How to Build the Gunfighter Mentality in Martial Arts!

Interestingly enough, the Gunfighter Mentality used to be part of the training in the classical martial arts. I remember training back in the middle of the last century, and everything we did was geared towards this ability. While there were many factors involved in the death of this principle, people like Bruce Lee probably drove home the spike.
Bruce Lee added circling and bouncing to the martial arts. The Gunfighter Mentality depends on stillness, being coiled like a snake, and here was this fellow acting like Mohammad Ali, circling and jabbing and destroying the mindset of the Gunfighter. Now Bruce Lee would have won most any fight anyway, but a generation copied him, and they gave up the deadly zen stillness of the Gunfighter.
Now stillness is what it is all about when it comes to true martial arts, and there are several good reasons or this. There was much interchange between karate and zen principles in Japan, and people practiced zen for long hours began to see the benefits of sitting, waiting, and cultivating silence. In the silence ones perceptions worked better, and their intuitive nature could take over.
When one is silent, just sitting, when one just relaxes, the senses begin to work better, and the world begins to open up. Try it, just sit in a chair comfortably and just relax for a while. The world will start to make itself known, tell you things, and you will become brighter, sharper, calmer.
Once the student begins to appreciate that his perceptions, and thus reactions, will work better, the real work can begin. In the silence we used to corkscrew our stance downward, into the ground, and search for the best set of the leg, the best position to spring from. In the silence we would examine the angle of the hip and the turn of the foot, trying to make every single part of our bodies into totally responsive and explosive mechanisms.
Freestyle matches, instead of moving all around and wasting energy, would be subtle shifts of the body and edgings toward the opponent. Instead of throwing a hundred punches, most of which missed the target, we would set up to throw one punch, but every ounce of our might would be instilled in that one punch. Most important, we left the training hall as different people, aware people, patient people.
The Gunfighter Mentality in the martial arts is pretty much unknown now, and it is too bad. I believe that if the fighters of today began building the characteristics of a good Gunfighter the Martial Arts would take a turn for the better. This might not be good for mixed martial artists in such places as the UFC, however, as the techniques might become too dangerous to be used.
Al Case has examined martial arts for forty years. A writer for the magazines, he is the originator of Matrixing Technology. You can get his free ebook at Monster Martial Arts.









