The Flailing Bear Effect

Tell me if this sounds familiar. You have been training in martial arts for a few years. You have devoted hours and hours of your time and energy to developing a "toolbox" of effective practices and techniques that stem from the system that you have studied. In fact, in your regular practice, you have gotten to the point where these things work fairly reliably. You start to think of yourself as having ownership of these things.

Then something changes. You are doing free practice with your teacher. As teachers tend to do, yours starts throwing a few wrenches in the process. Maybe the speed is faster than you are used to. Maybe the intensity is a little higher. Perhaps he starts doing things that you don't expect, and aren't used to feeling. Educational "pops" become real hits that hurt. Maybe it is as simple as saying things that really, really piss you off. Even better if he does it in front of an audience.

Regardless of the methodology used by your teacher, he has effectively tilted your world in the middle of the exchange. Suddenly, you transform from a somewhat competent martial artist into a flailing bear. All those subtle shades of technique leave you, and you find yourself forgetting even the most basic of lessons. When you finally sit down, you are feeling seriously frustrated with yourself. You start to doubt your competency. If it is a bad enough experience, maybe you even doubt the validity of your training as a whole.

I know that I have had this experience a ton of times in the course of my training. Luckily, some years and a lot of frustration have yielded some insight on this subject, so I'll share it here, in hopes that it eases similar trials in other students.

Consider this: you didn't leave the womb knowing how to do a martial art. What you had were your physiology and what comes instinctually to you as a human being. Your body is a machine that has evolved over thousands of years. Most of that evolution took place well before humans were sophisticated enough to come up with complex systems of martial arts. Therefore, our body is more suited to the conflicts of animals than the more complex, tactical situations that we can find ourselves in as martial artists.

Think about the adrenaline response. Your heart rate elevates. Your body becomes super-oxygenated as a result. You get faster. You get a bit stronger. Your pain tolerance experiences a quantum leap... your fine motor skills go all to hell. Your ability to engage in linear, sophisticated thinking goes out the window as well. Suddenly, your mind seems like it can only think one or two steps ahead, and it is extremely prone to getting caught in behavioral loops, that is, developing a fixation on one action and doing it over and over again, irregardless of the result. In short, you lose many of the important things you need to do martial arts well.

You become a great, lumbering oaf that is good at repetitive, gross flailing movements.

Believe it or not, that transformation is the apex of thousands of years of evolution. For most of our survival as a species, that kind of persistent, focused flailing was the best chance we might have at driving off a large, carnivorous predator. Things like the decreased blood-flow at extremities like arms and legs might seriously impair your fine motor skills, but this effect would be a godsend if said arms and legs were getting mauled by a lion. Basically, our physical responses to conflict have not caught up to our tactically-thinking, tool-using minds.

Like it or not, that is what we are stuck with. The frustration and doubt experienced by the student in the above exchange is, in part, a psychological gestalt. The very essence of a teacher pushing a student's buttons is that he is doing something the student does not expect. As a result, the student no longer feels safe and the adrenal response predictably ensues. When it kicks in, the student's very biochemistry robs him of many of the tools needed to practice martial arts well. The teacher does not experience it because, of course, he saw the whole thing coming. He is not surprised or threatened because he chose to do something different. As a result, he will not be struggling with those same natural barriers. In those situations, the already large skill gap between the student and teacher suddenly expands until it seems like the size of the Grand Canyon.

And the student's crisis of faith ensues.

But it shouldn't. Here is why.

To start, the student suffers from unrealistic expectations in the above scenario. Why should you feel bad that the adrenal response has affected you the way it affects nearly every other human being on the planet? It is entirely unrealistic to believe that, as a beginner, that you ought to be immune to your own biology just because you want to be so. Your biology is unbelievably powerful, and it will not be put aside lightly. Managing, circumventing, and at times harnessing these natural responses is a long conditioning process. It takes time and a lot of repetition.

People sometimes get the idea that they are somehow inherently "weak" because they don't do well when things get intense. A lot of old Westerns talk about special people who have "nerves of steel", and those who don't, like this is something that is entirely in the hands of fate. In my opinion, that is a load of B.S. I've seen all manner of people, in a wide range of personality types, learn to maintain their functionality in stress situations with the right training. (I should mention that I'm not only talking about martial arts here; I've seen it happen ten times as often in the training of trial attorneys.)

Sure, some people start off ahead of others in terms of managing these responses. Some come to the practice with other experiences that have taught them to monitor this response. There is some carry-over between different types of stress. Some lucky few, for whatever reason, may not feel the responses as strongly due to their biology. But whatever hand the universe has dealt you, I can guarantee you two things: there is a learning curve, and every human being out there will lose their shit if the right buttons get pushed. Therefore, we've all got to study just the same.

The experience I described at the start is such a valuable training tool. It shows you where your skill really is when the shit hits the fan. You can't put a price-tag on this type of reality check. Most people training never get lucky enough to get them, and only discover it to their horror when it is too late, and they are already in serious danger on the street. Any training that purports to be "realistic" or "combative" has to address these issues, if it is valid.

The continued exposure to this type of stress re-wires your brain responses. When exposed to the same stimuli again and again, the adrenaline dump becomes less dramatic. Also, you start to develop strategies for how to deal with it when it hits. This is one of the reasons that higher-level people seem so skilled. In the heart of conflict, they retain nearly their entire toolbox because the situation is familiar.

The desensitization process appears to be never-ending. My own teacher has thrust me into uncomfortable situations until they were no longer uncomfortable. Then he would change something, and I got to start (almost) all over again. The whole idea is to expose the student to as many "button-pushing" situations as possible, so that there is the highest likelihood that he will remain very functional in a real conflict.

This is a long, often uncomfortable process, but there are enormous possibilities for growth, not only as a technician, but also as a human being. A strange bi-product of this type of stress is that it dredges up thoughts and feelings that are often buried deep within your psyche. You really get to discover who you are. These times that you spend in "the crucible", so to speak, are the real spiritual practice of martial arts, in my opinion. It also says a lot about your character that you are willing to endure this type of discomfort and come back for more. Most people aren't that determined.

When you experience these trials, I hope you'll consider what I've mentioned here and see these experiences as the valuable gems they are, not the roadblocks our delicate egos often make them out to be. If you turn into a great, flailing bear, know that it is part of the process, and it is happening on purpose. Instead of wringing your hands and bemoaning it, it is far better to study it intelligently and deal with it in the best way you know how.