Kaiden Joseph made time to speak with me at length today, offering his thoughts and insights into how I may work through and past my current plateau. Some of the key take-aways from our conversation were:

• Challenge myself to grow in my regular class sparring by setting specific parameters to help me learn from failure as well as success, such as “for the next three matches, just attack immediately” or “for the next five matches, move only linearly” or “for the next three matches, never retreat”. The essence of this is to embrace losing matches in order to learn from them, rather than falling into the “tried and true” patterns.
• Make a conscious effort to change my cadence or rhythm. In my solo training, I can work this into refined strikes and gambit drills. I can also break up my requirements, instead of just going start to finish, jumble them to ensure they are not just rote, to help them be discrete units, tools that can be more easily intermixed. In sparring, apply variable speeds to be less predicable and break out of my opponents expectations and rhythms.
• If I choose to continue with my pursuit of Silver Chain, make it a 110% commitment. Go into the next contract with a plan regarding how to achieve the necessary sparring, and do it no matter what that takes. Silver Chain is looked on as more than just a skills rank, it is a rank where the holder should inspire others.

• He discussed The Defense Cut, something he has previously touched on with me, going over the origins of it as more of a combination or blended initiated-response / offensive-defense technique. At its core, as he developed and practices it, you begin with an offensive action, which creates an opening that your opponent attacks, where you then draw/snap back into a defense of, and then follow/riposte with a final attack before your opponent can recover. The difference between the common 1-2-1-2 / attack-defend-attack-defend pattern and this is subtle and has to do with training heavily to respond quickly mid-attack with advanced defenses and then flow rapidly back into counter attack.

There was much more in our over an hour of discussion, and I look forward to continuing to exchange observations and thoughts, and to learn from his experience and perspective.