part0009

“If you strike upon a thought that baffles you, break off from that entanglement, and try another, so shall your wits be fresh to start again.” — Aristophanes

Judo training practitioners often engage in newaza (groundwork). This groundwork is a subset of the system’s katame-waza (grappling techniques), which includes osae komi waza (hold-down techniques) and kansetsu waza (joint locks). As the name implies, these techniques are all performed on the ground, used to hold an opponent down and disable his or her movement in order to win a match.

In the early beginnings of Kris’s newaza training he found himself on top of his opponent, wrenching on his arm. His attempts to pry the other man’s arm loose in order to get an armlock were not developing as he had hoped. While he futilely yet doggedly struggled with his plan of attack, one of the black belt instructors walked up and paused, gazing down at the situation. After a few moments he said, “You should let that go and move on to something else.”

Sound advice, but unexpected in that moment. Kris had locked himself into an assumption of how he believed things were going to work, yet the idea in his head was not coming to fruition in reality. That’s pretty normal, especially for inexperienced practitioners. We get an idea and over-focus on implementing it to the exclusion of other, better options. But, as the old saying goes, “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”

A more academic way to look at presumptive entanglement is through the lens of the sunken cost fallacy. In economics and business decision-making, a sunk cost refers to money that has already been spent and cannot be recovered. The sunken cost fallacy is the tendency for people to continue pursuing an idea or project even after it is clear that it cannot or will not succeed (meet its intended purpose) because we have already invested so much in that project. This fallacy can be seen in bridges, transportation projects, and other public works where the actual cost far, far exceeds the original estimate yet stakeholders merely shrug and say, “Well, we’ve already come this far...”

The judo coach pointed this fallacy out to Kris with his simple statement, “You should let that go and move on to something else.” Unfortunately, many martial arts instructors fail to differentiate between logical and illogical training drills and methods because they do not take into account the challenge of presumptive entanglement.

Presumptive entanglement uses the same psychological blind spot as the sunken cost fallacy, but in a more hazardous way. You see, this flaw takes the adversary for granted, deliberately creating a false environment in which to flourish which makes us believe that our applications can stand the test of the real world when they cannot.

For instance, experienced judoka become exceptionally good at throwing their opponents in tournaments because they routinely practice against people who resist throws in training. That’s good, laudable even, as long as we are only practicing for competition. The challenge is that one of the most common ways in real life to resist a throw is to punch an adversary in the face. Judoka don’t regularly practice against that since punches are outlawed in the sport.

Speaking in broad terms every martial arts drill has a protective action built into it to allow for safer training. Think of it as a pressure release valve, a means of allowing action up to a certain point, and then the action is removed, stopped, or transformed to prevent injury. A sport can be played multiple times because it is designed to allow the participants to both train and participate in competition repeatedly over time.

Combat is not designed this way. Training for combat does have the pressure release valves, of course, but in actual combat those release valves are removed. In firearms training, for instance, we can wear special safety gear and use Simunition® for force-on-force training, then replace the non-lethal rounds with real bullets for use in the field.

In the earlier newaza example where his technique didn’t work, Kris’s opponent was restricted in his responses. He was not allowed to gouge Kris’s eyes out, bite him, or grab his testicles. You can undoubtedly think of many other options, any of which would work but are illegal according to the rules of judo hence not attempted by his training partner. That safety valve made the drill valuable training for tournaments, but could easily lead to unrealistic assumptions should the judoka involved find themselves in a similar altercation on the street.

But what if we were to change things up a bit? Take the idea of presumptive entanglement but apply it to combatants who are standing and facing each other and we find a way to move past the sunken cost fallacy and directly address presumptive entanglement.

When we understand and identify presumptive entanglement in our training, we are able to maintain the necessary safety valves in the dojo , but release them on the street when required to do so. We must be consciously aware of all the intentional flaws in our drills. Generally, they fall into one or more of the following three buckets:

While judo often focuses on groundwork, karate uses many of the same type of entanglements standing up. For example, kotegaishi (wrist lock throw), a ubiquitous technique made famous by aikido that is also found in jujitsu , karate, and many other martial arts, might be used to demonstrate how a person can be thrown with the simple flick of a wrist. But, it’s also a great example of where these three presumptive entanglement factors—pressure release, compliant participants, and fragile complexity—can be baked in.

Kotegaishi is a supinating wristlock which requires practitioners to grab a hold of their adversary’s arm (typically but not always with both hands), bending and twisting to execute the technique. Executed properly it can break an opponent’s wrist and dislocate their elbow and/or shoulder, but that means that pressure applied to the opponent’s wrist must move up through their elbow and shoulder before transferring energy into their body. Consequently, we must use a compound movement, one which requires all three joints to work together, in order to make the throw possible.

Any angle or movement that is suboptimal allows for energy leakage which may thwart our technique… which is beneficial when we don’t want to cause dislocation or joint damage, but not so much when causing that damage is our goal. Working with a compliant partner we may not realize that we are inadvertently undermining the throw via pressure release.

Oftentimes our training partner will throw him/herself to relieve the pressure, simultaneously avoiding injury while facilitating our technique. Or they might simply “tap out,” ceding victory by acknowledging that our application would have been effective irrespective of whether or not it actually was.

Again, this is generally good for practicing safely, but can lead to a false confidence in the movement. If our technique will not work against a person who is actively resisting it will not hold up to real life application. There are ways to safely work around this in training, but the danger lies in not realizing when our training partner is being too cooperative.

The more options an adversary has, the more fragile our technique becomes when truly put to the test. Let’s face it, it’s not possible to simply walk up to a resisting adversary, put him in a wristlock, and dump him onto the ground. Consider all the ways he/she might fight back…

To begin, kotegaishi requires both of our hands to be brought to bear against one of our adversary’s, which leaves their other hand unentangled. That free hand can be used to strike, slap, gouge, or otherwise thwart our technique. Or, our adversary they may simply move or shift in a way that relieves the pressure on their joints, countering our advantage. Or, the opponent might use his/her unencumbered knees, feet, or legs to strike us. Likewise, headbutts or bites may potentially be used as counters too. In real life, all these factors must be accounted for.

Virtually all addictive behaviors, including gambling and substance abuse, share key neurobiological features which involve the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is tied to both reward and reinforcement, and can be affected by operant conditioning which is an associative learning process. Like the intermittent payoffs we achieve from gambling that can lead to addiction, dojo drills modify certain behaviors via reinforcement or punishment. It’s good to build so-called “muscle memory” through patterns and repetition, but only to the extent that those patterns are useful for our intended application.

Martial artists use operant conditioning all the time, not only in drills but also in various dojo rituals that are found in traditional martial arts and to lessor degree modern combatives. There’s nothing wrong with this so long as we take it in the proper context, understanding and questioning the presumptive entanglements that come with the territory. Never take these practices on blind faith. We must actively identify the intentional flaws in each and every drill and keep them firmly in mind when training.

When possible, we must practice with practitioners of other arts so that we will be able to handle a wide variety of styles and techniques rather than training to compete or battle against folks who fight just like us. In that same vein, we should practice against members of the opposite gender as well as people who are physically larger, smaller, older, and younger than we are from time to time too. More often than not if we’re attacked on the street it will be by someone bigger, stronger, or more ferocious who believes that they can win, but threats come in all sizes and shapes so we must prepare for every eventuality.