In Search of Efficiency
Part One: Introduction
Many years ago, I was teaching a class at Neil’s. A fellow was at the back watching. We hadn’t met yet but I had heard about him. He had returned to Uechi after a long break away. An original Jim Maloney student which sparked interest in our club since Jim had been Neil’s first Uechi teacher. His name was Rick Bottomley.
I taught a class on how to jam kicks. At the end, I went back and asked him what he thought about the class.
“Well,” he said “You teach like all strong guys teach. What is that small young lady at the end of the line going to do against a real big guy kicking her with what you taught?”
I looked over at this talented but petite woman and said, “She’ll die.”
And that lead to an very long talk about not going force on force and how if you need attributes (speed, strength, size) to make a technique work then without them, or against someone with more of them, you fail. In the end, our conversation brought us to where if what we taught couldn’t be done by everyone then it wasn’t what I wanted to teach anymore. We talked a long time on what could be taught.
The next week at the same time, same class, Rick B was watching and at the end I came over to talk to him and in shock he said, “You taught that whole class off our talk last week.”
I said, “Well yeah.”
His response was that no one else had listened to him and that started a decades long friendship and training partnership as we searched for the most efficient ways to be effective.
My knife defence book (yes it will be out soon – almost there) is based on a number of the principles we have discovered over time.
Techniques are the application of principles. However, without principles they require superior attributes over the Aggressor to work. Using principles, we hope to make the applications universal.
But this is not to say size, strength or speed do not matter. A bigger stronger, faster person with the same principles as you is deadly.
Over the next while I’ll talk about some of the principles in my book and others. And yes, hopefully this will expand at some point into another book. But that one is farther in the future, because I’ve line my “From the Ground Up” counter assault from the ground book as the next one to work on.