Chapter 127: Train Hard? or Hard Training?

People believe, rightly so, that one must put in the sweat equity through training and practice to achieve anything. What people might overlook is that to achieve certain things one must focus proper intent, intelligence and effort to achieve the objective of that intent.

In martial arts there are a variety of objectives in training and practice such as self-protection, then self-improvement and even a more philosophical objective but one thing is always true, that intent drives the practice. 

So, "do you train hard or do you do hard training?" It is a question derived from an article I read but here I plan on taking a slightly different direction. 

Martial artists train for years to achieve their goals and objectives what ever those may be, it is an individual thing to achieve. Often, in their exuberance and excitement along with gratification to reach goals that take a bit more patience and time, don't rush it. 

The author of that article provided, fundamentally speaking, a great definition of training hard vs. hard training. 

1.Training hard is being sensible and intelligent, finding a way to understand the methodologies and find weak points each presents, if any.

2.Hard training - being proud of a black eye, calloused hands and knuckles, a broken nose, or a fractured wrist is being proud of a mistake instead of learning from the mistake. Once thought of as badges of honor or symbolic of a black belt, actually represent a session when no one learned.

Hard training first, in my view it is a more robotic mindless actions that do create fit and healthy bodies but fail miserably to teach martial arts. It can be observed by the ROTE actions done to practice technique-based repetitive actions vs. usable applicable methods, etc. Mind-no-mind is not to be taken literally because training hard requires thought, memories, creativity and synthesis along with conditioned action encoding of certain memory functions of the mind. 

Look at it as a combination of intent in action, visual imagery and reality-based training programs that engage more than merely body movement and encoding patterned technique-based static actions. This is why training hard, being an intent oriented sensible and intelligent effort to learn, understand and focused intent based analysis of what is taught to what is applied especially toward self-protection. 

What most young martial artists fail to realize is that we all have been conditioned socially to assume that strength and speed are what carry the day, truth it is to an extent but not the whole truth. Speed and strength have their purpose, training our strength has benefits toward health, endurance, fitness and endurance along with its stabilizing functions of the body and mind. 

Speed comes in a variety of things, for instance a fast hand and fist vs. the ability to speed through the OODA to the action stage faster than your adversary, makes sense people will say and they are right. Achieving that mind-state of maturity over simply easy repetitive practice of patterned techniques is another. It should be the goal.

Lets add in a bit about kata: A brilliant means of training hard and, when done right, training intelligently. It demonstrates that technical mastery comes, NOT, from hearing the uniform snap as a punch extends, etc. but from the satisfaction of feeling, seeing and applying skills in a variety of practice and training form/situations. Kata is about balance, coordination and the manifestation of fundamental principles.