Last night my brother-in-arms, Hylton Silver, and I were running a Krav Maga class. We focused on an interesting topic – pressure. I recently wrote on pressure in self-defense training, and you can read more about this here.
We were working on defending against punches and tackles/takedowns, and asked our students to make sure that they really try take each other down, and (while not going full force) make sure they make contact with their strikes too.
They were doing pretty well!
The class wraps up and Hylton and I look at each other. Pretty much simultaneously, we say something that threw quite a few students off, “you are not failing enough”.
The more advanced students were smiling as they knew exactly what we meant. But there were several blank stares which said ‘weren’t we supposed to make this work?!’
Yes and no. Let’s talk a little bit about failure, why it’s important, and why you should experience it on a regular basis in training.
Buying your own BS
My opinion on any martial art that considers itself effective either in sport or self-defense is that it needs to work against uncooperative and/or resisting training partners. Obviously, different levels of resistance are required (more on this here and here). But, to put it bluntly, if you never made your techniques work on someone who doesn’t want you to apply them, then they are, from a combative standpoint, worthless. You certainly do not want to test this out for the first time in a competition or when defending yourself. But I digress… well, kind of.
This is such a powerful trap!
We often get complacent working with partners who know how they are expected to react. They attack, we counter, they fall the right way. There is a time and a place for this, but it’s not all the time, every time. When you start introducing intent and resistance (i.e your partner intends on successfully attacking you and resists when you try and defend) you will not be able to make things work 100% of the time. I’m going to make a big statement here:
Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you.
Unless your name is Bruce-Lee-Georges-St-Pierre-Chuck-Norris (and even then) there are no such things as perfect moves. Sure, there are some things that are better than others for your training context, but nothing is guaranteed.
Not even Mike Tyson’s lead hook. Ok, maybe Mike Tyson’s lead hook.
Point is, if we never fail in training, it often means our training partners are being too cooperative. It’s important to highlight that this is often done out of good intent. We want to help our partner successfully apply the technique. That’s what we’re here for, after all – to learn how to make these things work!
But if we don’t fail, we don’t learn the finer points of what makes something work. If we don’t fail, we won’t know for sure if something is effective. If we don’t fail, we may end up giving ourselves false confidence. And that is detrimental from both a combative and character development standpoints.
Speaking of Character…
I have written quite a bit on the recent trend of ‘everyone gets a medal’ and you can read more about this here. Failure is one of the most crucial aspects of learning respect, discipline, determination, humility and the value of hard work, to name just a few.
Every great man and woman in history – everyone that you look up to – has faced failure; often and deliberately.
When we fail, we learn how strong our resolve is. We learn humility and respect when we are faced with those who are better, stronger, faster, more skilled than us, or simply want it more than we do.
Failure is the ultimate teacher. It will show you what you need to work on, both in your art and in yourself. If you ever wonder what you need to improve on in your martial art, pick the thing you hate doing the most (more on this here). It is, in all likelihood, also what you fail at the most. And working on it will make you improve the most.
If you are accustomed to winning, accustomed to having your way, then failure will remind you that there is always – always – someone who can do better.
Lastly, failure makes us face our fears. Fear that we are not as skilled, or fit, or strong, or fat as we thought. That maybe we didn’t want it enough, or that weren’t willing to pay the price of achieving a particular goal. When we face those fears through failure, we grow and develop as martial artists and human beings.
The best martial artists, the most inspiring people and the highest achievers, are not those who succeed all the time. They are those who set their aim high and fail often in trying to get there.
So where from here?
Let me sum up with a quick story. I came up through traditional martial arts and self-defense – namely Danzan Ryu Jujutsu, Kali, and Krav Maga – way before I got into combat sports.
We didn’t do much sparring in those systems, just some Judo randori and the odd pressure drill. I still clearly remember my first sparring session with Hylton Silver and first grading under Dr. Gavriel Schneider. I remember freaking out at being hit, I remember getting hit with a right head kick before Dr. Gav stopped the round and got us to sit down. A similar thing happened when we did ground fighting. His comment? You have a lot of heart, but you need to do more sparring, standing up and on the ground, if you are going to get better.
I hated sparring at the time. But facing such a dismal failure I decided that I need to pick myself up of the floor (which, FYI, still happens regularly when I spar with Hylton) and focus on sparring. I started doing BJJ, which wasn’t a huge deal. BJJ never really scared me much (more on this here). What I truly hated was stand-up sparring. But I decided to learn from my failure. I found a phenomenal boxing coach and started sparring regularly 3 times per week.
Fast forward a decade or so, and my absolute favourite thing in the world, my happiest place, is when I’m sparring. Boxing has become a true passion, and one I would have never found had I not failed so badly at when it counted in the first place.
Keep Failing!
Pick something that you hate training, something you suck at, and force yourself to do it until you are amazing at it. You will learn determination and self control, and you may also find new things that you never imagined you will love so much. You will become a better martial artist, as well as a more humble and compassionate human being. After all, we all fail at one time or another, in and out of training.
So by all means, give yourself credit when you are doing really well in training. But make sure that you fail regularly.
So with much respect and admiration to you, I wish you many more failures on your martial arts journey.
What was the last thing you failed at in your martial arts? Leave a comment below because I’d love to hear about what you hate training and need to get better at.
Stay safe, stay tuned.
Osu/Oss
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