Those who hit the mats ask questions based on that experience; those who don’t hit the mats ask questions from the depths of their imagination.
As instructors (who are only ever speaking from our experience on the mats as well as the street) this is our constant vexation. There’s nothing worse than having someone walk up and ask a question that is clearly from the realm of their darkest fears and imaginings… “How many unicorns are in the Land of Gumdrops and Rainbows?”
I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell have no idea.
Questions that arise from experience jibe with similar experience, meaning that I can recognize a mat-induced question because it’s probably something I’ve wondered myself after a particularly good (or bad) session and then been motivated to explore, physically.
Mat time is your own personal violence laboratory – if you find yourself wondering about something (“What if he has the knife in his other hand?” or “Would that really work with a gun?”) then all you have to do is grab your partner and work on it at your next session. If you still have questions (and doubtless you will), then those questions will be based on your physical experience – how it went, the problems that stopped you cold, new ones that arose from doing it with another human body in motion. Those are questions we can answer. We can give you hints and ‘tricks’ to try at your next session. And if you still have questions, well, then we’re just working the problem, aren’t we?
I vividly remember a phase where I was intensely interested in grabs, holds, and grappling in general. I asked my partners to come at me with tackles, takedowns, try to restrain or pin me when it was my turn. It wasn’t long before I had answered all my questions for myself – in the end I was no longer worried about such things. I had exhausted all the possibilities (or nearly so, or at least to my satisfaction) and was confident in my ability to seriously injure someone who wanted to wrestle me, with little or no effort on my part. If I had any leftover questions they were to the point and very specific – meaning that I could expect a useful answer to my query.
Later I did the very same thing with firearms, with identical results. Guns became a fad, I worked it to death, and left with not only questions answered, but a skill and the confidence to execute it.
Questions that come from physical experience are based on the facts of the matter – how the human body moves and can’t move, the limitations of the laws of physics, the gravitational constant. Mat questions are questions about reality. Questions that come from movies, TV, videogames, comic books, the Internet, ‘helpful’ friends, or your own fears are best tested against the realities of the mats first, before you open your mouth. Most times they vanish with something as simple as ruptured testicles. If they persist and vex you on the mats then at least you’ve worked through the stupid/obvious stuff before asking for help. And that means that our answer is both targeted and useful to you.
Getting back to the Land of Gumdrops and Rainbows, so many times I’m asked questions where the real answer is, “It doesn’t matter.” Of course, that’s incredibly unsatisfying and does nothing to fill in the blanks of the one asking. But it would be the truth. When a question so obviously comes from the imaginary world in their head instead of the real one we’re standing in, there’s not much more I can say. It’s maddening to try to argue a hypothetical with facts that are not a shared experience; in other words, if Mr. A has no idea what he’s talking about, then no amount of factual advice from Mr. B is going to change that. We have to share some level of real, physical experience in order to communicate physical action. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of gas and wasted time.
Am I saying you shouldn’t ‘bother’ us with questions? Of course not. You know me better than that. What I’m saying is that you’ll get the best, most useful answer if your question is based on physical experience instead of the fairy dust of ‘what-if’ worrying. If you have a question the first place you should go is to your own personal violence lab – the mats – and grind it out with your favorite reaction partner. Then you can ask us about the specifics of what went wrong. And then we can give you the why, and how to fix it.
This is the process of improvement, not “But what if he has a knife and a gun?”
