Several years ago, a new jargon term appeared among martial-arts and self-defense teachers: Training Scars. The term refers broadly to the unintended consequences of bad habits acquired in training.
A classic (but possibly apocryphal) example from law enforcement is the story of an officer being found dead at the scene of a traffic stop that turned into a shootout. As the story goes, the officer was armed with a revolver; after firing the six shots in his cylinder, he had to reload. His colleagues found him dead with an unloaded and opened gun, and six spent cartridge cases in his pocket.
The implication was that the officer either wasted reloading time emptying the spent brass into his hand and putting it in his pocket, or (less believable) policing it up off the ground first. The “training scar” in this story is the ingrained habit – either learned at the Academy or on the range with his department – of not letting spent brass fall to the ground and stay there, but capturing it and putting it in your pocket to turn in later, an "administrative" range practice which has no place in a shootout.
I don’t know how much I believe the facts of the story. It could be an urban-legend; then again, I’ve seen Soldiers retain the dumbest things from their training, so who knows? Nevertheless, the idea of “training scars” is valid because I myself have been the cause of at least one of them!
Back when I first started teaching, one of the more obvious
things I’d see needing correction was with the “pushing” hand in “Brush Knee.” If a student isn’t told what this hand does,
the odds are good that he or she will move it in a sort of impotent hand-wavy
motion (if you think I'm being judgmental, I know about this tendency because this is exactly what I was doing for years before I was put straight). I wanted to correct this in a way that was simple and light-hearted, a way that would not only give the “push” intent,
but that the student would easily remember.
Most of my students are “of a certain age;” this age being one where “The
Three Stooges” is a part of our collective cultural memory. So I told them to imagine they were in a
Three Stooges pie fight. “Pick up the
pie, then throw the pie.”
As time went on, I realized that there were better ways to
teach this pushing and its intent. So
when I made a correction to one of my long-time students a couple months or so ago,
she asked me, “But what about the pie?
Huh?!
"You know – ‘Pick up the pie, throw the pie’?
I’d literally forgot I used to teach “Brush Knee” that way!
More recently, I’ve changed some of my teaching methods and the images I use. I seldom say “hold a ball” when I’m teaching something like “Ward Off,” “Wild Horse Parts Its Mane” or “Fly Diagonal.” Instead, I say “hands circle.” This is because if we’re using this hand position, either in push-hands or (Vishnu Forbid!) in a fight, we may easily have the image of a ball in mind, when we really need to have our partner/opponent and their intent in mind.
You may have heard me say “You’ll need to eventually let this go,” when I was talking about “doing tai chi underwater.” It’s the same thing. We use a metaphor – water, pie-fights, balls, wheels-and-axles, miniskirts-and-3rd-graders – in order to lay hold of and internalize the intended feeling. But once we’ve done so, the metaphor has fulfilled its usefulness and should be let go of, with only the feeling remaining.
This is where at-home practice becomes important. It’s clear, from the story of my student with the pie, that I’ve created at least one “training scar” I’ve since forgot. This implies I've created others I don’t know about. When you practice at home, you may find yourself throwing a pie, swishing around underwater, holding a beach ball or hugging a bicycle wheel. When you do, it’s worth a bit of extra effort to lock the feeling in and “let the metaphor go” so the “training scar” can heal.
