Peyton Quinn's ideas

I'm also interested in hearing Mr. Hayes' response to Peyton Quinn's specific influence on him...

In an interview in www.realfighting.com issue #3, I saluted Peyton Quinn for his brave and original work. This was inaccurately interpreted by too many people as my somehow "adopting his method to change my own." That is not what happened.

My real purpose in saluting Peyton Quinn was to make a comment on how few influential martial artists took the time to check out what I was introducing back in the 1980s when my groundbreaking work so dominated martial arts magazines at the time.

(I can understand how confusing it must be for readers to see one well-known martial artist saluting another who is so different and not in any way connected. Such a salute rarely happens in the ego-insecurity-charged competitive world of conventional martial arts. My apologies for confusing so many people with my unconventional action.)

Peyton Quinn does not offer a full curriculum of techniques as we do in To-Shin Do. His purpose is different. His training gives just enough mechanics to allow participants to fit into the psychophysical-emotional response experience under pressure.

My seeing what Peyton Quinn was offering reminded me of the importance of addressing in martial arts training the psychophysical "inner struggle" that takes place so often when good people are confronted by bad (or at least "misguided") and stress chemicals and responses flood the perceptions. It is my strong belief that such important inner considerations were totally missing from the martial arts training that I went through in the 1960s and 1970s. Everyone I encountered was simply teaching mechanical technique - only a tiny part of the big answer for preparing for actual self-defense. For that reason, back in the 1980s I created a learning system based on 5 elemental emotional responses so that students could have an honest idea of what their strengths and weaknesses might be in an actual fighting clash with an attacker determined to humiliate or harm.

I would not say that I "studied techniques with Peyton Quinn" or that his seminar "changed" anything that I had developed over the 1980s and 1990s. To-Shin Do is its own unique training method.

- Stephen K. Hayes