Awareness in Martial Arts.

When you have been training martial arts for decades like I do, you realize that as you age, your speed, strength and explosiveness will probably go down.
As you spar others who give you good resistance, you realize that to overcome that challenge, more techniques might not be the answer. So if that is not the answer, what is?

Awareness, that is the answer to overcome challenges in sparring and fighting. I can only speak from experience and I hope it is useful.  Flight time in praticing, drilling and sparring a particular art in a right way consistently over a long period of time will build awareness at the very high level.

In the beginning, I always think off adding more techniques to be better than my opponent. Evertime I try to do something and I failed, I would always look for a new answer, usually new technique to overcome that problem. This is very common for a beginner. What I realize after 2 decades of training, my focus shrink on not just adding techniques, but I am more interested in going deep, understanding the techniques I already own and know, so that I can pull them off more efficiently without facing any new obstacles.

I am not saying that it is not important to learn and add new techniques.  What I am saying is when you have a high level awareness, you can most of the time avoid common problems in executing your techniques successfully.

So how do you build high awareness in fighting? Master the basics at the deeper level. Learn the technique correcly, drill them hundreds of times, isolate spar them on many different fighting scenarios, integrate the scenarios. You also need to tape yourself in sparring, jot down notes on what to work on. Most importantly, be patient and don’t give up. Without you knowing it, your awareness will skyrocket.