What is Meaningful Intensity?

What Is Meaningful Intensity?

In the Knife Control Concepts program, we discuss the concept of meaningful intensity a lot.

We generally refer to meaningful intensity as kind of like the 80/20 principle.

At any point in time, the person who is practicing, moving, or attempting to learn should be moving at a pace where they’re challenged.

They have to think. They have to recruit their body in ways that are maybe a little more uncomfortable than normal. They might mess up and fail a little bit.

However, they’re moving at a pace where they are mostly successful most of the time.

We use the idea of meaningful intensity to guide the role player in a knife defense situation. We use it to help find what variables, what speed, what intensity, and what level is best for who they’re working with.

If your training partner is newer to doing anything like this, they’re most likely not going to be able to move quickly. They may not be able to manage too many different variables at any given time.

For them, in that moment, the best thing is to find what combination of speed, aggression, and additional things they have to focus on is appropriate for them to learn and build whatever skill we’re working on.

That’s going to change person to person.

Success and Failure Are Both Necessary

When people come to one of our sessions, they’re not going to learn everything there is about defeating a knife, and they’re not going to magically become better in 12 hours of training.

Instead, we’re giving them a training protocol, a structure, and a way to practice.

We’re highlighting the skills that may be necessary, the elements of dealing with different ranges of the fight, and the model of how to start putting this into practice.

It takes hours and hours and hours to really gain a high level of competency against a violent knife attack. It’s not going to happen quickly.

So, if we want to have the most effective version of training for any given person, we need to understand what meaningful intensity is in any moment of training.

How hard does this person need to go to push their comfort zone just a little bit farther?

How hard do they need to go to push their understanding just a little bit farther?

As humans, we need to do well often.

You need to feel like you’re making progress. You need to feel like you’re doing something good.

If we’re constantly failing over and over and over again with no identifiable successes, what may end up happening is that we stop training. We may become complacent, frustrated, or stop training altogether.

That’s the worst thing you could possibly do if you’re going to talk about defending yourself.

At the same time, we absolutely need to feel challenged. We like to have a challenge. We like to feel growth. We like to find something we can’t do, but it’s right there where we know eventually we will be able to do it.

We need failure as well.

Success and failure are absolutely necessary in any training environment.

Finding the Sweet Spot

For the most part, we want people to understand what they’re doing if they’re building a specific skill.

We need them moving at a pace where they’re successful about 80 percent of the time.

They’re doing it how they should. It might be cutting an angle appropriately. It might be where their head position should be. It might be a one-minute drill where, during that one minute, they feel in control the majority of the time.

But they should also be challenged.

They should feel like:

“Man, I slipped up.”

Or:

“The knife touched me at one point.”

Or:

“That was really hard to maintain that position against the energy that was going there.”

That’s the sweet spot for learning.

There are times when perfection should be taken into the model. If you’re being introduced to a brand-new movement, skill, or concept, and you’re running a very slow technical drill, that should be done really slowly. We should be aiming to have the best variation of it and really understand it.

But even in those cases, very quickly we’re going to start changing the energy so that we’re not perfect in our reps, but we’re brushing right up against that resistance.

If we take away the idea that we need to be perfect in our training, and we take away the idea that the only good training is going hard and attempting to get murdered by a knife, where do people actually learn best?

They learn best when they’re doing really well, working hard to do well, and still failing a little bit—just enough to push those outer limits of comfort, expand their comfort zone, and expand their knowledge base.

That’s what we refer to as meaningful intensity.

Intensity Has More Than One Dial

Intensity can be adjusted in many ways.

Most of the time, when people hear the word intensity, especially in martial arts, self-defense, combat sports, and defensive tactics, they think of speed, violence, and aggression.

Those are absolutely attributes of intensity.

If I do a drill slowly, it’s going to be less intense than if we go a little bit faster.

However, there are variables that can create intensity.

For example, if we start with a baseball bat grip frontside two-on-one position against a knife, and the attacker is only moving their feet around and changing directions, that’s a lower level of intensity.

The second we allow the attacker to start, even slowly, not only moving their feet but also pushing and pulling the blade at various angles, that is a level of intensity.

We’ve added a variable that is going to split the attention of the person learning the defensive position.

They now have to read the language and feeling of the legs while also tracking and moving against the limb.

We could technically be going at the same aggression level and the same speed, but by adding that additional variable, we increase the intensity.

Then we could add the support hand. Now the support hand can be pushing, posting, framing, or hand fighting.

Again, we can be moving at the same speed, but when we add that variable, it changes things.

If we start looking at the variables of the fight as elements of intensity, we can really start to understand that finding meaningful intensity can be similar to an audio engineer behind a sound table.

There’s not just the volume button.

There are sliders and knobs.

We can adjust how many variables are in play, what constraints are put on the movement, what the speed is, what the aggression level is, and how much fight IQ the attacker is allowed to have.

We can play with all these different dials to find the best thing for that individual student in that moment.

And that is one of the most important parts about teaching:

Finding what this person needs to learn, not forcing what we think they should be doing or what we think they should be learning on them at any moment in time.

Meet People Where They’re At

It’s really about finding ways to educate people on how to train, meet them where they’re at in their path, identify where they need education and growth, identify weak spots, and curate drills that are meaningful, effective, and efficient in helping them progress forward.

Meaningful intensity is the intensity level that the student or participant needs in that moment.

It’s finding the right amount of intensity for the person who is attempting to learn.

That can be changed by speed.

It can be changed by aggression and force.

It can be changed by adding elements and variables.

What matters is that we educate the attackers in these courses on how to turn those knobs up and down to find the right amount of level for that participant.

We’re looking for an 80/20-style principle where they’re doing well most of the time, failing while they’re drilling a little bit, and having to work to meet in that middle.

That is the sweet spot for education and learning.

Meaningful intensity is an incredibly important part of the learning journey. It allows us to take a class that is generally done in a group setting—with anywhere from 10 to 40 people in a room—and take that education down to the individual level.

Certain people in the room are going to be moving faster and harder and doing more things.

Certain people in the room are going to be moving a little bit slower and focusing on the elements that they need to.

And that’s meaningful intensity.

Written By Aaron Jannetti