. Randori is a form of practice, not a competition to see who is better. People usually forget this point within 10 seconds of the start of a session. As soon as you stop thinking about randori or sparring as practice and start treating it as another sort of competition, it’s practice value plummets. You stop trying your weaker techniques that you should be polishing, and switch to your favorite techniques. People also start getting defensive because they don’t want to lose. In judo this means all sorts of bad postures and muscling to prevent throws. Instead they should be working on ingraining good posture and movement which will allow them to execute good, effective technique.  

The third problem I see is that people don’t go into randori with a plan to use it to get better. Go into a randori session with a plan for what you want to practice and improve. Don’t worry about winning and losing. It’s practice, so you getting better is what constitutes winning, not beating the other guy. If all you do is worry about winning, you’ve already lost the chance to improve, and worse, you’re likely to pick up bad habits in the effort to win. PIck a technique you need to work on and focus on finding where that technique fits in the movement. Or just work on how you move and sense your partner.  Take the time to develop an understanding how people move and react. These sorts of practices will make your budo much better, polish your skills and improve your fundamentals.  

 

 

Early 20th century randori

PIck a speed and intensity for your practice that suits the points you want to work on. Slow is great for some things. Fast and light might work better for polishing something like foot sweeps.  Think about what you want to get out of a randori or sparring session, and how you will have to train to get that. Don’t just rush in and throw everything you are working on to the floor.

When you go all out to win during practice, the best you can hope for is that you win without developing any bad habits.  You don’t get any better. The worst that can happen is that you develop and ingrain bad habits from trying to win and not lose, while developing a counterproductive attitude about winning and losing.

Training at less than 100% intensity is tough, because we associate training hard with effective training.  This is true when you are working on cardio or strength development.  You only improve your physical condition when you push the limits of what you can do.  The more you sweat, the harder you work, the stronger you get and the more your stamina increases.

Hard training is great for strength, but what does it do for technique?

 When you are working on technique however, hard training gets in the way of good training and can turn into bad training. Adding muscle, as I keep rediscovering, does not improve technique. Oddly though, adding technical skill does make muscle more effective.  Interesting how that works. In order to make your physical strength as useful and effective as possible, you have to work at practicing without it. Once the technique is smooth and fluid, then you can try adding a little speed and strength at the proper moment for those to be useful. Strength and speed are not always benefits.  Using them at the wrong time is a waste of energy and can destroy the effectiveness of a technique.  I have lots experience at finding ways to blow a perfectly good technique, and adding strength or speed at the wrong moment is one of the best.

There’s one other area where the temptation to practice too hard is too frequently succumbed to.  That’s when practicing “real” techniques, like self-defense techniques.  The allure of doing the technique as hard and as fast as we can because this is for self-defense and we want to be sure it will work is a powerful one.  It’s even more irresistible than my wife’s cookies fresh out of the oven on the cooling rack when she’s left the room.  The problem with this is the same as in randori and sparring.  We can start relying on bad techniques and too much muscle and speed to get by.  This is fine until you run into someone with good technique, or even just someone faster or stronger.

A better method is to practice the technique at a very low intensity. As you get more comfortable at it, have your partner increase the intensity slightly.  When you can do the technique calmly and smoothly at the new intensity, have your partner step it up again.  Eventually you’ll be able to do the technique calmly and smoothly with your partner attacking as intensely as they can.  You’ll have good technique, and you’ll be accustomed to maintaining calm and relaxed, effective technique even under intense, strong attacks.  If you jump straight into working at high intensity levels it will take much longer to master the technique, if you ever do.  More likely you will develop bad habits to compensate for the skill you don’t have yet, which will just make developing the skill that much more difficult.

Train slow and work up to it.  It’s easy to practice things wrong.  The temptation is always there to start practicing harder, faster and more intensely than your technique is ready for.  Don’t give in.  Practice right so you truly learn how to do the techniques and master you art.

P.S.

This site had a very nice article about practicing from a musical perspective.

http://www.musicforbrass.com/articles/art-of-practicing.html