How To Build The Gunfighter Mentality In Martial Arts!
One of the most important things you can have, if you want to be a good fighter, inside the ring or out, is the gunfighter mentality. The best fighters, like Chuck Lidells and Anderson Silva, have this intuitively in their personality. The losers don't.
Interestingly enough, the Gunfighter Mentality used to be central to learning the classical martial arts. I remember training back in the sixties, and everything we did was pointed towards building this ability. While there were many factors involved in the death of the Gunfighter Mentality in training, people like Bruce Lee probably drove home the spike.
Bruce Lee added circling and bouncing to the martial arts. The Gunfighter Mentality depends on stillness, being coiled like a snake, and here was this fellow acting like Mohammad Ali, circling and jabbing and destroying the mindset of the Gunfighter. Now Bruce Lee would have won most any fight anyway, but a generation copied him, and they gave up the deadly zen stillness of the Gunfighter.
Now stillness is the heart of the matter, when it comes to Gunfighting in the martial arts, and there are several good reasons or this. There was much interchange between zen concepts and karate in Japan, and people who sat in the zen position for long hours began to see the benefits of sitting, waiting, and cultivating silence. In the silence one could see, could perceive, could empty themselves enough that their intuitive nature would take over.
When one is silent, just sitting, when one just relaxes, the world begins to open up. Try it, just plop yourself down in a chair and relax for a while. The world will start to come alive, tell you things, and you will become a brighter, sharper, calmer person.
Once the student begins to appreciate that his perceptions will work better, the true martial arts can be developed. In the silence we learned how to set our stances, to sink them into the ground, and search for the angle set of the leg, the best position to spring from. In the silence we would examine the position of the foot and the turn of the hips, trying to make every single part of our bodies into responsive and explosive machines.
Freestyle matches, instead of bouncing around and wasting energy, would be subtle shifts of weight and edgings forward. Instead of throwing a hundred punches, we would set up to throw one, but every ounce of our might would be instilled in that one punch. And, most important, we walked away from that training different people, aware people, patient people.
The Gunfighter Mentality in the martial arts is pretty much unknown now, and it is too bad. I believe that if the fighters of today began building the characteristics of a good Gunfighter the Martial Arts would take a turn for the better. This might not be good for mixed martial artists in such places as the UFC, however, as the techniques might become too dangerous to be used.
Interestingly enough, the Gunfighter Mentality used to be central to learning the classical martial arts. I remember training back in the sixties, and everything we did was pointed towards building this ability. While there were many factors involved in the death of the Gunfighter Mentality in training, people like Bruce Lee probably drove home the spike.
Bruce Lee added circling and bouncing to the martial arts. The Gunfighter Mentality depends on stillness, being coiled like a snake, and here was this fellow acting like Mohammad Ali, circling and jabbing and destroying the mindset of the Gunfighter. Now Bruce Lee would have won most any fight anyway, but a generation copied him, and they gave up the deadly zen stillness of the Gunfighter.
Now stillness is the heart of the matter, when it comes to Gunfighting in the martial arts, and there are several good reasons or this. There was much interchange between zen concepts and karate in Japan, and people who sat in the zen position for long hours began to see the benefits of sitting, waiting, and cultivating silence. In the silence one could see, could perceive, could empty themselves enough that their intuitive nature would take over.
When one is silent, just sitting, when one just relaxes, the world begins to open up. Try it, just plop yourself down in a chair and relax for a while. The world will start to come alive, tell you things, and you will become a brighter, sharper, calmer person.
Once the student begins to appreciate that his perceptions will work better, the true martial arts can be developed. In the silence we learned how to set our stances, to sink them into the ground, and search for the angle set of the leg, the best position to spring from. In the silence we would examine the position of the foot and the turn of the hips, trying to make every single part of our bodies into responsive and explosive machines.
Freestyle matches, instead of bouncing around and wasting energy, would be subtle shifts of weight and edgings forward. Instead of throwing a hundred punches, we would set up to throw one, but every ounce of our might would be instilled in that one punch. And, most important, we walked away from that training different people, aware people, patient people.
The Gunfighter Mentality in the martial arts is pretty much unknown now, and it is too bad. I believe that if the fighters of today began building the characteristics of a good Gunfighter the Martial Arts would take a turn for the better. This might not be good for mixed martial artists in such places as the UFC, however, as the techniques might become too dangerous to be used.
Source...