Dealing With Pain – A Martial Artist’s Frequent Companion – Part IX

My father had a friend many years ago named Jerry Bolden. (Both he and my dad died a few years ago.) Jerry had been raised in the Florida Everglades by his grandmother, who he often described as one of the toughest women on the planet. He said he once sassed her, then ran and jumped on the back of his horse. He spurred it to race away before she could get to him. She calmly reached down from her rocking chair on the porch and grabbed her bullwhip. She whipped it out, wrapped the end around Jerry’s neck, and yanked him off the back of his horse.

Jerry moved to San Jose in the mid-50s, where he met my dad. He lived out in the country and drove heavy equipment for a living. But he did a lot of hunting on the side – deer, bear, and wild boar. A friend of his brought the first Pit Bull dogs into California for Jerry to use to hunt hogs. (Pit Bulls were much smaller in those days than most today. Jerry gave me one of his pups in the late 50s and I raised it.)

Jerry was a tough guy, your worst enemy or best friend. He once killed a bear with a hatchet. He killed a 400 lbs. wild boar with a hunting knife. He was a handsome, charismatic, and funny guy, who dated a lot of women, including married ones. He came home from work one day to find the husband of one of the women sitting on his sofa with a shotgun aimed at him. Jerry somehow managed to finesse the guy into letting him move closer. When he was within range, he kicked the end of the shotgun. It blew a huge hole in the ceiling. Then, Jerry beat the guy up so badly that when the police arrived, they arrested him.

On a dare, he once removed an abscessed wisdom tooth with his pocket knife and a pair of pliers.

Jerry was just one of the many strong models of a man I saw while growing up. These images were in my mind when I began karate training in the 50s. Training was very rough in those days. Dojo wars were a common affair back then. Dojo windows were blacked out or boarded over so no one could see inside. The front door was kept locked. When someone knocked, a black belt was sent to answer it. He got into a fighting stance before he unlocked and opened the door. One of my first instructors told us he wanted to see blood at every workout – and he did. Part of training back then was seen as getting used to the presence of injury and pain.

I “pinged” my knuckles – punched a concrete wall full force to break the “cap” on my middle knuckle so it would harden and protrude when it healed, allowing me to hit as with a ball peen hammer. In fact, I broke it twice.

Along the way, I got into the habit of setting my own broken bones. I found that if you reset one soon after it broke, it was numb and not a problem. Some weren’t easy. But with images of Jerry Bolden in my mind, who could dig out a wisdom tooth with a knife, I viewed any hesitancy on my part as wimpiness.

My mind, as I’ve said before, came to be in constant combat with my body. When my body cringed away from my attempts to reset a dislocation or break, my mind would make my body press, pull, or twist even harder.

The only time I went to the doctor or emergency room for treatment of a karate related injury was when it was something I couldn’t treat or fix myself. I put in a couple of stitches once for a cut but it didn’t go so well. The needle didn’t want to penetrate the skin and I couldn’t tie the sewing thread close enough to the cut to be very effective. Next time I got cut, a student’s toenail sliced open the webbing between my middle and ring fingers, I went to the emergency room and let them handle it. It was a strange, gapping cut that I couldn’t figure out how to close. This was in the early days and I was in my gi. The doctor had never seen a karate injury before. He called in all of the other doctors, who all got a kick out of it, at my expense. This was another reason I avoided doctors and hospitals.

I’m certainly not advocating this approach for anyone but myself. In fact, it was probably a bad idea. It made my mind and spirit stronger and raised my pain tolerance but probably did so while putting my body at greater risk.

Thanks again for putting up with my ramblings.

Dealing with Pain – A Martial Art’s Frequent Companion – Part VIII

For as long as I can remember, my mind has been at war with my body. I’ve always felt my body was too weak, too whinny. It would often balk at delivering everything my mind asked of it. If I wanted to do one thousand reverse punches per day, it would not cooperate. It would complain throughout the entire process and try to quit before I was done. My response to this would often be to make it do even more reps, or do each with even more power, as if training an unruly or lazy animal.

I always saw my mind as the driver and my body merely the machine. Although it was a wondrous machine – the harder you work it, the stronger it becomes, unlike non-biological machines – it was a machine nonetheless.

While sparring one of my black belt students one night many years ago, our receptionist asked me a question. I looked over at her and started to hold up my hand to stop my sparring partner for a second. But he had already launched a kick. It caught me on the end of my ring finger and bent it all the way back to my wrist. The joint broke and the skin split open, exposing the bone and connective tissue. Students gathered quickly around for a look. “Is that the bone?” one asked, then cringed away. I didn’t say anything. I just pulled out the handkerchief I had tucked in my gi, wrapped it around the bleeding joint, and continued sparring. They were amazed but it was nothing for a martial artist, just part of our job description.

I saw it as a learning opportunity for my students. Teachers teach even when they’re not “teaching”. They teach some of the most important lessons through their personal behavior, how they carry themselves and how they lead their lives. They teach negative things by smoking, drinking, abusing drugs, womanizing, violence, cockiness, bragging, promoting themselves to higher ranks and titles, and so on. And they teach positive things via humility, hard work, mental and physical toughness, focus, love of the martial arts, living moral and ethical lives, and so on. This was a chance to show my students what a martial artist does when he’s injured.

I always said “A fair amount of masochism never hurt the quality of a martial artist.” But this is true of most physically challenging activities.

While a graduate student at Stanford, I was an assistant coach for the swim and water polo teams. I also worked with the track team and individual athletes on the football, basketball, and baseball teams. All of the top athletes I ever met or worked with – including national and Olympic champions – had this quality in common. They worked harder than anyone else, focused on areas in need of improvement, and saw pain as a welcomed constant companion. If asked about their skills, they never did as many martial arts today do, brag about their talents. They always spoke only about what they weren’t doing up to their standards or desires.

At 68, I now cut my body far more slack than I ever did during my over 55 previous years in the martial arts. In actually, it has probably earned a bit of respect.

Thanks for following my humble ramblings.

I haven't forgotten you!

Sorry for the delay in posting another installment. I've had to attend to several other things and a difficult section in my novel. But I'm working on my next blog post and hope to have it up in the next day or two. Thanks for your patience, Jim

Dealing with Pain – A Martial Artist’s Frequent Companion - VII

Many years ago, Dr. Henry Beecher, an anesthesiologist, investigated pain both during war and civilian life and found that how a person perceived an injury greatly affected the level of pain he seemed to experience more than the extent of the injury. During World War II, Beecher noted that only one out of every three of the wounded soldiers brought to his battlefield hospital for surgery complained of enough pain to receive morphine. But, when he returned to civilian practice, he found that four out of five who received surgery comparable to that given the soldiers claimed they were in severe pain. According to Beecher, some even pleaded for an injection of morphine. From this, Beecher concluded:

"There is no simple, direct relationship between the wound per se and the pain experienced. The pain is in very large part determined by other factors, and of great importance here is the significance of the wound. In the wounded soldier, the response to injury was relief, thankfulness at his escape alive from the battlefield, and even euphoria. To the civilian, his major surgery was a depressing, calamitous event.”

My personal reaction to an injury is generally to ignore it, at least initially. Through practice, I’ve acquired the ability to block out the pain signals with signals coming in from other, more pressing things, like my opponent or simply the task at hand.

The way the mind stores experiences in memory has an interesting side-effect. We store select experiences initially in what’s known as “short-term memory.” Through some process, we transfer these to long-term memory, so we can access them at a later date. But if you give no attention to an experience when it occurs, it doesn’t get stored in short-term memory and, as a result, is never placed in long-term memory. It’s not wiped from memory, it was never there.

Through the years, when I would shower after a hard workout or tournament match, my wife would often ask me how I got an injury or a large, sometimes huge, bruise. I would seldom be able to answer her. I honestly didn’t remember as I gave it no thought at the time. So its cause was never placed into my memory.

I’ll be getting into methods to help achieve this – drills to strengthen our minds. For now, try ignoring injuries or pain when they occur and focus completely on the task at hand – or perform the drill I talked about last time – and see if it helps. I always tell myself that pain doesn’t exist unless I allow it to. I usually don’t choose to allow it as it serves no useful purpose.

Thanks for reading my humble ramblings.

Dealing with Pain – A Martial Artist’s Frequent Companion – Part VI

Many years ago, scientists raised a group of Scottish terriers in isolation in order to determine how a lack of interaction with other dogs would affect them as adults. They found several major differences between normal dogs and those raised in isolation. One was their pain tolerance.

Some of the isolation-reared dogs, when grown, would repeatedly poke their noses into the flame of a burning match, seemingly oblivious to pain. They would keep sniffing at the flame as long as it continued to burn. They also showed little or no painful reaction to being stuck with a pin. The scientists checked and found nothing wrong with the dogs’ sensory systems.

Famous Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov performed many experiments on dogs. In one, he would only feed a group of them after they had received an electric shock. After enough repetition, the dogs, when shocked, would salivate, wag their tails, and look towards their food dishes. They continued to react in the same manner even when the intensity of the shock was increased. They also showed no painful reaction when the experimenter intentionally cut or burned their skin.

An American scientist, after reading of Pavlov's results, decided to carry the Russian's investigations one step further. In this experiment, cats were first trained to respond to a shock as had Pavlov's dogs. Once this response was developed, the animals were further trained to administer shocks to themselves in order to indicate that they wanted to be fed. Once trained, they seemed almost eager to receive a shock, as that meant that they would receive food.

How does all this apply to us? Well, there is evidence that man is really not that much different in this regard. We, too, can become able to respond differently to pain. There are a few different methods for bringing this about.

The following is a drill I teach my students, and one I’ve used myself on occasion over the years: (The same approach can be applied to any number of drills. But I like to introduce it during normal stretching exercises, when many in need of greater mental control and pain tolerance encounter problems.)

Students sit on the floor and put their legs straight out in front of them. Then, they grab their ankles and pull their heads down towards their knees until they feel a fair amount of pain in the backs of their legs. Next, they count as fast as they can from one to ten but in the following manner: one – one, two – one, two, three – one, two, three, four – one; two, three, four, five – one, two, three, four, five, six – and so on until they reach ten. Those who do the drill correctly find they don’t feel the pain in their legs as they are counting.

The reason this works is it overloads your brain. So much is being processed that it leaves no room for an awareness of the pain signals coming in from the backs of their legs. This is not something you would want to do during a fight or match. You need to focus totally on the fight at hand. But in a street fight or tough sparring match, we generally experience the same type of sensory overload and resulting pain blockage.

But try this drill yourself and see if it works for you. It is a good initial option that drives home the point that we do have power over pain. (And it can be useful during dental or medical procedures, painful runs or hikes, and so on.) There are other methods which have more direct application during confrontations. I’ll get into these in the future.

I’ve had to put the blog a bit on a back burner. I’m trying to finish my novel. And, because of the reorganization of how groups are structured on Facebook, I can’t directly message friends. So readership has dropped drastically since the change. It is becoming hard to justify spending as much time writing for the blog as I have when I have so many other things needing my attention. But, we’ll see how it goes.

Dealing with Pain - A Martial Artist's Frequent Companion - Part V

          Many years ago, my son, Dan, had a classmate over to play. They were probably in the 4^th grade at the time so they weren’t small children. When his mother dropped Louie off, I quickly gathered that she was one of those moms obsessed with her son’s wellbeing. This was the first time she had allowed him to visit a friend and play alone. Before she left, she impressed on me the need to keep a close eye on Louie to make sure nothing hurtful happened to him.

As soon as she was gone, I asked Dan to be extra careful as I didn’t want him to get hurt and have to face his mom when she returned.

The two boys went onto the front lawn to play catch. What could go wrong? It wasn’t long before I heard a dull thud outside, followed by a blood-curdling scream. I thought Louie must have been hit by a car and ran outside.

Louie lay on the sidewalk, writhing in pain, clutching his arm, and screaming. I tried to find out what was wrong with him but he wouldn’t respond. He just kept wailing as if he were dying.

I looked questioningly at my son, who shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t know what was wrong with him either. I saw a large, broken, dirt clod in the street and asked Dan if they were throwing rocks at each other. He said they just threw the one. “Did you hit him with that dirt clod?” I demanded. He said they just threw it into the street to break it. Louie stopped screaming long enough to say that Dan had hit him.

I asked Louie where he had been hit. He held up his hand. “Look, blood,” he said, shaking as if in severe pain. I didn’t see any blood. He showed me the tip of his little finger. There was a tiny red speck on it where a small, dirt pebble had flown off the clod and hit him.

We had a couple of issues going on with Louie. First, he had zero pain tolerance. And second, his entire being was focused only on the pain. Concentrating on an injury can often produce a sensation of pain far out of proportion to the actual damage. Pain from even an almost microscopic injury can, under close and constant attention, become unbearable.

Stop reading and mentally scan your body. How many sources of pain can you locate, no matter how slight? You can likely locate a bunch. Now, focus only on one of them and see if it doesn’t get worse.

"Some people think only of pain," said Soke Takayuki Kubota, Instructor General of the International Karate Association and a person noted for his pain tolerance. "Everybody has pain. But if you think only of pain, you can't do anything."

I’ll have more to say on this topic soon, including more words of advice from my conversations with Benny Urquidez and Bob Halliburton. Thanks again for your support.

Dealing with Pain – A Martial Artist’s Frequent Companion – Part IV

Pain has an immediacy to it. It demands our attention and can totally dominate what we think and do. A painful injury during a fight or a match can often spell defeat. So it’s critical we learn to set our pain threshold as high as possible.

As I mentioned in my last post, pain serves a very important and useful function. It notifies us when something is wrong somewhere within our bodies and insists we drop everything we’re doing and take care of it. That, of course, is not always possible. Plus, some injuries require immediate treatment. But most do not. Once pain has warned us, its purpose has been served and it must be shut off so as not to distract us.

Pain is what is known as a relative sensation. What to one man is severe may be barely noticeable to another. Also, what may seem excruciating under certain circumstances may be tolerable under a different set. Some of this is due to genetics and some to psychological or sociological factors.

On the genetics level, we’ve all likely seen those people who are what they call “non-responders” in jujitsu and pressure point systems. You crank on a wrist lock and the recipient just looks at you, feeling no pain whatsoever. Others howl and dance around. Some of this could be due to an improperly applied lock or attack. But there are a significant number of people who are just wired differently than the rest of us.

You also have people who are tougher mentally than others, for whatever reason. They may have endured a lot of pain growing up or while in the military or on the street and so on. You see similar reactions in top athletes in a variety of sports and activities. Pain is often the fork in the road that separate champions from the also-rans. Most will “hit the wall” and the pain will cause them to back off. The top performers will keep on going or perhaps go even harder.

I’ve worked with a variety of Olympic, professional, and national and world caliber champions over the years. They all have this ability in common. They know that if they can’t work within the pain zone, they will never achieve their goals for a high finish. They know all of their major competitors work regularly within the pain zone. In fact, they see pain as a positive sign. It tells them that they are working within the champion’s zone, the zone where only the very best train or perform.

I’ll discuss this important subject further in my next post. Thanks again for reading my humble ramblings.