Are you livestreaming your martial arts classes? Attending or teaching online courses? Or totally reinventing your martial arts practice to respond to COVID-19 . . . ?
In the book Online Martial Arts – Evolution or Extinction, Matt Stait and I look at the possible outcomes of this sudden accelerated move to online training during the COVID-19 pandemic – and ask some difficult questions about the essence and the future of the martial arts.
But a (word) picture paints a thousand words! Here are seven powerful metaphors from martial artists across different styles, to describe how the current situation feels.
If you have any others to share, please let me know in the comments below!
1. 1984 and the “Physical Jerks” Lady
Joelle White – Karate
One of the funniest COVID metaphors I’ve seen is from Karate blogger Joelle White (A Beginner’s Journey), who declares that she has become:
A minor character from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. I am now the “Physical Jerks” lady on the telescreen because I lead an early morning online fitness class via Zoom.
In George Orwell’s novel 1984, every home (except for the “unimportant” lower classes) has a Telescreen. As well as providing entertainment like a TV, the ruling party uses them to spy on its subjects. The screens are monitored by the Thought Police. As part of the totalitarian regime, citizens are required to exercise along to the telescreen. This is how it feels . . .
Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had already appeared.
‘Arms bending and stretching!’ she rapped out. ‘Take your time by me. One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it! One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! …’
[…] ‘Smith!’ screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. ‘6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! That’s better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.’
A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston’s body. His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away.
[…] ‘That’s better, comrade, that’s much better,’ she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.
Just for the record, Joelle is a good friend and definitely not like this scary lady at all. She also does NOT look like the image above. But it’s still a great metaphor!
On the serious side, of course there’s also a very sinister side to the “telescreen” concept in 2020. How many of you have had a casual conversation about some random object in earshot of your smartphone, only to be sent marketing emails on the same thing later that day?
Today’s post is light-hearted though, so if you want to frighten yourself with articles on the topic such as this, feel free – but otherwise read on . . .
2. “Zoom as the methadone to BJJ’s heroin”
Graham Barlow – Brazilian Jiu Jutsu (BJJ)
I saw this in a post by Graham over on Kung Fu Tea and really liked it – it very much speaks for itself . . .
What Zoom classes cannot do is replace the adrenaline hit that BJJ gives you. As Robert Drysdale recently said in his podcast with Paul Bowman, people in their initial phases of falling in love with BJJ are a little bit like drug addicts. They need their next hit. Very few things in martial arts match the BJJ experience. You get to live the (safe) life of a warrior for the half hour rolling session that ends each class. You genuinely experience the visceral thrills, the highs and lows of victory of the battlefield, in a way that you can’t find in any other martial art. Your rolls with your favourite training partners become like the legendary battles of Achilles and Hector at Troy.
Well, at least that’s what they feel like to you even if it just looks like two guys cuddling. And you get to do this every lesson. And full time academies have 3 classes a day. Just think of the possibilities!
All of this makes Zoom the methadone to BJJ’s heroin. There’s no other way to cut it – a taste of Zoom just leaves me craving the real stuff. As James famously sang in the mid 90s “If I’d never known such riches, I could live with being poor”.
While some will be happy with a Zoom class and a grappling dummy as a stop-gap, even the most die hard supporter of their BJJ academy is simply prowling at the gates like a hungry lion waiting for them to be unlocked so feeding time can begin. If I contrast the number of students I used to see on the mat with the number of faces I see on my academy’s live Zoom call, it’s a fraction of the number it used to be.
3. A grounded boat
Gary Savage – Jiu-Jitsu
Gary posted this picture to Facebook a couple of days ago, with this really poignant reflection:
Sums up my thoughts about Jiu-Jitsu at the moment. Without water the boat is going nowhere. It has no life, no reason. Can it even be called a boat. It looks like a boat but its life blood is drained. It lies broken, waiting, hoping for rain. To a day that it can do what it was built for. Either that or maybe the boat is broken, and even with the water it would sink to the bottom. But rather that than never be given the chance.
4. A chef whose food you can’t touch or taste through the video screen
Gunther – Martial arts fitness
One of the most thoughtful and incisive long-term Budo Inochi readers I know of is Gunther. He wrote the other day:
[…] Trying to teach martial arts online is like trying to teach a student chef online and you don’t know if he/she is really progressing since you can’t actually taste the student’s food.
His sharing this brilliant image led to a further conversation – here are some more of Gunther’s insights (by permission):
You can also say that about other jobs where you need to check the student’s progress like wood crafting, auto repair, electrician, plumber, machinist repair, various medical and nursing professions, various agriculture classes at the colleges where you grow and cultivate plants, raising and taking care of livestock, acting, dancing, learning to play all sorts of musical instruments, repairing and maintaining computer software and hardware, doing all kinds of medical research like studying diseases, and trying to come up with ways to counter them which means you have to use groups of people and subject them to certain conditions for a certain length of time and then write up the results of what happened to them. Many jobs whether they are blue-collar or white-collar ones still require hands-on work.
[Just as with martial arts] students’ work does need to be physically viewed by the instructor in order to catch any discrepancies in their work and make corrections to them. Unless we can transport our homework to the instructor via the computer just like in the 1970s movie Willie Wonka where a chocolate bar was transferred over the airwaves onto the TV screen, we still have to physically attend a classroom to do the work. Besides, our houses and apartments are not designed to be academic classrooms or job vocational classes. Think of the electricity bill, storage and safeguarding of dangerous chemicals and dangerous bacteria vials, costs of buying, storing and maintaining various machine equipment, etc.
5. “Pretend swimming”
Matt Stait – Kickboxing / Reality-based self-defence
The “dry swimming” image is one of Matt’s favourite ways to describe self-defence teachers who have little or no experience of “real world” violence. But it applies pretty well to online learning also. In the first context, he writes:
[Consider] the instructor that claims to know how to disarm a knife wielding attacker when the nearest they have ever come to real danger is waving a shock knife around in a sports hall. The unspoken truth is that a lot of black belts can’t fight. I mean that they can perform well in a stylised, sanitised version of combat, but in the outside world they would come unstuck very quickly. I know this will offend some people, but I think it is a fair statement.
The absurdity of the situation is beyond ludicrous. Imagine taking your child to swimming lessons where the instructor has never been in a swimming pool, but once a wise man described swimming to him and now he is convinced he is the best swimmer ever and loudly decries anyone who thinks you can swim in a different way.
[…] My beef is with the so-called experts that have never done the things they teach, never had what they think they know tested for real, never had to perform their made-up techniques under stress and genuine fear. Yet these types are the first and loudest when it comes to rubbishing other people.
So how does this apply to online martial arts training? Well, the analogy of learning to swim is equally valid here. Learning techniques by yourself at home with no “body” to practise them on is like trying to swim through the air without the water’s resistance to enable you to actually swim. Learning the physical moves without any stress testing is similarly unhelpful for learning actual self-defence.
That’s not to say that online martial arts training can’t be enjoyable, and useful, and many other really good things. We just need to be careful to differentiate between actual self-defence training, and martial arts training for other purposes.
6. Phoebe’s guitar
This one is how online training feels to me.
This image comes from the episode of Friends where Phoebe tries to teach Joey to play the guitar with her own idiosyncratic method – which involves not being allowed to actually touch a guitar until you know how to play it. Instead, she shows Joey the hand shapes for each chord in the air, with her own made-up names, and makes him practise them like that.
At one point Joey admits that he’s visited a guitar shop and touched some of the guitars, which makes Phoebe furious. She shouts at him for questioning her method. Needless to say, in future episodes, we never see Joey actually playing a guitar.
7. Fighting the invisible enemy
This one isn’t actually about martial arts training, but it’s a metaphor that makes our response to the virus sound like a martial art or form of self-defence. Everywhere you look, there are references to the “war” against COVID-19. Our brave healthcare workers are described as being “on the front line”.
On one level this is understandable and perhaps helpful. We need to protect ourselves and others from this threat, and metaphors are a powerful way to mobilise public action. However, Costanza Musu convincingly argues that this “war” metaphor for COVID-19 can be dangerous.
Firstly, it enables politicians to call for urgent, unquestioning obedience. This in turn enables swift emergency legislation and other measures, which in some parts of the world have been chillingly authoritarian. But even in more democratic countries, the same mechanism is at stake. Musu gives the example of the United Kingdom.
The Coronavirus Bill gave government ministries the power to detain and isolate people, ban public gatherings including protests and shut down ports and airports. Health Secretary Matt Hancock put it this way:
“The measures that I have outlined are unprecedented in peacetime. We will fight this virus with everything we have. We are in a war against an invisible killer and we have to do everything we can to stop it.”
Secondly, if the COVID-19 response is a “war”, some people may start to see other groups of people as the “enemy” alongside the virus itself. The two examples Musu gives are racist slurs aimed at the Chinese or “Asians” in general; and rural residents feeling threatened by city-dwellers fleeing to the countryside. Both of these have led to vicious hatred and even vigilantism.
Thirdly, Musu argues that the “war” metaphor can intensify nationalism:
As we find ourselves at war we may be irresistibly drawn to an inward-looking, my-country-first attitude. Arguments over essential supplies have erupted, with countries blocking shipments of items like masks and other protective equipment or life-saving ventilators.
She therefore calls for a greater focus on civil responsibility and global solidarity, instead of the idea of warfare.
So there you are – seven vivid metaphors for martial artists training in the time of COVID-19.
Please feel very free to add your own in the comments below!
And if you’ve enjoyed reflecting on the implications of online training like this, and would like to go even more deeply into the topic, you’ll love Online Martial Arts – Evolution or Extinction? – available from Amazon now!
Joelle White
Ask my daughters and they’ll tell you that I’ve been known to look even meaner than that lady 😉 Honored to be part of this collection 🙂
Kai Morgan
LOL yes, they should know of all people 🙂 thanks again Joelle for letting me use your content – much appreciated! Take care Kxx
Joelle White
Confirmed – I just asked one of my daughters about it and she is now snorting with laughter.
Michael Lapreziosa
Thanks for the post. I’m not well-traveled in the online martial-arts world, but it doesn’t seem that a lot of the well-known figures are looking at the global lockdown (“house arrest”) in this way. The attitude is more one of “let’s grin and bear it and adapt like the adaptable martial artists we are during this time of unprecedented bla bla.” What I see, and for perspective I’m in one of the lockdown states, Pennsylvania, is a gradual pushing and acceptance of a “new normal” — I hate the phrase. And looking ahead, in Pennsylvania at least this new *ab*normal does NOT allow for gyms or fitness clubs, yoga studios, martial arts schools, etc. to be open any time soon, and if they are allowed, it will be with restrictions such as “distancing” and “masks” or whatnot. None of this is compatible with MA training and I will never do that in my school. The Zoom lessons have worked fine as a stopgap, but I agree with your metaphors above. If this is the long term outlook for martial arts, then there’s no point to MA schools anymore, and we might as well go back to secretive training of 1-2 students at a time.
This topic is timely for me; I’m glad you’re out there addressing it. Plan to purchase your book as soon as Kindle version is available — because I don’t want to wait for delivery time of a real book.
Kai Morgan
Thanks Michael for your really interesting commentary. It seems to me that a lot of prominent discourse about the martial arts feels somehow weird right now, as if the genuine grief and frustration many are feeling doesn’t exist?
Someone sent me this 20-min video – it’s nothing to do with martial arts but I thought it was excellent. He talks about how people are so intent on looking on the bright side, they can fall into the trap of “negativity shaming” i.e. having no tolerance if other people express less positive emotions and views.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5TtaTN5MsDo
I submitted the Kindle version of the book to Amazon this afternoon so hopefully it’ll be up soon!
Best wishes
Kai
Michael Lapreziosa
Well thanks, I speed-watched about 3/4 of the video, and while I agreed at the beginning, him saying that fighting against the circumstances is childlike, and acceptance is called for, doesn’t ring true to me. Again, here in the US, and in my state, this clearly comes across as something that is *being done* to us and it has nothing to do with public health or anyone’s well-being. In short, it’s a massive power grab and middle-class demolition, and, without sufficient resistance taking the form of “x” , “y” and “z”, this ABnormal *will* become our new normal. It’s not going to just go away if we are patient enough. But I promise not to say anything more about it here. It gets tiring being the outlier so often.
What are my students training for now? My 1:1 and group Zoom lessons with children, while enjoyable, are always tinged with sadness on my part, for them, being confined at home.. ………Look forward to your book. Cheers, Michael
Kai Morgan
Hi Michael, I have to admit it was ages ago that I watched it (the start of the UK lockdown) and I don’t actually recall the point you pick up about acceptance – the point that really struck a chord and stuck in my mind was the bit about “fake positivity” as I was already starting to feel that way.
The world has changed so profoundly since then – I should probably listen to it again and see if the “acceptance” bit feels different now, as it clearly didn’t even register much at that point.
You’re welcome to share your views here any time btw. The whole point of writing this blog is because I get to connect and hear from people with diverse views that I wouldn’t meet in my normal day to day life!
Michael Lapreziosa
Bought it!
Kai Morgan
Thank you so much Michael! Would you be able to leave a review on Amazon if you get some time please, as it really helps . . . ? Best wishes Kai
Michael Lapreziosa
I’ll be happy to, yes. Reading through it now.
Kai Morgan
Thank you!! Hope you enjoy the rest of your Sunday . . . 🙂
Kai Morgan
Just been sent this via Facebook – brilliant!
Kai Morgan
Interesting response from Paul Arnold, copied over from his comment on Joelle White’s Facebook page, where she shared this post:
Whilst I have no problem with the Dry Swimmer analogy when we apply it to instructors who teach people how to deal with real world violence when they have no experience of real world violence, I find it problematic for numerous reasons when we apply it to Self Defence Instructors:-
1. It’s dangerous
The message it sends out is that you can have spent years training with the best SD experts in the land, but no one should take you seriously as a SD instructor until you first go out into and put yourself into life threatening situations. So there are only two outcomes, you end up qualified to teach, or you end up dead.
Let’s say Matt has dealt with knives, and then he teaches me all he knows, but by his own analogy no one should listen to anything I have to say until I first go out and find someone in a bar who carries a knife and tries to kill me with it. That’s great if I survive ,but if I don’t I’m now dead. But apparently that’s the risk I have to take in order to earn credibility, even though the knowledge I am passing on is not mine, but Matt’s.
And where does that end? Even Matt would conceded that if he dealt with enough knife incidents, no matter his level of experience, eventually the day will come where something went wrong and he dies too. As we know, wet water swimmer still drown.
Telling people they need to put their lives at risk first in order to earn credibility as a SD instructor is not only dangerous, it’s not only inaccurate, but it’s also just stupid.
If I tell someone don’t walk down the street with your head down looking at your phone because you won’t be aware of what is going on around you, and you are advertising to everyone you have a phone worth stealing, then that is sensible advice. I don’t have to myself walk around the street for hours on end with my head down looking at my phone until I am mugged in order to give myself credibility to pass that information on. Which brings me on to the next on to the next point…
2. It implies Self Defence is only about dealing with violence.
90% of self defence is not about dealing with violence, it’s about the soft skills. Soft skills have absolutely nothing to do with the physical side of self defence, ergo your ability on the physical side (Hard Skills) has no bearing on your soft skills.
You can have beaten up 15 muggers, but are you the best person to teach people defence against muggers, no because you keep getting singled out by muggers as a possible victim because your soft skills are non existent. Or would it be better to learn from the person whose soft skills are so good no mugger has ever selected them as a potential victim? The correlation between hard skills relates only to your ability at hard skills, not to your overall ability to teach SD, which is 90% soft skills.
One of the best self defence resources avaiable online is the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, and yet there is not one single piece of information on how to deal with violence, it is 100% about avoiding it. But, according to the Dry Swimmer Analogy, their information holds no credibility.
3. It’s not correct
I learned The Fence from Geoff Thompson, and yet I have never trained with him. In fact, I’ve never even met him. I learned it from his videos and his books. And when I needed to use it in real situations I was able to effectively utilise this skill. So to put in into the terms of the dry swimmer analogy, I learned how to swim on dry land, and then when I actually found myself water, low and behold, I was able to swim.
The next point on from that then is when do I become, in the eyes of the Dry Swimmer Analogy, eligible to pass on the knowledge gained? The knowledge that I had was effective but while untested by me I apparently had no credibility when passing it on. I only gained the credibility to pass it on once I had used it. Which is clearly not correct.
Dr Heimlich was able to teach people the Heimlich Manoeuvre. and yet he himself had never used it for real when he did. He had developed it by applying his knowledge of anatomy to the the problem in order to find a solution. He was a dry land swimmer, yet the people he taught it to were able to go out into the real world and swim with it.
Cus D’Amato never boxed, and yet he trained the best boxers in the world. He was a dry land swimmer.
4. If we are telling people who can’t deal with violence they can’t teach self defence (because we are mistakenly reducing the whole of Self Defence to the purely the physical element) then we are leading people who can deal with violence to mistakenly believe this qualifies them to teach SD (even though they may posses little or no soft skills).
Having experience real world violence means one thing, you are good at dealing with real world violence, but violence and self defence are not the same thing.
Violence is merely one small subset of self defence.
Mr X may have spent 20 years working as a doorman and Mr Y may have spent 20 years getting drunk every Satruday night and getting into fights, but that has no bearing on their ability to teach their respective daughters to recognise the warning signs of an abusive relationship so they can finish the relationship in the early stages before it develops. And considering most women are killed in their own home by their partner or ex partner, not only is that by far a more useful Self Defence skill, but it is clear that a persons unquestionable ability as to throw a violent drunk out of a pub, or to win a fight in a pub car park after an argument over a spilled pint, is about as about as relevant to Self Defence as table tennis lessons are to someone who wants to learn how to drive a Formula One Car.
So rather than the Dry Swimmer Analogy relating to “self-defence teachers who have little or no experience of ‘real world’ violence”. What we should be saying is that Dry Land swimmers are “Instructors who try to teach people how to deal with real world violence who have little or no experience of real world violence.”
Perhaps that seems pedantic to some, but I think it is an important distinction which needs to be made. So, forgive the pun, but when referring to Self Defence, the dry land swimmer analogy holds no water (I know I now but sorry, I couldn’t resist 😜)
******
NB: Matt’s response: Paul Arnold I know you took some time over that response, and it’s well thought out……….but here’s the thing. You can watch as many pornos as you like. Until you have sex you’re still a virgin. Ps. Hi Joelle👋👋
Gunther
Dear Kai:
Here is an article about the drawbacks of working from home: https://theconversation.com/remote-work-employers-are-taking-over-our-living-spaces-and-passing-on-costs-140610?
Dmitry
According to the famous pyramid of Maslow SAfety is a very basic need, the essential one. Somehow when They allow essential businesses to stay open they forget about self-defence (physical ana mental health) being MORE essential than essential shopping. No animal in the nature considers food if it doesn’t feel safe. …except us, humans, apparently! Closing yoga, pilates, karate, aikido etc. classes (do not want to write a long long list) the rule makers deprive us from the health and safety.
Let’s write a blog about that!
Kai Morgan
Dear Dmitry, apologies for taking so long to reply to you – I haven’t been near this blog since last year. What you say is very close to my heart, being passionate about the benefits of martial arts training for physical and mental health. Very much hoping that we can return to “normal” now (whatever that means now . . . )