Ghostwood Farm

Protect ya neck.

(NOTE: I try to title my posts with song titles, and since I don’t know any songs with “Rochambeau” in the title, you get some Wu.)

Mingus, one of our geriatric dogs, woke me up at 2am on Christmas morning to pee. After she came back in, I could not get back to sleep. For some reason, I was thinking about rock-paper-scissors.

And, yeah, this is about fighting.

I was coaching two students in a sparring session two days earlier. X, an older teen and a 1^st dan black belt in taekwondo, has not been in class for a couple of months because of school and college applications. He also trains in hapkido and modern arnis. His preferred approach is to kick first, punch second, and avoid grappling at all costs.

B, in his early 20s, is quite consistent in attendance and a 4^th dan black belt in taekwondo. He also trains in hapkido. His kicks are very very good and he is getting more comfortable with his punches. He has been working a lot on clinching and grappling during sparring, particularly in clinching to a couple of different judo throws.

As X and B were sparring Monday, B kept clinching X, who did a great job in basing, preventing the takedowns and throws that B was trying to execute. Finally, a student who was watching with me yelled, “B, pull guard!” And he did. And it was hilarious.

I think this episode raised the idea of rock-paper-scissors for me. I honestly don’t know if it’s original, so if you are aware of this metaphor being used by someone else in a martial arts or fighting context, I’d love to know about it.

It goes like this:

Imagine you, like X (or me, for that matter), prefer striking. You are a skilled striker, and striking is where you are most comfortable. You probably have the skills to defend yourself against a majority of potential untrained attackers. You do not like clinch, and you avoid training it for that reason.

Now, imagine you are like B. You are a skilled striker and are actively working on improving your standing grappling. You probably have the skills to defend yourself against a majority of potential untrained attackers. However, crucially, B is also actively developing skills to deal with a better striker.

If a skilled striker is rock, B’s developing clinch skills are paper. He has an answer for someone who is better than he is at his primary approach. This is not to say that X doesn’t have a paper to a good striker’s rock, but B might have more papers than X does.

Personally, where I am most comfortable is sort of a muay mat approach: heavy on punching and low kicks. That’s my rock. If I am attacked, I am most likely to initially respond with punches, teeps, and low kicks. However, if my attacker is a trained striker, my paper is standing grappling. So far, so good.

Now, what if my attacker has been training in judo, or has a couple of years in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and so has reasonably developed standing grappling skills? He has scissors for my paper. That’s ok. I need a new rock for an opponent who has an answer to my grappling ability. This might be short-range striking (elbows, knees to the leg), or maybe eye gouges.

Perhaps he has an answer for those techniques, too. Perhaps he takes me to the ground, and my rudimentary ground skills are not enough. Perhaps my scissors versus his ground-fighting paper is going to actual scissors (or another, more reasonable weapon). At some point, an opponent may have more answers than I do, but my goal should probably be to maximize how many responses I have, thereby minimizing the chances that any opponent in a violent encounter has the last, um, scissor, I guess.

I was talking to a friend last Saturday during sparring class about Ryan Hoover‘s idea of a second plan A. This is an important concept in fighting that I think will be familiar, though it is couched in unique terms. I do not want to speak for Ryan, so I will tell you how his concept resonates with me, and how that ties back to rock-paper-scissors.

Many of us find ourselves trying for a particular technique in sparring. That works out all right in a striking context: We can keep trying to get something to work in different contexts with different approaches and partners. This experimentation is an important way to learn, and in many ways is the point of sparring.

However, especially in a grappling context, we often get fixated on one particular technique, even after we know that technique will not work and that our partner has our number. “I MUST GET THIS OSOTOGARI!” Sparring can be a lot of different things, but at its root, it is practice fighting. It is better to move on (flow) to a new technique rather than forcing one that appears unlikely to be successful. I believe if I am comfortable doing that in a sparring context with a partner, I am more likely to pursue that approach in the context of violence with an opponent.

Where the concept of second plan A comes in is that a “plan B” has the connotation of being a sub-optimal solution that will only be tried reluctantly after plan A has failed. Instead of clinging to the “better” plan A to prevent being forced to the “lesser” plan B, the second plan A paradigm says, look, plan A is not viable. This might be because your opponent/partner read your plans and is pre-empting you. It might be because you blew an opportunity. It does not matter why: Your first plan A is gone. Your second plan A, and your current course of action, becomes what is available next, your best option in this new context. And so on, until you get to your nth plan A. Or knocked or choked out, I guess…

Changing my approach is not failure, it’s adaptation. How does this apply to rock-paper-scissors?

Thinking about fighting like rock-paper-scissors takes a person out of that rigidity that having a single, best plan A implies. It can make one intentionally proactive by reframing how they think about fighting. Fighting through a counter to get to one’s “plan A technique” is no longer appealing. Now, someone throwing paper on your rock just makes you look for scissors. It isn’t failing, not really; this is fighting iteratively, adaptively. This is not a new concept, but I find the rock-paper-scissor framing a useful metaphor that most people will intuitively grasp.

I have not pressure-tested this idea or really thought through it completely. However, writing it out has helped me clarify my thoughts regarding how to approach flow and my willingness to move on during sparring, regardless of the art and context. In talking through it with others, it appears to be easily grasped and helpful, and I will be using this idea in coaching sparring and in teaching hapkido. I’m gonna call it “The Rochambeau Principle.” What do you think of the name?

My next goal will be to develop a seminar on this topic. The trick will be, I think, to get the concept across without participants tying it to the specific techniques we might use to illustrate the concept, if that makes sense. It may not be possible but I’m going to take a run at it.

If I ripped this off from someone, please let me know who! If you find this idea useful, use it, refine it, make someone better with it, and let me know how you refine it so I can use your better version, too.