Thinking in Terms of Weakness

Similar to an older article on self-defense archetypes is the theory of thinking in terms of weakness. The most basic level in terms of learning self–defense is repetitive memorization. Most people who learn like this do not know why it works only that it does. Then the next level is the archetypes. Those who learn to use archetypes find how it works and reapply it to different attacks. The highest level is learning weaknesses to create defenses.

I was speaking with one of the elite students from the class I go to at an advanced practice recently and he was telling me about how in Aikido this is how they would teach you. You would essentially end various defenses in the same counter based on the weakness you wanted to exploit.

This requires a heavy pull from the student to learn as most curriculum in competitive arts such as Taekwondo do not teach this method. They tend to stick with memorizing textbook techniques rather than finding why they work and implementing them elsewhere. Another problem is that experimentation is also something that I generally discourage children and beginners from taking part in. Finally, it takes a much longer amount of time to learn a series of weaknesses and how to exploit them than it would to teach them an archetype or even a series of defenses for various attacks.

Anyone who is a red belt or even blue belt should take an interest in learning the weaknesses and why their techniques work in order to better teach others and also to improve upon and develop better techniques.