Re-up That Enthusiasm

It has been a while since I last posted.  Mostly I've been puttering around at home, grumpy, waiting on my body to heal up enough to do something other than sit.  It did, however, give me ample time to study for all of my final exams this term.  Now that those are over it's time to start training again. 

A couple of things that are important regarding a fight:

Being able to recognize when someone is trying to set you up for an attack is one of the biggest steps in being able to prepare yourself to stop it.  the greater this ability, the faster you can perceive a threat and decide whether it is real or not.

Changing our everyday paradigms to creating an alternative mind set for combat situations.  Most of the time you brain runs on autopilot using preset structures about human behavior and critical thinking.  These guide our everyday actions but limit us in a fight. In combat you don't have the luxury to sit back and think about what is happening so it is important to precondition yourself to notice aspects of your surroundings, of other people, and of spacial positioning.

There is an aesthetic in combat that should be considered. The fighting community does recognize the "thug" fighter versus "non-thug", or what might be call a skilled fighter.  To deal with thugs one must consider that they may not be fighting, but trying to immediately render you incapable of resisting. While the set up may take time, the attack is going to come at you fast.  Preconditioning will help deal with this but it is difficult to prepare for.  A few ways that help include: trying to provoke an attack by make them attack when you are ready, and by countering patterns to breaking up their combinations.