The Importance of Performance Game

I think the recipe for excellence in martial art is to practice correcly, consistently for a long period of time. Because the term is martial art, a lot of people forget that its an art. That means although thinking from self defense concept is important because it is martial, but if we just focus too much on self preservation aspect of the art, we are too shallow on our view of it.

I started training martial art because of self defense, but i fell in love with it. I then decided I want to be in it for a long haul. Its about longevity with me. Therefore; there are 2 aspects of martial arts: self preservation and self perfection.  Self perfection will help you to be more efficient when you perform your technique and also you get to express yourself better using martial art.

According to Sifu Burton Richardson from JKD Unlimited, performance game is a game that is useful to train both self preservation and self perfection. The outcome of the game is playfulness in martial art. By being playful, you get to achieve self preservation, because the game is functional, and self  perfection because you take away the risk of being injured.

For instance, let say you want to practice boxing sparring with a partner and you don’t want to hurt each other. What you can do is play with open hands where if you tap your friend forehead when you throw your jab, that means you score. He, on the other hand, needs to block your jab and throw his own jab to tap you.  From here you can tweak it to let say jab vs cross only or jab vs jab cross.  Then play a different game such as jab vs jab, but tapping the head and the thigh (real target is the groin) or stomach.

You can also play where the other guy try to clinch and you try not to clinch and just use Boxing. Or let say both of you use lead tools only such as lead hand and lead leg only for light kicking.

As for grappling, you can also use performance game.  Remember the word is “performance”, so you want to improve your performance in any area that you want. So, if let say i want to improve my ability to flow from one technique to another in grappling, I can roll without submissions so that takes away the pressure from both of you and just focus on exploring other areas of grapplin when you roll.  The result, you get better at flowing from one position to another, escapes, recovery and sweeps.

Later you can work let say on one submission, straight arm lock.  Don’t tell your friend, but as you flow roll, you are hunting for that trigger to pull of the straight arm lock. Then you change role. This way, you are using progressive resistance to help each other out so that both of you can benefit.

By taking the risk of being injured away, using performance game you will have more fun and also improving both your self preservation and your self perfection because you are willing to explore and take more risk.