Baddest man on the planet

Both Tyson and Fedor have been dubbed ‘baddest man on the planet’ but while both were or are top of their respective games they are very different men. Last night I watched documentaries on each of the ‘Worlds baddest’ and while one rose and faded the other continues to rise and looks unlikely to fade in anything like the same way. Nevertheless there are interesting parallels.

By the time Tyson became the youngest ever World Champion he had a fantastic team around him. Cus D’Amato had taken him out of reform school and away from his troubled neighbourhood in New York and with Kevin Rooney and Teddy Atlas was guiding his boxing potential. After D’Amato died Rooney took responsibility for Tysons training, resulting in his distinctive style that brought him success and fame.

Tyson’s Peek-a-Boo style allowed him to slip and weave his way in close, avoiding his opponents punches, allowing his devastating speed, power, and aggression to wreck the other fighter. In the documentary “The Tyson Story” Kevin Rooney  time and again mentions how Tyson, right from the start threw punches with ‘Bad Intention’. That’s the phrase he uses; ‘Bad Intention’. You only have to watch him training to see that while the knockouts are dripping with bad intention.

For me this ‘Bad Intention’ is the overriding similarity between Tyson and Fedor. If you watch Fedor training the same ‘Bad Intention’ is evident and again he’s dripping with ‘Bad Intention’ in the ring. In the documentary ‘Baddest man on the planet’ Fedor says he trains “relentlessly, like an engine”. He has a strong team around him practicing with his trainer Aleksander Michkov for many years, he is comfortable with his surroundings and just gets on with it. His aggressive style re-wrote ground and pound in MMA.

Outside the arena there are similarities, both literally fought their way out of poverty, both liked to fight as kids but I can’t see Fedor fading the way Tyson faded, he just doesn’t have the distractions. Tyson faded because of those distractions and sacking Rooney was clearly a mistake, he changed his fighting style and became a beatable fighter, and then there were the frustrations boiling over with inexcusable results in and out of the ring.

Despite the inexcusable side to Tyson the ‘Bad Intention’ in the punches, training and the fights is key; besides Fedor has shown that these inexcusable outcomes are NOT inevitable. Regardless, this ‘Bad Inntention’ is the type of thing you get from Steve Morris’s assertion to ‘Watch the Fight’ take it, absorb it and use it in training. This ‘Bad Intention’ attitude can then be taken from training into the fight if you have one, in either a sporting or in self-defence setting. In essence you’re preparing properly and you will improve.

Basic Padwork…..?

Over on the Fighting Arts Alliance Forum, Steve Morris has been posting a lot on a thread called Basic Training. For someone coming from a Karate background the basics I’m used to are way more basic than the methods he’s been explaining, to say the least.

Having trained at Primal quite a bit, I’m fortunate enough to have been exposed to quite a lot of what he’s talking about, although this particular thread has been a bit of an epiphany in many ways. He starts off with some clips giving an impression of a typical training environment in Thailand. These set the scene for the fantastic padwork clips that follow, far more sophisticated than those I’ve witnessed in Karate basic training.

One of the problems I have had outside of Primal is getting the idea behind the padwork  over to people; the padwork exchange has to be representative of the fight, with the role of the padman being critical.

So I tend to break drilling right down to minuscule elements of a fight. One drill we do is to get the pad man to move around back, forth and laterally holding a shield while the kicker has to land thigh kicks, sounds easy, try it. Mixing distancing, timing and footwork with the technical skill of a round kick to the thigh ramps up the difficulty no end. Add in the padman coming back at you, and you’re onto something. But my efforts to get this over have never been to my satisfaction.

This also helps ensure that the striker is always switched on or loaded, it’s so very easy to hit the pad and …… stop, which is of no use to anyone. SM wants us to bring the fight to the training, without being switched on this is not possible. So to try to get this over we have been doing some basic, drills emphasising being switched on while performing minuscule elements of a fight, with some success.

In one post, on the basic training thread SM says firstly that

padwork comes in at three levels, basically: technical, where you’re learning the mechanics and how to apply the power in a particular way; conditioning where you’re repeating the skill in an anaerobic, hard-contact manner; and tactical, where you’re actually engaged in a fight with the pad man

and then

In order to fulfill this (achieve real padwork), 1) you have to be technically sound and be a fighter, and 2) the pad man has to be the same

I did know this, it’s not new as such, but it hadn’t occurred to me that padwork can run from technical through conditioning to tactical, and a single round within a session of padwork could contain all of these elements. I feel a bit daft, again, for not realising this, but that happens when you’re learning.

Over the last two nights I have tried to get the concepts of always being switched on and bringing the fight to the pad work across, emphasising the importance of the padman. I think we really made some headway. The lesson plan went along the following lines

• switched on explanation and drills
• movement drills
• put elements of both these into the three levels of  padwork and pad holding

100 subs made

Went for the 100 submissions last night and made it! Hurray! It took a while to get through them and there were repeats on either side of the body and the same thing done from different positions, but 100 nevertheless.

These 100 didn’t include triangle, the ‘standard’ armbar, or any form of twister. Plenty of chokes/strangles, cranks and figure fours though. The best thing is that it’s made the doubters believe it’s completely possible, the main doubter managed 88!

While getting to 100 is a reasonable achievement in itself , it’s of limited value if these cannot be applied when needed, although I can now ‘see’ possibilities more clearly. So the next goal is to improve application of submissions. All very enjoyable.

Absorbing the impression

In last weeks post about creating an impression of the early years Tyson I tried to get over how I attempted to achieve this rather abstract concept. It’s not easy to describe, almost by definition, because describing the process requires you to be left brained about a right brain activity. While, of course, the left and right hemisphere’s of the brain interact through the course of our everyday lives, the left hemisphere is dominant.

This is essential to enable us to complete our regular tasks, although at certain times the dominant side can interfere where it’s not wanted. An obvious example is when we’re under pressure, the left hemisphere can bully its way to the fore when really the right side is better placed to take control.

I’m really thinking of sporting examples, Tim Henman was a  great tennis player but toward the end of big matches you could see him tightening up and not going for the ‘big shots’. It was almost as if he was trying to consciously control what he was doing, when really he needed to let go and just play. The irony is, that letting go and just playing his game is probably what got him into the good position in a match.

In times of stress when snap judgements are required the subconscious is really set up to draw on our experience and to make a rapid decisions. This is part of the survival mechanism if only we were to work with these cognitions, see the Blink post. Of course, if the stress response is too severe we can become too aroused for anything other than fight, flight or freeze.

When not under stress we can relax the conscious left brain and allow the right brain to have more of a say. This is a very natural process and we all do this on a daily basis, when we are drifting off to sleep, or start to daydream. Any creative process involves fanciful right brain activity, but often though default left brain will butt in to rubbish that creativity with its logical criticism.

In terms of absorbing the impression you may want to build of Tyson you really do have to let the right side get fanciful, become child-like. This always reminds me of a TV program I watched as a kid. It was of a schoolboy who dreamed of playing cricket for England. It really struck a chord with me because I used to behave so much like the hero of the program. He’d be walking down the street with radio/tv commentary going on in his head as he struck the winning runs.

I’m not suggesting you actively embed a commentary of you destroying fighters in a Tyson-esque manner, although that might work, rather it’s that kind of daydream mind you need to activate in order to absorb the essence of Tyson. Open up and soak up the impression of him you get from watching clips like those in the previous post, then take that feeling and use it in training. It’s amazing how you can feel like you ARE Tyson.

I image my brain as a sponge, mopping up the essence of Tyson, this may or may not be appropriate for you, it’s a pretty personal experience.

It may sound ridiculous, but suspend belief, don’t listen to Mr Logic Left-brain, and give it a go. It’s not an immediate thing, and it does take some effort to try to extrapolate from watching to doing, but it’s a great tool and can help you improve if you give it a good go.

Blink

I read a recommended book called ‘Blink‘ recently, thanks Random Flow. It’s about those moments when you instinctively know something without knowing why. The author, Malcolm Gladwell, provides many examples of when a snap judgement is more effective than a cautious decision.

The idea is that by trusting subconscious processing we are not aware of, years of experience in a given situation can be drawn upon in an instant. A good example is of the fireman who ordered his men out of a burning kitchen because something was just not right. Moments later the floor collapsed, because the fire was actually in the cellar below. The fireman somehow knew the fire was not burning quite ‘right’. In this case he saved the lives of his men.

There’s many more instances and if intrigued you really should read the book, it’s very good. A recent conversation with a friend reminded me of ‘Blink’. As head doorman at a club he described a ‘Blink’ moment when refusing entry to a member of the public. The person refused entry had previously been a nuisance when one of his friends had lost a phone that one of the doorman was looking after. Some trouble occurred and the phone got lost while this was being sorted out. The bloke who owned the phone was fine about it but this other one was being obnoxious.

My friend was in the process of permitting entry for the nuisance and his friends when he recognised them from the previous incident. The nuisance was saying something and at one point my mate saw a certain look in the eye for just a flash and this was enough for him to refuse him entry. My mate told nuisance that his friends were fine but he was not, because he recognised  trouble in the look in his eye and he didn’t want the headache. Of course nuisance was not overjoyed at being omitted on the basis of a look in his eye. But my mate was later proved right as the nuisance had to be removed four times that night after somehow getting into the club ’round the back’.

The point is that if we ‘trust’ our intuition or instinctive feelings in a situation we can avoid trouble before it happens. In the case of my doorman friend it’s fairly cut and dried, he has a lot of control over who to allow in to potentially cause him a headache. If we are on out own we can head a ‘bad feeling’ about a place and leave before any potential headache occurs.

A decision does not have to be based on all the facts, there are examples in ‘Blink’ when too much information clouds the issue, snap decisions can be more advantageous. In self-protection situations it is essential to trust subconscious processing as delayed action could be costly. If you get the impression that the bad guy is about to hit you, he probably is, you don’t have the time to weigh up the rights and wrongs or the various factors that have taken him to that point. Some people believe they have the time to do so, I once argued this with someone on the Karate Underground forum. Better to trust your instincts, I’d say.