Super-Heavyweight Finals, Wong Fei Hung All Kung Fu Championships September 2001
A 230-pound giant glowered and raised his wrist to mine. His heavy sweating face smelled of rage. This guy was an accomplished fighter with a mean streak and lots of friends at the tournament. He wanted to tear me apart. The referee stood frozen, poised to set us loose for round two. I took a deep breath, exhaled, and felt the blood pumping through my body, the ground soft beneath my feet.
In seven weeks I would defend my title as Tai Chi Chuan Push Hands Middleweight U.S. Champion, and at 170 pounds I had entered the super heavyweight division of a regional tournament for the extra training. Maybe it was bad timing for an experiment, but I was curious to see how I could do against men much bigger and stronger than myself.
In the first round I had neutralized the big man’s strength, used it against him. Now I had him mad, aggressive, and off balance. The ref gave the signal and my opponent exploded into me, a brutal attack, coming fast from all angles but somehow in slow motion when I relaxed into the moment. In Tai Chi the artist learns to turn aggression back onto itself, but this is easier said than done when the incoming violence is honed by decades of martial training. My shoulder slipped back when his left hand flew forward, his fist filled the empty space, but then his right hand surged toward my stomach. I melted away before the force connected, caught his right elbow, and followed the momentum. Next thing I knew the guy was flying away from me, spinning twice in the air before righting himself eight feet away. He shook his head and came back at me. Only a minute to go and I will have won the finals. He attacked and I slipped aside, sensed I had him off balance, but then his shoulder ripped into me and I heard a crack. My hand felt icy hot. I knew it was broken. The pain jolted me into deeper focus. Time slowed to a near stop. I didn’t show him the injury, quietly fought with one arm, fell into rhythm with his attacks. On the video his hands look like bullets, but in the match they felt like clouds, gently rolling toward me, easily dodged, neutralized, pulled into overextension, exploited. No thought, just presence, pure flow . . . like a chess game.
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When I think of this testing moment in my martial arts career, it reminds me of that afternoon in India some years earlier when an earthquake spurred me to revelation. In both cases, distraction was converted into fuel for high performance. In the chess scene, the shaking jolted my mind into clarity and I discovered the critical solution to the position. In the Push Hands moment, my broken hand made time slow down in my mind and I was able to reach the most heightened state of awareness of my life. In the chapter The Soft Zone, I mentioned that there are three critical steps in a resilient performer’s evolving relationship to chaotic situations. First, we have to learn to be at peace with imperfection. I mentioned the image of a blade of grass bending to hurricane-force winds in contrast to a brittle twig snapping under pressure. Next, in our performance training, we learn to use that imperfection to our advantage—for example thinking to the beat of the music or using a shaking world as a catalyst for insight. The third step of this process, as it pertains to performance psychology, is to learn to create ripples in our consciousness, little jolts to spur us along, so we are constantly inspired whether or not external conditions are inspiring. If it initially took an earthquake or broken hand for me to gain clarity, I want to use that experience as a new baseline for my everyday capabilities. In other words, now that I have seen what real focus is all about, I want to get there all the time—but I don’t want to have to break a bone whenever I want my mind to kick in to its full potential. So a deep mastery of performance psychology involves the internal creation of inspiring conditions. I will lay out my methodology for systematically cultivating this ability in Part III. In this chapter, I will take these three steps of high-performance training and illustrate how they are also critical components of the long-term learning process.
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Let’s return to that intense scene in which my broken hand inspired a moment of martial clarity. My perception became so heightened that I saw everything in slow motion. My opponent seemed stuck in molasses while I could move at full speed. The experience was very inspiring and ended up being a beacon for my martial arts training for years to come. However, I faced an immediate problem once the adrenaline faded. I was left with a broken hand seven weeks before the National Championships.
I went to the doctor the day after the injury, hoping for some good news, but after X-rays he told me there was no chance I could compete. I had a spiral fracture in the fourth metacarpal. Best-case scenario, he said, my bone would be fully healed in six weeks but my arm would have atrophied substantially because I would be completely immobilized from the elbow down. I would have just a few days for physical therapy, and it was absurd to consider taking tournament-level impact under those conditions. I walked out of his office resolved to compete, and the day after I got my cast on I was back in training.
My first few days working with one hand, I felt a bit vulnerable. I was worried about someone accidentally knocking into my cast and jolting the injury. I held my right hand behind me, and mostly did sensitivity work with training partners I trusted. We moved slowly, standing up, without throws, doing classical Push Hands in which the two players try to feel each other’s centers, neutralize attacks, and subtly unbalance the partner. This isn’t ego clashing or direct martial work, but an important method of heightening sensitivity to incoming power and intention—something akin to cooperative martial meditation.
It is very important for athletes to do this kind of visualization work, in a form appropriate to their discipline, but often when we are caught up in the intense routine of training and competition, it feels like we have no time for the internal stuff. I know this quite well. Sometimes when I am in the heat of tournament preparation, months will pass with brutal sparring, constant pain, hitting the mats hundreds of times a night while drilling throws, and then I’ll realize that I’ve moved a bit away from what really makes things tick. Then I’ll spend a week doing soft, quiet work on timing, perception, reading and controlling my opponent’s breath patterns and internal blinks, subtle unbalancing touches that set up the dramatic throws that ultimately steal the spotlight. After these periods of reflection, I’ll almost invariably have a leap in ability because my new physical skills are supercharged by becoming integrated into my mental framework.
The importance of undulating between external and internal (or concrete and abstract; technical and intuitive) training applies to all disciplines, and unfortunately the internal tends to be neglected. Most intelligent NFL players, for example, use the off-season to look at their schemes more abstractly, study tapes, break down aerial views of the field, notice offensive and defensive patterns. Then, during the season they sometimes fall into tunnel vision, because the routine of constant pain requires every last bit of reserves. I have heard quite a few NFL quarterbacks who had minor injuries and were forced to sit out a game or two, speak of the injury as a valuable opportunity to concentrate on the mental side of their games. When they return, they play at a higher level. In all athletic disciplines, it is the internal work that makes the physical mat time click, but it is easy to lose touch with this reality in the middle of the grind.
Since I had broken my right hand, I was forced to cultivate my weaker side. I quickly realized that there were certain martial movements that I relied on my strong hand to cover, and now my left had to catch up so it could do everything. Day by day, my left learned new skills, from deflecting attacks to uprooting someone at unusual angles to eating with chopsticks. After a couple weeks of slow work, my fractured right hand was a bit more stable. I was used to protecting it behind me while playing with my left, and I was also comfortable falling and rolling without touching the injury to the floor, so I was able to mix it up a bit more. Then my teacher began pairing me up with slightly more aggressive training partners who were less skilled than me and not necessarily controlled. A couple of these guys really wanted to prove something. I was a big fish at the school and now was their moment to dominate me. They had two hands, I had one, and they intended to exploit the advantage. Clearly, I had to approach these situations with openness to being tossed around. If I wasn’t prepared to invest in loss, there would be no way to do this work. That said, it was fascinating to see how my body reacted. My left arm instinctively became like two arms, with my elbow neutralizing my opponent’s right hand and my hand controlling his left arm. I had no idea the body could work this way, and after a few days of this training, the notion that I was playing at a disadvantage faded. I felt completely comfortable with one hand against two, so long as I was a bit more skilled than my partner.
This new perspective opened up a whole new vision of martial intercourse. I realized that whenever I could control two of his limbs with one of mine, I could easily use my unoccupied arm for free-pickings. Today, techniques around this idea are a staple in my competitive martial style. If even for a blink of an eye you can control two of the other guy’s limbs with one of yours, either with angle or timing or some sort of clinch, then the opponent is in grave danger. The free hand can take him apart. This principle applies to nearly all contact sports: basketball, football, soccer, wrestling, hockey, boxing, you name it. On the chessboard it is also relevant. Any moment that one piece can control, inhibit, or tie down two or more pieces, a potentially critical imbalance is created on the rest of the board. On a deeper level, this principle can be applied psychologically whenever opposing forces clash. Whether speaking of a corporate negotiation, a legal battle, or even war itself, if the opponent is temporarily tied down qualitatively or energetically more than you are expending to tie it down, you have a large advantage. The key is to master the technical skills appropriate for applying this idea to your area of focus.
I was familiar with this competitive principle from my chess days, but it wasn’t until I was forced to train one-handed that I began to understand how potently it could be applied to the martial arts. I would never have guessed that I could control two hands with one in a freestyle exchange, but to be honest, after three or four weeks I became so comfortable fending off both my opponent’s hands with my left, that the idea of ultimately getting my right hand back felt like an unfair luxury. This injury was becoming a tremendous source of inspiration.
There was also an intriguing physical component of my recovery. I wanted to compete in the Nationals, so bizarre though it may sound I resolved not to atrophy. At this point in my life I was very involved in the subtle internal dynamics of the body through Tai Chi meditation. I had an idea that I might be able to keep my right side strong by intense visualization practice. My method was as follows: I did a daily resistance workout routine on my left side, and after every set I visualized the workout passing to the muscles on the right. My arm was in a cast, so there was no actual motion possible—but I could feel the energy flowing into the unused muscles. I admit it was a shot in the dark, but it worked. My whole body felt strong, and when the doctor finally took off my cast he was stunned. Four days before the Nationals an X-ray showed that my bone was fully healed, and I had hardly atrophied at all. The doctor cleared me to compete. On Wednesday I did my first weight workout on my right side in seven weeks, on Friday I flew to San Diego, and on Saturday, slightly favoring my newly empowered left arm, I won the Nationals.
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One thing I have learned as a competitor is that there are clear distinctions between what it takes to be decent, what it takes to be good, what it takes to be great, and what it takes to be among the best. If your goal is to be mediocre, then you have a considerable margin for error. You can get depressed when fired and mope around waiting for someone to call with a new job offer. If you hurt your toe, you can take six weeks watching television and eating potato chips. In line with that mind-set, most people think of injuries as setbacks, something they have to recover from or deal with. From the outside, for fans or spectators, an injured athlete is in purgatory, hovering in an impotent state between competing and sitting on the bench. In my martial arts life, every time I tweak my body, well-intended people like my mother suggest I take a few weeks off training. What they don’t realize is that if I were to stop training whenever something hurt, I would spend my whole year on the couch. Almost without exception, I am back on the mats the next day, figuring out how to use my new situation to heighten elements of my game. If I want to be the best, I have to take risks others would avoid, always optimizing the learning potential of the moment and turning adversity to my advantage. That said, there are times when the body needs to heal, but those are ripe opportunities to deepen the mental, technical, internal side of my game.
When aiming for the top, your path requires an engaged, searching mind. You have to make obstacles spur you to creative new angles in the learning process. Let setbacks deepen your resolve. You should always come off an injury or a loss better than when you went down. Another angle on this issue is the unfortunate correlation for some between consistency and monotony. It is all too easy to get caught up in the routines of our lives and to lose creativity in the learning process. Even people who are completely devoted to cultivating a certain discipline often fall into a mental rut, a disengaged lifestyle that implies excellence can be obtained by going through the motions. We lose presence. Then an injury or some other kind of setback throws a wrench into the gears. We are forced to get imaginative.
Ultimately we should learn how to use the lessons from this type of experience without needing to get injured: a basketball player should play lefty for a few months, to even out his game. A soccer player who favors his right leg should not take a right-footed shot for an extended period of time. If dirty opponents inspire a great competitor to raise his game, he should learn to raise his game without relying on the ugly ruses of his opponents (see Making Sandals, in Part III). Once we learn how to use adversity to our advantage, we can manufacture the helpful growth opportunity without actual danger or injury. I call this tool the internal solution—we can notice external events that trigger helpful growth or performance opportunities, and then internalize the effects of those events without their actually happening. In this way, adversity becomes a tremendous source of creative inspiration.