The Toad Impediment

The following poetic rendering teaches us in the karate and martial arts communities an important lesson. First, the centipede:

A centipede was happy – quite!

Until a toad in fun said, 

“Pray, which leg moves after which?”

This raised her doubts to such a pitch,

She fell exhausted in the ditch

Not knowing how to run.

                                      – Unknown

The lesson the centipede and the toad are teaching, “To focus on the atomistic while a good novice teaching and practice tool if not taken to the higher levels will lock one in the human logical slower brain mode.” The need for speed in self-defense requires we encode and program the brains sub-routines and procedural memory so the faster lizard brain, nature’s survival sub-routine, to extract appropriate actions to the situations for survival. 

Like the centipede, if you focus on the atomistic and make that focus the source of your actions you will always run into confusion. In a technique-based self-defense model the focus is on individual techniques for specified attack techniques so the focus will be on which leg/technique do I use and that puts us in the human brain, slower, and that brain locks, freezes, and you end up in the OO bounce - the freeze. 

Don’t let the toad, the teaching of technique-based self-defense, cause you to focus on which leg is used to act in any given situation. Expand the mind and progress toward the more creative zombie like sub-routines programmed through appropriate training to speed things up and let you walk as if you had been walking your entire life. 

Don’t let the toad impede your training, progress and ability. When in self-defense you can’t afford to think about which leg to move or the attacker will put you in the ditch in a pitch while your brain is still trying to decide what to do.