On Perishable Skills

Tracing the Circle – Weekly Meditations on the Practice
On Perishable Skills:

There's a trap that martial arts practitioners fall into sometimes. It's the trap of confusing what you know for what your skill level is. (This is called "Stinking of Books") What makes this trap so insidious is that the physical skills of martial arts are perishable skills. It's like physical fitness. If you don't work to maintain your fitness, your fitness level goes down. If you don't work to maintain your martial skill, the same. The manifestation of this trap is in thoughts like, the physical skill will be there if I ever need it. This is a delusion.

There's a second trap that practitioners can fall in and that is a relativity trap. It's when you say to yourself that, well, my skill relative to the skill of others is still good and you become content with that. You stop striving for high skill. You must always strive to pursue higher skill.

A third trap I think of as a trap of introversion. Someone falls into this trap when they only practice by themselves (even if they're practicing by themselves in a group of others, who are also practicing by themselves). Our skills are relational. The less we practice physically relating, the weaker our skill in relationship will be. While a weak relational skill may still triumph against an incompetent opponent (who, by definition, also has weak relational skills and is untrained on top of it), weak skills put you at a serious handicap against a competent opponent. Practice against dead equipment can help but is no substitute for live partners.

And these traps are mutually exclusive. Someone can fall into all of them at the same time. There are so many traps and pitfalls.

“The superior opponent still gets up earlier than me. He works out longer and better than I do. He's faster, stronger, quicker, softer, and he's met everyone I've ever met, and his skill is much higher. (Because he's practicing harder than I am) I'm just doing what I can to do to try and keep up.”