MADE A BOOBOO? DON’T STOP!

 By Phillip Starr

Ever been practicing a particular form and stop because you made a booboo? Maybe it's the same mistake you've made many times before, and you get so frustrated that you stop, shake your head, and start over? Well....DON'T!

We all know and agree that in an actual fight, we'll perform EXACTLY as we've trained, right? Of course! And therein lies the rub...

Many moons ago, one of my teachers insisted that we stop (the form) and begin again if we stumbled, lost our balance, or made any other glaring errors. “You lost your balance!”, he would say. “Your enemy has killed you! It is over. Begin again…” And so it went until the form could be performed without any booboos.

Many years later, I would learn that this method of training was badly flawed and could lead to serious, even deadly, consequences. It was during one of my early iaido classes. I was practicing the first basic kata, mae, for the hundredth time…and my nukitsuke (the first horizontal cut made after releasing the sword from the scabbard) was too low. Dammit! I made this error far too often!

I smirked and stopped, preparing to start over. “NO!”, my instructor bellowed. “You’re in the middle of a sword fight! If you stop, you’re dead!” I realized, of course, that he was right. He said that his teacher and his teacher’s teacher (who was the highest authority in the world on iaido at the time) had pounded this training concept into him. “If you make a mistake, KEEP GOING! Don’t get into the habit of stopping is you screw up…you don’t dare do that in a real fight!”

I realized how easily pausing when I made a mistake could become a habit; one that I really didn’t want. And it applied to all aspects of training, in any martial art. If you make a mistake or something doesn’t go as expected, KEEP GOING! You can go back and fix the problem later, at another time.

If you think about it, the same thing happens frequently in the practice of self-defense techniques and other aspects of training. It’s important that you DON’T STOP. In actual combat, Murphy’s Law is omnipresent – if anything can possibly go wrong, it will (and usually at the worst time). If you can’t adapt and keep going, you’re lost.