There are hundreds of martial arts styles out there each with thousands of different moves. It can be challenging to know which ones are the best to focus on. One things for sure though, you should focus on a few key skills and repeat them as often as you can so that they become part of who you are. Which particular skills you chose will depend on your background and experience, and developed capabilities. Personally, it would be no use me jumping around like a gymnast and doing head kicks. I’ve tried that and I’m simply not built that way. Instead I go for football style low kicks, as I have been playing football all my life, and boxing punches essentially. Boxing, as far as striking goes, contains the most true form of hand fighting.
Whichever you basis, these skills will serve as your simple exercises, through which to understand everything else properly. This will never happen if you do a bit of kick boxing here, and a bit of wrestling there, followed by some Juijisu after that. Your few daily exercises are a vehicle for practicing the truth if you like, they symbolise an idea representing the truth. For example, the jab in boxing represents the left hand being a kind of searching hand: quick and light. There is no “true” system, because truth is without form.
Often it’s the case that you’ve been doing a martial art for a long time but you’ve grown tired of its limitations. Great! You’ve just made further progress possible. Often people fear losing their abilities in one area by practicing something else. They reason that they might give up on their new discipline, so they just stick with the old one and practice the same old tired routines. But if you know one discipline well enough, the “essence” of it will remain in you. And you’ll never be bored of the truth, even if it’s limited to practicing just a few basics. Yes, it is by getting to the core of it that you learn the truth, not through the peripheral aspects. Peripheral aspects aren’t important.
Capturing the essence must be what Bruce Lee and others were talking about with the water and the cup. Lots of people thought he meant you must always be adaptable and change according to circumstance without form. This makes no sense on the physical level because we have a human form, it can’t change. This form of detachment would lead to death. In fact it is very dangerous to attempt to change the physical form and what it’s capable of beyond slight parameters. We must be Like water, but no ones saying anything about becoming water, taking the form of a wrestler at one moment, and then a mantis the next.
Lots of people attempt gymnastics style martial arts by leaping around all over the place. This usually ends with a hip replacement or knee surgery. Others learn mechanical routines resembling lizards, snakes, or robots, hoping to become super human. No, our core composition doesn’t change, but the way we use our form, the peripheral aspects, can. In the same way the arm is peripheral to the core stability. However, this doesn’t stop people building massive biceps in the gym hoping to improve their power. It might look good, but it’s far from optimal and it’s a huge waste of time away from what’s vitally important.
The peripheral aspects are merely symbolic of the core truth, and it’s varying forms. Let me explain. Using the analogy of the water and the cup, the style is the cup which varies in size, shape and composition. The water, or the “essence” fits into the cup but remains the same. In another Analogy, the molten iron is placed in the blacksmiths forge. It can be melded again and again by heating it up and recasting it to different shapes according to different weapons. This molten metal is the “essence” which doesn’t change it’s make up. The style it takes the form of is the weapon to be created. Never change the essence because it is the truth.
The true underlying fundamentals which govern all movements don’t vary from one discipline to another. This is the core. Importantly, according to these higher principles, every discipline is of the same nature. Get familiar with this nature. This nature will verify whether your technique is right or not, because they are subject to it. The skills themselves are just different ways of expressing this nature effectively and are dead without it. You don’t adapt the truth to the peripheral considerations, or if you like the details, represented by particular skills. The devil is in the details.
All too often I have had experts approach me in the gym to tell me that according to such and such an art my technique is incorrect. To be honest, I have usually benefitted from this advice on the peripheral level. In my experience, it is often highly experienced practitioners who give this kind of advice if they sense someone might be able to take it on board. You can quickly learn a lot about a skill from this kind of advice. However, beware, because many shrewd experts out there will try to give out a few “details” and then try to claim that it was them who were responsible for the improvement at the “core” level! You have to admire the tenacity! Shrewd business sense at it’s finest!
You’ve got to create a unified martial arts style, rather than trying to bring together a load of disparate skills from all different disciplines. Of course, some skill compliment others well, and as long as they share the same underlying principles then they are compatible. If you want everything to unify, it’s got to be in accord with these underlying principles, they come before everything else and the skills have to conform to them. This unity is the causes the skills to be effective, and it has to be experienced to be felt. It doesn’t matter how dazzling someone is at boxing, if what they doing completely limits there development in all other areas. They’ve cut themselves off from the source.
It’s when you try to entertain two, or three ways of fighting at the same time that you risk being seriously injured or worse. Sure, go and do, say, a boxing a course to get familiar with the basics so that you have a fairly stereotypical explanation of the basics. But once you’ve got that stereotypical model it must fit with a higher level of understanding beyond a separate and cut off system1. Trying to get them all to fit as they are already unified is extremely frustrating, and will eventually sap you of your motivation because it will never become second nature. This way only leads to mediocrity. The key ingredient is you. You’ve got to somehow pull together all the seemingly conflicting skills and make them converge to serve your purposes by reducing them to their essentials.
This is what I do. I’ve got the basic boxing punches, I then compliment them with a few low kicks, knees, etc., and some basic wrestling techniques. After that I’ve got a few ground moves. That’s basically it. I have practiced a lot of Steve Morris’s principles so that I know how to distribute my weight properly in everything I train, from walking, to sitting, to lying down. I can do this all day and this is the bulk of my training.
When you practice aligning yourself in the activities of everyday life, there’s no limit to the scope of your training. Everything becomes a training exercise. Because you don’t want to stand one way, punch another, and then sit down in a fundamentally different way. Instead practice aligning yourself, dropping your weight into things with dynamic stability, and breathing in sync with what you’re doing day to day. If it’s true of walking then it’s true of fighting.
There you have it, a few things to think about from an endless list of possibilities. The core, the truth, fundamentals, they are just different ways of expressing the same thing – The important points to keep in mind, the sign posts.
References
1 See Steve Morris http://morrisnoholdsbarred.com/ His method is by far the best. My advice is to ignore the other “practical” martial arts systems and focus on this. Steve shows you how to develop the fundamental skills, you can then play around with them, mixing up the tempo, applying them in thousands of ways achieving a wide range application within a small range.