I spent a great deal of my martial arts career as a technique collector. When I went to seminars to learn new forms or techniques, I took meticulous notes on every detail and frustrated the living hell out of my instructors asking them to drill me through all of the moves again and again until I memorized them all. I would practice these techniques into the wee hours of the morning for fear that I would forget any of them, and I have to say that this was actually a very annoying and stressful way to learn martial arts.

And then I became an instructor.

When I was teaching Choy Li Fut, the system was structured much like other schools, with a belt system that required certain knowledge for each advancement. A student might have to learn twenty self defense techniques and one or more forms before progressing onto the next rank. Because I had approached my training as a technique collector, this format was quite agreeable to me at first. After my first year of teaching, however, I began to rethink my ideas on how martial arts should be learned or taught. My students often expressed difficulty with memorizing their techniques before each test, and even more frustration as they moved up the ranks and had difficulty remembering all of what they had learned previously. I had felt much of the same frustration once I reached the advanced levels, and while I was required to know all of my material to become an instructor, I can easily admit to having to review my notes from time to time in order to stay on track. What I ended up noticing over time was that many of the techniques I was teaching were united under certain principles inherent to the system, and that each belt level had similar unifying principles it was aiming to convey. This might seem like an obvious observation, but coming from a technique collector who wasn’t given the memo about this it can seem less obvious.

Once I had realized this I found new ways of teaching my students. I used the unifying principles to make the techniques easier to remember. This way, should my students ever forget a technique, they need not feel as though they have lost vital self defense knowledge; as long as they remember the concepts, they will be just fine. Similarly, this principle-based teaching made it easier to remind them what they ought to know. “Which way should you step when throwing that kind of strike?” could be a leading question to create a mental contact point which they could use to remember the precept, and thus the technique.

It is for this reason that I came to the perspective that the art is not in the technique, but in the precepts and principles. A technique should only ever be a vehicle of expression for the art in question, not the sole manifestation of the art as a whole. Certain arts can have signature techniques and tactics, but these are simply expressions of the underlying principles. Ono-ha Itto ryu (the style of kenjutsu I practiced) for example, uses a downward #7 cut over and over again in nearly all of its kata. Past a certain point one might be convinced that the entire system was merely a way of teaching someone how to cut vertically in a downward manner, but they would be wrong. While the men-uchi is Itto ryu’s signature attack, it is a manifestation of the underlying principle “itto sunawachi banto”, one sword leads to ten thousand swords. That one cut, used to aggressively dominate the centerline and simultaneously deflect your opponent’s attack and wound him is the bedrock of the system, and is used as a vehicle for teaching both control of the centerline and single-time counters. Rather than limit the practitioner to only one kind of counterattack, this actually frees up the martial artist to use that principle in whatever way seems most appropriate at the time.

When we limit the scope of our martial arts to encompass only the techniques, we are hamstringing our efforts to become more proficient. If we spend more time collecting techniques than we do delving into the art itself, we will become great libraries of counters and counters to the counters, but there will be little real depth to that knowledge. Granted, you might be keenly aware of all the different ways that Joachim Meyer used a suppressing cut in his rapier system, but do you know why he executed it that way rather than another? What times might it be a bad idea to throw that cut? Sometimes the most basic and general knowledge is the knowledge you should be most interested in getting your hands on. It’s just like taking a science class: sure, maybe you know all the most interesting aspects of general relativity, but do you understand the fundamental underlying mathematics or geometry necessary to really grasp that awesome sounding knowledge? I think that’s a question that we as martial artists (HEMA or otherwise) have to ask ourselves every time we try to learn a new device or teach it to our students: what is the basis for this knowledge? Why is it done this way in this context instead of the other ways it might be used?

One thing all of us instructors fundamentally understand is that we only have our students for a limited time. While many of us would be overjoyed for it to be otherwise, our students do not have hours upon hours to train these techniques and then go home and study their notes and practice some more. Our students have lives and responsibilities, and we can’t pretend that they will always be able to retain every ounce of information we throw at them. These people have kids and mortgages to worry about, so the exact necessities of parrying in Bogen might evade them unless we, as teachers, find a way to make that information easy to remember and understand. The key to doing this is encapsulating that knowledge into basic principles that are like martial arts soundbites, easily digestible bits of info they can carry into every class and sparring match.

It’s easy to fall into the pit of technique collecting when studying certain aspects of HEMA. After all, many of the manuals give you technique after technique ad nauseum, often times waiting until the very end of a section to give you a functioning precept to unify that knowledge together (damn you, Meyer!!!!). I ran into this time and again when I was trying to run my old dagger class, and in some ways I’m glad that one suffered a little bit for lack of precepts because it allowed my dussack class to really improve in that regard. When I teach dussack, I definitely teach the techniques, but only as the vehicle of principle expression, not the art itself. Because of this I have noticed a major improvement in understanding amongst the attendees of my class, and I think focusing on the transmission of principles rather than techniques is something that will make all of us better fencers, and better teachers. But then again, everyone thinks their way is best.

Cheers, folks.