LMA Map 2: Scaffolding (Patreon)

• LMA Curriculum 

The Liberation Martial Arts curriculum has been moving slowly but consistently. One of my goals is to make sure no one falls through the gaps, so I am being thorough. Also, there's no deadline for where the curriculum ought to be because this is an indefinite project.

LMA is about challenging traditional reactionary training dogmas and educating people on a new paradigm while building a content library from the ground up. This takes lots of labor and time.

The LMA model is based on thousands of conversations, years of training and teaching, thousands of hours of research, adaptation to new technologies and how people learn, and liberatory Marxian politics. It's an ongoing process.

My aim isn't to be a teacher, I want to be an organizer. I want to help you or your org organize your training. You shouldn't be my student, you should be a participant.

You are not just a passive student to be molded but an active participant in your own growth and the growth of others. Learning is social, and martial arts is a social relationship.

Let's say you're organizing a meeting. How you run a meeting with five people differs from how you'd run a meeting with 500 people. An organization with 5,000 members has different demands than one with 50 people. Likewise, in a learning environment, you're not just dealing with various class sizes but also various skill levels and needs. When it's physical learning, you also have to consider the training environment (are we training inside or outside?) and the availability of equipment. So a liberatory training model needs to be flexible and fluid.

An organization must constantly change and adapt based on the conditions, but it's often ad hoc and on the spot. With LMA, we want flexibility to be a feature.

With the traditional instructor model, not everyone will get enough hands-on attention, and the progress of the class can be delayed by the needs of the newest students. This is not an egalitarian training environment, and that's not the fault of the beginners but of the training model. Time is precious and limited, we want to utilize that time to its maximum, and there's a lot you can do even in an hour. Having separate beginner, intermediate, and advanced classes requires more resources and logistics. Being inclusive and flexible should mean all levels.

Proficiency isn't about how bad you want it, how tough or smart you are, FOMO, absence of weakness, or whether a fascist trained today or not. Proficiency is about reps. The more you stand still and listen to me give instruction, the less practice you get. The more the instructor gets into power fantasies, even if it's a leftist or anti-fascist, that's a red flag. Just practice. Proficiency is not an information-processing problem, it's a lack of practice problem.

LMA applies the political organizer model to training. Rather than one instructor, every participant should also be a teacher. There shouldn't be a rigid division between teaching and learning. Every participant can teach. The organizer organizes the class. But the class and learning process should be participant-led.

There's a philosophical difference between a student and a participant. A student is passive, and the participant is active. Likewise, the organizer works alongside the participants rather than act as their puppet master from the top. Learning happens from the bottom. The organizer supports their autonomy.

In the traditional training model, the teacher can only be in one place at a time, whereas the students are everywhere. Imagine trying to have one photographer take pictures of an event vs. every person at an event taking pictures with their phones. Who will get more coverage, the single photographer or the people? The people.

Who will be more familiar with a book, the person who just read it or the person who read it 12 years ago? The person who just read it. Just because a black belt knows more than you doesn't mean they recently spent time on every move. The collective makes a great teacher, but what's even better is trial and error. It just needs to be appropriately organized. Without the bottleneck of one central instructor, the class is flexible enough to continue regardless of who shows up.

The participant has a say in their own training; this is how we accommodate all levels. Training should be personalized so everyone can work on what they need (have their needs met) in every class. This requires self-study, self-discovery, self-exploration, self-organization, and technology. Just because martial arts is physical doesn't mean we should refuse technology. Rather than saying no to phones, tablets, and laptops in class, let people use them because that's how they learn anyway.

People will use technology to look up moves and learn outside of class. Let them. Why is that bad? Why should we discourage participants when they want to continue learning outside of class? We should be thrilled. Let them bring that knowledge into class. The more resources the better. The more minds, the better. No bottlenecks. Let learning be democratic.

We now know more about trauma and emotional responses. People need safety but also autonomy and support. You don't want to feel like you're on your own because that works against safety. Making it entirely self-directed can also be its own gatekeeping. Without structure and instruction, beginners won't feel welcomed and will end up feeling lost. It can't be sink or swim. It shouldn't be dire. It should be fun. It should be play.

Instruction should be light and allow more time for practice. Instruction also shouldn't be about giving participants all the answers, hence why you don't need an expert. Participants have to learn to problem-solve, and solving it for participants through overteaching means participants never learn martial arts, they memorize answers.

Instruction isn't learning, doing is learning. Overteaching, in fact, delays learning and causes cognitive overload. You want to get to the try-fail cycles early in your practice and do lots of it. You can't talk or think your way out of the experience of trying and failing. Do it clunky to get to smooth. That doesn't need a teacher, you can do that on your own or with a partner. Help can and should come later. Take ownership over your practice. To each according to what they put into their training.

Along with theory and transforming how we think and breathe, LMA started with fundamental motor skills. This is conditioning and warm-ups. This becomes the scaffolding for fundamental movement skills, e.g., techniques. You learn the alphabet before writing a story. You learn to move your joints before you can move dynamically. Developing these motor skills shouldn't be daunting but fun because it means adults catching up on play.

Now once you learn a technique, does that mean you know when to use it, how to use it strategically, and how to vary it up based on context? No. Knowing the jab technique does not mean you are skilled with a jab. But you can only begin to problem-solve once you have the methods for problem-solving. Fundamental motor skills become the scaffolding for fundamental movement skills. Fundamental movement skills become the scaffolding for adaptive movement skills, which become the scaffolding for strategic movement skills and beyond. Knowing the roadmap removes all the guesswork.

If you have LMA and know other people with it, you can create your own LMA training group. First, start the class with internal awareness. One person can guide everyone through it, or you can play the unit and let me guide everyone.

Then fundamental motor skills: warm-ups and conditioning. Everyone can do their own warm-ups, or one person can lead the class through warm-ups or a combination. People who want to do their own warm-ups can, and people who need guidance can get guidance. Again, flexibility and variability. This is why the use of phones should be encouraged. They don't just have to pull from LMA, they can draw from anything. Whatever they want to work on or feel they need. Participants should be given the opportunity to take ownership of even their warm-up or follow along with the organizer's warm-up.

Advanced participants should consider more rigorous warm-ups to fatigue themselves for the subsequent practice. This integrates drilling with the sensation of sparring.

If a participant has brought along a guest who's new to the LMA model, take ownership over your guest and guide them through practice. Since learning is social, teaching is a great way to learn because not only is the other person learning, but you are also learning by teaching. You have to structure and prioritize your ideas, make analogies, and find the bugs. Clarifying for someone else clarifies it for yourself.

Warm-up is also a time to mentally transition to more deliberate training.

Next comes self-study. This means finding fundamental movement skills or techniques from the curriculum and drilling them. You choose what you want to drill. You can find something from the curriculum or something you've already been working on or something someone taught you or something from a seminar, or something from YouTube. It's open-ended. This is how a class can be all levels. Everyone does what they need.

If someone needs more support, the organizer can give them a skill to work on appropriate to their level. Organizers should always fall back on the curriculum so no one is ever lost or left out.

At this point, our training model should already look radically different, but radical liberatory training should look nothing like previous reactionary training models. More liberatory means less constrained.

LMA is meant to be followed in order, but that doesn't mean everyone should be in the same place.

There are lots of ways to practice a skill. You can drill as ritual, which is what I prefer. Drilling over and over until I feel lost in the ritual and find truth in the practice. It's practice as discipline, as an ascetic pursuit. You can also add variability. For instance, you can practice a move the same way twice, then on every third repetition, add a variable. If you're practicing jabs: jab, jab, block and jab. If you have a partner and are practicing single legs: single, single, double into single. If you have a partner, you can do a learning game (I'll explain this in more depth later).

Then we get to instruction. This means intentional movements. This should be from LMA so people have access to it, and anyone can teach it. Instruction should be brief. Use spaced repetition to highlight something new or something forgotten or base it on observing class needs. Instruction is another chance to support beginners and new participants.

Show the move, explain it, then have the participants try it right away. Let them help each other. It doesn't have to look exactly like how you showed it; what's important is they're trying it and figuring it out. However it looks is exactly where it ought to be. Then show it again and clarify any misunderstandings or details. 

Don't look for perfect replication whenever you're practicing (or drilling) a technique. How you do it doesn't have to look like how I did it, each rep doesn't have to look like the last rep, and how it looks months from now doesn't have to look like how it does today. Variability isn't a flaw of practice, it's a critical feature.

You can't instruct the learning process away. People need to have a chance to improve. Sometimes that might need to be explicitly explained and reinforced. I can tell you how to do the ideal golf swing, but having that information doesn't mean you can do it. It's not a lack of information problem, it's a lack of practice problem. Most people who are good at something can't tell you how to be good at that thing. So being good doesn't mean you have the information to be good, it means you have a lot of practice.

We've been conditioned to believe what we lack is information, which is just victim-blaming. Because once you've been given information, you should be able to pull yourself out of any problem by your bootstraps. But what we lack is opportunity and experience, which in this case means practice, time, and an environment without judgment.

Some people feel uncomfortable asking to see the move again or asking questions in class. Then having the unit online means they can study it later on their own. Again, flexibility is liberatory.

Then comes free play, contextual movements.

Free play doesn't mean there's no structure. There's still organization, but here we focus on learning games and adaptive movement skills. 

We have yet to get this far in the curriculum, but what do I mean by adaptive movement skills? This couples with our thesis on not overteaching. Consider the jump shot. If a coach says "jump shot," a skilled athlete doesn't need a bunch of different names and techniques for different kinds of jump shots. It's all based on the context. Skillfulness is knowing what to do based on the context. Even in combat sports like boxing and wrestling, they don't have a million names for every variation of a technique. But Brazilian jiu-jitsu and other traditional martial arts do, which create bottlenecks, which is why they are activities based on "secret techniques" and gatekeeping. This is what really waters down the system, asymmetry. Only when everyone has the same information does the overall level of the entire system rise.

If a boxing coach says, "throw the left then the right," they shouldn't need to specify because specifying is too slow and complicated. Let the athlete sort it out. That's autonomy. Let them apply. You're just the organizer. You organize theory, they praxis. But autonomy isn't automatic, it needs to be supported from day one, and that should be explained from day one. Since the LMA training model is radically different, expectations need to be consistently and explicitly set.

Adaptive doesn't mean replicating the same thing over and over, nor does it mean memorizing every variation. It means using the right technique for the right context. It doesn't need to be identical to how it was taught, it just needs to be effective. Adaptive skills are original and unrehearsed. You can't land the same punch twice. The context keeps changing. Each punch has a life of its own life.

Being adaptive means being like a river, avoiding obstacles, and self-correcting to find the ocean. So jabs or knee-cut passes during a live spar will never look the same twice because they're adapting to arrive at their destination.

The emphasis of free play is adaptation. For example, consider pads. You never miss. You should make them miss. This is where different learning games come in, including sparring games, which I'll explain further in future units. This unit lays down the scaffolding for upcoming training, provides a roadmap, and sets expectations.

Finally, end with situational awareness and cool-down stretches. Again, this can be guided or autonomous, or a combination. Even in an hour, you can get a lot done when training means doing.

Designing a liberatory martial arts program with autonomy, flexibility, and support requires a lot of planning and prep. This is a massive project, so thank you all for your support. I hope LMA can become a model and curriculum that both individuals and groups can adopt.

– Sam