The Rational and Impulsive Minds in Sparring

This post is inspired by a guest I saw on "The Colbert Report," about a year or two ago. I forgot the guest's name, and the name of his book, but his topic was interesting. It was about how there are two minds, the rational and the impulsive. The rational mind is deliberative and cautious. It weighs the pros and cons of a situation before making a decision. The impulsive mind goes with "the gut feeling," and decides without much deliberation.

The interview was only a few minutes long, but it got me thinking about how this applies to sparring, and how sparring opponents of all different skill levels can affect learning.

In the Beginning

When a student begins training, they don't know anything. The don't know what to expect. They may know few kicks and punches that had been taught to them, but they don't necissarily know how to apply them. So at this point, when a student attempts to spar, they used their rational minds to figure out just what the heck is going on. More advanced students can react more quickly and naturally because they have been practicing longer and have built the neural pathways in their brain that allow them to act instinctively.

Mid level training

By mid level, I'm talking about people who may be first or second degree black belts. At this point the student has learned the basic techniques and can probably deliver them quickly. They know the rules of the game, and may be eager to fight with people of higher skill so that they can improve their game more. When I was a first and second degree black belt. I was focused on this. I was focused on improving my reflexes, becoming more flexible, and just trying to get faster over all. There was a problem though. I couldn't read situations well and react accordingly. I had fast and accurate defense kicks, and I was beginning to learn how to use fakes in order to attack more effectively, but there was always something missing. I didn't have any "sense," as to when to attack, and I wasn't sensitive to when the other person was off balance.

High Level Sparring

At this point the competitor can use "mind games," against the other person. They can sense the distances for the other person's reach and they can move into the other person's distance and attack the other person in a decisive manor. The attacker at this point doesn't even need to be excessively fast, they just need to be able to accurately figure out what the other is capable of and use distance and timing to position themselves in a way that can maximize their own success.

Geniuses

A genius is a person who has a natural talent and a natural sense for how to attack and defend. These people may have physical or mental attributes that make them able to learn without being taught, or to learn quickly. Unfortunately these people exist everywhere. It is said that the legendary Boston Red Sock Ted Williams could see the strings on the ball when he was taking pitches. These people tend to make poor coaches because they can't really explain how they know these things. Advice from these people may be a bit vague. However, it is possible to try to break down these people's games as they are in action. You can look for their natural tendencies and try to turn their strengths into weaknesses.

The Hard Worker
This type of person earned their skills through hard work. This post is focused on helping this person avoid tunnel vision when they are training.

Sometimes when you train every day, the improvement is gradual. You can't see any improvement from day to day so motivation can sag. You may be an instructor at a school and you may lament the fact that everybody learns from you so you can't improve your skills at all. This type of thinking is wrong. In a martial arts school, everybody has something to teach other people.

When I was the leader of a Do Jang, I learned something pretty cool about the Tae Kwon Do forms from a six year old kid. I might post about that later since this post is about fighting. Anyway this is where the thinking about the impulsive and rational minds come into play.

When you spar with a person of greater speed and skill, you might use a combination of the rational mind and the impulsive mind. Your mind may race to try to figure out ways to beat the person of greater skill, and you may react impulsively to try to block or dodge the barrage of attacks that are being thrown at you. Sooner or later, the other person might figure out what you do impulsively and then exploit those weaknesses. For example, when the other person fakes, they might notice that you instinctively block your head. After your hand goes up to your head they might attack your body. The other person is in a relaxed rational state. They aren't worried about what you are going to do to them because you are in a state of panic.

Now you can train two ways to combat this in the future. 1. You can try to fight people of even greater skill, or 2. you can try to fight people of lesser skill.

Both have their advantages. People of greater skill will give you courage in the future. When you spar against someone who you fear, you get a little bit braver every time you manage to "sneak one in on them."

But people of lesser skill have a lot to teach as well. Suppose the instructor taught a fake out technique that you haven't quite mastered yet. Using this technique on the lesser student can help to encode the rational act of trying to fake out another person into an intuitive action that is less obvious to detect by the other person. Sometimes fake outs are so obviously fake outs that the other person doesn't fall for them. However, if you practice on a person of lesser skill, who is more susceptible to that kind of trick, you can adjust and modify until you can use it on a person of greater skill. So in this sense, you can use lower ranking students as learning tools.

Often times people who are natural geniuses get bored fighting with the same lower ranking students who can't put up much of a fight. This might be because the person of greater skill uses the same skill sets that already work for them. In this situation, I would recommend redefining the goal of the fight. For example, rather than trying to score more points than the other person, it might be interesting to try to used footwork to disturb the other person's balance. Or rather then using a roundhouse kick as the same defense kick, try to use a push kick or heel down kick, so that you can build other skills.

So in sum, here is a break down of the intuitive and the rational minds. The rational mind is the mind that thinks and tries to learn. After something has been learned then it becomes encoded into the intuitive mind. In Tae Kwon Do, we wish to put as much as possible into the intuitive mind. Put everything into the learned behaviors. Put as much as possible into the mind that makes you forget that you drove home. But also be sure to exercise the mind that learns things. This will help you to learn things more quickly in the future.