Cutting Fast!
Getting Lucky?

Hello Blast Reader,

This is Master Mikel Steenrod of Water Mountain Martial Society.  You subscribed to this newsletter at www.arnisgear.com or at www.h2omt.com . 

In my usual fashion, I want to address 2 topics in this issue of the Blast.  The first is something for sword enthusiasts.  The second is a vital training tip.

Many people, when they initially subscribe to The Blast figure that I am going to be talking about physical technique, and that presumption would be correct with most martial arts newsletters.  Such conversations are harmless for all involved, because for the most part, they don’t result in any sort of significant behavioral change while remaining modestly interesting.  What I’ve generally found is that people as a collective have an endless appetite for things that elicit an emotional response, but that don’t actually do anything.

Well, that’s not the path to self-improvement and not the path to making the type of tremendous training gains that people have come to expect from their dealings with me.  Frankly, there are a lot of teachers that will help you sit on your butt, and make you feel better about doing absolutely nothing.  I’m not that guy.  That is not the design of Water Mountain.

If you want to do well in any of the things that define your life, you need to learn to get your brain right.  The great benefit of kung fu and qi gong in general living is that you get immediate feedback about whether you have your head screwed on right.  It’s either there or its not.  You fail at what you’re setting out to do or you succeed.  If you fail, you can try again with little penalty.  Those trials let you work on getting your mind right so that the performance that is inside of you can get out.

That doesn’t come from talking about a particular punch, or the health benefits of a posture.  That comes from the nitty gritty of behavior.  That, my dear reader, is not safe to talk about.

Blade Speed and What it’s Good For!

First, let me say this.  While anyone can learn to be made competent with a sword, sword stylists are born.  If you want to read more about this argument, click the link to the WEAPONS PAGE here.  If you’re not a person that finds the sword interesting, then skip ahead on to How to Get Lucky.

Let’s set aside all the mythology of sword work and talk about the actual use of the sword, as if the sword were the latest in technology, and you needed to understand your relationship to the weapon and how to use it, because your life depended on it.  This is the approach I use in teaching.  I couldn’t give a crap about historical recreation.

The single most necessary physical sword skill to have is the ability to make a stable cut, at high speed, from rest.

There are basically two types of sword encounters from the battlefield and dueling:

1)      Opponent is instantly killed.

2)      Opponent must be fought, and there will be a clash.

Most people in battle will be #1.  They will not have any kills.  They will not block.  They will not be overwhelmed in a mighty battle.  They simply will be cut down instantly.  This happens to the #1s, because their opponents usually have a consistent advantage of a few tenths of a second in cut speed.  That advantage keeps the #1s from being able to launch a cut.

As my old teacher, Grandmaster Soon Jun, martial patriarch of the Soon clan, once said to me, “If you want to live, strike first.  Most will fall before you.  It is the easiest path to victory.”

For those of you who don’t know the basic physics of a cut, the tip of a blade moves faster than the base of a blade in most cuts.  For this reason, cuts are concentrated at the end of the blade. A fast cut speed using the tip keeps the blade from slowing when it enters the object being cut.  In this way the blade isn’t lodged in the target, and is at the ready for the next opponent.

This blade speed, if it is high enough, can hit more than one target with a single stroke, but to do so the sword has to not rotate (which will lodge the blade) when going through a target, and has to be extremely fast, because it will lose some speed (energy) with each target it passes through.

Being fast is being good.

How to Get Lucky

Funny enough, what I’m talking about in this section actually does fit the slang for “getting lucky.”  Often times, we look at success or failure as being the result of random events that bestow upon us the success or failure, because it was meant to be.

Yet, somehow “lucky” people usually are consistently lucky, and “unlucky” people are consistently unlucky.  We do see the same thing in courtship (a pretty word for people  *$&%), with those mating successfully usually doing so quite frequently, and those not, well, not.

How often have you heard the statement of being unlucky summed up as “It wasn’t meant to be.”  This is a statement that, to have training success and life success, you need to sponge from your brain.  If you hear this statement, run to the bathroom, lock the door, and gargle until any remnant of this thought is gone from you.  It is poison to your will and poison to everything it is to be human.  It is one of the single greatest slanders against humanity in existence.  Get it out.  Get it out as quick as if you were bitten by a venomous snake in the jungle, and you knew the venom would kill you.

The only thing that was meant to be is this: you were meant to be able to successfully deal within your personal world, and with yourself.  You came equipped with the hardware to do that.  You may not use it very well, but you came with that package.

Our success and failure is created by how our behaviors compel us to deal with our environment.  When there is a good match between the two, we succeed.  When there is a bad match between the two, we fail.

If we want to increase our successes, we modify our behavior or we change our environment.

We don’t EVER wait to get lucky or blame our failures on bad luck.  Blaming or crediting luck for anything keeps you from being in control of your destiny.

Have the courage to take the reigns, and then live honestly with failing and succeeding.  You will, by human nature, be driven to succeed more.  To undertake this task, you need only one thing: to believe that this is human power, and is inside of you.