Evolution of technique

When did you feel that the tech. you were taught needed to be modified to meet your students needs

In an art form, the artist takes defined techniques and parameters and uses them to express inner messages that evoke responses from others. Therefore, in a martial "art" specific details of technique are very important.

In a sports contest, the player takes defined objectives and methods and works with them under pressure to win out over rival competitors in producing the specific results that define victory. Therefore, in a martial "sport" the specific methods and definition of victory are very important.

Successful self-protection is a very different process, by my definition. Victory is often self-determined, and techniques are valued solely on their ability to produce results that lead to that self-defined victory.

I have always identified more with teaching self-protection than with teaching a "martial art" or "contest sport."

(By the way... Everyone understands that I am in no way disparaging artists or competitors, right? I enjoy watching beautiful martial arts, and I enjoy watching great championship wins, and I can be artistic at times myself and have won some competitions myself - I am just stating that those are not my ultimate purposes in martial training.)

My commitment to students is that To-Shin Do will remain the most honest and useful method of preparing for successful self-protection possible. The nature of that promise thereby requires us to continue to grow as a technology for learning how to produce better results. The nature of that promise in turn is that techniques for "getting it" will continue to evolve.

It is also true that the methods used by aggressors to dominate others change and mutate over time and social conditions as well. Therefore, a truly useful self-protection training method will have to grow and evolve in order to keep up with the development of new forms of aggression and attack.

It is my strong belief that a martial art that does not address directly the specifics of the aggressor's approach cannot be thought of as an effective method for studying how to produce real-world results. This is admittedly my "strong belief", and obviously there are others who disagree with my premise (...though the arguments they give to contradict me often tend to sound more like defensive-avoidance rationalization rather than reason.)

Think of comparing the study of self-protection martial arts with going to law school or business school. Would you really want to study with a "classical" teacher if real-world practical results - as opposed to scholarship - were your goal? If you wanted to be the best possible attorney or financier, how would you feel about signing on under a teacher who boasted, "I am proud to say that I teach the exact same law and economics that my teacher's teacher taught back in 1907... but you can kind of wiggle around in it and try to up-date it on your own if you want to."

- Stephen K. Hayes