Second City was the “training ground for a host of famous alumni including John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, John Candy, Catherine O’Hara, Tina Fey, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, and over 500 more.

Second City’s claim to fame is IMPROVISATIONAL COMEDY, as opposed to scripted and memorized comedy.

Sound familiar?

Kind of like a certain martial art you know about?

One of Second City’s central tenets is that improvisational comedy CAN BE TAUGHT…anyone can learn how to do it.

We all see Tiny Fey or Steve Carrell and jump to the wrong conclusion, that they were born funny.

Nope, they were made funny through training.  Sure, they might have had a sense of humor to begin with, but Second City honed it into razor-sharp wit.

Second, is that Second City has developed a (gasp!) structured program to teach its students these impov skills.

Second City has an entire course catalog on various aspects of improv comedy…made up on the spot….no memorized techniques…just comedy principles.

They even have (double gasp!) prerequisite courses before taking advanced improv courses….why bother teaching advanced skills when the students don’t have a foundation, or even been exposed to one?

Here are a few examples of Course Offerings:  Movement,  Movement for the Improviser & Stage Combat

Movement

This is a fundamentals movement class in which the student
learns to express themselves physically while using their
instincts and intuitions. Basic skills like relaxation,
stretching, and improvised movement are explored in this
class. The tools obtained in this class will serve as the foundation for any performer’s physical performance.

Movement for the Improviser

Stop performing from the neck up! Working through
movement exercises will ignite your improv and sketch work
with energy and vivid physical expression. Silent scenes,
character exercises, and basic choreography will give you
access to a wider range of characters to play and bring new
life to both your independent work and work within an
ensemble. Slow down the chatter in your scenes, penetrate
the silence, and gain confidence with moving to song and
music onstage.

Stage Combat

Have you ever wanted to learn how to slap someone, deliver a
punch to the stomach, or how to fall without hurting yourself
in the process? This is the class for you! This Stage Combat
class focuses on the skills needed to protect the actor and
their instrument when engaged in stage violence. A working
knowledge of stage combat is essential to any performer’s
training and this class will give you those fundamental skills.

Prerequisite: Acting 2 or Improv Level B

The act of improvisation relies on the brain’s language centers, which makes sense because there is a “back and forth” just like a dialogue.

In contrast, the act of rote memorization — whether it be comedy, jazz music or martial arts — uses different parts of the brain other than the language centers.

This means that there are two different skills being developed here.

It also explains why people who are good at memorizing aren’t necessarily (and often aren’t) good at improvising…UNLESS they practice improvising.

What Second City excels at is linking these two skills, learning simple techniques/principles and improvising off of them.

Here is one exercise from The Second City that gets students in the improv mode:

“Yes, and…”

I noticed all the “yes, ands..” at a Second City performance years ago.  I realized they were doing it, but at the time didn’t know why.

Now I know.

First, yes.  Saying yes accepts whatever the first performer floats out there — there is no mental resistance to what the improviser has just been given.

No matter what the first performer says, the second person doesn’t contradict it or judge it.  It keeps performers from thinking, “why did you just say something so stupid?  What am I supposed to do with THAT?”

In Systema, this translates into taking whatever the attacker gives you and moving with it, along with whatever first move your body makes as a result.  It keeps you from getting mentally stuck and thinking what SHOULD you do.

There is no should.  (Do or do not).

Saying yes takes out the initial tension and fear from the encounter.  I often have my students also think to themselves, “huh? now that’s interesting…”

Next is the and…

And leads the performer into his rebuttal.  It also gives him time to formulate a quick, witty response.  He can latch on to any component of the sentence he was given and morph it into comedy.

“Yesterday my wife served me liver for breakfast.”

“Yes, and…how did your liver taste?” (in Scottish accent. me=my in this case)

The improviser had the time to focus on the word liver and make an interpretation of me into my, messing with the sentence structure.

In Systema, the and comes from accepting the attack and just moving anywhere.  It gives you time to find something, anything to work with and see what happens.

Not all Second City improv is stellar comedy.  Some jokes bomb and others are mildly amusing, but getting performers to keep throwing things out there eventually gets the big laughs.

Not all self-defense encounters in Systema class are perfect.  Class is full of “Let’s try that again” and “partly successful defenses” that are good enough to protect you but not necessarily win the fight.

That’s called learning.

Improv and spontaneous self-defense, as Systema teaches, both benefit from principles internalized and applied in specific situations, always building on success.

To recap here is the main question:

“Why Systema instead of other very effective martial arts or MMA?”

A mixed martial arts fight is about who is the biggest best toughest person around; t is direct “alpha-male” type of behavior. The idea is to prove who is at the top of the food chain.

However, wars are not won always by the strongest side. History is replete with stories of smaller armies defeating larger more dangerous ones. Those who were smaller needed different tactics and strategies to defeat those who are larger.

If you are close to alpha male status, you are the biggest strongest fighter, then it may make sense to focus all your energy on this type of event.  Someone huge like Brock Lesnar, well of course he would want to go head-to-head with anyone in an ego-contest.

The problem with alpha-male thinking is just that, there is only one, like the Highlander.  What about the rest of us?

I am 5’10″ tall 165 pounds. I fully understand that most people are bigger, heavier and stronger than I am. I can’t even think about going head-to-head with such people.

As a smaller person, I am fully aware that the problem for me to solve is how to defeat such bigger, stronger people.

What would I have to do to survive being attacked by someone like this?

The wrong question for me to ask is how would I defeat the person in direct combat.

Smaller people are more dangerous because the stakes are higher, just as the smallest scorpion has the deadliest sting due to its venom.

Smaller people cannot afford to make mistakes or to underestimate their opponents.

This is why I got into the martial arts in the 1st place, I was a small person in a large world.

I needed an edge, trying to be the toughest guy in the room wasn’t it. I needed the kind of training in martial art like Systema offers.

BJJ offered (and still does in many cases) smaller people like me an advantage over larger, stronger opponents.  But with the rise of MMA it has lost some of its effectiveness because Americans are great at adapting and have created strategies for dealing with it.

No doubt I’m a fan of BJJ/Sambo but as I said last time, it is context-limited.  Plus, it still relies on too much struggling and force for my needs (that’s why it is called grappling).

While this context is important to be comfortable with, the nature of Systema training give me other advantages.

For one, the pain management work in Systema is unparalleled in the martial arts.

The breathwork to deal with the pain of being joint-locked makes it much easier to escape locks.

The joint-strengthening and mobility work make it easier to avoid getting into locks in the first place.

The emphasis on breaking vs. locking makes it easier to NOT struggle or grapple.

The nature of Systema striking is vastly different from the boxing paradigm which makes it easier for me to debilitate a larger attacker without trying to box toe-to-toe.

The major principles of mastering tension and relaxation to use an attacker’s force against him without using much force myself has been the MAJOR reason I continue to perfect this part of the art.

Speed, strength, endurance all decline with age but the major principles of Systema improve with age and experience and are particularly effective for smaller people like me.

There you have it, a second answer to “Why Systema instead of other very effective martial arts?”

Brad

P.S. More answers to this question next time…there’s a whole bunch more to say on this topic for sure.

Here they are:

Why do I continue to train in the Martial Arts and why do I train in Systema rather than BJJ or MMA?

I am a smart, college-educated man, so what is it about Systema and other martial arts that I prefer them over MMA-type training?

Am I daft? Do I not see the clear advantage of MMA training?

Is it that I have too much invested in other martial arts training to give it up and do MMA?

Is it age?

Or could it be something else entirely? And are my reasons right for you?

The simplest answer I’ve come up with so far is that Systema gives me the greatest chance to protect myself successfully in the greatest number of different situations.

Every martial art, somewhere along the line, gets niched; they all get specialized into a narrow context, like being in a cage or even being “all knife, all the time.”

I happen to operate in multiple contexts:

I don’t regularly live in a cage, although home sometimes feels like a zoo.

I don’t always have a knife on me, although much of the time I do.

I don’t always NEED the deadliest, quickest kill techniques even if I’d really like to use on them on the idiot in line in front of me.

The bottom line for me is that I never knew when or where an attack (or attackers) might come from so I need to be best prepared to adapt to any eventuality. I need to be able to switch into self-defense mode in a split-second while keeping my wits about me to formulate the best response to ANY random, surprise attack.

Systema gives me the ability to use both instinctive responses and at the same time rational, creative thought to deal with shock and surprise.

Systema allows me to remain calm under pressure, assured of my ability to (to quote Clint Eastwood) “adapt, improvise, overcome,” faster, easier and more effectively than any other art or combinations of arts I’ve seen.

There you have it, the quick answer to “Why Systema instead of other very effective martial arts?”

Brad

P.S. More answers to this question next time…there’s a whole bunch more to say on this topic for sure.

Brad Scornavacco:
Hi, everybody. Welcome back, and welcome to today’s call.

This is Brad Scornavacco. I’m the Head of School at Systema Colorado. My guest today is fellow Systema instructor, Bill Parravano, known as “The Knee Pain Guru.”

Today we’re going to talk about healing in the martial arts. But before we get to that, I just want to say hi, Bill. Why don’t you start telling everybody on the call today how you got involved in the martial arts in the first place. What drew you to martial arts training?

Bill Parravano:
Hey, Brad. Thanks a lot. I was interested in martial arts for the sheer principle of body mechanics. Being able to protect myself. Kind of that deeper searching for the sense of knowing what to do in a confrontational situation, or if something happened. That was my real draw to [martial arts training].

It was actually Judo that I got involved in first, and that was my real draw initially. There was such a sense of understanding body mechanics, and how you can position yourself to put your opponent or the person you’re working out with at such a significant disadvantage using leverage and physics and things like that, that it really fascinated me.

Brad Scornavacco:
You said you started doing Judo. How did that lead you to other martial arts? When everybody gets into martial arts, they have certain things that interest them, like you said. That really attracts them about that, and then kind of leads them into a direction because  a lot of people do multiple martial arts now.

So talk a little bit about where your path went starting with Judo, and onto other different martial arts because  obviously you’re a Systema instructor.

Bill Parravano:
To be honest, I wasn’t interested in other martial arts until after I blew up my knee. I had gotten into Judo, and loved Judo and throwing people and that whole concept. I wanted to go as deep as I could in Judo to understand those concepts and principles of Judo that created such force, that you could throw somebody on their back, or over your hip, or with a hand or leg technique. I wanted to go really deep with that, and understand that on a deeper level.

I started Judo in 1990. I traveled and competed on a regional and national level throughout the United States, and was reasonably successful. That came to an end when I blew up my knee, which was in December of 1998. I tore the l ligament in my left knee, and ended up dislocating my left knee four times. Which [is why] my reevaluation of what I was doing the martial arts for, and why I was doing it suddenly changed.

Brad Scornavacco:
It sounds like a major turning point in the way you looked at training and working in martial arts. I’m sure you had a lot of other bumps and scratches, and nicks and bruises and things from eight years of Judo. But then getting to that point where you had such a traumatic injury, do you look at that as something that led you to the healing arts? Or had you been doing healing before that, and they kind of mixed? Or is that something that then got you started at that point?

Bill Parravano:
At that point I had been going to different practitioners of different modalities — Chiropractic, massage, etc. I had tried different systems of energy work.

But it was more for me to experience it; not for me to learn it. I read books and things like that, but it didn’t go too deep because  Judo, as far as I was able to tell, didn’t have a healing component to it. Sure, there was warming up, stretching, rolling around and breaking a sweat. But there really wasn’t an understanding of how the systems in the body worked, and tying that into how we can relax the stress and tension in our body, which is huge.

Brad Scornavacco:
You said you got involved in all these different modalities, and started looking at having it help you. Being exposed to all these different healing ideas, how did that synthesize itself? How did you become “The Knee Pain Guru”? Was it because of your own knee injury that made you focus on that? Or did you see something as that was such a common thing, and that became your area of focus?

Bill Parravano:
It was from my own knee injury. After I blew out my knee, I had reconstructive surgery. They did a patella replacement (which is where they sliced part of my patella tendon; the patella, of course, is the kneecap), and put a pin in the bone in my lower leg, and a pin in my upper leg, and reattached this makeshift ligament that I had torn. They had also taken out a couple pieces of meniscus.

After the surgery I did three months of physical therapy, and they said, “You can wear this big titanium knee brace, and you can go back to Judo if you want.” But that’s no fun. In Judo you can’t do an on-lock or anything like that, because you’ll cut somebody’s head off with this titanium brace. The knee felt unstable and it would still swell.

There were so many dynamics about it, that I didn’t feel like I could show up on the mat and be a complete Judo player. I was 29 years old, and was looking at becoming one of the old black belts that stood off on the side, and was directing people on how they can compete and throw and things like that, and just didn’t cut it for me.

So I started looking at other things to do, because I couldn’t train as much or as hard as I used to because  now the way I was compensating for my knee, my back would go out, my neck would go out. I would have problems with my shoulders. It was the symptom of what people would look at and say “old age”, or just what to expect when you had been doing martial arts for 10, 15, 20 years.

It was like well, this is kind of bullshit. This is not how I want to operate. I didn’t want to be one of those (and you’ve seen them) old martial artists, the old Judo sensei that walks in and kneels down in front of the group, and he’s got one leg jacked out to the side because he can’t bend his knee fully. I was 29 years old, and it’s like that’s not going to work.

Brad Scornavacco:
At the same time you see people in various martial arts, for whatever reason are that older martial artist who is in phenomenal physical shape, and everything does work. Right?

Bill Parravano:
Right.

Brad Scornavacco:
You see people who have stumbled across something that has gotten their body to work throughout the course of their life, and actually function. That’s one of the things that appealed to me about what you do; is that there are ways for you to age and have your body work until you die.

Bill Parravano:
I do believe there is a very small percentage of people who, maybe for genetics or something else, can get away with whatever they’re doing and be older. They can be in their ‘50s and ‘60s and still be fine. However, for the most part you have people in their ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘40s who, as they get older, more stress and tension is building up in the nervous system. The injuries begin to add up. The ankle you sprained when you were a teenager, you sprained again when you were in your [early] ‘20s and again in your late ‘20s, and all of a sudden you have this compensation pattern going up into your hips and back, and it builds up.

Now when you go to practice you’re not really thinking about training; you’re thinking about how am I going to get through this so I don’t injure myself and I can go to work the next day?

Brad Scornavacco:
Yes, exactly.

Bill Parravano:
Or I could be there to play with my kids, and do those kinds of things. The focus goes away from the actual training of the art, and more towards this damage control maintenance on our bodies so we can kind of make it to practice, and sort of do something so we don’t jack something up again.

Brad Scornavacco:
Then you’re more and more afraid as you’re training with that mindset. People are training and they’re thinking, I’m going to train but I don’t want to hurt myself, and they wind up trying to protect their injury instead of overcoming it.

Bill Parravano:
And it’s no fun. Who wants to train like that? It’s not anything that’s enjoyable. The whole reason you enjoyed martial arts was to have that freedom of movement, and being able to experience the potential of what you can create out of a technique, a move or whatever it is.

What ends up happening is now we get into this fear pattern of less movement, more restriction, more limitations – both in our mind and our bodies. What ends up happening is we can’t pull out techniques anymore. Or those techniques are only for young people.

Brad Scornavacco:
You mentioned earlier that when you had your own injury you went through physical therapy. Obviously you’ve seen what the average person would go through if they get an injury and wind up having to go to therapy.

As “The Knee Pain Guru,” how does your approach in what you do differ? If I hurt my knee and went to the therapist down the road who goes through the run-of-the-mill school, how would that differ than if I went to you? What would you do with me that would be different?

Bill Parravano:
The big piece that is being overlooked that I don’t see many therapies out there talking at all about, is addressing the source of the issue. Any time we experience pain, restriction of movement, discomfort, burning, shooting – whatever that experience is in your body, it’s a function of your body tensing to protect itself from being injured further.

It’s a natural response. If someone sticks you with a pin, your body is going to cave around that needle and move away from it. It’s going to tense up to protect itself, and as we tense up, we generally hold our breath and move away from the injury, which is what we do with a sprained ankle, a jammed thumb, or an arm lock. We immediately tense up and hold it and protect it.

The pain you experience is the nervous system’s natural response to that injury. By creating comfort around that injury, by taking the pressure off those nerves in the area of the body that’s created the restriction, you create space. Which immediately reduces the pain the body experiences. Everything else is smoke and mirrors. You can diagnose it as being something.

Now if there’s a mechanical dysfunction (meaning you have a broken bone, torn ligament, torn muscle, rotator cuff, whatever it is), yes, that needs to heal first. However, what I’m talking about is when that is healed, the body is still protecting from that old injury. That the injury is no longer there.

And this is what causes the dysfunction I’m talking about. By creating comfort around that, you begin to create space which frees up the nervous system, which frees up the tension pattern that allows the body to move more naturally and free.

Brad Scornavacco:
If somebody was going to do physical therapy and not have that element of creating comfort around the injury again, would you said that might exacerbate the injury and make a worse or stronger response to protect the injury that might inhibit doing them?

Bill Parravano:
Absolutely. If you focus on building muscular strength in order to balance the body back out, that has a certain degree of benefit. However, what I see most physical therapy doing, is creating more of a dysfunction and tension pattern. More problems. More restriction in the movement, because they’re not looking at the effect on the nervous system. The effect on the impinged nerves that are sending a signal to the brain that knee pain, or whatever part of the body hurts, is having problems.

And they’re not looking at breath because  you can control the tension in your nervous system through breathing. The sympathetic/parasympathetic nervous system response (sympathetic is fight, flight or freeze; and parasympathetic is rest and relax). You can directly control that tension in your nervous system through breathing.

If you are incorporating creating space to take the pressure off the nerves, and looking at breathing simultaneously, you’re leaving 99% of what’s causing the dysfunction on the table.

Brad Scornavacco:
It sounds like therapy is trying to build everything up around the injury and the pain without ever just making the injury go away, or have it heal. Like you’re saying, with all this muscle work and everything else, it’s like you’re building these walls around it. But then it will never, ever actually get better. They’re protecting everything else.

Bill Parravano:
A perfect example is if you have something going on with your lower back. You had a rough practice the night before, and you wake up the next morning and your lower back hurts. You go to the doctor or the physical therapist, and they say, “You need to strengthen your stomach muscles.” Well, think about it. It wasn’t like you went to bed the night before and your stomach muscles suddenly got weak in eight hours of sleep and you wake up with back pain.

By strengthening your stomach muscles, you actually reinforce the dysfunctional tension pattern that’s going on in the lower back. So you do more crunches, more leg lifts, and you build up more strength in your stomach. Now it creates more pressure and tension in your lower back.

A couple months later you get more back pain and you go to the doctor, and the doctor is diagnosing you with a herniated disc, because you reinforced an already dysfunctional tension pattern. So the key isn’t to strengthen the muscles more in your stomach; it’s more relaxing the tension pattern that is putting the pressure on the lower back.

Brad Scornavacco:
That seems to be the approach. For some reason everybody thinks that if you just make your abs stronger your whole body will be better, and what you’re saying is that’s not necessarily the case.

Bill Parravano:
Build your core. It sounds great and all well and good. However, if you’re building your core and you’re tensing up and holding your breath, you’re increasing the tension in your nervous system. Making your stress level higher, and more difficult for your body to feel loose and relaxed. That’s fact. That’s how it is, and anybody talking about it in a way that is supporting sustainability and longevity in their martial arts practice.

Brad Scornavacco:
Absolutely. That’s one of the things that appeals to me so much about what you do. I am a professional martial artist. This is my only job — it’s not a hobby for me. I go to the school six days a week and I’m on the mat, I’m training, I’m working with people. I am a professional athlete in the sense that I get paid for my physical abilities, and to teach and interact with students.

I know that my body has to last until I retire, and I don’t want to retire before I need to. I’ve always had it in my mind that I need longevity. My joints need to last. My body needs to last. I need to be healthy and strong, and not be slowly, slowly, slowly getting more and more decrepit every year when I stand in front of my students. I would like to be strong, pliable, and have everything working until I don’t need it anymore.

What you’re talking about of doing these exercises, and going through your program and what you do to make sure that happens. I don’t want to be that person who is in the walker or the wheelchair. I want to be running into the grave.

It sounds like you’ve gotten to the key of what’s going to help people do that. It’s fascinating and it appeals to me. Why don’t you tell me now of some of the results you’ve gotten with other clients and students? What have you done for people?

Bill Parravano:
As you know, my focus with my business is around knee pain. The whole “Knee Pain Guru” online business that I’ve developed. I’ve taken people who have been diagnosed with bone-on-bone, which is considered to be the last stage before they have knee replacement surgery. I’ve been able to coach people on the internet to be able to get to a place where they can go hiking and biking and play with their kid and grandkids, or whatever the case may be.

One specific client in general is Bruce. He was a scientist in Utah, and talk about a skeptic! I’m talking about nervous system, and intangible things you can’t see or understand, and he has this list of things to do.

I gave him a protocol. We checked in once a week, and this is what you need to focus on, and within three to four months he was hiking in the mountains, camping with his son, and riding bikes with his grandson and things like that.

And it’s really cool that people can begin to get their life back as a result of following some simple principles. Simple concepts and ideas of listening to what your body is saying. Instead of beating yourself up more because you couldn’t hike five miles; you were only able to hike one-and-a-half. That’s okay.

We need to come back and see how we can recover better. A big focus in my program is recovery. It’s not about how hard you can train; it’s how fast you can recover, and the more you teach the body to recover, the faster you can get back out on the mat in the dojo or whatever you want to do. That’s the source of the success I’ve had with clients.

There’s another guy, Vinnie, who is a border patrol agent out of Australia, and I started working with him. He had two kneecap dislocations, and as a result, he had surgery after each one of those kneecap dislocations to rebuild the tendon around the kneecap.

The last kneecap dislocation he had was from martial arts training for the border patrol, and he was terrified of losing his job. He wasn’t able to get out in the field anymore. He needed to pass a physical in order to maintain his position.

After working six months with him, we got him where he not only tested out and passed the physical. He tested into a special operations unit that he is now in a remote part of Australia training with. It was 12 weeks of intense training for a special Marine unit that’s a part of his division he’s in that only a few select people get into.

Within a period of six months, he was able to accomplish that, and one of the big things we focused on was his ability to move loose and free in the context of martial arts training. So we were able to accomplish that.

Brad Scornavacco:
I saw you a month or two ago (I want to add my own story, which is kind of what has gotten to what we’re going to be doing). When we were in North Carolina, I had a snowboarding injury. I’m really active outside of the martial arts classes as well, and I separated my shoulder. There was one range of motion – even with all the mobility exercises and everything – where I was getting that sympathetic response, and my body was like this is not good. This was maybe in the course of a half-hour, and I was lucky enough to have your hands on me. You were helping me through that.

I felt the change right there in my body. Part of that is being a martial artist I can feel that happen easily, and I was aware of it. My shoulder hasn’t come back, so it’s not like I did it and then a week later it came back. It hasn’t been back since. I have moved through that range of motion with shoulder, and I am really happy about that because  I’m training and teaching all the time, I need my shoulder, and nobody had fixed it until I got to you.

I started talking to you, and you came across this idea that you wanted to be able to teach martial artists how to do some first aid. What you called it was “The Martial Arts First Aid Kit,” and I thought that was a brilliant idea.

We’re going to do this workshop in February here in Colorado, and you’re going to do a couple days teaching all of the martial artists how to do their own first aid. I’d like you to talk a little bit about what’s going to happen, and what is this idea of “Martial Arts First Aid Kit” all about?

Bill Parravano:
Thanks, Brad. I think the piece that’s really important to understand, is we train martial arts so we can be most impactful when we punch, kick or throw (i.e., the maximum amount of effectiveness with the least amount of input).

When you punch that person, they crumble. When you kick that person, they crumble. It’s like they’re not there. When you throw the person, it feels like they fly over your hip. That’s what we’re looking for in the martial arts.

However, in healing from all of those punches, kicks and throws, martial artists aren’t looking at the ability to heal the very same way. They’re looking at fighting the body to get it to let go, and it doesn’t need be that way.

We’re going to take the same principles and philosophies of martial arts, and apply them to healing of the body. Healing meaning creating that space. Getting the pressure off the nerves, freeing up those old injuries that you had sticking around for weeks, months or years, and working with those in a way that each martial artist that’s showing up can begin to help themselves, and begin to help other people in their club. So they don’t have to have all those dings, limps, shoulder injuries and neck tweaks and stuff like that. There’s something they can begin doing the minute it happens that’s going to speed up the recovery of the body so they can get back on the mat quicker.

Everybody wins because  now the person who’s learning how to do this can get back on the mat faster, as well as if you’re supporting your fellow martial artists. Now you have more people you’re going to be able to train with. They’re not going to miss practice because they’re injured.

Brad Scornavacco:
It’s funny, because I had a Jujitsu teacher who told me, “If you’re going to learn how to choke somebody out, you better know how to revive them.” It made a lot of sense to me. In martial arts you spend all this time practicing and training to hurt people. You’re borrowing each other’s bodies and you’re out there doing all of this. So you’re on the destructive side, and everybody is doing this.

At the same time, you don’t want to hurt each other. But it’s inevitable that if you’re doing an arm bar on somebody or somebody like that, somebody is going to tweak it too much, and the longer you’re training, the more that stuff is going to add up.

Martial arts teachers have it compartmentalized. We’re teaching you how to break the bones, strain ligaments and do all this stuff. But if you need to get healed, then go to the hospital. There’s nothing there for them. They don’t have any knowledge of saying you’re in a class, you tweak this limb, and now here’s what we have to do.

Like what you’re saying:  We need some “Martial Arts First Aid” right here, and we need some simple things they can do. Even if it is a serious injury, before they get somewhere they need to know what to do about it. They kind of have the deer-in-the-headlights things of oh, geez! This person is hurt. What do we do?

I know a lot of martial artists don’t have any kind of standard CPR or first aid or anything like that. Much less this kind of understanding of what you can do to really ramp up the healing process.

Bill Parravano:
That’s exactly the case. The extent of what I’ve seen on a martial arts mat has been somebody busts their eye open or bloodies their nose. I’ve seen compound fractures take place on the mat, and basically it’s just get the person to the hospital. What can we do? Get him an ice pack and drive him to the hospital.

Of course, this is not what I’m talking about. If something is broken or torn, or there’s something significantly wrong, then absolutely doctors need to be called in. You want to get them to the hospital.

But what I’m talking about is the recurring injury, the thing you keep dinging every week. You’re afraid to go in there because of the toe, the ankle, the knee, the hip, the back, the shoulder, the neck – whatever it is. The arm bar you had when you were 24, that now you can’t straighten your arm out all the way.

The (inaudible 30:23) motion in your shoulder that you can’t get into your technique, or you can’t punch correctly anymore because the arm doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. The shoulder isn’t loose enough. You can’t kick real easy.

Brad Scornavacco:
I’ve got a former student who did 30 years of real hard-style martial arts before he came to train with me. I’m telling you, this guy cannot straighten his elbows. He’s developed arthritis, and he stopped training. I was trying to get him to different healers and people to try to help him. This would be perfect for him. I look at this guy (he’s a postal worker), and I think about this beyond the actual training on the mat. This guy’s walking around with an inability to straighten out his elbows, and it’s from decades of recurring chronic training injuries.

I know he can heal himself. Or have somebody else help him get to a point where he can recover that, and he can actually straighten his arms out. When you come out here I’m going to invite this guy, because he’s a textbook example of somebody who could really benefit from this.

Even if you’re a martial arts professional, you’re in combat a very short period of your life. Maybe a few skirmishes. If you’re a civilian, maybe you have to defend yourself once. If you’re a police officer maybe you’re doing it fairly routinely.

But for the most part, these guys have to live with their body every day, and to be able to recover the way they were born to move is invaluable. You’ve got to live in your body your whole life.

Bill Parravano:
Brad, before we go any further, you talked about arthritis, and one thing I hear a lot is martial artists with arthritis. They had the arm lock. They had the kick to the knee or the hip or whatever it is, and now they’re developing arthritis.

But do you know what one of the medical diagnoses of arthritis is? If the doctor diagnoses you with arthritis, what they will write on that diagnosis?

Brad Scornavacco:
No. What do they write?

Bill Parravano:
They will write that the “joint is dehydrated.” That you have a dehydrated joint. The only way the joint can get dehydrated is if there’s not enough water. So you would think the common sense thing would be to drink more water, which is a component of rehydrating the joint. However, if the joint was injured, you have the body tensing up to protect itself from getting injured further.

Brad Scornavacco:
So it’s making it difficult to get rehydrated.

Bill Parravano:
It can’t rehydrate itself. Just like you can squeeze your fist and the rest of your arm could be relaxed, you open your fist and your hand will turn white. Then it will turn pink. The same thing is going on in the knee, the hip, the spine, the neck, the shoulder, the elbow, the knuckle that has arthritis because  it’s tensing up to protect itself from getting injured further. The joint begins to dehydrate. There’s no more fluid in the joint, so the joint begins to wear.

The doctor takes an x-ray, a CT-Scan or an MRI, and it comes up as arthritis, and they’re like well, you’re just going to have to live with it.

Brad Scornavacco:
I don’t accept that.

Bill Parravano:
Right. But if you address the stress and tension that has developed in the nervous system, and create a localized place of comfort for that joint, you immediately create space. Its relief in the joint takes the pressure off the nerves, and now the water that you’re drinking can actually get into the joint to begin the healing process that the body inherently knows how to do.

Brad Scornavacco:
So somebody who comes and says, “The doctor said I’m dehydrated, so I’m going to drink a gallon of water,” it’s not going to help, because they’re missing that component.

Bill Parravano:
They’re missing the component of the space in the body. As we get older, stress and tension builds up so there’s less and less space for the water to actually be hydrating into the joints. Think of it as a sponge.

Brad Scornavacco:
You said as we get older, that stress and tension build up. Obviously, people that’s just a part of aging. As you get older you’re going to be more stressed and more tense. That’s kind of the standard wisdom:  you just get older and you get tense. So are you saying that’s not destiny?

Bill Parravano:
That’s right. In our martial arts – Systema, the Russian martial arts – most of the people who move poorly are the people who just got in it. The people that are in it longer move better. It’s just the opposite in conventional martial arts. The younger people move better, and as you’re in it longer, they don’t. The tension starts to leave [assumed].

Brad Scornavacco:
I see that all the time. Having a storefront martial art and having a school and people come in, I constantly get people from every martial art on the planet that you’ve heard of, and martial arts you haven’t heard of, and invariably it’s the case that the ones who have doing it longer, you can see they’re moving worse. In Systema we usually get them from they don’t understand how to move at all, to that place of space and freedom.

Again, that’s why I think these two things fit like a hand and a glove. What you’re talking about when you’re doing it and your principles with Systema in particular, personally I think everybody who learns Systema should be doing this because  in Systema a lot of people who are in different healing modalities come in, but a lot of people aren’t, and the only healing they’re learning is they understand that there’s got to be relaxation, and getting rid of this restriction.

But I think there’s a missing component. I think what you have is something that will really, really benefit in particular Systema practitioners and instructors if they haven’t gone through massage school or Rolfing or Feldenkrais or anything else, and they just want to know how to heal each other.

I think what you’re doing is going to give them that system behind it that will help clarify what they’re doing. Instead of indiscriminately standing on people and saying it’s going to heal you. I think you can give them more of that understanding of the principles behind this, so they can go into each other with somebody and say maybe I’m not going to roll all over him, and put five people on him to heal him. He needs this. That’s something that appealed to me with going through it myself, and I think it’s fantastic.

To wrap up, you have videos on the internet where you’re working on people’s knee injury real-time. I’ve seen some of these myself, where you’re taking them through everything right there, and they’re giving you the results where they can feel it themselves and actually start to recover. That’s really impressive.

If people want to see what you do, they can go to your website: www.thekneepainguru.com?

Bill Parravano:
That’s correct.

Brad Scornavacco:
www.thekneepainguru.com. You can check out Bill’s site, and he’s got a free report you can get. I think even YouTube where he’s got a bunch of clips of his work, so you can see what he’s going to do.

But if you really want to see what he’s going to do and you don’t want to do it online, come to Colorado. He’s going to be here February 18th and 19th. We’re going to do two days where Bill is going to take my martial arts students, myself and anybody who’s invited (it’s open to the public) take them through it joint-by-joint. Right?

Bill Parravano:
Yes. We’re going to work through the body, and show how you can begin to relieve that tension. When you take the pressure off the nerves, the results are immediate. So it’s not something that is going to be in theory, because there’s going to be notetaking. This is going to be hands-on. We’re going to be on the mat.

What can you begin to do right now that you’re going to walk out at the end of the weekend feeling considerably looser and more free in your body.

Brad Scornavacco:
I’m really looking forward to it. I’m one of those life-long learners. I like the fact that you’re going to give the principles behind it. Like you said, if I go to you and say fix me, and then I leave, I think that’s the ‘give the man a fish’ thing. You’re really going to teach everybody how to do it. So when you’re going, everybody can continue to work with each other and help themselves. I’m really excited about that.

Like I said, if you’re listening and you want to go to thekneepainguru.com – if you want to get in touch with Bill for anything – you can do that and get hold of him.

If you’re interested in coming to the seminar, my website is www.systemacolorado.com, and you can do that. If you want to get into the seminar you can call my assistant, Michelle. The number for us is (303) 485-5425. You can get hold of her and I can get you guys enrolled, because the seminar has limited space, and a bunch of my students already are looking forward to this and have enrolled. They’re already on it, so it’s going to be a great time.

I invite everybody to come on down. If you can make it to Colorado, it’s a beautiful time to be here. You can come and ski and train. It’s going to be a really good time. If you’re interested in that first aid for martial arts training, this is the place to be.

Bill, I’d like to say thanks for taking the time to talk to me about this, so people can learn a little bit more about what it is that you’re doing. I hope to see people there. Anything else to add?

Bill Parravano:
Brad, it was really fun doing the interview, and I’m really looking forward to the seminar.

Brad Scornavacco:
Thanks, and I guess I’ll talk to everybody next time. See you, guys.

Paul Trout:  This is Paul Trout with Systema Colorado. Welcome back. Today we are going to talk about one of the larger mystiques in Systema, striking. This engenders quotes from training boxers such as “I have never been hit so hard in my entire life” and “I was at a seminar and this six‑foot guy just dropped.” In my experience it’s composed of senses composed of moving, relaxation, generating power from the body rather than the extremities, has a steeper learning curve than some of the other fundamental skills.

But the allure of the power is one of the things that attracts people to Systema and it’s very common to have people enter the school and say “I just want to do the hitting. I want to learn how you guys hit and take that back to my martial art” or “I was in a seminar and one of my friends said I should check you guys out and maybe I needed to be hit by you.”

So with all the talk and methodology I thought we’d chat about that this evening. So just jumping in, why is it inappropriate to work on strikes in class?

Brad:  Why is it inappropriate? [laughter]

Paul:  Inappropriate.

Brad:  That’s a good question because a lot of people I know ‑‑ it’s funny because, some Systema instructors come in, people come in with an ego and, like you said, they want to prove themselves and so the easiest thing to do in Systema is hit them. And you get an instant reaction. It usually happens. Systema surely knows to train you how to hit hard and deep so you get a complete ‑‑ the proof’s in the pudding. It’s in the hitting. But when is it inappropriate? This is a question that really is ‑‑ it’s hard to answer because you really have to be attuned to the people that you’re hitting and that’s going to be one of the overarching kind of themes with striking. If you see somebody coming in who is really afraid, if you just start working with strikes with them and you have the attitude of “Whoa, you look like you’re afraid so we’re just going to hit you,” it can make it worse.

Ideally it would be wonderful to be able to say “Well, this is really good for you and it will help and so we’ll hit you and you’ll be this different person.” But if the person isn’t ready to handle it, it can make it worse. Not only will it will make it worse for them; where it just ‑‑ it could just make them more fearful and they’ll also resent you.

That’s kind of one of the things that you can say that that’s an issue that they have to work on. You can say “Well yeah, you just have to work on that. It’s not me hitting you.” Well, you’re the one hitting them, right? So if you’re ever going to work on strikes, you have to take responsibility for the fact that you hit the person.

It’s very difficult to say “Well, I’ll just deal with it” or “Don’t be proud of yourself” or “Don’t feel sorry for yourself” and say “Wait a minute. I’m standing here with my hands on. You hit me as hard as you could or fairly hard.” So I think if you’re going to hit somebody especially if you’re in a teaching mode, you have to take that responsibility for what you did to a student because they come to you in trust.

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  So what I tried to do with people is explain all that beforehand kind of like we’re doing now so that they will understand it going in and it might not clear the air completely but it helps mitigate the fact that when you do work on striking, it brings up a lot of stuff. Psychologically more so than just physically getting hit because by the time you’re done with the striking with anybody physically and for the most part they’re OK. It’s, maybe they got some bruises and at certain times obviously there’s ‑‑ people do get hurt in training but it’s just part of the course. But a lot of the ‑‑ being hit brings up a lot of bad memories, bad experiences, things like that that people have to deal with.

So that’s a good and bad thing.

If you bring that out of somebody and you’re not ready to handle it yourself, if you have no, I guess, psychological background or understanding of people about how to help them with that, then personally I think that kind of thing is irresponsible.

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  So being inappropriate times of ‑‑ sometimes you have to build the person up before they’re ready to be struck and then get stronger so that kind of again there’s a kind of that baseline you’re working with. You have to look at them and say “If I hit this person, they’re going to crumble and they’re going to leave.” If you’re doing that to prove that Systema works, then it’s the wrong reason. So if you get somebody who is ‑‑ a lot of times what will happen is people will come up and ask. That’s a good sign for the most part. If I go, OK, now they’re kind of ready. They want to try it ‑‑ and of course, you shouldn’t just haul off and him them as hard as you can which I’ve seen people do. So when you do that, you have a person who might be a little bit more psychologically ready to deal it and handle it.

I will give you some of my own horror stories. I taught a seminar and I had a guy volunteer to do strikes and the guy was ‑‑ he was a whole head taller than I was and wider than I was. I can walk in the guy’s shadow and no one would see me. So he had had a larger Systema instructor hit him and he thought ‑‑ he told him. He’s like, “Well, of course you could hit hard because you’re very large. I want to know someone smaller.” So they had me work with strikes on him. I’m fairly slender and I don’t look like a gorilla.

So I took them through step by step. I explained everything. I did about everything you could say to somebody before striking and worked with them and talked to them, got feedback from while I was doing the whole thing. You know what the guy said? He felt great and everything else. It was wonderful and I thought it really worked and the guy didn’t came back too the seminar the next day.

He had to go ‑‑ he saw a massage therapist and he was like dealing with all this stuff. He’s crying and he’s mad at me and mad at himself and mad at everybody. Just all of these emotions just poured out of this guy and he just really, really freaked out. Oddly enough, he’s still training in Systema and other people could hit him and he’s fine but he doesn’t want to see me because I was the kind of the first one.

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  So if you’re going to do that with people, that happens. Even in the case where what I did in that case was explain everything ad infinitum, ad nauseam, secure this to this to this. This is going to happen to this. How is this feeling if you’re doing this just ‑‑ ? Again, I think just emotionally is what all the stuff comes out so if you’re going to do striking, you got to be prepared for that to happen so…

Paul:  Thank you. So a little more logistically, how often should strikes be worked and should they be worked as in dedicated striking classes or just as part of ‑‑ where this is a point you should be thinking about striking somebody or the strike comes from this?

Brad:  You know this idea that pain is too much pleasure?

Paul:  [agrees].

Brad:  Physically you get sensitized to the strikes, so if you see people getting struck over time maybe they got struck the first few times and they’re OK and then all of a sudden you see the following strikes and then less of a strike is working more ‑‑

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  ‑‑ because the body is primed for that. You’re getting a physiological response to be struck every time. And so what happens is ‑‑ and then ‑‑ again you run into it if you do it too often, you can start ingraining more fear into the person instead of overcoming in. Let’s say you did a striking class. You did a couple of hours of striking and the same people come back and their bodies are all physically is still bruised and even mentally and psychologically kind of going through all that stuff and then you do it like another one back to back.

You can ingrain some more fear and then if you do it too much with the same people. So there is that kind of, also there has to be kind of a recovery time from the strikes for people to do it again. Otherwise, it can really just do more harm than good and you can just kind of take energy out of people.

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  From too much so again it’s like that pain is like too much pleasure, too much of a good thing if you do it all the time. That works back into when is it appropriate and inappropriate to work with people? Let’s say you just did strike ‑‑ maybe did a striking class and the next day you come in and somebody comes in and he’s this very macho guy and he’s like, “I want to do strikes.” You think, “We just did strikes yesterday. Everybody is all sore from it. I mean [indecipherable] [0:08:36.2] strike again. Then you don’t only want to do it there and it has nothing to do with them but it’s just that the other people that can ‑‑

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  Now if you’re teaching, if you’re in a situation like you’re teaching and you’re rotating the people who come to class, sure you can do one more day and give the next day for them. So again too much is a bad thing. I mean maybe once a week, I guess, like when you’re doing it dedicated the whole time for the most time you’re doing really deep strikes and then doing all of these, maybe once or maybe twice a week if that. But if you’re doing it ‑‑ you start doing it all the time, everybody is going to start leaving and you’re going to wonder where they went because they’re all sore.

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  There is that thing, at least in the United States, where they’re just going to get back up and go to work. The guys are trying going to get up and saying, “I can’t bend. I can’t get up.” Practically there’s that aspect of how often to work in a class. Now if you do ‑‑ if you’re just doing Systema and you’re doing strikes here and there where it’s not a dedicated standing and get punched all the time, then you can do that and you should do that probably more often where OK, you’re doing self‑defense. I punched the guy. OK. Loosen them up and put him down. You can always intersperse that. You don’t have to do it so deep.

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  The deep part of it is the part that, does everybody want to face their fear every single day and stick it in your face all the time, every day it’s geez, it’s all I see? You kind of need some time to deal with it and then overcome in and come back to things and so yeah, maybe a really good time once a week or maybe twice at the most, yeah.

Paul:  Do you think that there is a minimum amount of experience or exposure or training, familiarity with Systema that students should have before they experience their first deep heavy‑duty striking class?

Brad:  No. I don’t think so. I think again more it’s in the psyche of the student if they’re ready for that. I’ve had people come in who kind of like this guys have never done martial arts before and they’re like surfer dudes so they’re totally laid back and they’re just like “Hey dude” and they’re hanging out and their bodies relaxed and they’re kind of ‑‑ they’re just doing that and they do striking and they’re like, “Oh, it’s really cool,” and it doesn’t really affect them because kind of they ‑‑ kind of they’ll follow the kind of the BS that people get to.

They still have that about them. Sometimes you can do it with people like that and they’re totally fine with it. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to have a lot of experience but if they don’t have any striking experience on hitting in, you got to make sure that they know how to strike properly and they’re forming their fists correctly and they’re not going to hurt themselves and things like that. So mechanically you’re going to teach all those stuff to those guys.

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  But as far as the ability to take the strikes and breathe with it, it’s all stuff you can teach in them class and a lot of striking you see in Systema, it’s not all OK, we’re doing striking. Class starts. OK, everybody start punching each other as hard as you can. There is a lot of placing fists, massaging, pressing, pushing. There’s a whole progression to the striking that you can do that isn’t necessarily OK, we’re hitting each other ‑‑

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  ‑‑hard and repeatedly. You can build off the skills to do it and if you can push correctly, you can do a correct strike. That connection between those two allows you to be able to do work with your fists a lot more than just work around the deepest of the hitting. You can definitely do that [indecipherable] [0:12:16.7] yourself. I don’t think there’s necessarily a ‑‑ somebody comes in. You don’t think you want to teach them how to hit somebody if don’t thing they’re quite right in the head. Maybe hold off on it but… [laughter]

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  Right? You know what I mean?

Paul:  Yes, your judgment is about it, is this the right thing to do today that’s ‑‑ yeah.

Brad:  Some people ‑‑ some teachers are indiscriminate. If you come in OK, I’ll teach you because it will make you better but I’m not kind of not like that. I’m kind of more ‑‑ do I really want to teach you this? Do I really want to have the [indecipherable] [0:12:46.5] Police come in and say this ‑‑ we found this guy in a bar fight and who’s teaching him how to punch and knock people out? Geez. So I do ‑‑ I do have a sense of responsibility on that about who I’m teaching how to hit. Those are some of the factors you might consider if you’re teaching striking.

Paul:  Are there any specific issues you’ve encountered with striking classes with the mixed sex class, women striking women, men striking women, women striking men that ‑‑ ? Is there anything that you’ve noticed that is kind of like a common theme for people starting out?

Brad:  Yeah, there are. One of them is don’t have couples punching each other [chuckles] .

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  That’s one of those big ones of ‑‑ I ran into a guy on the coast and he was a Systema ‑‑ it was a new Systema shortcut at the time. He had done a couple of seminars. First time they were going to see Vlad and he was with his girlfriend. We were doing ‑‑ striking that day and I went up to him. I kind of met him and said, “You guys shouldn’t be hitting each other.” They kind of like, “Yeah, we kind of thought maybe we shouldn’t,” because they’re so much emotion laden with the strikes. I mean your wife changed you and you know that you guys don’t hit each other.

When you do that with them ‑‑ if you’re really close to somebody, it’s almost like you have a relationship, you have contact and this emotion that comes out in strikes so I’m kind of like, “You didn’t do the dishes last night.” Wham, and you hit each other and it can get worse. That kind of thing I definitely avoid with anybody who’s in a relationship.

With men hitting women, there are ‑‑ well, I guess there are a couple of clients. First you get the guys who really like hitting women and you probably want to talk to them and keep them away from the women [laughter] .

They might like hitting women a little bit too much and you need to ‑‑ you need to work on them and then ‑‑ for the most part it’s the guys who are just uncomfortable hitting women and to a degree I would hope that it’s more natural than the other guy where you feel uncomfortable like, “Hey what? My dad told me never to hit a lady,” things like that growing up with.

Sometimes you just have to overcome with the men. Then the third kind think that they don’t want to hit women because they think that the women are too fragile.

Paul:  Yes.

Brad:  So they don’t train honestly saying, ” I don’t want to hit her hard” and they wind up being kind of condescending where the women have to tell them “Hey what? You can hit me. Go ahead.” That happens fairly often where people just ‑‑ they just don’t know what to do and the easiest thing is to ask them, also the women and the women that I train, no, they can take it. OK, you can do this. Do this. This was that. That was OK so as long as you have the lines of communication open, for the most part they can do that.

You have an instance of a woman saying, “Yes, that was my breast and you should hit higher here and go over here and you can work with that.” For the most part a woman who is doing Systema, she’s been doing it, understands enough to say that. It really goes who can read the partner.

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  If a woman who has had some experience a little bit more like I ‑‑ what’s going on? Yeah, you could hit me here. Don’t hit me there. They can ‑‑ they can work with that. You can say on one hand, “Well, you might get hit in the breast anyway so you better get used to it.” There is ‑‑ there is OK if some guy attacked me and he hit me once. Fine, I’m dealing with it. Do I want to deal with it as a woman in class every single day? Maybe not. You need to be able to work with that. On the other ‑‑ the flipside, again you have the women who love ‑‑ want to come in and hit the man. [laughter] So like, “Give me my ex‑husband,” and they’re hitting as hard as they can. They usually hit pretty deep too.

For the woman hitting the man there is that structurally or just as far as their fists sometimes if they work on ‑‑ just like new guys too if their wrists aren’t strong enough you’ll see him striking harder than their fist and their wrist can handle so they wind up hurting themselves. So if you’re teaching, it’s something to watch out for, if they’re hitting and always breaking their wrists and they hurt themselves. Sometimes that happens with women hitting.

The other thing with women hitting again is the opposite of the woman who do not want to hit anybody because they don’t want to be seen as unladylike. That’s just one of those cultural things that you don’t do this. You don’t hit people.

You’re nice and they ‑‑ sometimes women will bring that into it, of “Well, I don’t want to him to hate me because I hit him or be mad at me or so those kind of that approval stuff kind of happens and they do not want to hit there. For the most part a lot of the women in Systema that I know they have problems, they’re gone.

So you have that, men striking women, women striking men, women striking other women. Normally they’re pretty good with that. You can still run into the… if there are enough together that somebody doesn’t like anybody then you get the emotion back like there are jealousies in class and ‑‑ that’s a whole sociology of that. A few women and your whole group of men and they’re kind of who wants to be the ‑‑ get all the attention.

I’ve seen that happen and when they work together or they don’t want to work with each other, they want to be completely away so ‑‑ I mean you can’t get around that if you’re teaching. You have to know that those things are going on.

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  Be able to kind of smooth it over for anybody. Those are some of the things that come up with not just striking but just every aspect of training with ‑‑

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  ‑‑ men and women.

Paul:  So what do you think is the most common mistake people teaching make when they’re teaching strikes?

Brad:  Most common mistake people teaching strikes make?

Paul:  Yeah.

Brad:  I think it might be that responsibility part.

Paul:  OK.

Brad:  Because ‑‑ that really attitudinal. It’s that I see people sometimes when they work on striking. Again, they have that radical, well, it wasn’t me that hit you. It was the strike. If the person is getting upset with you or if you crack their sternum and they say, “That guy punched me, I was trying to learn how to hit and so he cracked my sternum,” you’re responsible for that. I don’t care what your metaphysics are. You’re responsible for that. I think with that part there sometimes there is a sense of ‑‑ you got to think about it. You’re standing there letting someone punch you. There is ‑‑ there is a lot of trust involved in standing there and letting someone punch you.

Paul:  There’s a huge amount of trust involved.

Brad:  There is a sense of “I will show you how hard I can hit you because I’m the teacher.” So you get in to that or people can get into that. It’s a trap of “I’m going to show you how good I am because you’re going to stand there with your hands on. I am going to punch you as hard as I can.” With me, I am very conscious of that and Vlad said once something he wrote on his form once a couple of years ago which was like something to the effect that you should get punched 10 times more than you punch your students or something when you’re working on this because it flips that because the students are the ones punching you instead of you walking into a room scaring everybody in the room because you’re going to hit them so hard and then everybody is already primed to be afraid.

I think that’s the kind of hard to [indecipherable] [0:20:19.6] for the student. That’s good if you’re running ‑‑ you want to keep everybody in line and you just want to rule by fear. I don’t like to do that but people ‑‑ some people do that. They get caught up into that in the same way other martial artist gets caught up into the “I’m the black belt. You’re yellow belt and I’m going to show you how it goes.”

That is a danger that can happen when you’re teaching striking and so in that sense you’ve got to understand. You got to understand that if you put your fist in someone’s body and they freak out, can you handle it?

Or you’re just going to walk away from them saying: “Well, you know what? That’s really just something that’s inside of you that you have to deal with and once you can do that, you can come back and talk to us.” You have to help them. They would not have that response had your fist not hit their body.

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  You can say all you want, “Well, they needed it and I was there to heal them and help them that really is all there was.” Yeah, you can say that and maybe it is true and maybe it’s true to a degree but again you’re still responsible for the effects in your class. It’s just like anything else. I teach kids all that. I’m out there. I’m responsible for those kids and adults are just big kids [laughter] in some ways so you’re responsible for what happens in class. If those people leave, OK. Some people might disagree with that [inaudible] [0:21:42.7] . I would say that that’s one of the big mistakes I see.

Paul:  OK. You mentioned briefly that ‑‑ so we jump into why do Systemas talk about strikes and healing so much together? Is it trying to avoid responsibility or is there some connection there?

Brad:  Well, I once heard somebody say, “Well, you’re healing him even if you’re killing him.” Well, OK, if that echoes into the next life and you kill them and you can say you’ve healed them for all eternity, then great but while they’re in this life, if you punch somebody and you break their sternum, I don’t believe that his sternum needed to be broken to teach him a lesson.

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  I don’t believe in that personally. If you were a goof and you break the guys ribs because you punched him, then you broke his ribs. I don’t think that you necessarily have to look at it as well, every strike is healing because they’re not. But like I said, if you define it, it’s such that no matter what you do is healing, then it’s an opportunity for healing maybe but that aside, if you get a percussive massage, if you get a Swedish massage, you get a deep tissue massage, if you’re rolfed, sometimes there is pain involved in that, you know, just working of the muscles, the connective tissue, your organs. There is a lot of that that goes on in different healing parts.

It can be painful and people come out of it and they’re thinking, “Wow; I feel much better. Something had loosened up.” Those same types of dynamics happen in Systema striking. Not even just striking, even if you’re doing push‑ups on somebody and you’re working on and you’re giving them pressure and then deep pressure that’s working everything around, when you’re done with that, you feel better.

There is a couple of different levels when we talk about the healing but just on the mechanical level kind of that’s what you’re looking for. Interestingly enough, when somebody has a chronic pain, there is a certain inter‑neuron that when the pain receptors go off and fire you feel pain, it’s designed to shut it off. If you got an acute pain, you would get hurt. Everything would jack up. You feel the pain and there’s another mechanism in the body that says I’ll turn it off.

Basically kind of that’s what happens. It’s pain and the part of the body says I’ll turn the pain off. When people suffer from chronic pain what happens is that message to turn it off somehow or another gets lost and it doesn’t so the pain continues on and on and on.

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  And there’s a really interesting way to get that then to fire again which is to give that person more acute pain. I mean it’s brilliant in its simplicity.

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  So if get this inter‑neuron and it’s not firing or it ceased to fire and you give the person an acute pain, that’s another signal for it to try to fire again. So if you ‑‑ if you have an itch and you start scratching it, that’s giving that skin more acute pain. Those interneurons fire again to tell you that the pain receptors are shut off and all of a sudden you’re like, “Well, I just better.” You don’t feel any pain anymore. So there are times when people have a chronic pain that factor takes it a way, can take it away. So actually getting hit and get that percussion can actually get the nervous system into firing and tell you to shut off the pain and voila [laughter] hey, it doesn’t hurt anymore, right? That’s one aspect of how it can heal on just ‑‑ on a physical level.

Other levels when you’re just talking about the bodies own, the endocannabinoids like all of your, like the man‑made opiates in the body that happen when, you know, endorphins and everything like that, that when you hit somebody, you can release all that because the body is trying to deaden itself to all of that. And that lasts for a period of time before it levels off and you think, “Wow, it woke me up. Right? You do that until the body goes on alert.

Basically it’s kind of a low‑level stress response and it goes on alert. All that stuff happens and when you’re under stress it’s one of the things that happens. If you want the body to deaden itself to the pain and so if you do that, that happens. I don’t know if we talked about this in another interview but there was on one of the channels, The Discovery Channel or whatever, the woman who ‑‑ she put the hooks in their back and through her skin and hung her around and so ‑‑ she said it felt like ecstasy.

She just was in bliss and so wonderful and she was hanging from these hooks like the Native Americans, did all that. They show her flying on the room and they said, “After about 10 minutes if they don’t let the hooks out, it becomes one of the most extreme pain she can imagine.” They said that that was basically after all those endocannabinoids. Everything went ‑‑ they basically ran their course.

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  Then the fact that like, OK, I’m hanging by my skin. OK. Now again, it’s exquisitely painful. When I saw that, I thought, “Hey, that’s sounds a lot like striking. You strike for a while and you feel better but then if you keep on striking like.

Paul:  It’s the first strike…

Brad:  Oh, this just hurts more. Oh no, it hurts more. By the time the person even feints toward hitting you, you’re just like ‑‑ you’re folding up. I don’t want to get hit again. Those kinds of mechanisms happen. That kind of thing happens with it. Some of those things physiologically you kind of wonder what’s going on. On another level, the way with healing is that again, when you get hit in the solar plexus, you want to think about all of the nerves that are inside the intestines giving you that signal basically to ‑‑ the limbic system, all that fight or flight stuff and so you get this signal straight through that. When you get struck and you feel it, the body wants to curl.

It wants to magnify that pain and so you have that response which just kind of makes it worse. What you’re doing physiologically by not folding and by staying straight, breathing it out, you’re teaching the body to have a different response. So you don’t have your body position.

You don’t have again that whole pain response that kicks off so you’re actually making it by controlling the way your posture is and your breathing, it prevents you from going to that position in the same way that they say like if you smile long enough you’ll eventually start to have happy thoughts. If you frown long enough, eventually you’ll eventually going to start to feel that. It’s exactly kind of the same thing.

When you don’t put the body in that same position of curling which it’s used to doing when you’re in pain, you start to actually to retrain that response. So that pain response, that fear, tends to dissipate and so there is something that happens on that level.

There is a cognitive level. You’re thinking, “This big guy just hit me as hard as he could. And yeah, I felt it and yeah, it hurt. But I am OK.” And the confidence of that, of saying, “You know what? If somebody ‑‑ I walk into a bar or something or the park and somebody hits me, I’m going to be all right. I’m going to be able to take it and be able to handle it, deal with it, dissipate it and be able to defend myself. That’s a really cool feeling, that confidence of that.

So you got all of these factors working together to do that, to get that out. Again ‑‑ on that kind of psychological level, that psychophysical level of how would you heal things. It does bring things up. If you get hit, those fears, when your fear response is firing, obviously could bring up other things that are related to the fear because your brain is trying to say, “What are all the things that have made you really afraid?” A lot of the things are unconsciously forgotten.

That’s why some people come up and they get hit and start crying like geez, I don’t know what’s going on with me. I just really was afraid of something and all of those other negative emotions start to come up because of activating that fear response in such a deep way.

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  A lot of that comes up and the ability to again have that come up and look at it and kind of analyze it again ‑‑ sometimes, you think, “Hey, you know what? I was afraid of that but I was only a five‑year‑old kid then. Now I’m an adult and it’s OK. All of a sudden ‑‑ then you again by not having the rest of the experience that goes around that you can kind of dissipate it and deal with it. There are good cognitive effects of doing it. There’s a lot to the healing and it’s very real and it’s not mystical. There are ‑‑ there are very maybe not simple but there are things you could point to, mechanisms going on of why does this stuff works which is something that I’ve always wanted to be able to explain to people myself, instead of just saying, “Oh, well it heals you.” Then people look at me like “What do you mean?”

Being able to give them some reasoning for what is going on in their body and their brain for why that’s been happening ‑‑ people tend to accept it and be able to work with it. Oh yeah, I got that. Oh yeah, it was ‑‑ something happened and it kind of came up and I was thinking with it. I’m glad now that I can deal with it.

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  That’s a healing of dealing with those negative emotions that are sticking out. I guess that’s kind of like that there’s a sliver of the whole thing, of healing on that.

Paul:  Excellent. Thank you. How has your approach to striking changed over the years? This is not just teaching which is just. At this point you’ve been doing ‑‑

Brad:  Like they’re using them?

Paul:  Using them, teaching them, being with hit, you’ve got 30 years of martial arts experience and 12, 13 in Systema so it’s a pretty broad ‑‑

Brad:  I had one of my friends who is a black belt in another martial arts when I started. I was talking about Systema,s striking. This was ‑‑ that was seven years ago or something. I was telling him, “Oh, I can hit so much harder and deeper and it’s amazing how my strikes can do this.” He looked at me and said, “Because you broke my rib at least once, you can hit hard before you get Systema.” So I thought, “Yeah, but no, you don’t understand but now I can hit really [laughter] I can do these other things with it.” I have to remember that. I had a degree of being able kind of to do that.

For me what expanded was being able to do it more relaxed. I was fairly relaxed doing it but now to understand kind of my shoulder is holding me back in certain strikes ‑‑ the circular strikes are easier because the martial art I did before had a lot of circular movements in it so it was easier to relax my shoulders, move it circularly. But linearly there was still a little bit more of tension.

There are a lot of other different angles that Systema hits with that I’ve really taken into, just these odd angles and odd positions. The strikes come from out of nowhere. I really like that aspect of it and not being able to set up to do it so they’re much more invisible. Just that sense of striking without an intention so that the person doesn’t see it, that was something that I didn’t really have before. It’s like if I was going to hit you, I really want to hit you.

You could really feel that it was going to come and that’s what Systema, being able to hit without the person being alerted to, is really, really cool and just a much deeper understanding of the power of it, different targeting and hitting certain targets that I didn’t think that I could work with. Another one was just when I did other martial arts I just wanted to hit him, hit him, hit him and hope he falls down completely.

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  Where in Systema just ‑‑ I call it structural striking. So you hit the person and you don’t have to strike to knock him out. The follow through of the strike would be at such an angle that they would fall down which I thought ‑‑ I’ve seen Michael do that all the time and it’s really, really cool.

Paul:  Yes.

Brad:  Because then you could control it. You could not hurt him. It hurt a little bit or ‑‑ but you’d still have an advantage over a larger person because you’re always putting him off balance with the strikes. There are a lot of those aspects of the strikes as well as different body parts which watching Vladimir hit from every single body part from his little toe to the top of his head and having it work with something that was. I just ‑‑ I knew the concepts and I was like, “Oh, I can practice all the stuff now and I work out all these different things. I really liked that and also getting more of a body wave going in the strikes and to strike just do a short striking, to be able to strike from places where somebody was attacking, bear hugs and even using the striking motion to escape holds and things like that even if it wasn’t a debilitating strike, the same body movement which kind of pervades all of the movement was really cool.

Striking and taking strikes, that was one of the things that took me a long time to be able to get. I don’t know. When I started, no one told us to not bend over.

Paul:  Really?

Brad:  Yeah. So there wasn’t the ‑‑ then all of a sudden I came back from one of the trips to Russia and all of a sudden everybody was like, “OK, tell him not to bend over.” I’m like, “Why? Nobody told me not to bend over.” It was like Michael just kept punching the stomach and the chin and they were punching the stomach. He’d bend over. They’re punching the chin. He’s standing stand back up. [laughter] And that was the don’t bend over, right? That was the don’t bend over lesson. It’s so much easier. It was like “Hey, don’t bend over.” It doesn’t hurt so much. He was great. That was one of the things that has changed, I guess.

I have stopped trying to prove to people that I can hit hard or deep. There was a time where I went through that. I guess everybody does where you’re thinking, “Am I really hitting this person hard? Well, I better show him that you can hit hard. It’s pretty much ‑ ‑ personally you kind of dealt with that like, OK, fine. I could hit somebody and I could do this and I don’t need to show them.

If somebody wants it and asks for it, yes, I can but I don’t necessarily kind of get off on OK, I’m just going to take someone in, try to drop them, show everybody that. I just ‑‑ that could just be a general martial art thing of going through it. It’s just something that I just don’t need, I don’t feel the need to have to show that to somebody. Maybe this is just wrong again not to have ‑‑ I also ‑‑ I kind of almost feel like the striking is the easier part to do.

That could be my old background because I’ve just done it for so long but I’m thinking, “Well no, this is easy stuff. The hard part is that real soft work, subtle all things get together, all those things that are really, really refined. But I have to remember that most people don’t think that way.

But I do. I get and effect. If I see ‑‑ if I hit somebody and I see him start to tear up or like really I’m very concerned about that where other people they could care less and say, “OK. So what?” Those kind of aren’t people I would trust to have my back, I guess. I wanted people to be more concerned about that but ‑‑ I love it. It’s great. I just think it’s wonderful and like when I teach I would say that.

For me the striking is always something I have in reserve. I can hit them anytime. Oh, I want to strike this so I want to work on all these other subtler aspects of Systema, timing and working with the enemy, those things and if that doesn’t hurt, OK, hit him, because I know that works.

A good solid strike, you could do that and so if you’re working on just trying to move the guy, manipulate him, get him, work his tension against him anything like that, I think, do that stuff, get control of him if you need to and in case they’re really strong and really aggressive, things like that, you can always pull off the strikes. It’s kind of how it has changed.

Before it was always OK, somebody comes up, I’m hitting. It allows me and, I guess, anybody else who has gone through it a much broader arsenal of what you can do in a situation.

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  You can choose your response a little bit better. Being able to hit really hard allows you to do the other stuff because you always have it.

Paul:  It’s like walking around with a gun.

Brad:  Exactly.

Paul:  You always have the option of trying and shooting.

Brad:  Right. And now you can choose a different response.

Paul:  Right. So the last one. What is the most bizarre or weird reaction to a strike that you’ve ever seen?

Brad:  What is the bizarre or weird reaction to a strike I have ever seen? One of my strikes or somebody else’s? [laughter]

Paul:  Either one, both.

Brad:  I think first for me, I think it would be and I’ve done this on several occasions and I’ve thought about why, but I’ve actually hit people and made them cry and laugh at the same time. I’ve seen other people strikers hit people and they cry. I don’t know anybody I’ve seen had them laugh and cry at the same time. It kind of, I can show you the video of Vlad punch somebody on the floor and the guy is just ‑‑ he said, he’s just giggling up the stomach, you know; I’ve seen people laugh and I’ve seen people cry. I’ve never seen them laugh and cry at the same time.

Paul:  I’ve been a person who has been struck and laughing.

Brad:  Yeah.

Paul:  Yeah.

Brad:  Right? But those at the same time were strictly bizarre because you’re like, funny, not funny, you knoww, what’s going on? OK, what is this? That worked for me and, like I said, I’ve done them more one time. I think part of that is there are tears from the pain but I tried to really make sure that the person realizes that it’s not that ‑‑ I am not doing it to hurt them and it’s in a lighthearted fashion. So it’s almost just like it hurts so bad but then I’m looking at them kind of smiling and laughing at them and they know me here because I’m not the most serious person in the world. They do that and they’re kind of laughing but then they’re crying because it hurts. They don’t ‑‑ and so the confusion of the body and it’s kind of funny to see. That for me personally doing something, I think, the most bizarre reaction I’ve seen.

As far as seeing other people hit people, I’ve seen Michael hit people and they’re spinning around and rolling around the room and just what the heck are you ‑‑ it was kind of a bizarre ‑‑ I’m like, “OK, I saw him punch you and then you’re ‑‑ I don’t know what you’re doing. You’re pirouetting. You’re rolling and you’re standing up. You’re stretching. What are these people doing?”

Then I have people tell me that “Well, that’s how they’re trying to move their body try to get the pain out of it. Not so bizarre later on…

Paul:  Right.

Brad:  But at first ‑‑ and that’s something. If you see that on YouTube, you’re like, “What are these people doing?”

Paul:  Yes.

Brad:  People just do not understand it. I saw that and then Vlad hit me once and then I tried to emulate him. No, you’re not doing it and I was really just faking what I had seen. It’s what I was doing. He’s like, “Well, that guy was really just trying to do it be he had to do it. I was just trying to like, “Well, he did this and maybe it made him feel little better. So here I am trying to do the same thing.” It didn’t work at all and Vlad just [inaudible] [0:40:32.6] [laughter] but that‑‑ just that ‑‑ because everybody’s bodies also moved differently with what they want to do. People jump up and down. They’re swatting themselves. They’re hitting themselves. They do not know what to do. People are looking around and they’re ‑‑ I’ve seen people get hit and just get so angry and don’t know what to do where they were just want to like strangle somebody. I’ve seen a lot of bizarre reactions to strikes.

Once Vlad punched me and it was on camera and so you see him hit me and see me drop just like, my feet flat to the camera. I laid down flat because again I learned in Russia they’re like, OK, if you have to, just lie down flat because ‑‑ and again the reason behind that was to straighten your body out again but as far as funny and goofy of just seeing my own body fall and see my own feet just kind of go up under the strain, when you see these feet sticking up into the camera, it’s kind of funny.

I had a guy who ‑‑ a lot of times, not sometimes but fairly often people check out.

Paul:  Yes.

Brad:  They just ‑‑ the pain puts them in their own world and they’re just ‑ ‑ everything vanishes. The whole world vanishes and they’re stuck within themselves and the pain and they just and I know you’ve seen this. Vlad the way he says it, it was ‑‑ they just go away. You have to kind of bring them back down to earth because they just ‑‑ they disassociate. It’s so hard they just ‑‑ they’re off in a different place and you kind of bring them back to reality so that’s a bizarre one. It’s not so bizarre in the sense that I am not used to seeing it. Yeah, it’s a fascinating topic and then there’s a lot of strangeness about it especially if you’ve never done Systema but you get enough people going through it. They had all the same reactions so to a degree they’re all human in some way or another so.

I don’t think one is better than the other but it’s just how each person kind of reacts to it. So yeah, fun to explore.

Paul:  Do you have any closing comments because I’m out of questions?

Brad:  Yeah, definitely if you’re interested in it, you should see it a bit. You should talk to people about it and you should start slowly. It’s definitely something that everybody should experience because in the right hands, in the right fists, it’s very healing. It’s really good. We do have a joke that it always feels better when it stops hurting. You’re going to go through the pain and you just have to say hey, I go through this and you know you’re going to come out OK in the end. If it’s too much, just tell everybody it’s too much. I mean just say it. It’s enough for ‑‑ and you’ll see, people come up and will come up to whoever is doing the teaching and say that that’s enough. I got it. And that’s good enough. I will tell you one mistake I made a long time ago in striking. I had a guy who was a black belt come in and I was trying to teach him some Systema. This guy was as rigid as it takes. I was very new on Systema and I thought oh, punching good for you.

So I said punched him. I hit him in his solar plexus and the guy backs up and I’m like ‑‑ so I kind of creep over to him and punched him again. He kind of backs up. I basically chased the guy into the wall and I am punching him. Hindsight is 20/20.

I should have realized that I was doing more harm than good at the time so again ingraining more fear into the guy than help him overcome it and so just be careful about that on both ends of it just to make sure that in the end it becomes a healthy thing and not ‑‑ it could be healing or destroying. That’s kind of the point of it so I guess that’s what I would have to say.

Paul:  OK. Well, thank you very much and we’ll see you next time.

Brad:  See you next time.

Interview

If you are looking for a Colorado Systema and Russian Martial Art School then we are  your premier source for Mikhail Ryabko/Vladimir Vasiliev-lineage Systema.

Systema Colorado offers a complete martial arts education “based on the training of the Russian Special Forces (Spetsnaz).”

Here are just some of the topics we teach:

• Knife Defense & Knife Use
• Gun Disarming
• Escape from Holds
• Fighting from the Ground
• Defense against Mass Attacks
• Bodyguard Training and 3rd Party Protection
• Striking and Strike Dissipation
• Joint-Lock Escapes & Dynamic Joint-Breaks
• Systema Breathing
• Russian Healing & Tissue Annealing
• Improvised Weapons
• Kick Defense

All of our training is hands-on so feel free to come on in and watch a class, but it is always better to participate as that is the fastest way to have all your questions answered.

See you on the mat,

Brad Scornavacco, Head of School

Al McLuckie Interview

Brad Scornavacco:  Hi everybody this is Brad Scornavacco. I’m the Head of School at Systema Colorado and with me today we have Al McLuckie, fellow Systema instructor and long‑time martial artist. Al has been in various martial arts and Chinese martial arts, Philippine and Indonesian martial arts. He’s actually the person who got me into Systema. And so, we’re going to get started and talk to Al a little about his experience with the martial arts.

So Al, how did you get started in the martial arts in the first place?

Al McLuckie:  Hi Brad. The initial impetus was the depiction of it in films and TV. I remember at age nine seeing Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto judo‑throwing gangsters. And in the mid‑60s, “The Wild Wild West” with Robert Conrad, “The Green Hornet” with Bruce Lee. And then by the time the “Kung Fu” series came out along with the first Bruce Lee films, I really wanted to train. So around ’72 to ’76, I began training in Korean then Japanese and finally Okinawan karate.

Brad:  Where did you go from there with your training?

Al:  Basically, in 1976, that was when I began Filipino martial arts training.

Brad:  OK. And so what was it about the weapon‑based martial arts, like the Filipino martial arts because they’re known for their stick‑and‑knife and sword work. What was it about those arts that appealed to you?

Al:  Well, actually it wasn’t so much the weaponry. Being a Bruce Lee admirer, I knew that Dan Inosanto was a top student of Lee’s. And Inosanto did Filipino martial arts. At that time there were no videotapes but I did mail order several Super eight films by Dan and also by Grandmaster Angel Cabales in the Serrada system and began looking at those.

What appealed to me, after about five years of karate, was the flow and motion and the rhythmic quality of Inosanto and Cabales.

Brad:  OK. So it wasn’t necessarily that they did weapons but you liked the flow and the fluidity of the arts?

Al:  Right.

Brad:  So what was your Filipino training like?

Al:  Well, let’s see. The word “brutal” springs to mind. In Fort Wayne, after a few months of studying these films, I met a guy who had just moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana from the west coast who was a student of Cabales and also one of Angel’s top students, Mike Inay. I trained with him in Fort Wayne for a year. Then moved out west with him and my brother and a friend and trained in Mike Inay’s backyard invitation‑only class. Inosanto, who was a friend of Mike’s, would occasionally drop over and worked with us informally.

In my initial conversation with Inay, he said that he appreciated my moving out west to train with him but he needed to know if I had a problem with being injured, which was an inevitability in his class.

He basically said that he felt that you had to have the element of danger present for your training to bring out your warrior spirit.

So, broken knuckles, knocked off thumbnails were common. I remember one guy, he had most of his teeth knocked out in class and the rest having to be pulled. But mostly, just deep contusions from heavy sparring without armor.

We got away with training like that, in large part, I believe, due to the dit da jow that we’d end up rubbing into our injuries for a half hour after every class.

And it was a really good mix and it would take away the pain and heal you up rather quickly. Al Novak, who was the top student of Bruce Lee’s friend James Lee, made and sold it to us by the gallon.

Brad:  So at some point you started studying Chinese internal martial arts. So, tell us a little bit about that and how that helped you take your training to another level.

Al:  Yes. I guess it was about 1979, in a [inaudible 4:32] school, I saw and met Tom Bisio, who was the top student of Leo Gaje’s, do a demonstration which was extremely impressive. And then later, in 1981 and 82 in Chicago, Tom and Leo Gaje taught seminars at the Degerberg Academy, which after moving back to Fort Wayne and in 1980 I taught it for about nine years.

I thought Tom was and is in a class all his own. He refereed my first full contact stick tournament and worked with me privately in Chicago. I felt, at the time, that he must have peaked as I simply couldn’t imagine how someone could improve from the level he was at.

Then after about a two‑and‑a‑half year gap I saw him again. And he was three times better. And he told me that he had begun training in hsing-i kung fu and that the biomechanics trickled down to his Pekiti Tirsia and Doce Pares skillsets.

I began training with Tom in hsing-i. And also with an excellent high level teacher in Chicago, Wai Lun Choi, who Dan Inosanto would work with when he would come to the Windy City. Also, I began training in William Chen’s tai chi biomechanics system.

And all of these radically improved my Filipino base with the training of synchronizing your joint rotations, opening and closing of the rib cage, the opening and closing of the inguinal crease, connection of the core with the external motion and other factors.

That again made all the difference to me. I trained with Tom roughly from, I guess, ’87 to around ’92, maybe ’93. It was definitely a stage that I benefited from.

Brad:  So, given all of that training and very realistic training that you had, what attracted you to the Russian martial art, Systema?

Al:  Well, let’s see, I think it was October of ’98, someone gave me a bag of most of Vladimir’s videotapes. I had a pretty good eye for body mechanics. In watching him I felt he was probably the highest‑level martial artist I’ve ever seen. So I studied the early tapes and worked the material for maybe seven or eight months. Then drove to Toronto with a friend of mine and trained for a few days. That’s when I realized Vladimir was far, far better than I gleaned from the tapes, which is often the reverse.

It had to have been a couple of years since I really trained in anything. Nothing I’d seen had really inspired me or motivated me so I guess I was just ready to try something new and really became sold on it.

Brad:  So I want to talk a little bit about the knife work because there is a lot of knife work in the Filipino martial arts and Systema addresses knife use in defense a great deal as well. So given the fact that you have trained in both systems and both approaches, how would you characterize the differences and the similarities between the Filipino versus the Russian approach to the knife work?

Al:  I would say that the similarities are in that they both use an opponent’s tension against them. Both of the approaches elicit tension from someone and then completely take advantage of that tension. So I like both approaches although at this point, obviously mostly Systema. But both arts developed from the battlefield and are currently in use on battlefields. One thing I do like from the Filipino martial arts that I don’t see in the Systema is that they have a training method that involves relatively safely speeding full speed, multiple strikes with a live blade at a student, including distractions of your non‑weapon hand, which is great for psychological toughness.

Although I have to admit I’ve been in the emergency ward six times from live blade training.

On the negative side of the Filipino martial arts, I see a lot of instructors that, once they master a given drill, they’ll often demonstrate it and teach it with their bodies kind of lazily static and using fast isolated arm motions, which is a terrible example for a student to consciously or unconsciously model.

Not unlike the Kenpo syndrome we’ve both talked about over the years. I would say if karate arts could be somewhat like ice, I would say the Filipino arts are absolutely more like water and that the Russian system seems to be more like the vapor.

Brad:  So circling back a little bit, what benefits, if any, do you see in integrating? The fact that, again, you have these two systems that both have so much to offer in terms of these weapon arts. What benefits do you see in integrating them, or are there areas of the Filipino martial arts that you might recommend Systema students to cross‑train in or at least get exposed to and to see what these guys are doing?

Al:  Yes. Well, I think one’s previous training as well as every life experience is going to color your expression of Systema, like it or not. There might be things you would want to let go of or try to unlearn like rigid, hard blocks and stances, the slight snow leopard‑monkey‑snake‑crane posturing or manufactured aggression and training.

But if you grappled for instance, prior to Systema, some of that is going to come through in the form of fall flowing, for example, with someone on the ground. I think you would recognize opportunity where someone with little or no technical base will simply not see.

You take our mutual friend Martin Wheeler, for example, arguably one of the very top Russian martial arts instructors in many areas, certainly including grappling.

I believe his current skill level is due to, besides his dedication, his tenacity and intelligence and no doubt for the massive amount of one‑on‑one time he’s spent with Vladimir.

Gut prior to Systema, he trained with some really good, tough, skilled, technical grappling instructors. And he still spars with grapplers and wrestlers regularly.

I can’t imagine anyone thinking, “Gee, think how good Martin would be if he didn’t have his prior background and then he quit all that silly sparring with non‑Systema guys.”

Now in terms of the Filipino martial arts, if you’ve never played with a truly skilled Filipino martial artist, you should understand a few things.

While it’s highly beneficial to exercise with sticks, to massage yourself in the training part with sticks, learn how to take a shot to the pectoral area or the gut with a stick and not crumble…

Try tapping the bridge of your nose with a 27 to 32‑inch hardwood stick, open your mouth and tap your teeth, your temple and your collarbone, your elbow, your wrist, your knuckles, your kneecaps, shins…

You want to understand that a good kaliman’s stick is faster than the fastest jab of the best boxer who ever lived. And he’s going to be targeting those areas with a lot of speed, deception, and accuracy, flexible commitment, along with the rest of his body and the whole of his being.

So if you’ve never played with someone like that, and you are out there telling yourself you will just proceed and strike at his density or flow with him, it may or may not be adequate.

As with grappling and defending a choke, unless you’ve experienced being choked up by a skilled choker, you’re not going to understand that from the inside out enough to truly deal with it.

Filipino martial arts are one of the few martial arts systems I’ve ever heard Vladimir publicly compliment on more than one occasion.

And for all I know he is about to release a 3‑DVD set on short stick work that is completely different from Filipino martial arts. But till that time, I guess I plan to continue floundering around with what I’ve done and running through the filter of Systema.

One thing I would like to mention is that if someone is thinking that they don’t need to train with the 27 to 32 inch stick because they already are handy with the four‑and‑a‑half foot stick, that’s like thinking that because you can work at saber there’s no need to work knife work. It’s simply not the same and it needs very specific training methods.

Brad:  Great. So, on to the karambit. This is a knife that’s gotten really popular in the U.S. maybe in the past decade. People coming into my school, already talking about working with it. It’s my guess that through a lot of the Filipino, JKD channels, student instructors, people are really digging this knife.

So what is it and tell me a little bit about where it came from and what’s unique about its uses and things like that?

Al:  Sure. For its history, I would recommend just someone Google it. But basically it is a Malaysian weapon. I think it’s truly a frightful weapon due to its organic, natural design and capabilities, the concealment potential and traditionally, they’re often poisoned. You can use it to manipulate a person’s body. You can insert it and internally manipulate it with tremendous leverage due to the design of it. And then withdraw it from a body while cutting right through a rib or a spinal cord.

Then again, it’s very hard to disarm due to its design, the ring design of the grip. Again, against a skilled player, a skilled player is not fixating on just his weapon and neglecting the use of the rest of his body in conjunction with it.

I don’t believe in training against morons with weapons any more than I expect an unarmed attacker to only throw a drunken haymaker at me.

I can remember about 15 years ago, a friend of mine who was a cop in LA told me about raiding what turned out to be a recently‑abandoned drug house.

And they found among some abandoned knives and training knives, they found a dozen video tapes on Filipino knife fighting. And so, somewhat like the UFC mentality is assimilating in the culture in terms of empty hand fighting, I would say it’s highly likely that Filipino knife fighting, stick fighting, whatever, is slowly assimilating into the culture.

And again, that was about 15 years ago when my friend found the empty drug house that was full of those training tapes.

Brad:  That definitely helps with the… assuming that the person likes the weapon that they’re using and knows how to use it versus they cannot just take it up at random and all of a sudden they’re attacking you with it.

Al:  Right.

Brad:  So, I’m out of questions unless you have anything else you wanted to say in closing. But thanks for taking the time.

Al:  Oh, I appreciate it, Brad. Looking forward to seeing you in a few weeks.

Brad:  Al will be teaching at Systema Colorado in a couple of weeks. If you guys want to get in on that, you can just go to http://www.SystemaColorado.com. Our phone number is 303 485 5425 just ask for Al about the seminar. And Al is also a very, very…

Al:  Chicago workshop we’re doing just too in case anyone wants to…

Brad:  Yeah, we’ll be doing a Chicago workshop, Al and I will be featured at the Academy of Self‑defense on 95th, between Kedzie and Pulaski on the south side. So we both will be teaching jointly there, coming out this weekend. If you’re in here and want to go there, it’s the Academy of Self‑defense.

And Al is… also, one thing I wanted to tell everybody is that Al is an amazing oil painter. Pretty sure your website is almcluckie.com, right?

Al:  Correct.

Brad:  Here it is. www.AlMcLuckie.com. So try and check that out, or if you just want to contact Al, you can get it through his website.

Al:  Yes the martial arts I’ve done for the last 40 years is kind of a hobby. I really am an artist at heart.

Brad:  Definitely check it out and we’ll see you guys next time. Thanks a lot. Bye.

Al:  Thank you, Brad.

1. What would you teach to women who had only one day to learn how to defend themselves successfully?

2. Is it even possible?

Answer to #2= YES.

Answer to #1=Systema, of course. You think it would be anything else?

I used to teach women’s self-defense classes just like every other martial arts teacher–by technique.

Women would learn a few cool moves that were more about getting them to think that they could learn how to defend themselves if they trained than actually teaching them to defend themselves on the hurry up.

Incidentally, there is a guy in town teaching exactly that–deep stances and hard blocks to women. Been there, done that. I can only shake my head. These women are getting “false confidence” that they could defend themselves.

Enter The LETHAL LADIES tm

Lethal Ladies is the name of the women’s self-defense program that I have created that actually works in one day.

Lethal Ladies has two main components:

1. Using body armor for Full-Speed, Full-Force scenarios.

Yes, a group right here in Colorado pioneered using armor. Basically, it is just glorified sparring gear to martial artists but it is necessary so women can “let it rip.” I wouldn’t recommend women taking any self-defense class WITHOUT ARMOR.

2.  SYSTEMA.

Systema training principles are the key that makes Lethal Ladies unique.

The Breath Work to Contain Fear, well, you won’t find that anywhere, especially not done to the extent we do it in Systema and how we apply it.

The Natural Movement Work is UNPARALLELED in its ability to get women moving and escaping and overcoming their instinct to freeze. Honing their Innate Self-Defense Skills versus trying to teach them something foreign can’t be matched by any other training method, period.

I’ve been teaching Systema for 13 years and I am still astounded at how quickly these Lethal Ladies pick up the work. They are moving instinctively, spontaneously and pre-thought…all because of Systema principles.

I get a kick out of the marketing of Body Armor Courses because they are supposed to be so scary and overwhelming. Sure, they are for most people and they work….

…However, by the end of a Lethal Ladies course the women report being exhilarated and HAVING FUN. Just so you know, whenever I break out Body Armor for the Systema students they too report “That was Fun.” (fear and joy actually share neural circuitry)

One BIG DISTINCTION is that Systema teaches us to contain our fears rather than amplify them and try to harness that.  This way we stay in conscious control while dealing with our stress response.

Systema’s results speak for themselves.

(Caveat: we only dealt with standing grabs in one day. Obviously, other Lethal Ladies classes deal with ground work, weapon-defense, multiple attackers and the results are the same. I just don’t want you to think training is ever finished after one day, it’s just that the progress is amazing!)