Unlocking human potential through martial arts
Many martial arts bloggers (Striking Thoughts, Mokuren Dojo and Dojo Rat to name a few) have published their opinions on the veracity of chi projection, empty force (ling kong jing) and no-touch knockouts. Naturally, I have a few opinions of my own–but I do not intend to share them here and now. No, my purpose today is a humble and scientific one: to gather data.
The plural of anecdote is data, right? So, please take this multiple choice poll.
10:41 PM. Responding to an assault call, Officer Tim Hoffman takes statements from the two parties involved.
John’s story: “I just came down here to relax, man. So I was sitting at the bar, and I heard this man and woman arguing over there in the corner. I could see the situation was getting out of hand, so I walked over there, and calmly suggested they should lay off. The guy just blows up, gets in my face, starts swearing and threatening me. I knew I’d have to defend myself, right? I got into a defensive stance.
I posed the following survey question to a group of martial artists:
What is the nicest compliment that anyone has ever paid your martial art performance? Or, if you can’t remember, then what compliment would you most like to hear?
Here are some of their answers:
The sound of tapping. ~Fraser
“For a fat guy twice my age…you left me in the dust” was the best one I ever got. ~Jerry
I get people telling me “you’re really good” all the time. Or “I always learn something rolling with you.” ~Trav
The Final Qigong Demonstration of John Chang remains one of my most popular posts. With the help of Youtube’s new viewer demographics feature, we can learn more about the people who find this video so fascinating.
It seems my critics are right: I am a little slower than average.
Patrick Parker (of Mokuren Dojo) and I were discussing the feasibility of intelligent responses to physical attack. Patrick asked:
What exactly do you have to do to get the faster intelligence that Chris says we need? Well, really we can’t. From my understanding of the neuromuscular machine I don’t really think that you can make the brain/spine/muscle machine work faster than it already does. There is hardwired into us about a ¾ second delay (if not more) in the OODA loop.
A search for evidence supporting or refuting this unavoidable delay, led me to the Human Benchmark reaction time test.