Here's an excerpt from the book "Why Michael Couldn't Hit" And Other Tales of Neurology of Sports by noted neurologist and author Harold Klawans M.D..

Michael Jordan is a great athlete. There's no question about that. He was, at the time of his initial retirement (in the spring of 1993), the greatest athlete of his era, or darn close to it. But it was hard for me to join the accolades that pronounced him the greatest athlete of the century. He was a basketball player. Period. Others had been great athletes in more than just one game. Jim Thorpe, the great Native American athlete, had won both the decathlon and the pentathlon at the 1912 Olympics, an accomplishment never matched before or since. Then, after he was stripped of his medals for having played a couple of games of semipro baseball, he went on to play both major league baseball and professional football. Despite his unexcelled variety of athletic skills, Thorpe only managed a lifetime batting average of .252 in six seasons as a major leaguer. His best season was his last, 1919. That year he hit .327 in sixty games. But as soon as professional football beckoned him, he gave up baseball. In football he was a star people would and did pay money to see.
Michael Jordan had played basketball and only basketball, and because of that the neurologist in me knew he could never make the grade as a major league baseball player. We would never have the pleasure of watching him star for the White Sox or even for the Birmingham Barons, or whichever team the Sox picked out for him. For wherever he swung the bat, Michael Jordan would not be able to hit a baseball, at least not well enough to play competitively at a major league level.

That was a bet you could take to the bank. Not because Michael Jordan wasn't a great athlete, with both speed and quickness, or because he would get poor batting instruction. And certainly not because of any lack of effort on his part. He could be taught and could learn to play the field and run the bases with the best of them. No one would work harder to develop his own abilities. Unfortunately, hard work and dedication would not be the issues. His inability to hit would be the direct result of a neurological problem. It would not be due to any undiagnosed neurological malady but to the way in which his brain and ours have evolved to do what they do. His lack of hitting skill is part of his legacy as a member of the human race.

No matter how great a superstar he had become, no matter how superhuman the rest of his body seemed, his brain was still a human brain with all its attendant abilities and limitations. Hitting successfully is not a pure muscular skill, like pressing a couple of hundred pounds. Hitting is a visual-motor skill, and like all other skills it has to be learned. The brain has to learn how to recognize the spin and speed and direction of the ball as it leaves the pitcher's hand, and then to swing the bat at just the right speed and in precisely the proper location to hit the ball solidly as it crosses home plate. This is a tall order for anyone's brain. And the sad fact was that at age thirty-one, Michael Jordan's brain was just too old to acquire that skill.

How could that be? Thirty-one is young. People learn at ages far older than that. Hitting is not exactly nuclear science. And that is precisely why it can't be learned at such an ancient age.

To realize why this is so, it is necessary to try to understand the human brain and how it learns and acquires skills. The human brain did not just appear fully developed within our skulls. It evolved to get there. Our evolution, like that of every other species, began as a biological one. It was part of the process of classical Darwinian descent. But the evolution of we humans and how we live and function no longer consists of merely biological evolution but also includes social, cultural, and environmental changes. We have developed the ability to alter our environment to an extent that no other species can even approach. Hence, by changing and controlling our own environment, we have effected a second form of evolution, which guides and directs the brain's further functions. In other words, our brains have evolved the ability to guide and direct their own development.

While rarely looked at in that way, baseball is a prime example of such an environmental change, a change that can be fed into the developing brain and alter the way in which it develops and functions. Not even Abner Doubleday made that claim. American children grow up being exposed to baseball as a man-made environmental condition and learn how to hit baseballs with baseball bats. We do not all do that equally well, but we do it. We also learn how to dribble basketballs while for reasons unknown to us our French counterparts are raised in an environment deprived of baseballs but replete with soccer balls. These French kids acquire the skill to dribble that ball with their feet.

How does this difference come about? How does baseball as an environmental input act upon the brain? And why could that input not act on M.J.'s brain?

The increase in the size and complexity that characterizes the human brain has been achieved with remarkably little genetic change. There is an embarrassingly close similarity between our genetic makeup and that of the gorilla or the chimpanzee. More than that, the total amount of genetic information coded in the double helixes of DNA has remained fairly constant throughout all of mammalian evolution, from shrews to kangaroos to dolphins to us. It is thought that there are about one million genes. That number is pretty much the same in the mouse and in humans. It is divided up into different numbers of chromosomes in different species, but the total number of genes is relatively stable. In all humans it is, of course, identical, and the actual number of active genes is far less than one million. In fact, the number is closer to one-half that, since forty percent or more of all chromosomal DNA appears to be redundant and plays no active role in development.

The best estimates suggest that about ten thousand genes, which is one percent of the total gene pool (or approximately two percent of the active gene pool), play an active part in the design and construction of the brain and the rest of the nervous system. This is true for humans and chimpanzees and walruses and even pet gerbils.

For humans, this number seems to be woefully inadequate, especially when the size and complexity of the human brain are considered. It seems enough for a simple house cat, or maybe even a chimpanzee-but for us? The human brain is made up of 10 to the 10th power nerve cells-that is ten billion cells-one cell for each dollar it would cost to build a couple of top-of-the-line nuclear submarines. Looked at in that way, ten thousand genes do not seem quite so inadequate. After all, the defense budget took only three or four hundred members of Congress to set it into place. And we all know how many of them are redundant (or at least seem that way).

There are, in addition, 10 to the 14th power synapses, or active connections between nerve cells, where messages can be sent or interrupted. That is one hundred trillion, a number that dwarfs any projection of the national debt into insignificance. That is a number worthy of respect.

How can a mere ten thousand genes manage to control so many synapses? How can these relatively few genes do so much more for us than they do for other species? Remember that most of what they do for us is not that different. Any survey of comparative anatomy of the nervous systems of mammals supports that conclusion resoundingly. The major structures are all the same, whether the brain belongs to a sheep or a person; and so are most of the major pathways. The hardwiring is pretty much the same, far more similar than dissimilar.

Consider the optic nerves. They always start as outpouch of the brain itself, beginning in the retinas of the universally paired sets of eyes. They then travel back toward the rest of the brain and decussate (or cross) partially in order to read the same geniculate bodies of the thalamus. There, pathways known as the optic radiations carry the visual images back to the occipital lobes. It is pretty much the same in every species.

This arrangement sends information from the right visual field (everything seen with either eye that is to the right of the middle when looking straight ahead) into the left visual cortex, an area known as the calcarine cortex of the occipital lobe. Analogously, images from the left visual field end up in the right calcarine cortex. This system has the same structure and function in all mammals. The same genes have done the same job and produced the same basic wiring diagram. It is this system that lets lions see which gnu is straying too far from the pack and that Chicago fans hoped would allow Michael Jordan to pick up the exact spin on a baseball as it leaves the pitcher's fingers. For it is learning within this pathway that is critical to the batter. Without it, he cannot hit a lick.

The baseball world is divided between right-handed hitters and left-handed hitters. But hitting (with the exception of onearmed Pete Gray, who played outfield for the St. Louis Browns during the last year of World War II) is a two-handed affair. Both hands grasp and swing the bat. Right-handed batters differ primarily from their left-handed counterparts not in the use of a dominant arm for hitting but on which side of the plate they stand. And how they look at the opposing pitchers. And, of course, pitchers do differ as to which hand releases the ball and where that release point is in relation to the vision of the batter.

It is the visual fields that differ with batting stance. The right-handed hitter stares out at the pitcher and must pick up the pitch coming out of his left visual field, if that pitcher is right-handed. But he must see the ball rotating out of the center of his vision and right visual field from a left-handed pitcher. This is undoubtedly why right-handers fare better against lefthanded pitchers. They get a better look at the ball. This has a neurophysiological and neuroanatomical basis. There's nothing psychological about it. For the same reason left-handers see the baseballs coming at them from right-handed pitchers better and hit those pitches far better. Yet hitting is never easy, and as Yogi Berra put it, good pitching always beats good hitting. And vice versa.

The best example of our phylogenetic debt to other species in the design of the hardwiring of our brains is probably the entire process of decussation, or crossing, to the other side of the brain. The right brain directs the left arm. Why? It also feels sensation from the left side of the body: pain, touch, temperature, pressure, position sense. It sees to the left. Again, why? This all results from a crossed wiring diagram filled with decussations galore. But why? How did it get that way? Put most simply, it came about because the pineal eye of early amphibians had a lens.

On our long trip from amphioxus to human, one stage was the amphibians. Many amphibians developed a single extra eye in the top of the head. Although this eye was above the parietal lobes, and is sometimes called the parietal eye, because it served to transmit signals to the pineal area of the brain, it is more often called the pineal eye.

The pineal eye had a lens, and it is the lens that makes all the difference. If an object, say, some insect the amphibian would love to eat, moves from left to right, the image on the retina of the pineal eye also moves. If there were no lens, the image would move in the same direction. Since there is a lens, however, the image moves in the opposite direction, to the left. The fly is now on the right, but the image is on the left side of the pineal retina and the left half of the brain. And the amphibian still wants to eat that fly.

To eat it, he must catch it; to catch it, he must see it. So as the fly moves farther to the right, he must turn his eye by lowering the right side. A muscle on the right side of the head must pull that right lens down. But the sensation to trigger that movement is in the left brain. So the left brain has to send an impulse out along a nerve to that muscle on the other side of the skull-from left to right. That phenomenon is called decussation, or crossing of nerve fibers, and it all started with the amphibians.

If the hardwiring and the basic structure of the human brain are so similar to those of other species, why do our brains function so differently?

The complexity of our brain is not achieved just by our genetic heritage but also by what that heritage allows the brain to do. Our genetic coding allows the brain to grow and develop while interacting with the environment. It is, in essence, still growing and developing as it is learning. This interaction with the environment shapes and directs the brain's growth and development. No other species can make that statement.

Human infants are underdeveloped and helpless at birth and remain so for a long time. The human brain is far less developed at birth than were the brains of our newborn ancestors. We are born with an immature, almost embryonic brain that continues to grow and evolve in relation to its environment to a degree and for a duration of time that is unprecedented in any other species. How did that happen? And why?

The brains of most other species are fully formed by birth, whereas the brains of the primates continue to grow during a brief, early postnatal period. However, the brains of humans continue to grow at rapid fetal growth rates long after birth. This process extends for many years. The duration is different in different systems of the brain, and in some even continues into what we consider adult life. At birth, the human brain is only about one-quarter of its eventual adult size and weight. In other words, at least seventy-five percent of the brain develops after birth where environmental influences can help shape that development. It is during this prolonged period of dependency, of growth and development of the brain, that the brain is most plastic and thereby most susceptible to environmental influence. It is not just the ten thousand genes that figure out how all those synapses are to interact but the environment that helps write the software. It is during this period that most environmentally dependent skills are acquired by the brain.

This is one reason why it is almost impossible to discuss the inheritance of acquired skills, including such skills as language abilities or intelligence, as purely genetic issues. Nature determines the limits of what nurture can accomplish. That is an absolute. But at the same time nurture determines not only what nature can do but the way in which nature develops in order to do it. In so doing, nurture determines what we measure as nature. It is not because it was good politics that the Head Start program was the most successful aspect of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. It was because it was good science.

The drawn-out period of brain development means the period of infantile and childhood dependency on adults lasts many years. This dependency is both a result of the lack of adult adaptive function by the brain and a sign that the process of acquiring adaptive skills is still proceeding. The ongoing brainenvironment interactions build upon the plasticity of the still-developing brain, but this is not a process that goes on equally forever. The human brain is distinguished from the brains of other species by the postnatal capacity for learning and its apparent plasticity, but there are limits. There are critical periods, or windows of opportunity, for different types of learning. If a skill is not acquired during its critical period, then the acquisition of that skill in later life will be harder, if not impossible. Language has usually been our model for such skills, but no skill is more environmentally dependent than hitting a baseball. In other words, an adult who was deprived of exposure to baseball as an adolescent and tries to learn to hit a baseball would be much like an adult who had never been exposed to language trying to learn to speak at the age of twenty. To extend the analogy, hitting a major league change of pace is far more like trying to learn to read. Skills must be learned at the right time, if they are ever to be learned well.

We are not unique in this. Birds learn the specific songs that they will spend their lives singing by imitating the songs of other birds. In order to be able to do this, almost every species of bird must hear these songs quite early in life, in the first couple of months in fact. If the songs are not heard during this critical period, they are never learned. Birds deprived of this input remain songless. The one exception to this rule are canaries. It appears that each season canaries can learn new songs. It is almost as if they can recapture their youth. This annual rebirth of a critical period for learning is accompanied by an annual crop of new auditory neurons that makes the acquisition possible.

Would Michael Jordan be able to recapture his youth, or was he merely a human whose window of opportunity had come and gone? His superior athletic skills did not mean that he had a unique ability to regenerate new visual-motor neurons on an annual basis. His brain was no different from any other human brain. His unparalleled basketball skills were the results of talents he had acquired and developed long before his thirtieth birthday, at a time when his brain was still developing and was still capable of selecting such neurons and neuronal networks.

Human infants acquire a bewildering number of different skills as their brains mature. They learn to sit up, to stand, to crawl, to walk. None of these physical skills requires any teaching. None is even based on mimicry. A blind infant masters them all. It is as if the acquisition of these skills is hard-wiredbuilt- into the nervous system.

The process is not the same for hitting. A child who is unfortunate enough to be born into an environment without baseball will never learn to swing a bat on his own. The acquisition of a particular athletic skill is analogous to the acquisition of particular songs by songbirds. The ability to acquire songs is there. It has been ingrained genetically into the brain. The specific song depends on the environment. So it is with hitting. It is just like our acquisition of language. The ability to learn language is genetically encoded in our brains. What language we will learn depends on exposure. So Americans learn English and how to swing a bat. The French learn French and how to kick a soccer ball.

Children do acquire language with very little assistance from anyone else. It is primarily self-taught, as long as a child is exposed to language. Our brains appear to be innately equipped with systems that are able to acquire language. But this innate capability is both governed and limited by the maturation of the brain.

As the human brain matures and acquires specific selftaught hard-wired skills, it simultaneously passes through a succession of stages when language may be acquired. By age one, when the child can stand alone, she is capable of duplicating some syllables and understanding some words. Six months later she is creeping backward and downstairs and can walk forward. She now has a repertoire of anywhere from a few to fifty words, but they are used as single words, not phrases. By two years of age, she is running with numerous falls but nonetheless running, and now she uses short phrases; the babbling that had begun at about six months, when she began sitting up, disappears. And so it goes until age four, by which time language is well established. Hitting a baseball remains in the future. The physical skills a person can acquire are entirely constrained by hardwiring. They can only be learned when that wiring is completed and can be activated.

There is an attempt now to apply this type of stepwise approach to learning to hit by starting very young kids off hitting a stationary ball resting on an elongated tee. Whether this is educationally or even neurologically sound is unclear. Most baseball hitters are not exceptionally good at hitting golf balls. And hitting a stationary golf ball does not in any way prepare one to see and hit a baseball. They are far different neurological processes. Golf at its most basic depends primarily on maintaining a posture that allows the golfer to carry out a finely controlled skilled movement. Hitting a baseball is a visual-motor skill that is about recognizing where a baseball is going to be at a particular instant of time and then getting your bat there, posture be damned. They are not the same skill at all. Besides, the window of opportunity for hitting may not begin until later than the age of six or seven. Having a youngster at age five hitting off a tee could be like reading to a six-week-old baby-it could just be too early to matter at all.

The same stepwise learning occurs in the acquisition of language, with one other constraint. Just like the learning of bird songs by birds and learning how to hit a curveball, the acquisition of language requires environmental input. Infants acquire the language they hear. American children learn English, French children French, Arabian children Arabic, and so forth. No matter what the language, the process and the stages are pretty much the same. And no matter what culture the human infant is raised in, no matter what language he is exposed to, acquisition of language can only occur during a critical period of development. A critical period is a specific time interval in which an ability must be acquired if it is ever to be acquired at all. It is the entire window of opportunity. For language, that critical period, or window of opportunity, is estimated to end at about puberty....



But how do we know that there is a window of opportunity for language? The earliest evidence came from those few humans who had not been exposed to language until after this critical period had passed. Their hardware was never given the needed software. One of the first and most celebrated of such instances was that of the Wild Boy of Aveyron. This boy, who was given the name Victor, was found living alone in the woods near Aveyron, France, toward the end of the eighteenth century. He was thought to be about twelve years old when he was captured. At that time he could neither speak nor understand language. In fact, he had no understanding of the concept of using language for communication.
Professor Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, a physician who was interested in the study of human behavior, took charge of him. Itard had published the first case of what later became known as Tourette's syndrome. For over five years, Itard tried to teach Victor to speak, to get him to learn even the rudiments of language, but Victor was unable to acquire the skill. After years of effort, he was able to understand a number of words and phrases but had learned only a few utterances, such as milk "lait" and Oh God "O Dieu" These he often said incorrectly. The now tamed Wild Boy never came close to acquiring the use of language. His critical period for doing so had passed.

We do not have all of the details of Victor's case history. It is possible that he may have been mentally retarded or deaf. But neither need be true to explain Victor's failure to learn language. For Victor, no language exposure before puberty translated into no language ever. Does that mean that the failure to see a ball hurtling toward you during childhood will translate into an inability to ever pick up a bat and hit a ball? That's hard to believe. Especially based on one eighteenth-century French kid.

Other far better documented cases of children who were completely deprived of environmental language input make the same point. A girl who has been dubbed "Genie" is one of the most recent examples (1977). She had been isolated in a room and kept away from virtually all human contact from the time she was twenty months old and should already have been able to say a number of words and understand a great deal more. Her isolation was continued until she was thirteen and had passed puberty. This imprisonment was enforced by her father, who was obviously schizophrenic and who treated her like an animal, to the extent that he barked at her instead of talking to her.

When Genie was finally discovered and rescued from her isolation, she was totally without language. Like Victor, she could neither speak nor understand speech. Whatever she may have learned early in her life had been lost. It was at this point that language exposure and instruction were initiated. Genie did better than Victor. She did learn to comprehend language but her speech lagged far behind her comprehension and she never mastered even the rudiments of grammar. According to her mother, she had learned single words prior to her incarceration. This suggests that she was not retarded, but more significantly that during the critical period early in her life, she had already started to learn language. So perhaps she had an advantage over Victor in that the key element of her postpubertal learning of language was relearning. As a result, Genie was able to reattain at least a fair measure of comprehension. Overall, however, her level of achievement was poor.

If Victor is the right model for the study of critical periods of development, then Genie does more than bring us into the twentieth century. The acquisition process may not be entirely all or none. Genie did learn something. By analogy, she could learn to swing a bat. Perhaps she could play sixteen-inch softball. But she could not really hit successfully, and certainly not at a major league level. And that is what has to be kept in mind when looking at Michael Jordan's career switch. What M.J. wanted to do at age thirty-one was not just to be able to play pickup games of softball in the park on Sunday mornings. He wanted to play major league baseball. He wanted to hit against the best pitchers in the game. He didn't want to learn to say a few phrases; he wanted to learn how to perform Shakespeare in the same company with Olivier and Gielgud. Not a bad fantasy.

What is the neurophysiological basis of learning that underlies both language skills and the hitting of baseballs? How does the genetically encoded brain actually learn the specific language to which it becomes exposed, or learn the sport of its environment? There are two opposing theories. One is referred to as instructive or constructive, and the other is called selective. The older, standard view is the instructive view, in which networks of nerve cells are "instructed" by experience to form certain synapses, or pathways, which, once formed and reinforced, are retained. This could easily produce a neural network capable of learning language as a process and then learning new languages with increasing ease. In this view, the critical period would close when the network would no longer be able to reinforce pathways.

A selective process works in just the opposite way. All the pathways are there waiting to be used. If used, they are reinforced. If not, they atrophy and disappear forever. In other words, the brain "learns" by selecting from a preexisting, wide range of possible pathways. The critical period starts when the maturation of the pathways sets out the range of adaptations that can be chosen. Those that are not chosen are eventually eliminated by continued maturation. The end of the critical period represents the time at which unchosen networks are eliminated. You learn to speak one language by such closure and you can add on to that one language of information. If you don't, you can't. End of ball game.

The theory of a selective process is very attractive and seems more consistent with the acquisition of language, which is far more dependent on exposure and selection than on instruction. The child hears sounds and learns to select the same sounds as part of its language. Whichever model is right, and most cognitive scientists are leaning toward selection, that process is bound by a critical period. The parameters of this window of opportunity remain the same, whether the process is selective or constructive. The relative skills of American athletes in world competition have not improved in the last two decades, but today we can field a competitive soccer team. Why? Because kids in the United States now play soccer. We, too, can now dribble with our feet.

hey a$$hole, why do you keep posting pages of
non-martial arts related bull$hit on Tim's site?

If you really think this type of crap will benefit anyone interested in Internal Martial Arts discussion, just post the link to the site you plagiarized instead of these lengthy, crappy, "hey-hey look at what I read" posts.

(by the way, I don't mean to offend a$$holes by associating them with the likes of you)

CoolHandLuke

You do have a point, would I be good or even like martial arts if my father had not started teaching me the very basics when I was three? The same with basketball which i happen to be very good at and love if I had not started to learn to dribble and shoot when i was four. I am now trying to learn spanish and am finding it very hard to remember.

Firefrost

CoolHandLuke,
this essay (long!) was very interesting but I suppose martial arts are different, you know why? Speaking is somewhat an acquired skill, strongly related to our specie but still acquired, like baseball. Fighting spirit is innate, belongs to the conservation instinct that is in every little ceel of our body: the struggle for life. It is, in my opinion, something closer to brething, you can polish it with technique but never fail to learn it.

I'd have to say that Cool Hand Lukes post have merit just because I like reading about this kind of stuff.

When I was a kid I was obsessed with figuring out why in the world can't I hit or catch a baseball. I suck at any sport where you have to catch or hit a ball flying towards you. Suffice it to say I can't play tennis or baseball. What I did find is that I did very well at sports where I get to throw something or shoot at something. My eyes are really good at estimating distances and I'm good at hitting the mark. So I found that I was good at shooting, throwing the javelin, and archery. I also figured that I'm pretty good at observing the field during a game. I figured that I had the brain for strategy. So I played basketball and usually played point guard. I could pass the ball and shoot from any range, just don't pass me the ball during a fast break. It entails catching the ball, you see.

What does this have to do with martial arts? To me, Everything. The way you are wired combined with you natural physicality will help determine your level of success in any athletic endeavor. My natural tendency to be good at things that can be transferred over to martial skills led me to want to study martial arts. Unfortunately or fortunately I'm not very strong or physically gifted with quickness or size. So I tended to gravitate towards the softer martial arts that emphasized the use of internal principles vs martial arts that emphasized brute strength.

You've got to know your inherent strenght and weaknesses to maximize your potential to learn certain things. You have have to understand how you are wired to maximize your strenghts and compensate for your weaknesses. You have to know what you do best so you don't waste your time doing something that you are not suited to do.

Just trying to pass on some info.For a teacher or an aspiring teacher I would think that anything related to motor learning may prove helpful.Just MO.

Bruce Kumar-as some now call him- once told me that the success of Hungs fighters was due in part to their early start in Martial Arts.He infered a "window of opportunity".

Some more stuff.

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/coachsci/vol31/table.htm

I completely agree that the earlier one starts to train the better. But perhaps aptitude and the will to persevere (with a competent teacher of course) may also count for just as much.

The greatest Xing Yi Quan fighter in the history of the style (and a man often included in the short list of the greatest Chinese fighters of all time) was Li Neng Ran. Li did not start training until he was close to forty.

Teaching in reverse.Opinions?

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/coachsci/vol31/backprog.htm

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/coachsci/vol31/wrest2.htm

That's very interseting stuff. Here's my question. They used a whizzer takedown to illustrate teaching in reverse. But in order to start with the partner in the air, you have to already have sucked up the arm in a whizzer, stepped across to block the partner's legs and twisted your hips for the throw. This is tantamount to learning the throw in the normal forward sequence, no?

Tim,

I love the way you think! The second paragraph of the first page stated: "The interference caused by the activity prior to the attempted control of a new skill element is a major weakness with forward progression instruction".

I find this statement hard to swallow. It seems to me that if the learning of the grip in the golfing example must be first, than by the logic of the statement, the grip itself would interfere with the learning process of the swing in reverse as well.

In Wing Chun we do some movements in reverse in form. I don't know that there isn't value to this concept, but I do wonder about the conclusions of the author. I think the whole concept of progress in any skill or endeavor is forward, but that is just what I think.

Regards
Bob Shores

Tim,

I know what you mean.IMO the value of learning in a reverse manner may reside in a greater appreciation/comprehension of the function that preceding links in the chain provide.

Tim,Mr Shores

I also wonder if learning in a reverse manner is not a more natural method-from a developmental standpoint.

As stated above IMO it might seem to provide an effecient method of filtering out superfluous preceding activity.

Take a very young toddler who hits someone.Generally they adapt a frontal head on stance and simply slap with very little connection to their center or lower part of body.Some merely flick their wrists,although rumor has it that Shang Yun Hsiang half stepped his way out of the womb.

Same thing with throwing.A young toddler usually will assume a head on frontal position and simply throw with only their arm,and even then only with a limited amount of arm potential.Rarely does one witness a toddler engage in elaborate pre windups to deliver the ball.To introduce an elaborate windup to a young toddler just learning the simple act of throwing would IMO produce quite a bit of negative interference to the throw itself.

Beginning fighters often flail in a disconnected manner.Through expierence they eventually-hopefully-learn how to harness and develop power from regions deeper in the body.It seems most have to be ugly before they are good.Is this not in some respects a backward or reverse progression-power initially developed from the more peripheral regions?

Tai Chi traditionally practices pushing hands before distance practice.A reverse progression of how a fight usually unfolds?

Just some thoughts and opinions.

Coolhand,

I don't know what kind of ubber-toddlers you're sparring with, but speaking from my own experience,toddlers generally suck at throws and strikes.

As a matter of fact, I've never had a problem over powering anyone under the age of 13. If you'd like to pick a couple of youngsters and begin 'reverse training' them we can arrange a proving match between yours and any tykes I train in the traditional methods.

wait, I misread your post. You agree that it's easy to beat up toddlers. However, my previous offer stands if you want to test training methods "bambino e bambino".

By the way, what's with the "IMO" crap. Is it really so tough to type "in my oppinion". IMHO, TS!

Roberto Numero Dos

Luke,
I understand the logic, I have trouble actually picturing the method when it comes to martial arts practice (although we do use a related method of "worse case scenario" training so beginners learn how to deal with the result of being caught in holds at completion, before they are taught to stop them earlier. But the escapes are still taught in a forward progressive manner).

It seems to me "first things first" is the necessary procedure in both methods. Since this is the case it's more logical to go from 1 to 10 in order rather than skip everything between 1 and 10 and then work your way backwards to 2. This seems like it would be more confusing than helpful in the teaching process. I see value in some aspects of this concept, but I don't see it as "the method" of choice (a useful tool no doubt). We practice many sparring drills from contact, eliminating the entry while perfecting the drill. Then we work it from various entries, but this is just one phase that is removed and then added back in. I have not tested this but I seriously doubt that if for these drills I were to teach the entries first and then the drill that the end result would be all that different.

Regards
Bob Shores