Reaction time is one of the biggest and baddest, if not the biggest and baddest, scams ever foisted upon human beings. The idea that you must wait for somebody else to move before taking action is a trick of a blinded mind, and will get you killed. The whole concept, and I dont care if you are a practitioner of Hung Gar or Wing Chun or Shotokan or whatever, is designed to make you a victim.

Now, the problem is that this concept of reaction time has become common to all arts, and basically corrupted those arts. One of the reasons is that the martial arts have been designed for children, and children dont have enough sense of themselves to deal with reaction time except in the most victim manner. Thus, you have to avoid classes taught for, or evolved for, or designed for, children.

Another problem is that the mixed martial arts phenomena that is currently the wow in society has driven people to training methods that utilize nothing but muscle and brawn. How strong are you, how fast are you, and not how can you harmonize with your opponent. Again, the method creates victims of time, moving after somebody else has moved, and it does not create people who move in The Now.

For example, watch one of the latest UFC bashes, the fighters miss as much as they connect, yet the time involved should be faster than somebody can move their heads. The reason this is happening is because people are moving in response to action, and not in concert with it. Or, and this is really worse, they are moving without having any real idea of where they are moving, striking out blindly and hoping to win the lottery.

On the other end of the scale are fighters who dont miss much, who are aware in the middle of combat, and come out of the fray unscathed and yet with a knock out to their credit. Watch the last fight with Anderson Silva Silva, the one against Forrest Griffin. Anderson seems lazy as he exists at the edge of Forrests punches, and yet he is never touched, and instead loops a lazy, little punch in that knocks Forrest into the middle of next week.

But Forrest was already in the middle of next week! Forrest, you see was trying to hit a head without knowing where it was, which is obvious if you analyze the trajectory of his punches. Forrest was not capable of being in The Now, or of predicting in any fashion where Andersons head would be.

So here is the question that I have been getting up to, if a person is in reaction time, punching because of and not in concert with the action, where is he? The truth is that it doesnt matter where he is, what matters is that he is victim to the trap of reaction time. He is not in charge of the fight, he is living some other time, he is living in the past, he is victim to reaction time.

Well, it should be fair obvious that the world has gone crazy, and we all knew that, but we can uncrazy it by undoing this trap called reaction time. Simply, you must seek out training drills where you move in concert with your opponent, and because he moved. Whether you study Choy Lee Fut, Kenpo, Krav Maga, or whatever, you must research what reaction time is, admit when you have it, and remove it from your life.

Al Case, 4O years martial arts, hundreds of articles for the mags and his own column, has designed methods which will undo reaction time and de-corrupt entire martial arts. You can take advantage of his free report at Monster Martial Arts, and you can see him moving without reaction time at Blinding Steel.

That is probably the number one reason most people get into the martial arts. Everybody has had that bully in their background. Everybody would like to feel bigger, stronger, free from the threat of violence.

Now, to be truthful, if you just want to fight, I recommend going to a boxing club for a few months. You’ll get in shape, you’ll learn what it feels like to get hit, and you’ll learn how to hit back.

If you think there is something more than fighting, however, then you must look to the martial arts. You must believe that the world isn’t just a struggle for survival, but that there is a point to it all. You must believe in yourself as a human being, and that you can actually ascend to higher levels of awareness.

The first step is to build a structure for containing the knowledge of the martial arts. This is why you should explore forms; this is something that boxing does not teach. This is the mechanism which will elevate you as a human being.

Second, you must achieve discipline in your life. I don’t mean the discipline where you get a belt on the bottom as punishment for doing wrong. I mean the discipline of doing something every day for the simple reason that you love doing it.

Third, you must study a system that has logic. The reason for this is one of expedience. You don’t want to spend decades sorting through the bushwah. You want to get there while you are still young.

Fourth, you must not stop doing the art for a single day. Drill those basics patiently, open your eyes and look at what you are doing. You must not just work out in the physical sense, you must invest your awareness into your art.

The fact of art, you see, is a manifestation of the human spirit. It is your awareness filtered through the layers of your logic and spread across the heavens for all to see. Life can be heaven, you know, but only if you can isolate the art within your soul and allow it to shine.

Al Case has been knocking the bushwah out of bullies for 40 years. You can learn how he does it, and get yourself a free ebook, at Monster Martial Arts.