Systematizing My Systema, Part 3d: Mental Toughness Training

In Part 3a of the Systematizing my Systema series of articles, we discussed the general idea of athletic training vs. sports training and we also argued that training for self defense is definitely an athletic endeavor, rather similar to training for combat sports in terms of motor qualities (strength, speed, power, mobility), physiological/metabolic qualities (aerobic, anaerobic endurance) and basic movement skills, although quite different in terms of the strategies and tactics explored. We also claimed that a person involved in any type of athletic activity, in order to maximize performance, needs attributes, skills and mental toughness. Attributes were discussed in detail in Systematizing My Systema Part 3b, while we addressed training for skills in Systematizing My Systema Part 3c. In this post we will discuss the third aspect of our training which is pressure testing for mental toughness. 

PRESSURE TESTING: WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH... 

First things first: "Why should we pressure test at all?” you might ask. The answer is rather simple: through drilling you do acquire skills, but under combat stress these skills tend to deteriorate - under pressure, a lot of the stuff you are good at in a martial arts training session might go out the window! Now, pay close attention to this, because there's a lot of nonsense written online on this particular subject: we are not pressure testing whether our techniques function in conditions of combat friction - we are testing whether we ourselves can function under pressure! As long as our techniques do not ignore the laws of physics, they will work just fine – paraphrasing a good friend of mine who’s into Japanese martial arts, O Soto Gari does work in real combat, although my O Soto Gari might not. Rather than the techniques, it is our brain where the source of the problem lies, where emotions arise (mainly fear) that can make our tactical knowledge disappear and mess up with our physical skills.

The key-word here is emotional regulation. It is actually quite strange that although the role of deliberate practice (i.e. drilling for skills) in developing expert performance in sports has been exhaustively studied, the role of consistent exposure to competitive settings has not been studied nearly as much, if at all. Still, it is quite difficult to imagine someone who is capable of regulating his emotional responses to a stimulus that he has never been exposed to, right? Just to give you an example, imagine Larry Bird fooling around and shooting thousands of hoops from outside the three-point line – if he never practiced with a fellow teammate trying to defend against him in a dynamic environment, would he be able to score as much in a real game? I seriously doubt it.

Now, the most common argument against dynamic training in a self defense context is that the actions one might take against his opponent when in a life-threatening situation are way too dangerous to be practiced repeatedly without control. In addition to that, some people claim that the use of protective equipment in order to reduce this potential for injury, distorts the mechanics of techniques (for example, a glove allows people to hit much harder that they would bare-knuckled), so it could lead to bad technical habits. My answer to these arguments is: “YES, you would have a point… IF we used these methods to develop technique, but WE DON’T, so you are WRONG”. Let me repeat it once more: we drill for skills; we ‘compete’ to expand our capacity to regulate emotions. In this sense, our competitive training (against resisting opponents, that is) or pressure testing methods are a means to an end, not an end it their own.

Storm Fighting as practiced by athletes of the Russian All-Around Fighting system. Rounds last only twenty seconds, during which the athletes are only allowed to attack - no defense is allowed. The purpose of this drill is not for one to become good at Storm Fighting, since in real combat, retreating and defending might be necessary. The whole point is for practitioners to develop the mental toughness necessary to keep pushing forward while ignoring the pain and the fatigue that is building up over the rounds.

The idea behind the pressure testing we do at the Dynamo is very simple: yes, it would be dangerous for practitioners to closely simulate realistic self defense conditions in a training setting, just to trigger the emotional responses we want to explore. So instead of simulating the conditions, we try to trigger the emotional responses through other conditions, with a lower risk of injury! Although I can’t back this up with hard scientific evidence, my belief is that humans do not have a different fear reaction system for every situation they face – it is the same adrenaline that flushes through the system of a fighter in the ring, a doctor performing heart surgery, a member of an ambulance crew performing CPR to someone who suffered a heart attack, or a fireman trying to remove an old lady from inside a building which is being consumed by flames. Once emotional control can be achieved under one set of conditions, it’s easier to ‘transfer’ this capacity to a different context.

That is why the methods we use in the Dynamo to pressure test are non-context-specific and they basically fall under two categories. The first one is various forms of symmetrical competition: fist fighting, kick fighting, kick-boxing, wrestling, or stick fighting. YES, I know these are not "realistic self defense" practice fields, but the point of this type of work is not to become good at fist fighting, wrestling and so on; the point is to become good in solving combat-related motor problems under a certain degree of pressure and to explore the idea of recovering after making mistakes that bring you in disadvantageous positions. The participants in this type of drills are not trying to win over their partner in order to feed their ego – they are exploring, together with their partner the dynamics of the interaction – the benefit is not in victory but in reaching conclusions. The second type of pressure testing at the Dynamo includes asymmetrical limited-parameter drills (for example, only strikes with the fists are allowed) that are designed to induce panic to one of the participants, who is then asked to apply specific series of actions to limit the symptoms of stress and recover in order to survive. Increasing the pressure in this type of drills is done very gradually so the student can be aware of the exact moment when the fear reaction system kicks in and learn how to recognize the symptoms.

This was the sixth and final (seriously, I promise) article of the Systematizing my Systema series, the purpose of which was to present the training methodology at the Göteborg Dynamo Club of Russian Martial Art as a goal oriented process. This process includes the knowledge of a great variety of training methods and the effects each one of them produces, setting as specific a goal as possible, selecting those methods that when applied in combination will produce the desired result, scheduling those methods in a training program and applying it - as I wrote at the beginning of the first article of the series, it is the 'why' that will determine the 'how'. Blindly following the system a supposedly formidable martial arts master promotes and hoping that you will some day acquire that master's skills, makes as much sense as reading a champion athlete's conditioning program in a magazine and following it blindly with no regard to your level of physical condition, possible limitations and needs - it is more often than not a recipe for disaster or at best a waste of time. In our next blog post we will discuss what we do best at the Dynamo, that is, power generation training.