You Might Be Prepared
But Are You Ready?
"Depending on the circumstance, you should be: hard as a diamond, flexible as a willow, smooth-flowing like water, or as empty as space."
- Morihei Ueshiba
I grew up in the martial arts. I studied Judo, Muay Thai, Jeet Kune Do, Kali, Silat, and even wrestled a little in my youth and now practice jiu jitsu as an adult. The culture informed much of how I see the world to say the very least. If you're embedded in that community there is an ancient debate that lives on to this day - which martial arts are the most effective? With the advent of televised full contact martial arts events it seems we've found or are at least in the process of finding which have the most application under the conditions of real time violent interaction with an opponent.
Even those that claim to be effective under the conditions of violence can only truly claim to be so given a particular set of constraints set forth by the sporting environment. Regardless, over the last three decades or so the popularization of mixed martial arts has done much to debunk martial traditions less based in what we might consider hard evidence for use in direct human conflict. As such many dismiss traditional soft arts or the use of forms as completely useless. While arts like Tai Chi may not offer a direct solution for human to human violence this does not absolve them of utility altogether. Perhaps softer arts like Tai Chi or other meditative movement practices such as Yoga offer an integrated practice for learning to pump the brakes and more effectively tune into what's going on under the surface. Perhaps their utility isn't in the grittier area of directly applicable skill development but instead sheds light on other areas necessary not just for performance today, but performance for a lifetime.
While this article is not an analysis of current martial arts cultural trends, the relationship between so called hard and soft martial arts such as Muay Thai and Tai Chi respectively, do offer a nice analogy for human performance professionals and working people in general for that matter in regards to how we can think about the strategies for performance outputs and recovery. How so? We often see the same sorts of divides in the strength and conditioning and human performance arenas. On one hand we need hard proof of methodologies that provide demonstrable performance outcomes in real time. On the other hand, there are layers deeper or perhaps better stated, more sophisticated undertones of connectedness that allow for softer "arts" to be used in concert with the harder methods.
A good place to start reconciling these two facets is by defining terms. There are categories for measuring training and its effects in which we can find the justification to purposefully include both Tai Chi and Muay Thai on our quest to realize our performance potential whether as athletes or as human beings.
Preparedness and Readiness
When it comes to the ideas of health and performance or the intersection of those which I like to call performance longevity, the terms used to describe the various components that build them can be ambiguous. Preparedness is comprised of the various skillsets that allow us to perform well whether we are talking about athletics or every day life. These skills are comprised of technical, tactical, intellectual, and even physical attributes that can be developed through practice associated with our particular endeavor.
For example, if we are talking about sports performance, preparedness would refer all of the sport specific preparation necessary to, well, prepare an athlete appropriately to compete at that sport. Running plays, drills, and studying tactical approaches to winning. In a workplace it might be comprised of all the training specific to the performance of a particular job. Think of all the fun onboarding training you've gotten when you start work at a new place like operating a forklift at your new warehouse job or even the preliminary skillsets you developed throughout high school and college that cover everything from basic mathematics, reading, and writing to the use of basic computer software to communicate with others and transfer information.
While mastery of skills, techniques, tools, and tactics is essential for success both in sport and in the workplace over emphasis on them can and often does lead to a myopic view of performance that in my experience causes leakage elsewhere in life. Many times have I worked with athletes who needed to be rebuilt because the road it until it broke then rode it some more. Preparedness is essential but to focus on it as the sole contributor to performance outcomes misses the context in which performance occurs, human life. Highly skilled human beings often perform well in spite of, not because of, their underlying lack of health. Be prepared, yes. But also be ready.
Readiness refers to the fundamental state of the human. What is our sum psychological, emotional, and physiological condition? What is the cost of our adaptation? For a long time this was largely ignored as a part of performance because it is harder to measure although no less important. Readiness answers this question: Am I healthy enough to call upon the skills I've developed when I need them?
If you take a highly skilled person of any kind and you turn their circadian rhythm into scrambled eggs I promise you will get a degradation in performance. This is by no means a novel concept yet our approach to mitigate potential lapses in performance is often to simply add capacity - more preparedness. I can just take more. This is like thinking that you can get a big enough bucket to catch all the rain. There is certainly a place for making your bucket bigger but it's not the whole game by any stretch of the imagination.
Val Nadeskin of Omega Wave Discussing Preparedness Versus Readiness
High Tech Readiness
To some degree, we are starting to clue into these fundamental realities. Our FitBits, Apple Watches, WHOOP straps, and Oūra rings provide windows into how our core physiology is dealing with the demands of life and stress. Many even provide suggestions as to how to change our behavior to make "deposits" into our readiness account and even give us a readiness score. We try to reduce negative stress costs through recovery tools and techniques. We track our sleep phases and learn about our chronotypes. This renewed sense of self-care is great (although somehow we even manage to turn this into another neurotic performance target at times). Technology can be help us achieve better states of readiness by quantifying our placement on these scales.
I like using these various technologies as a way to calibrate my internal sensitivity to what the heck is going on under the surface. Perception doth lie.
Low Tech Tuning
Mindfulness, meditation, breathing techniques, and the like represent a renewed cultural zest for improving our readiness. Many of these techniques while seemingly novel are embedded in the so-called soft arts that I mentioned at the start of this article. The influence of our predominantly secular and industrial culture often leads us to place more value in the more obviously measurable, tangible aspects of performance, especially acute performance, while negating that which tends to be a non-obvious or indirect contributor to performance. Be it workplace or sports performance.
The non-obvious beauty of many of these practices is that so much of what we need to be "ready" comes baked into them. Over time they get decorated with esoteric terms and mythology so often the baby gets thrown out with the bath water. Or in other cases we poorly identify the problem they solve for us. We mistake a lack of contribution to preparedness as valueless. Forgetting, once again, that performance does not exist in a vacuum where skills are all that contribute to outcomes. This fallacy causes us to throw away so much of value simply because we failed to properly measure its impact.
Perhaps these softer arts or even softer portions of the martial arts (karate katas, Ram Muay from Thai Boxing, etc.) that I studied in my youth did not have a direct effect on the combat performance environment. But what if they were valuable methods of detecting changes in and improving readiness and we tossed out baby and bath water?
One Flow
Our culture prepares us well. We get more than adequately "trained" to usher into specialized environments to perform. Get the good grade, get the promotion, win the game. Our strategies for accomplishing those things are both deep and wide. The deep* influence of industrialization and its focus on acute productivity (often falsely signaled as empty busyness) as the highest virtue has created wonderful little worker bees who burn the candle at both ends until the moment of implosion.
On the other hand, the overly secular and industriousness nature sometimes leaves us bereft of ways to manage our Selves (with a capital S). Without the same practices built in to provide the much needed indicators of vitality and readiness - we will eventually crash. Whether it's through technological means or more traditional holistic frameworks is not necessarily the most relevant detail. Have something that gives you regular and reliable feedback about your readiness.
Outcome driven, skill development is essential. Technical knowledge of the games we play, figuratively and literally speaking, are the buy in. But they're not what keeps you at the poker table. Be prepared. Deeply study your field of play technically and tactically. But know that being prepared is not enough. You must also be ready.
Thanks for reading,
Rob Wilson
Check out my article, Staying in the Black, on how to use HRV as a readiness tool HERE.
🙌🏽 so much to think about here for my runners "preparing" for marathon day.