Sydney Senshido Seminar 2009
Walk the Talk…
I haven’t attended a huge number of seminars, but this one certainly raised the bar high. The underlying concept of this seminar was avoidance of a confrontation. Many schools will preach avoiding a confrontation at all costs, but rarely do you get involved in drills that equip you with the skills to avoid, or pre-empt if necessary. All of the drills we covered were designed to reduce reaction time and increase perception time.
Rich discussed the important yet almost always overlooked fact, that a confrontation begins with an emotional assault, and that the physical aspects are incidental. That is why it is important to train our minds, not only our bodies. Over the weekend I didn’t see anyone pulling off spinning backfists or flying armbars when being confronted. However, I did see people diffusing the aggressor with dialogue and other psychological tactics.
Without going into detail on the actual drills, here are some skills we developed:
• Peripheral vision
• Awareness of the changes in body language/positioning, facial expression and intent when an aggressor is about to strike
• Ability to pick up on movement within a crowd of people
• Ability to analyze a crowd of people quickly, identifying possible threats
• An understanding of how our body wants to react/flinch from a passive stance when an attack is launched
• Increasing our reaction time (using an extended version of the “opportunity drill” for the Senshido fans out there)
I felt using Rich’s drills, that even in the few hours we were there, there was an improvement in all of these areas. Imagine training it for a few months or years?!
Rich mentioned he was a bit unsure of peoples reaction to the seminar as it wasn’t as “hands on” as other seminars. I don’t think this was an issue as the mental stuff still required participation and focus from everyone, not to mention that it did get more physical towards the end. Training these “soft skills” is IMO more important than hard skills. There is no point in learning defenses to x or y attacks when you don’t even see it coming.
A big thank you to Rich for making the trip downunder, Dom for putting it all together, and Phil, Athena and Nick for helping out. See you all next year!
