This one is more for instructors designing courses or seminars, but fun for everyone.
I just posted a couple of excellent books giving details on a specific topic. I want to change gears for this post and show what can be done with very little. Too often, for me, I see course going for breadth over depth and that is fine but sometimes it is helpful to look closer at what you already have for something that can be taught.
I am going to put this disclaimer out because I see a great deal in this small book, but others have not seen what I do. So, you may or may not get what I did from this book.
The book is: “Hadaka-Jime: The Core Technique for Practical Unarmed Combat” By Moshe Feldenkrais.
Moshe Feldenkrais is best known for his “mind-body” method but he was also a Jujitsu practitioner who became one of the first European Judo black belts after he met Dr. Kano. In 1940 after the Nazi invasion of France he escaped to England and became a science officer in the British Admiralty where he conducted anti-submarine research in Scotland from 1940 to 1945. During his time in the British army he taught Judo to officers and soldiers on the base. He was asked to create a course that could teach effective self defence for war time and teach it in the shortest time possible – 10 hours. Yes, just ten hours.
To design the course he chose Judo (his base) because “Judo does not teach so many tricks, but rather inculcates in the mind and body a special sense of balance and action enabling the body to react to an unforeseen attack, smoothly , swiftly and in the most efficient way.”
He chose to focus on one technique only, Hadaka-Jime or a naked arm strangulation. By picking one technique, he allowed the trainee to learn to believe in that technique and know if they could just get to it, they would be fine. And he taught you can get there many different ways.
He designed the course so that even though it was only ten hours the trainee performed that one technique thousands of times.
He considered this a first aide course.
For me if you look at the program you will see “that the specific technique becomes secondary to the more important learning process.”
This book had a strong influence on my knife defence book “Watch Out For The Pointy End.” I designed my course to focus on one response to a knife assault. If you can initiate that one move, then you will succeed. Now after that one move there are more options, so this is where it differed from Feldenkrais’ book.
I also saw that the Feldenkrais book managed to teach a number of principles while it taught how to get to that core technique even though those principles were never talked about. I thought that was brilliant and in the early drafts of “Watch Out For The Pointy End” I tried to accomplish that very subtle teaching and failed horribly. Thanks to honest feedback from Rory Miller, Rick Bottomley and Randy King I “showed the magic” as Rory suggested and the book turned out much better.
The reason I am recommending this book is because if you are designing courses or seminars or even trying to create a self defence approach, I feel this book has a great deal to teach if you look between the lines and read closely.
I honestly don’t know if others will see the same thing, I have been told my mind works differently when I analyse self defence material but I have to recommend this small intense book if for nothing else for historical enjoyment value and for how much I got out of it.