I’m working my way through William Gibson’s much-anticipated latest novel, “Spook Country“…
There’s a martial arts element, in that one of the protagonists is a Cuban-Chinese “illegal facilitator”, expert in the Russian art of Systema (and something very like to parkour, judging from some of the sequences).
I don’t know very much at all about Systema, though I’m vaguely aware of it as being developed for Soviet special forces. So, I looked it up on Wikipedia, which didn’t really clarify very much, but there was one small passage that intrigued me:
Popular controversies concerning Systema
Due to the widespread online availability of excerpts from Systema training videos and DVDs, a number of controversies have erupted on various martial arts message boards and forums primarily regarding the lack of competitive resistance and the claims of no-touch knock-out “psychic energy”. According to some practitioners of Systema, some of the controversies are due to online video clips being misunderstood.
This sounds a lot like Ling Kong Jin, or “Empty Force”, which is a controversial topic within the Chinese martial arts, and which I’ve written about in passing before… Anybody happen to know anything about Systema, and this element of it…?
I am not familiar with this “Empty Force”, but I have been training in Systema for a few years. The training methodology in Systema is one of the most significant aspects of the style. If you’re interested in hearing more, email me. The issues raised with “psychic energy” is often due to a poor interpretation of “psychic.” This psychic is used in the sense of psyche, in the sense of every non-physical aspect of a human (emotional, psychological, nervous response, fear motivated, etc.). the no-touch work that bothers people on DVDs (understandably if not familiar with what’s going on), is due to the fact that most of the guys you see being manipulated without touch are seeking to avoid being hit (if Vlad or Mikhail have ever lay hands on you, you’d understand why), and Mikhail is working with their avoidance to manipulate their structure so as to result in falls. If they didn’t avoid, successive physical application of deep strikes will alter the body posture/structure accordingly to the same ends. These sort of demonstrations are not to demonstrate technique per se, but sensitivity to an adverserial movement. It is a sort of serious play in which one seeks to “get into” another’s movement in order to steer it (like herding). Virtually every fighting style seeks to do this at its higher levels. If one enters this space, it can make for more efficient work. I speak for no one but my own understanding of what am learning about movement through my experience of this training.
From painful experience, I’d say that this is a key point