Focus Strategy No. 3 – The Foil

The fake focuses on sending an opponent to defend a fake attack, the feint focuses him on not believing the attack; the foil strategy seeks to stop him focusing by creating confusion which is the inability to think or take action. A foil strategy can occur when you hit your opponent hard, stunning him or causing such pain that he cannot focus but in general the foil is more strategic.

In boxing and continuous fighting such as boxing, kickboxing and MMA the foil can be used widely in tying up an opponent so he cannot fight back effectively. In boxing I was taught to spoil which is the name my father (who taught me to box) used to refer to foil tactic. 

An old tactic in boxing was to put something on ones gloves that would burn the opponents’ eyes so he couldn’t focus. 

Others are the controlling and clinching to foil the opponent’s attempts to get off a clean punch. Muhammad Ali used the foil extensively to lift the Heavyweight title from George Foreman in one of the great fights we know today as ‘the Rumble in the Jungle’. This fight is a classic example of the foil in action. Muhammad Ali the consummate strategist completely nullified everything Foreman tried to do. Foreman was frustrated constantly; he couldn’t think straight or launch effective attacks as Ali, spoiled, intercepted, clinched, trapped and turned him. 

If you want to study spoiling in action I highly recommend watching this fight. 

Focus Strategy No. 2 – The Feint

The Americans call the feint a fake, it’s only in Europe that we use the word feint because it’s a French word and probably stems from our Norman ancestors. I tell you this because most people consider the fake and the feint to be the same thing and that only the words are different but I have separated them to define two similar but different concepts. 

The fake sends an opponent the wrong way whereas the feint lures an opponent in a different way by either getting him to over respond or under respond; either way is against what is right for him and is exactly right for you the perpetrator. The fake tricks an opponent into going to defend a fake attack which is directionally based whereas the feint seeks to lower or draw the opponent’s guard. A feint is not based on the direction but the action. A feint draws a defence but also tempts an opponent to not respond. For instance you shape up to an opponent and throw a jab at him, but you pull up short and back away. You do the same thing again and get the same response. Now the opponent stops taking your attack seriously and when you throw you jab again he doesn’t bother to defend it and this time you follow through and hit him with it. The feint draws a response but the trick comes in when it tricks the opponent into not responding or responding too much. There are many subtleties in the feint that you should study well. In terms of the phrase I’ve used I don’t want to get into semantics about the meaning of fake and feint, suffice it to say that I have separated them to define the stratagem, the words used are less important. 

The great thing about the FLITE strategies is that they are based on laws and laws always apply. Unlike techniques which though valuable are only applicable when the occasion is right, such as trying to kick when you are in kicking range. The laws underlie both technique and strategy and in strategy something you’ll notice is that they have polar opposites, that is in many situations an opponent who doesn’t over react can be just as vulnerable as if he did react because you position yourself for the attack anyway so if he doesn’t respond at all you just hit him anyway and if he responds too much you hit him anyway again. The skill is in always being ready to switch tactics mid-flight so your position is always important. (See Warrior Wisdom on Base, Balance, Set Up and Launch Point for more details.)  

Focus Strategy No. 1 - The FAKE

The Fake

The first of the focus based strategies I want to examine is the Fake. The fake is epitomised in the phrase ‘send him left to go right’ and is concerned with sending the opponent the wrong way, making him believe that you are attacking him high when you are really going low for instance. We can see the fake in almost every sport and see it often in tennis where an opponent is sent the wrong way as the ball hits on the opposite side of the court or in Rugby or football where the tackler is sent the wrong way allowing a player to pass as he gets closer to the goal.

In martial arts the fake can be attacking the head only to switch the attack to the legs when the opponent responds or throwing a punch to left side of the head when in fact your real target is the right side. The fake is such a common ruse that we often don’t think twice about it, it’s so natural that often we don’t even have to be taught it. As soon as we begin sparring and realise that our opponent can thwart our direct attacks that we soon learn that trickery works better to help us hit the target on our opponent without getting too banged up in the process. It’s worth pointing out here that if more instructors understood strategy and how to use it better they wouldn’t lose quite so many students who quit when they begin sparring and realise that it’s not as much fun as it looks and it fact it hurts! Too many instructors let their students figure it out for themselves causing high attrition in student numbers. 

Focus – The 5 Strategies of Mis-direction 

My research has resulted in defining 5 key types of strategy which I term FLITE which is an acronym of the elemental laws that they respond to being: Focus, Leverage, Invulnerability, Timing and Expectation and this month I want to share what I’ve learned about the 5 strategies of FOCUS.

I mentioned last month that I would cover the 5 Key strategies in my next article so here they are. FOCUS – the combat law of focus says ‘what you focus on becomes your reality’. This means that you can only focus in one direction at a time and whatever you focus on becomes all you can see. The philosopher and scientist Abraham Maslow once said ‘give a child a hammer and the whole world suddenly looks like a nail’.

Focus strategies deal with controlling an opponent’s gaze that is, seeking to control what he looks at with a view to making that thing seem more important than anything else at that moment. Conjurors do it all the time with their illusions, making us believe one thing when in fact something quite different is the truth. If we can control where our opponent sets his gaze then it’s pretty sure you can claim his entire attention if only for a moment, as long as it is long enough for you to achieve your purpose.

There are 5 focus based strategies and it may be worth explaining here how come I batch things into 5’s such as the 25 elemental laws and the 25 strategies, well it’s not on purpose it’s just that in life and especially martial arts the number 5 does tend to appear a lot. Musashi’s ‘Book of 5 Rings, the number 5 appears frequently in the number of guard positions, stances and of course the 5 Rings that make up his chapters. Yagyu Munenori, Musashi’s contemporary and sword master to 3 Shoguns in feudal Japan also details numerous references to the number 5 in terms of stances and guards and the most famous of them all – Sun Tzu in ‘The Art of War’ contains many references and lists numbering 5. So often has the number occurred in my own study and teaching that I use the number a lot, not on purpose necessarily but because it appears so often that I now look for it. However  I want to stress that I only use it when it fits well. My study of strategy came naturally to 5 because that’s as many as I could discover. Traditionally Chinese strategy details 36 stratagems and I studied these but found that several were just variations on the same strategy, what I would call techniques rather than true strategies. True strategies are based on elemental laws as we’ll find out next. Read on tomorrow ;)