Martial Arts: The Mind / Body Link

By Lor Mun Mak

In order to stop your opponent in a fight you have to affect them. The best way to achieve this is to attack their mind. By finding ways to break the opponent’s mind, their body ceases to have a driver. The aim of this book is to investigate mind weakening strategies to build advantage.

There are six main ways of attacking the mind:

1. affect their senses
2. internalise their thought process
3. affect their emotions
4. deny them time
5. deny them the ability to measure you
6. activate the primitive defence response

When faced with violence, your mindset focuses on attack and defence. By adding weapons into the attack, the win seems even further away. In desperation you return to your natural response, stopping your thoughts of exiting and focus solely on physical strategies. The mind/body link has been broken, allowing the group to take you to ground, the worst outcome. Your re-activated primitive responses now limits your mind and body coordination to a focus of grabbing one person and ignore the attacking group.

Your martial art is designed to keep you safe in very unsafe situations. Take a well-functioning group attack where they collectively believe they are more powerful than you are, but break this belief and the group dynamics will crash in front of you long enough for you to escape. If you think you can rely on technical stuff in battle, then you are going to be disappointed.

Who hasn’t had an instructor tell them that you have to ‘get the job done’, but what does that even mean when you know you are missing skills? In some ways it is a statement that sends people off on the wrong track, by training even harder, only to find the solution is to give up. The answer is simple: dismantle the opponent’s intentions towards you, just like a magician creating inattention to complete the trick.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lor Mun Mak
• Release date: Oct 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463001363

Lor Mun Mak

I have never considered myself special in the Martial Arts world; never wanted any accolades that I could use to promote and market my credibility. In truth, I did not want to be in the limelight. Even so, I still attracted my fair share of unwelcome challenges. My drive was directed to unravelling the accepted illusions created by Martial Artists. When taught, it is like watching magicians performing a magic trick on the unsuspecting. The spin is as diverse as the number of techniques that support the rhetoric. I am sure many devotees would not agree but are ready to justify their success with a good story. I am writing this book to get people to look beyond the blinkered view of media output. There is always a lot more to be discovered than the current loudest noise.I found during my travels that Martial artists could not allow for unexpected events. They always needed to be in control, so they can dominate the situation. Any suggestion of a random attack was treated like a stage play, leaving no room for error. Interestingly they could not imagine a violent group attack where the little kid with a knife could take the best of us out. The Question I asked, are you ready to experience the freedom of thought needed to survive such a chaotic situation? To me this was obvious that you can be caught out of your comfort zone. So, my focus in the arts shifted from fighting skills to surviving a group attack. What I discovered was not in the bounds of the fighting arts.Like most martial artists, we all have too many techniques. Much of what we learn is waist. I also became a control freak, making each technique so valuable to an unsuspecting student that they believe the spin wholeheartedly. I must have spent years perfecting these teaching strategies. It was worth it, the enthusiasm paid the electricity, but it was a real time waster. All I personally wanted was a way to deal with the chaos of a non-staged group attack. I had enough of social fights, like facing unwanted challengers and ring fighting. I noticed my thoughts shifting from fighting to survival, so I spent more than forty years following the stories of great fighters and self-defence stylists, only to be disappointed that most of them wanted to show their prowess by having a fight. Even with the most delicate inquiry resulted in a mismatch of what they said and did. As frustrations grew, they had to ask, “do you want a fight?”To me these people have developed fragile personalities, trapped by technical delusions, and will fight anyone to prove their point. I concluded, ‘I must be talking a different language’. My issue was an uncontrolled group attack, while their perceptions was only on a two-person fight. I did not like their desire to dominate or to be their door mat. I treasured life. It does not take a martial artist to beat up on people. Today, streets are much more like the wilds where unskilled people cause death and injury even to good fighters.This book aims to promote survival skills as an alternative to the social organized fighting approaches that suppress people’s instincts to deal with multiple attackers.

Book preview

Martial Arts – The Mind / Body Link

By Lor Mun Mak

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2018 Lor Mun Mak

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this free e-book. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form.

Warning: It is strongly recommended that children and adults who are not experienced in martial arts should not attempt application of the principles of this book unless under the supervision of a currently certified instructor/coach in the fighting arts.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

The Mind / Body Link

Affecting the Opponent

Forward Pressure

Accelerated behaviour

Outcomes

The System

Mindset for Battle

Freedom

Multiple Attackers

Sharpening Your Weapons

Energy

Defences are built into what you are doing

Intent

Design, Build, and Test your Art

Training the Body

Longarm Footwork

Single opponent verses group battle

Learning / Training model

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Introduction

One of the key aspects of the martial arts is the link between the mind and body.

It works in both directions; the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind.

The implications for battle are two-fold:

You can stop an opponent’s attack by wrecking their mental focus on you, which dismantles their physical actions.

The other part is not allowing your own mind to be trapped by the situation and decreasing your physical ability.

Your chances of safely exiting a situation are dramatically improved when both parts are working in your favour.

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The Mind / Body Link

The link between the mind and body is at the core of every martial art. There is a compelling reason for this; if you can disrupt the mind, then you can disrupt the body.

The opponent’s physical system is powered and driven by their mind. If you can affect their mind sufficiently, then you can reduce their physical effectiveness. This is a double-edged sword as the same applies to you.

If you base everything on the logic that an opponent is generally only dangerous if they can focus their intentions on you, then you have a clear path forward to develop your art.

Your goal is simplified i.e. to dismantle the opponent’s intentions towards you. This will open up your thinking to a whole range of self-defence strategies, as well as an approach to fighting that will have a similar foundation for both single and multiple opponents.

If you break the opponent’s intentions towards you and send their mind internal, then it is likely they will start to turn away from you, as this is a natural defensive action i.e. we turn to protect our sensory equipment such as our eyes, and to see if the way is clear to get away from the danger.

If you don’t break them and they retreat or back away from you, then you have two options. You can stop and leave, or you can go in again. Part of your mind being free is you are not worried about having to damage or destroy your opponent. You only need to break their mind until they give up, at which point you leave, as it may only be temporary or they may have friends in the vicinity. If they are too resilient and don’t break down, then getting out is a good option.

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Affecting the Opponent

Affecting the opponent is about affecting their intentions towards you. The more rapidly you can achieve this, the less potential for you to be injured by their weaponry, be it strikes, kicks, knees, elbows, head butts, takedowns, etc.

You ultimately don’t want to be hit or grabbed. Remember that for self-defence, you only have to create the conditions where you can exit the situation safely.

Shock and Pressure

How can you affect your opponent’s mind such that their physical ability is momentarily affected?

The right combination of shock and pressure is one such method and it can send the opponent’s mind internal very quickly. This switches them from their calculating brain that is planning and reacting with an attack / defence mindset, into their primitive brain where the survival response lies.

Ultimately, you want to trigger the flight response for a moment so that the opponent will turn. The objective then is to ramp up the pressure on them so that they turn and present their back to you.

Turning (to run or bunker down) is the first step in a survival response to get away from a threat, or to present the back as the least worst target.

You can switch people into this response with the right amount of shock and it’s not something that people can easily train to stop from happening. Note however that everyone has a different threshold of pressure that they can withstand, and people with fighting experience can recover very quickly.

A heavy combination of shock and pressure will get you the desired results even in a group of opponents. Multiple attackers are at their most dangerous when they act as a concerted group. Break the ‘group mind’ into a bunch of disarrayed individuals and your odds of safely exiting the situation will improve dramatically.

How to create shock

To create shock, your actions have to temporarily overwhelm the person and send their mind internal, where their focus is on saving themselves rather than on attacking you.

This should inform you that even if your actions are not actually doing much physical damage to your opponent, they need to think that you are.

For shock to be effective, it has to be cumulative i.e. you need a series of shocks that sends their cognitive mind into a downward spiral so that their primitive mind takes over. You are after a defensive reaction and the best result is to get them to turn away from you. This is a natural defensive reaction i.e. the first step to get out of a situation.

Of course, people will return to the battle if their cognitive mind can recover. This is why you also need pressure, to stop the person returning on you.

Creating shock is not an easy task. Everyone has a different mental resilience depending on their training, their exposure to violence, etc. In order to give yourself the best chance of creating both shock and pressure you need to work with the biggest weapon at your disposal. This is your accelerated mass.

The Body is the Weapon

Very few exponents use their whole body / system to its full potential in battle. The body becomes the weapon when you use your accelerated mass to create effective strategies regardless of whether you are facing a single opponent or multiple attackers.

How do you create an effect on your opponent using your accelerated mass?

You have to shock the person if you are to break their mind for a moment. You need to throw your mass (explosively and violently) at the person if you are to do this. It is the explosion of your whole system onto the opponent that creates the moment of shock. To give yourself the best chance of having an effect on your opponent, you have to give everything of yourself. It’s all or nothing when your strategy is full energisation.

You have to use your body to create a series of shocks for the opponent that sends their focus inwards, while maintaining a pressure that doesn’t allow their mind to recover. It is the combination of pressure and shock