Visiting the LMA Learning Lab (Patreon)

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We recently welcomed a visitor to the Liberation Martial Arts (LMA) Learning Lab. O, an academic and amateur boxer, already has a home gym and coach. Rather than teaching him how to box, we introduced him to the LMA approach. Since it's an approach rather than a style or discipline, it can be applied to any style, level, and context.

O visited us for a week (the longest we've had a visitor) but didn't have any of his gear. He brought 12 oz. bag gloves he picked up from a store near his lodging. Limited time and equipment and having to return to a gym to develop under his primary coach were the context of our training and gameplay. It's mutual adaptation; we adapted to O, and O adapted to our approach—which included O unlearning and us learning about O. This led to a rich learning experience for all parties.

The Learning Lab isn't an open gym with classes or private lessons. It's neither direct instruction nor open sparring. It's radically different; rather than drawing from gym settings, our approach is inspired by concepts like mutual aid, reciprocity, and political organizing. While it's not how we'd implement the Learning Lab in a socialist society, it's the best solution within the context of capitalism, where rent, expenses, and debt exist. Consequently, training isn't free, as this is my sole source of income.

Everyone should approach the Learning Lab with an open mind, avoiding evaluations or judgments based on preexisting models. Instead, focus on how much you improve and enjoy your time here. In other words, come with an empty stomach, and I'll set the table. It's simple yet challenging.

In O's own words:

I've been training martial arts on and off for nearly two decades. I can confidently say that I've made more progress in the past week of training than in any single year of that time. The LMA training style is personalized to the individual and uses a different method than I've experienced from any other gym that emphasizes live practice and teaches you to control your attention where it's most needed in any fighting situation (competitive or otherwise).

Things to keep in mind if you plan on visiting the Lab: You can't just show up or jump in. We're not a cookie-cutter commercial gym or a PE class. O, perhaps as an educator, quickly grasped our Way and, like many of our practitioners, found LMA to be the only training approach that made sense to him.

O started with breathing, ease, perception, wu wei (effortless action), safeguarding, and Wayfinding (intuitive movement). To explain that simply, we had to ensure O wouldn't get into a fight-or-flight response and would not cause fight-or-flight in other practitioners. Fight or flight is like a domino effect, which is how things often escalate in a gym. However, through safeguarding and ease, coordinated movements emerge. Being more intuitive with his body than most, O naturally took to the LMA approach. He might say it's because of his rich movement background, but I believe his body intuition led him to seek diverse movement practices. He could have easily stuck with a monotonous movement practice and believed it was enough, but having that movement diversity enriched what he already had.

One educational tool we use is the chest protector. While its secondary function is protection, its primary purpose in LMA is to teach auditory perception and wu wei. Perception extends beyond vision; it encompasses sound, touch, smell, reasoning, and memory. Wu wei involves relaxing the body and letting inertia, and the weight of your arms, legs, and equipment do most of the work. An efficient punch produces a sharp pop sound on the chest protector, while a tightened, inefficient punch results in a dull sound. We used these sounds to guide O's punches, defense, and energy conservation. He can hear it when he effortlessly and cleanly lands a shot and when a shot lands on him. A measured pace has a distinct sound, not just on the chest protector but from the movements and breathing. Sounds teach us a lot, as do touch and even smell—though I'll save that discussion for another time.

To an outsider, the LMA approach may appear to be just safe sparring, suggesting that there's nothing radical about it and is only valuable when combined with Westernized standard instruction. In such settler-colonial settings, the instructor directly tells the learner what to do, and there is nothing for the learner to solve, discover, or learn. Their only job is memorizing instructions rather than thinking for themselves or learning how to think. In fact, it is wrong to go against instruction and think independently. In other words, there is no learner, only martial arts zombies. I've previously discussed the enslaved Afro-Haitian origins of the zombie.

In LMA, there is much more happening than standardized sparring that fundamentally challenges those Western norms. Its value lies not in conjunction with colonial instruction but in its inability to coexist with it. Similar to how liberatory and punitive parents might both let their kids play, which might look the same to an outsider, yet fundamentally different things are happening with fundamentally different results.

O arrived more relaxed than most, but after two sessions, he unclenched his body even further. A pattern among those trained in other programs is that their movements are often independent of their perception. Once we united O's perception and movement, his movements naturally became better informed, and his perception provided better information. In our approach, perception educates movement, and movement educates perception. When this forms a seamless loop, you flow—moving without gaps or hesitation. After a few sessions, O was playing and flowing, developing an intuition for movement—Wayfinding. After a while, O was just vibing with various partners, each with their own distinct movement styles.

Back at his home gym, O has already reported significant improvements. We, too, benefited from training with O. That's how it works at the Learning Lab; learning is reciprocal rather than top-down. We hope to see him again soon.

– Sam