Episode 554 - Mr. Glenn Murphy

Mr. Glenn Murphy

Mr. Glenn Murphy is a martial arts practitioner and instructor. He is the founder of NC Systema which is based in North Carolina.

I guess my drive to studying Aikido was kind of wanting to study something that worked with refinement and efficiency. I was never going to be like the biggest or the fastest guy out there, it just occurred to me that trying to just learn how to wrestle or box in the skilled way as you can would still probably going to get your head kicked by a very large guy in England at some point.

Mr. Glenn Murphy is a martial arts practitioner and instructor. He is the founder of NC Systema which is based in North Carolina. I guess my drive to studying Aikido was kind of wanting to study something that worked with refinement and efficiency.

Mr. Glenn Murphy - Episode 554

A lot of us martial artists train with one or two styles throughout our journies however, Mr. Glenn Murphy is an exception. Mr. Glenn Murphy started training as a kid with Judo at a local army camp then followed by a multitude of disciplines such as Karate, Fencing, swordplay, and even went to Japan to become an expert in Aikido. His time with Aikido became numbered and decided to train with Systema and founded NC Systema. Mr. Murphy is a great story-teller and he tells his journey from Judo to Systema in great detail. Listen to learn more!

Show Notes

Mr. Glenn Murphy

Check out Mr. John Molyneux podcast, the Success Breeds Success Podcast, and check him on YoutubeWe mentioned Bruce Lee and the art of Lethwei

Show Transcript

You can read the transcript below or download it here.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Hello and welcome, you are listening to whistlekick Martial Arts Radio Episode 554 with Mr. Glenn Murphy. I'm Jeremy Lesniak, I'm your host for the show and the founder here at whistlekick. Where everything we do is in support of the traditional martial arts. And if you want to know more about what we do, go to whistlekick.com, it's our online home and it's also the easiest place to buy our products. And if you buy some use the code, podcast15 saves you 15% and helps us know that this show is something that you value enough to make a purchase. The show gets its own website though, it's whistlekickmartialartsradio.com, we bring you two new episodes every single week with a goal of connecting, educating, and entertaining you the traditional martial artists of the world. If you want to support the work that we're doing here, whether through a purchase or another way, you've got some choices. You could share an episode, you could follow us on social media, you could pick up one of our books, you could tell a friend, you could leave a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. Or you could support the Patreon. If you think the new shows we're doing are worth 63 cents apiece, not to mention all the back episodes you get access to, consider supporting us for $5 a month, You could do as low as 2. But even at $2 a month, we're gonna give you more content, the more money you're willing to contribute to us, the more content we're gonna give you. Today's guest, Mr. Glenn Murphy holds the distinction of being the first as far as I can tell, I did a quick check. So if I miss somebody, I'm really really sorry. But he is the first Systema practitioner that we've had on the show. Now that's not his only martial art. At least, it's not what he started with. And so we get a really interesting conversation about not only his story, but Systema and how it relates to martial arts that you may know better, and how his life has changed as his martial arts experience and training has changed. So let's check that out. Hey, Mr. Murphy. Welcome to whistlekick Martial Arts Radio.

Glenn Murphy:

Glad to be here. Thanks for the invite.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Hey, of course. Appreciate you being here. You and, and I told you this when we were chatting just a few minutes ago, I'm pretty sure you hold the distinction in that. Your your art while not, you know, hidden, you know, easy enough to know about it the name when I'm sure it comes up. Well, people will have heard of it but I think you're the first guest on Martial Arts Radio with that style.

Glenn Murphy:

Well, I'm honored.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Hard to keep track, you know, 500 and some episodes, you know.

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah, that's a lot quite.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

But uh, yeah, I'm excited to talk to you and get some more perspective on what you do. But of course, we start in a boring way, not a boring way we start in a obvious way, because I haven't come up with a better way to start. You generally started the beginning and so what what's your martial arts beginning? Where do we rewind that tape to?

Glenn Murphy:

Probably, when I was a kid, just kind of where most people get into things, Karate and Judo and Jiu-Jitsu in England growing up. So I'm from the southeast of England, originally near Dover, or my hometown is actually where the Channel Tunnel is. We know where that is, that goes from England to France. So that's where I grew up. And I started, I guess, doing Judo at a local army camp, the local army folks used to teach it there. So that was fun, and probably inspired by, you know, late 70s, early 80, Kung Fu movies and things, lots of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and probably a parallel development in that I went to an all boys school. So I was always getting into a lot of scraps and wasn't particularly good at scrapping, but learned how like not to lose too badly. And then and then wanted to take out kind of judo or karate or something like that. So I could hit a bit harder or protect myself or protect the other kids from bullying. I seem to get pulled into that role quite a lot when I was at school. And then, I did mostly that and fencing. So I did European style fencing for a bunch of years as well, which I think also counts as martial arts. So also swordplay throughout my teens, and then I didn't really get into training seriously until my early 20s. I moved to Scotland to go to university. And there I started studying Aikido and got very, very deep into Aikido and studied for probably about 14 years. And with an instructor in Scotland that had spent many years in Japan with one of the founders, students by the name of Morihiro Saito, very famous in the Aikido world, and he he recommended me and sent letters of introduction to the Iwama Dojo, and after university in Scotland I did I have four years there. I moved to Japan and I trained for two years at the Iwama Dojo and other dojos in [0:04:39] and about 200 300 miles north of Tokyo for a little while as a soto-deshi so as an outside student, and I did that for a couple of years and then came back had five years in London during which time I was teaching and training Aikido still and then trying out a bunch of other martial arts. So I did some Chinese internal stuffs some Tai Chi, Bagua. Some Filipino stuff, some Escrima and it was there that I discovered Systema and after experiencing Systema and a slight refractory period where I wasn't quite willing to put down my other tools. I was 100% in and I've been training that ever since. So I'm pretty much Karate and Judo and stuff as a kid and into my teens, and then Aikido throughout my 20s and early 30s and then for the last 15 16 years, it's just open Systema.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Wow. Now anybody that knows anything about Aikido and Systema knows that if you were to kind of chart in some way, if you were gonna find some way to organize martial arts, I think it would be pretty fair to say that no matter the methodology, you probably see Aikido and Systema, if not as polar opposites, I mean, pretty pretty far apart. And so I'm really intrigued, Aikido really grabbed you. It sounds like in such way you went to Japan for because of Aikido, right? I mean, that's kinda how it sounded. So you're I mean, you were all in.

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah, yeah, I did uh...

Jeremy Lesniak: 

And then something got you all out.

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

What, how that happened?

Glenn Murphy:

I guess um, I guess my drive to study Aikido was on a kind of wanting to study something that worked with refinement and efficiency, I was never gonna be like the biggest guy out there or the fastest guy out there. So it just occurred to me that and I just trying to learn how to wrestle or boxing as skilled away as you can was still probably gonna get your head kicked in by very large gaining with it some point. And so I think I was just looking for some more tools and some more kind of biomechanically refined tools to work with. And maybe on some level, I was also looking for some sort of structure to live by, you know, a lot of people I think they get into very traditional, either Chinese or Japanese arts are doing so because they, they're looking for some sort of meaning and purpose through their training, I think. And I kind of bought wholesale into the whole kind of Bushido, Hagakure, and Samurai mentality, you know, I learned Japanese when I lived there. And I studied very very hard and did like a thousand sword cuts a day, and all the things that you do in order to immerse yourself fully in that in that culture and those ideas, and I really enjoyed it. And I had a wonderful time, I don't regret a second of the time that I spent training Aikido, I met some wonderful friends, great people, got to do seminars, in like Denmark, and, and Scotland, and Finland, and Japan and all over the place. And so it was really, really great. It introduced me to a wider scope of people in the martial arts. But I think there were a couple of kind of formative experiences while I was in Japan. And especially, actually, while I was training Aikido, when I was in Scotland, there was one experience where I was got into a fight with, with the guy coming back from a night out on the town in Aberdeen, built in Scotland. It's very cold, very dark, late at night. And a guy was kind of being abusive to the girl that I was walking with and we got caught into a scuffle. And we started fighting, and then he pulled a knife. And, you know, in traditional martial arts, you do a lot of training and how to deal with knife stabs and things like that. But typically, people line up nicely and do a nice, you know, straight thrust to the stomach and you practice your perfect wrist lock technique, and they go down the ground, and you feel very good about yourself. But this didn't look like that at all. There was a lot of scuffling, there's a lot of clenching, there's a lot of me just trying to keep the thing away from me. In the end, I smacked him in the neck, held him down and and his two friends actually pulled them off and then begged me not to tell the police 'coz he's on probation. So so I basically escaped that and realized that a lot of my techniques for all the time that I've been training, which wasn't all that much time at that point, I guess it was only about four or five years in Aikido but all the techniques seem to kind of go out the window. And I got I got very adrenalized and I could feel the effects of stress and aggression, the stress hormones, everything raging through my body. And I realized that I just survived that encounter, right, I didn't dominate, I didn't win, I didn't prevail, I just survived it. And it could have been a lot worse. And I think that stuck with me and that was part of the reason why I kind of doubled down went to train Aikido at the source thinking maybe my Aikido just wasn't good enough. And if I, if I studied really, really hard in the place where it's hardest to study and get my black belt there and all that kind of stuff, then it would make me feel more confident in the ability of the system that I was using to to prevail in a real situation. I mean, clearly, self defense wasn't the only reason why I was training. But nobody, I mean, with some exceptions I think if you can do lots of things with fitness, you can do crossfit, you can do yoga, you can do any number of other things. So if you're deciding to train martial arts, as like a physical pastime, then probably self defense figure somewhere into your view of what it's for, right? And I think that doubling down in on that was my tactic to just sort of see how far I could go with it. And then I had a couple of other forms of experiences with that that made me feel like maybe I needed to augment my Aikido. You know, I knew that I couldn't do anything if I got taken down to the ground by a BJJ guy or a Sambo wrestler or something like that and I knew that my ability to deal with people with firearms or multiple attackers was very, very limited. Um good boxes can hold you at range very, very easily if you haven't got the skills at dealing with that. And so I started to kind of augment my existing training, which was pretty solid in the Aikido world, you know, I got my black belt in, in the, at the, at the place where Aikido was essentially founded and all passed down to. So I had a good pedigree in terms of my Aikido training, and it was a lot better than most of the people when I came back and started teaching and training in London. There were a few people that were at that time, I felt that I would go to and learn. It's only when a friend of mine came back from Japan and started teaching, I actually started training again, I was teaching for a little while and he came back he was better than me. And I started training his class and but at the same time, I started to do all these things the escrima, the stick fighting, the knife fighting, and looking at the Chinese arts in a way to try to develop a stronger route or better footwork or, or ways of kind of augmenting what I felt were gaps in the system of Aikido in some ways. I'm not denigrating Aikido in any way by saying this and just that's the way that I felt in terms of my own ability and my own technique. And I think I always can't came up wanting and I've, I felt like I was putting a jigsaw puzzle together and the pieces didn't quite fit, you know. And then I just one formative day, it was a university that I was attending to do a postgraduate degree, I just saw this sign saying, learn Russian martial art, you know, real, real stuff, no belts, no pajamas, no grades, no nonsense, you know, just go in there and we'll train. And it was in the basement of a pub on the, on the campus where where we were. And it was taught by an English guy who had been to Russia a couple of times, and was an instructor in Systema. But in retrospect, he wasn't amazingly good. But my experience of it was quite eye opening and that I showed up and there's all these guys. And first of all, they're on hardwood floors and they're throwing each other around doing, you know, shoulder throws, hip throws, back drop, takedown sacrifice throws, and they're just hitting the ground, but they're hitting it like cats, they're like, there's no big slam, there's no kind of big break for where they slam the ground, they just seem to be able to not hurt themselves. And I'm looking at this thinking somebody is gonna die here, you know, please break their neck or a leg or an ankle or something. But they just seem to be extraordinarily soft in their movements, they could go from being they could get punched very hard and kind of absorb it in a soft way without bracing up and they could get thrown and just hit the ground like a cat. So that was very impressive to start with. And then the guy who was teaching actually had an Aikido background before he went to Systema as well. And he asked me about what I'd train before and he's like, okay, come try and put a couple of joint locks on me. And and I did. And I just kept ending up on my ass basically, every time I tried to touch him, I just ended up flat on the ground. But it wasn't that he was picking me up and throwing me or that he was locking me painfully to the ground. It was just a pure knowledge of biomechanics and how my body worked that just eluded me, he's like, his level of understanding was so far above mine, that it was like, I was a toddler, messing around with his dad. He just kept plunking me on my ass and I'm like, what is going on here? And to be honest, it was a big kick in the ego. You know, after years of training martial arts and thinking yourself quite tasty and I was like, I've got to go back to the drawing board. You know, there's, there's something that I've really, really missed. And, and I started training with them, but out of ego or, or, you know, enjoying the feeling of being accomplished, and not quite wanting to relinquish all of that I kind of trained both side by side for a while .I wouldn't let go of Aikido. And for a few years, I was training Aikido mostly and I would train Systema like once a week. And so I'd feel good three days a week and then once a week, I'll get my ass handed to me by these Russians, English guys. And then when I moved to the States in 2007, I tried to join join an Aikido school here in North Carolina. And I just didn't think the the standard was that good to the school that I went to and I wasn't that impressed. And coincidentally about a month after I moved here, and the top guy outside of Russia in Systema, Vladimir Vasiliev came to Charlotte, North Carolina and to do a seminar, like a two day seminar, so I signed up, went to that seminar. And then at that point, I was like, okay, this is it. I'm all in for this one. So I met Vlad and worked with him one to one, I was a 100% convinced of the efficiency and the power and the scope of Systema, what it could do. It was so much more than just a martial art and I didn't really realize what it was at the time. I was just thinking it was gonna be another set of tools to put in my kit. But I realized it was something entirely different. It was an operating system for making you do things better and martial arts is just one of the things that you can do with it. So so at that point, I quit Aikido and just started training Systema full time pretty much and I've been doing that ever since.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Wow. Well, lots of lots of things to respond to that.

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah sorry, long answer to your short question.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

No no. This is great because it gives us a lot of opportunities for places that we can go. The the short thing that I'll respond is that you're I've heard a number of people talk about their experiences with Vlad. And I have not met him, I have not trained with him, I have not done any Systema training. But, what you're saying you experienced is exactly what I have heard others say that meeting him is transformational.

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

You do their martial arts. Go ahead.

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah. And I understand that that can sound a little cultish.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

It does, yeah.

Glenn Murphy:

When people say, oh, I met this yoga guru and then you know, it's my world changed. And it's not that Vlad is very unassuming and he doesn't like having the mantle of master instructor or anything like that, you know. I think he almost reluctantly got into teaching, just having left Russia moved to Canada and married, you know, married a Russian, but in Canada, and stayed in Toronto, and it's his wife that's really built the business around him. I think if it was his doing, he'd still be teaching 20 guys in a basement, you know, it's his wife it's made it into a career for him. So he's a very unassuming guy, he's very humble, but he's just has spectacular skill. And he's just one of those people. I mean, sometimes you meet them in different walks of life outside martial arts as well, that are just entirely interested in authentic interactions, right, he gives you his undivided attention, you feel like he's really trying to listen to what you're saying, and work with you as a person for what you need. And at the same time, he just has this incredible awareness and capacity for understanding what how you move, how you breathe, how you walk, he can tell most things about you just by watching your walk across a room. And some of that's from his Systema training. Some of that's from his military training. He was you know a special operations for a bunch of years and, and was trained to notice things about people. So I've come across people who aren't martial artists, but a military like that I've worked with, you know, a couple of Navy SEALs here and Special Ops Coast Guard guys and army guys who have that same level of situational awareness, you know, they can size you up in seconds. But, but the combination of that ability, I think that that lurking awareness and dangerousness with this personality that's really quite humble and kind and generous. And when you put the two of them together, it's quite it's quite an interesting package. You don't see it a lot of places in martial arts, in my experience, usually when somebody has that level of skill, a certain level of arrogance comes with it. Right. They know that they're the best and, and they're an air of superiority or something comes with it. But you don't get that with Vladimir it's all, it's very disarming.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Interesting. I hope I get to meet him.

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

The other piece, and then I think this is where I want to I want to go for now. You talked about that exchange with the knife.

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

And it was really clear that that unsettled you.

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah sorry...

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Go ahead.

Glenn Murphy:

Get in that when you get there.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

I would imagine that regardless of that exchange, you probably would have ended up in Japan. You were you were on track, right? You were into Aikido pretty deep. And going to Japan and learning Japanese and training there seems like the next logical step. What what I'm suspecting, based on how your training went, when you came back was that you, part of you in Japan was looking for that answer that you didn't have during that knife exchange. What was the missing piece there? And didn't find it. Is that is that fair to say?

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah, I think it's fair to say and I think I was looking in the wrong places for it. And I think some people just look at a problem like that, and just think I wanna solve it by becoming faster and stronger and the best at what I do. And then I have so much confidence in my ability, that that will overshadow this nagging voice that says, you know what, you're still very vulnerable and anybody could stab you. I'm kind of work in that way. Some people go the other route, and they just go into full personal protection mode and carry knives and guns on them at all times. So that they feel prepped for everything, right? So that's another way that people put kind of a shell of courage and confidence around the fear that's on the inside. That's the way that I would term it. And I think in some ways, that's that's what I was doing there. There was there was still some part of me that was not acknowledging the fear was on the inside. And it's just kind of blustering and putting a mask on the outside and getting very skilled in in some very specific ways, but never really addressing that internal state of being like I if if things really go down here and knives come out and things going towards me. I can't I can't stay calm in this situation, or I can't stay calm enough to deploy these skills that I'm so proud of. And nothing in my training up until I started to stammer gave me any reasonable tools for working with that. And I still haven't really seen, to be honest, in most martial arts, a direct solution to that problem outside of Systema and Systema has provided a different answer, which is you have to start with your nervous system first, you have to start with acknowledging the fear that you have, or acknowledging like the pride and the overconfidence that you might have and acknowledging where you're strong, where you're weak, and then starting from that very basic idea of like ending, understanding and knowing yourself. And then once you know your strengths and limitations, you can start to kind of craft that and build something on top of it, whether it's physical skill, whether it's psychological skill, whatever it's gonna be, but you have to start from that basis of knowing yourself otherwise, everything you do is layered upon a shaky foundation. Does that make sense?

Jeremy Lesniak: 

It does. It does and, you know, we have people listening from all different styles all over the world, and most importantly, different reasons for training. And, you know, there there are people out there I so I'm gonna add a third category to the the kind of duality that you put forward, people who either don't want to worry about it or don't think it's a significant risk. And depending on where you are in the life you live, that may be true.

Glenn Murphy:

Sure, yeah yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

We all we all train for different reasons and one of the things longtime listeners know is that I absolutely do not judge I mean, your whatever your reasons for training, I'm just happy you're training. I totally couldn't care less.

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

But there are there are some schools out there and it's it's Systema may codify this better, and I suspect that they do. But we're talking about stress and the nervous system and the concepts there. I mean, they're not, they're not unique to Systema.

Glenn Murphy:

No, I wouldn't I wouldn't say they're unique, but like, um, a lot of styles have different solutions to them. And there's solutions that can work in some situations.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Sure.

Glenn Murphy:

And and I think there are other parts to this, I mean, a very simple path to one, one very simple path to not worrying about individual kind of monkey fighting, like person to person conflict that doesn't involve multiple attackers, or weapons or anything deeply life threatening, right? It's basically posturing. It's as a kind of a ritualized fighting that most of us should probably go out by the time we're 20, right?

Jeremy Lesniak: 

I have hoped for it, hopefully.

Glenn Murphy:

20 years. Yeah, exactly that some don't, some do. But one solution to that is just to, you know, to train something like boxing, or MMA for a long period of time, get in the ring and get clobbered a bunch of times, and figure out where you're vulnerable, where you're not, and have a very strong understanding of how much punishment you can take, and what the capacity for injury is, how strong you really are, whether or not you can hit people whether or not you really can control people. And in doing so you just kind of test it by fire, and then your psyche will stabilize at the place where you currently know yourself to be right. So one way to do it is kind of that way and to go in kind of the hard way for one to one fighting, and you will find out a lot about yourself that way. And I think that's one way of kind of tempering your nervous system to an extent, the problem comes when you have more complex situations than that. So if you're thinking about martial arts as a self-defense system, then you're thinking about the potential for armed attackers, for sucker punches, for people attacking you from behind using clothing, you know, using environments, using smashing your head off a wall or a car or something like that. And there's nothing in particular with within a lot of one to one focus styles that, that prepares you for that. And there's some like Krav Maga that will put you in certain situations, and then practice kind of busting out of those of maximum aggression and people wearing pads so that you can kind of unleash as hard as you can. And again, that that's another potential solution to it. I'm not saying that systema has the monopoly on thinking about fear control, and the nervous system, and stress and how that affects fighting. There's lots and lots different ways and some styles go quite deep on breathing as well and on controlling your mind state that you work in. You know, karate has the whole mushin concept and lots of other even in high level Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu now you see a lot of the top instructors and the Gracies and the Machados talking about breathing and the importance of it, which you didn't hear a lot of years ago. And so I think every style has its, or a lot of styles have an approach to it. But for me, it wasn't as systematic. It was almost like well learn all these physical skills first. And when this becomes a problem, we might address that problem. But trust us if you learn how to do a really good punch or an armbar, you'll probably be okay. But I don't think that's necessarily true. It depends on the kinds of situations you find yourself in. And like you said, it's different horses for different courses, right? If you if you live in a comparatively safe place, you might never feel like you need to learn any kind of self defense. And you live in a place where the the environment is such that most of the violence is fairly controlled and ritualized. Well, if you're just having scraps of school, or you're just in a, you know, a gated community where everybody plays nice, then you probably okay, but if you're somewhere else, or you travel to less desirable parts of the world where kind of all bets are off, then if you really consider seriously considering your martial art as a self defense system, you have to start taking these things into account like would I be able to survive in this environment? Would I be able to keep calm enough to deploy any skills in this environment? Does that make sense? And Systema for me, it was the first one where where they sort of said from the very beginning, you know, your skills will be useless unless you consider what's going on with your nervous system and your psyche, you have to train that every bit as much as you do your body and your skills and your techniques of wrestling and striking and ground fighting or whatever it's gonna be. So it's I was fascinated by this idea of giving you a direct concrete series of practices that actually build that independently of fighting experience. Yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

And I think that that's, that's the key. You know, any as you said, Systema doesn't have the monopoly on this concept. But what my understanding of Systema and and Krav Maga and, and certainly other schools, right, it's, we're in 2020, it's really hard to generalize based on style anymore.

Glenn Murphy:

Sure.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

You can so many people have cross trained and brought concepts in from other things.

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah, absolutely.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

But the path to surviving a fight really does need to go through the concept of dealing with your adrenaline and nervous system and fight or flight and that whole bucket of stuff. It's got to be addressed at some point. And whether it's day one in a Systema class or, you know, eight years in, in a karate class, it's doesn't really matter to me, as long as people are getting what they what they want, and they need out of their training. But at some point, ideally, you go through that you figure it out, because as you said, without it, what do you do?

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And as you said, also people not everybody trains for the same reason. So it can be it might be that you're studying Aikido, or Karate in the same way that somebody studies Archery. You know, you're not planning on killing anybody with bows and arrows tomorrow. But you just you get benefit from the peace of mind, the focus, there's lots of benefits to martial arts besides self defense. And it's probably worth saying at this point that for me, now, at my age, in my stage of development, self defense is not my primary reason for continuing to train Systema. So a lot of people who come into Systema start with that and then once they reach a certain level of understanding or development, they, they may continue with that, or they may start to focus a little bit more on the ancillary benefits, the other things that systema does for you, most specifically, in terms of health, and emotional control, and your ability to connect with people and understand people better. And so it has, understanding yourself has a lot of deeper ramifications for how you interact with people in the world, whether it's like the the jerk at work, or the or, and talking, you know, arguing with your wife without, without it becoming, you know, nasty, or snipey, or something like that, you know, being able to keep yourself on an emotional low boil and keeping a wide view, seeing the whole situation, wherever you are. That to me is much more important. And a lot of the people that train under me and with me now, you know, we have CEOs, we have people who run companies, we have people, you know, in high stress jobs and environments like police or EMTs, stuff like that. And they so their main reason for training is not that they want to be, you know, Russian super soldiers or something like that, right? They get their goal for training is that it's the more they train the karma they become in high stress situations. And that has its own benefits quite apart from self defense. So even though we started out on this tack, and I think probably because that's the tack that I started on, right, I was kind of obsessed with learning how to defend myself properly. It's no longer really my chief motivation. So it's um, so I guess it was the road in but it's not the road forward for me.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Makes sense. I want to go back to one other point. And I think this is a significant point. And it might be something that is enlightening or at least worth considering for people listening. And that is, you talked about training Aikido and Systema kind of at the same time.

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

And just the words you used or at least my, the way I took them was sort of that your head said it's time to leave Aikido but your heart wouldn't let you do that as quickly. But there was there was an enough of an emotional tie there. That it took you some time to extract yourself. Did I pick up on that right?

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah, I'm not sure if it's, um, a division between the head and the heart. It wasn't that logically I thought I should do Systema and but I felt like I wanted to stay with Aikido because I was still in love with it. I don't I don't think it was um, I don't think that's quite the division. I think it's more that my reasons for training had changed. And I had developed and changed as a person in that time training. And Aikido is no longer the tool that was gonna get me to the next stage in my development, if that makes sense. And but the reason why I was hanging on to it was because what it did was make me feel confident, make me feel accomplished, make me feel like I'd worked really hard for something and gone to Japan and got there you know, got the achievement and that I could show that to people, right. And one of the things that systema does is is kind of hold up a mirror and show you how much of your daily interactions and decisions kind of often stem from like it from ego or pride or a need to show off to people like in some way. And I think the combination of starting systema and having that kind of being hit with the humility stick, and then being forced to take a really good, hard look at myself and where my motivations were coming from. And the realization that the main reason that I was still training Aikido at that point was because it made me feel fluffed up made me feel better, right? It wasn't because I wanted to learn more Aikido, it's because I wanted to show people Aikido that I could do, right. And I realized that there was a mismatch there, there was like a dissonance that wasn't sustainable. I should say that I know some people who've managed to train Aikido and Systema concurrently for many years, they do it fine, you know, when they put the Hakama on the Aikidoka. And when they take it off and put their jeans and t-shirt on their Systema practitioners, yeah, so some people are very good, they can change clothes, and then they can change styles, and they can do it. But I think for me, I felt like Aikido was doing what was doing the wrong thing for me. I think for other people, it could be really helping them, it could be helping them feel stronger, and helping them train and even become more focused and learn more things. And if that was my mindset at the time, I would have kept going and still be training Aikido now and, and I still love Aikido, I still love to see people practicing it, it's a beautiful style, and it has a lot of benefit. And if my kids decide they want to study Aikido, I'll be more than happy to take them to classes or train them myself or wherever it's gonna be. But I think the things that I was looking for, became different. And I felt if I kept training Aikido, it might hold back my development in Systema more than anything else. And I was so committed to, to becoming not more skilled in systema but getting more understanding of myself through systema that I think having one foot out and one foot in would have been detrimental to me. And I needed to kind of make a clean break so that I could get off the ego train a little bit.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

And this is this is one of the reasons that I like to define myself as a martial artist. Because there are times when karate is front and center for me there are times when taekwondo or kempo, or kickboxing, or you know, any other number of things could be what I need and have the opportunity to train right now. And if I define myself as a martial artist, rather than I'm a karate guy, I mean, aikidoka.

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

It becomes easier. I don't have to wrestle with that identity.

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

And so many people do. I've had conversations with people, somebody local, talking to me about their their children being so close to black belts in a particular style and the school closed, and what did they do? And I really want them to get their black belt. Let's let's focus on the priorities. Why is the black belt the priority? You know, why is training not the priority? Why is getting better not the priority?

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah. Yeah, there's something to be said there as well in the in the idea of training something for extrinsic rewards versus intrinsic ones. I think to be honest, you can train more or less anything, you can train taekwondo, you can train karate, you can train jiu jitsu, you can box, or even be an MMA fighter, and do it, it's possible to train that for intrinsic rewards, right? You're training to try to try and be the warrior, to to make yourself stronger on the inside and on the outside, you know, to, to learn life lessons that you can apply elsewhere. And it's entirely possible to do that. But I think sometimes the structure of some styles encourages extrinsic reward instead, it's like you're not training to be the best blue belt or brown belt you can be, you're training to get the next belt, right and, and that's, that's the thing that's important. And with kids, you can understand it, because that's where the whole belt belt system came from right there, there was never there in karate before they started teaching it to kids. And then that kind of migrated its way to adults is the idea is that you have to give kids like a benchmark or some, some, some hope that they're doing it towards something and they're very goal oriented in that way. And so if you give them colored belts to stepping stone between then maybe they'll go the distance and show kind of perseverance and do all the things they need to to to attain that black belt. And then by the time they get there, they'll have learned a whole bunch of valuable lessons that maybe they wouldn't have done if you just kept them in a white belt and said train like that for 10 or 15 years. I trust me it's gonna be good.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Yeah.

Glenn Murphy:

And so and that was another thing that appealed to me, I think. And maybe it was partly reaction to the kind of the training that I had in Japan as well which was, which was excellent, but it was it was very traditional. So showing up as a new soto-deshi at the dojo you know, you had to scuttle around and clean the mats first after after everybody left and there were certain costs that you could use and certain pieces of the, you know, the commies or the shrine that was on the wall that you could clean but only the upper students could clean the upper ones. Everybody lines up in order of you know, have their belt on their level, their attainment level. And there's a strict hierarchy to it, that that I guess can serve a purpose but after a certain point, you're like, is this is this really serving the needs of the students coming up and through and getting valuable information? Or is it making sometimes the people that further up just feel better about themselves, right? And I realized I was becoming part of that hierarchy in it. And sometimes that can do certain things. So I think extrinsic rewards can be, can be distracting sometimes. And the complete absence of them in systema, though, we literally don't have any belts at all, there are no grades. And not everybody becomes an instructor, there are people that train for 20 years, and they're happy to remain practitioners like being an instructor isn't a badge of honor, or a merit badge in systema you just you become an instructor because you have an ability to teach as well as to do right? So it's, it's, it's a different thing. It's a bit like somebody being promoted to a manager, just because they've been at the company for a long time. You know, it's like, some, some people have no business managing, but they just get put in those positions. I think sometimes in martial arts, some people have no business teaching, they're really good martial artists, but they're not good teachers, you know, and vice versa, you know, so...

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Are you familiar with the Peter Principle?

Glenn Murphy:

Say again.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

The Peter Principle.

Glenn Murphy:

Uh I've heard of it, but..

Jeremy Lesniak: 

It's uh you know, I'm gonna, I might mess it up a little bit. But it's this idea that in a corporate setting, you're promoted to the point of you're promoted one step beyond your competency, essentially, like, hey, you do this job really, really well. So we're gonna promote you up unless you stink, you stay there.

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah. Does that come from the Patreon office space? Is that where it come from?

Jeremy Lesniak: 

It's older than that.

Glenn Murphy:

Okay.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

I first heard it in like, 2001.

Glenn Murphy:

Right.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

It's go it's going back.

Glenn Murphy:

Right, that makes sense. Yeah. I just don't maybe it referred to the Peter in the office space maybe, because it he's just checked out. He's not showing up to work and they promote him because they think he's management material.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

But I think it happens in martial arts settings, too, just as you're saying, you know, if somebody has the, the material at such and such a level Master, they are promoted and expected to remain there until they, they get it. And so you're kind of always behind the A ball, in a sense, trying to trying to move forward. And and I've spoken both for and against rank at various times on this show. It's it's not a clean cut subject as far as I'm concerned. So the the question that I asked this half sarcastically, without belts, how do you know who's good?

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah, it's basically you, you demonstrate how good you are with your inherent attributes, right? It doesn't matter what color belt you're wearing. If you can't absorb a punch, if you can't deliver a heavy punch with minimal effort. If you can, ground fight and hold your own. If you can't move against somebody swiping at you with a knife without panicking or tensing up or flinching, then you show your ability or or your lack of it, just in the doing of everything. So in systema kind of the proof is in the putting. It doesn't matter what people tell you about what they understand about biomechanics, or what they saw last night in the MMA fight, and no, I would have done this, or I would totally would have armbar that guy, right? You get, you get armchair quarterbacks like this, and in all martial arts, but in systema it sorts itself out very quickly. Because once you start rolling together, you realize that it's, you know, it doesn't matter. And, again, that's not unique to systema or so and that and BJJ as well, you know, somebody can talk a big game, and maybe they got their belt at another school or something. And then when they go into free grappling or something, they just get owned immediately. And then you and then you know what level they're at, you know, they're not really a blue belt. I mean, the example I'll give actually is that when I came after Japan, and after moving back to London and training there and teaching there for five years, I moved to North Carolina and went to a an Aikido school. And the, the lead guy was pretty good. I thought he was a good standard and he was apparently like a fourth dan and, and he had a few like third dans and other people working underneath him. And and when I joined the school, I explained my situation, I'm like, hey, I've just moved here to the area and I'm I trained to Japan, I trained over here, I was at the Iwama dojo and I got [0:39:09-0:39:10] when I was there a second dan. And he's like, okay, cool, yes, but you're not part of our organization so you're gonna have to wear the white belt, right when you come in. When you so you know, just wear the gi and the white belt, I was like, okay, yeah, that's fine. And so left the hakama at my home, left all that stuff that I've been going for years, and I showed up and started training, and then the first class on there and I line up at that, you know, the low end of the dojo with all the weight and with the white belts, and I start training and I get paired up with a couple of his black belts and things and when I'm gripping them, when I'm holding them for the beginning of the technique, or you just grasp them, a lot of them couldn't move, they just couldn't they were routed to the spot like my grip was such often thousands of sore cuts in traditional training in Japan, that they were just stuck and that they couldn't start their technique. And I eventually I used up and let them go a little bit but if I really wanted to pull in the juice, they they couldn't move. And then when the when it was flipped, they were trying to give me trouble and like gripping me really hard and working on that kind of stuff. And it was pretty easy for me to fling most of them around, you know, that whole thing. So we went through that whole training session, I didn't really say very much we just trained. And then at the end of the class, the the instructor came up and he goes, yeah, you can go ahead and wear your hakama next class, basically, at the end of it. And then the next class, the funniest thing happened was that I actually, it wasn't the next class. I like the next class I showed up and I wore the white belt again and I sat more or less in the middle of the room, like higher up than the kids that were wearing white belts, but lower down than pretty much everybody else, all the other adults, right, who wearing hakama things. And what happened in that second class was that all the black belt started filtering in the sitting to the to the left of me. So you had like a half empty dojo, and all these people squashed to the left of where I was apart from one black belt guy who scale at me and set the other side, you know, but just so just in on one session, they figured out what the pecking order was. And it was the end of that session, the instructor said, yeah, you should just go ahead and wear your hakama next class. So it didn't matter in some senses which organization I was from, or, you know, where we learned or what pieces of paper we had, it was clear from the ability once we were there, what skill I didn't, didn't have, right, and so I give that as an example not to, you know, blow my own trumpet. But just to say, I think it should probably always be like that, in some ways. And like you say, it's not that clear cut, because with kids, it's, it's hard for them to have motivation, sometimes intrinsically. And that's why systema kids classes aren't really that much of a, you know, a runaway success. But in the few places that people have tried them, it's it demands a lot of attention, a lot of focus, a lot of perseverance, and to no immediate gratifying end, you know, I mean, so it's, it can be really fun, all that kind of stuff, but they're not getting that little reward of like, I got to this place, and here's why I'm going. So it can be very difficult to train kids without extrinsic rewards, I'll grant you that. But with adults, you could make the argument that some people do better with some extrinsic reward, and some don't. But most of the research when you look into this in behavioral science and psychology shows that people only work for extrinsic rewards up to a point. And that the end, the end of the day, you have to have an intrinsic reward, you know if you're gonna kind of develop meaning in what you're doing, right. So there's definitely arguments on both sides of this one, but I think I come down on the side of, it would be better if you even if you are a style that has belts, maybe to have fewer of them, you know, like three belts, you've got like a beginner one, I'm learning belt, and I'm at a level where I could teach belt or something, right? And then wherever you are on that continuum, you're just working hard at being the best beginner you can be or the best intermediate student you can be or the best instructor you can be right, rather than constantly having your eye on the prize, you know.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

I agree. And I've, I've made the prediction that in the next 20 years, belts will will change, they'll have to. 'Coz we have and this is not meant as disrespectful to people that are listening that might be in this boat. But I started training in the early 80s and at that time, in order to you know, let's use the karate model where you have 10 degrees of black belt, you know, there would be one 10th degree black belt, per style. Usually in the world that person would be really old. They probably couldn't train that hard anymore because they were really old and ninth degrees, and even eighth degrees were still pretty old. And I don't mean, old for you know, to me as a kid. I mean, you know, your 10th degrees would be in their 80s and they're the eighth and ninths would be in their maybe late 60s, early 70s. You know, it was it was a lifetime. Yeah. To train, to get there. And now there are people in their 20s who are fourth, fifth, sixth degree blackbelts.

Glenn Murphy:

Sure, yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

There's not a lot of room left. So what do you do? Are we gonna? Are we gonna add more more belts? Are we gonna add more stripes? You know, are we? There are styles that are adding 11, 12, 15 degrees to black belt. And so at some point that gets watered down enough, not saying it is now. But if it follows that trajectory, it gets watered down enough that eventually people say, well that doesn't have value anymore.

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah, it can be demotivating to other people who have worked for like 30 years for their 6th dan or something. You know, I mean, if they see if they see a 16 year old who's been given one can be a bit demotivating for those people I think so. I think I think there are some inherent problems with with belts and gradings for adults at least. But yeah, it's again, it's not chief among my concerns. I mean, it certainly makes it easier to market a martial art when you tell them when you tell somebody how long they can expect to train before they get good. Like, that's one of the questions that people come in to assist them with me with it like how long how long do I have to do this before I can, you know, kick ass I could be I can kick somebody's ass? And it's always, you know, it's a silly question because you have, it depends on the context depends how much skill they come in with, it depends how much time they plan on training, you know, and the mindset they're gonna apply. You know, it's not just a question of putting in X number of hours, and then you're guaranteed this amount of ability, you know, so you wouldn't say that if somebody if they were learning violin or piano or something great. It's so it's kind of it's a silly question but at least in martial arts, where you have extrinsic rewards, you can say, well, typically it takes people a minimum of I know what, three years to get to yellow belt or, you know, six years to get to brown belt and like ten years to get a black belt or something, you can give people kind of waypoints. And then that helps them pace themselves in their training. So it is a useful device for sales and marketing. Definitely. And it helps get people to start and and to an extent to stay with you for a little bit. But I'm not convinced of its of its efficiency or inherent worth in building better, stronger martial artists. Let's put it that way.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

When you were talking about answering that question, people come in and how long before I can kick ass. And I was imagining, well, day one, but just the person who's asked you can kick changes. Right? So on day one, you can probably beat up a five year old. And that led me to and in the early. So bear with me, maybe this is a new standard for martial arts. Listeners, especially if you're new I'm joking. In the early days of Facebook, there were a lot of apps and longtime Facebook users will remember this time when you would install these applications within Facebook and one of them was how many five year olds can you take in a fight? And he would ask you three to five questions and it would give you this ridiculous number like you could beat up 47 five year olds in a fight. And so what if that was the new standard? How many small children you know, massing upon you could you defend yourself against. It is as valid a standard I think is anything else and it's it's silly and meant to be silly because rank is silly.

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah, it can be I wouldn't I wouldn't go that far to sort that but but actually there's there is some interesting truth hidden hidden within that so with that silly metric cracked if you just translated that to you know, average competent people, you know, just a average Street Fighter about your same size or build run it running around. The answer to how many people could you beat up in a fight is maybe one and almost never two right? For most people if they're untrained and for a lot of people training, a lot of martial arts, that number changes to definitely one that still never two or three, right that there is there is a definite there's a difference between understanding what it is to square off against one person and attempting to fight off two or three people who really want us to view you it's a different concept. So that's actually so when we're talking about how do we know, when when somebody is good. There are a lot of people that come into Systema. And most people, I would say, come into systema with a background in other things. So some of them come in having wrestled or done Jiu Jitsu, or done Aikido, or done Escrima, Kali or Karate, or something else. So they come with kind of a pre loaded um base set of skills. And it's interesting, one of the things that we watch is not how good are you at fighting one person, but what happens if we add a second person or third person or somebody with a weapon? And that's when you really start to see the kind of things that we measure a skill in systema. So I mean, it doesn't really mean anything to say, how good a fighter is he, outside of the context of, you know, you know, pound for pound matchups in sport fighting and things like that. It means something in some contexts, but when you say good, good at what? What are you training for? In some ways, systema, the training method, and self defense is a bit like spread betting, you know, we train in order to make our psyche stable and resilient to ups and downs, and adrenalization. And we trained to be able to calm ourselves down, if we get sucker punched or hit, we train our bodies to be able to take a lot of impact, you know, getting punched with real fists and hit with real sticks, unpadded those kinds of things. We train to adapt in wrestling and grappling situations, you know, you can employ techniques, but your bazel ability is your ability to stay calm and find solutions and those things. And then we train with a wide variety of different things like weapons, and multiple attackers and stuff like that. So you're kind of spread betting, once you've got your foundation, you're like, I want to get at least competent in all of these things, just in case I get into a fight in an alley against three guys. And I've got you know, I have a wall to deal with, I have three guys to deal with one of them's armed, at least I want to be able to survive against these people. So we're kind of spread betting and getting competent, all those things, rather than be like, I want to be so good at boxing or so good at grappling, that anybody that's in front of me, I could pretty sure I can knock them out, or I'm pretty sure I could choke them out, right? So in some ways, that's kind of putting all your eggs in one basket and hoping that the other guy, you know, wants to grapple or wants to box or that you're so good at it, you will get that guy, but it's kind of it's ignoring all of these other potential situations. So from a self defense perspective system of spread bets a lot like that way. But another way in which it spread bets is that we want to make sure that everything that we do in systema is building us physically and psychologically, that we're not gonna practice methodologies, mindsets, or techniques that make us more likely to get into fights, and more likely to miss the cues that enable us to get out of fights, right and to see things come in so that we don't blunder into danger. Because, you know, the expression is all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? If you're really good at knocking people out, then the first sign of an altercation, you'll probably square up, choke your jaw put and be like, alright, let's do this. Because if push comes to shove, I can knock you out, right. Whereas if you understand the parameters of violence and how quickly it goes south, you're more likely to look for a loophole, and a way to kind of talk the guy down, buy him a drink, you know, make him feel like it was his idea, whatever it's gonna be, and be a little bit more clever about it and sustainable. And then that way, you can continue doing your martial art until you're 70 or 80. Or some getting burned out through the training methodologies when they're like 30 or 40. You know, got those you said like a lot of the you know, all the tense downs and things like Saito Sensei in Japan, he would, it'd be amazing on the mat. And then as soon as he got off the mat, he would be like limping and hobbling. And he had trouble getting up and down from his knees, which is a tough thing when you live in Japan, and all that kind of stuff. In the end, he wasn't crazy old, you know, he was in his early 70s. And, and that's significant. And I've seen people in a lot of martial arts with like, busted up knees and busted up shoulders and things. And they, they can't play with their kids, right. And they can't, they can't do certain other things because they've they've punished themselves as much as they've punished their opponents over the years. So we we kind of one of the precepts of systema is non destruction of yourself, right in Aikido they talk about, just use the amount of force that you need to subdue your opponent and be very kind and loving. It's like, we don't quite do that. We still snap things and beat people and we'll do all those kinds of things. But we want to make sure that those the techniques we're using physically or psychologically, don't harm us in the long term, we want to make sure that it's a sustainable practice that we can do, you know, into our old age.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Makes sense. Absolutely. I want to contrast Aikido and Systema just personally just a little bit more show 'coz let's face it, we might have a handful of people listening who have trained systema, the majority of people listening have never done any systema, should aikido is probably something that they can relate to a little bit more. And here we also have this paradox isn't the right word, but this contrast for you and the thing that you started with, sort of and the thing that you are now doing, so I'm gonna ask the question in kind of two different ways.

Glenn Murphy:

Okay.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

What did your Aikido experience help you with as you stepped into Systema and what did it, what was more difficult?

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think, as with most people, it gave me at least a vocabulary to be working with. It gave me an understanding of balance and understanding of posture, and some understanding of biomechanics and how to move people around in terms of balance, and centers of mass and all those kinds of things that you learn those from Judo and wrestling and other styles too, as well, that way. It gave me a repertoire of very specific techniques and joint locks, you know, aikidoka know at least 50 ways to snap your arm off. So this is not coming into a straight when, and sometimes those things will just manifest themselves in my system of practice, right? If something falls into your lap, whether it's like a, you know, a quarter gushy wrist lock or or a left hook, then you're probably gonna take it if you've trained it many times in the past, it will just appear right? But so it gave me kind of a vocabulary for understanding what martial art is. And it also, at least the way that I trained it, traditionally, with like, lots of weapons, doing a thousand sword cuts every day, and trying to understand the relationship between moving with an object and moving empty handed and moving another person around those traditional training methods, repetitive but precise, and build a certain kind of dexterity, and coordination to my body that made it easier, I think, for me to at least start making other movements. So and it also, I think, the emphasis of Aikido in not colliding with your opponent, right, not crashing and smashing like some other styles, use the crash and smash to really good effect like a Filipino styles will do that Krav Maga will do that, you know, some Karate styles are very kind of forward pressing in that way. And even the brawling boxing styles do the same thing, right. And Aikido explicitly avoids that the idea is to move sideways to or around or behind your opponent or just kind of slip, the the, the angle of attack so that you're never directly opposing force. That's kind of the the ideal in Aikido. And I think training that for many, many years, gave me an eye to seeing where those lines might be, right how at least understanding where the center line is, where the attack could come from, and treating the opponent like a dangerous ball of stuff from which, you know, a foot or a fist could emerge, rather than looking for an individual punch or a kick. And so it definitely, and distance and timing visit, there's a lot that comes from that, just as there is from training, a lot of other martial arts, where where it hindered me is that, like many martial arts, it depends on the specific positionality and of stance and your position relative to the other person. And some techniques only work if you're in a perfect position relative to the other person in terms of footwork, right? Whether it's throws or joint locks or takedowns, where it's gonna be so that that rigidity and that moving and then settling into a stance, and has a downside in Systema because we have no stances in Systema but all of the movement is natural, and of the way that you would probably move when you're walking, albeit like you walk sideways and backwards and forwards in a fight not just forwards. Right. And so yeah, the analogy we use is that you fight like you walk into stand only walk like you fight you know, so it's that held me up for a long time. And I was so obsessed with drawing power from my hips and turning my hips into every strike or every throw or whatever it's gonna be that it became very hard for me to relax my hips at all. And that makes you very, very vulnerable to getting punched frankly, if you hold your hips very very tight and in a in a hard stance. It can be easy to injure the abdomen and into the back for somebody that knows what they're doing with striking so it's um and you implanting your legs too, you come up against a good kickboxer or muay thai guy, they'll just you know, if you hold a solid stance in front of them, you're not moving, they'll just drill that it back and then you'll go down and he play immediately, right, so. So it's I think that my idea of how to generate power was molded by Aikido in some useful ways. But it also led me down some blind alleys, there was some ways in which I was seeking power in places where I wasn't gonna realistically find it in a fight. And and Systema showed me some of the ways in which it could be useful and some of the ways in which it isn't useful. So it's, it's hard to explain until you get into the details of it. But that's the problem with Systema is that it's so amorphous, right, it has no fixed stances, it has technically no fixed techniques, although there are some that kind of recur quite a lot. So what you're really doing is trying to remove things from your body, really, you're trying to remove tendencies. Rather than add things on, add techniques. You're trying to remove the tendency to flinch, you're trying to remove the tendency to buckle, to lean away and to do things that kind of bleed by mechanical power away from your body. And then once you understand those things, then you can start to build your attacks, build your defenses, and then even attacks and defenses that you see other people doing. You know, I can roll with a BJJ guy and he can get behind me or you know, slip on some sort of lock in, and I'm oh, that was interesting. And then 10 minutes later, I can use it back on, you know, it makes you very, because you understand what it is and what it does. You don't have to learn it step by step, you understand the principle of what he was trying to do, you know. So it's, it's very, it gives you an operating system that makes it easier to absorb other things. But the downside is that you come in with your own operating system, you have to kind of unlearn at least a little bit of that first, or at least put your skills on the back burner for a while. And while you learn this new way of thinking and moving and doing and then later, the skills will reassert themselves anyway, you know, so yeah, it both helps and hinders.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

I get it, I get it. Let's look into the future. You know, you got a magic crystal ball and you're gonna look out a few years and say, you know, this is where I'm gonna be. Where where would you hope you were going to be? Think about your goals. Think about what the future may hold. What do you want to happen as it relates to your martial arts?

Glenn Murphy:

Um, I mean, for me, personally, it's just to keep training as a practitioner, to deepen my understanding of myself, and to pass as much of that exploratory knowledge onto my students as I can, without making mistakes and leading them down blind alleys. Right, I think we have a responsibility of fidelity, you know, the stuff that we learn, and helping people to get either to the place that we're at, or even beyond us, right. So from my point of view, as a teacher and instructor, I just want to make sure that I keep learning myself that I'm not gonna rest on my laurels and stop training and think that I know things and just stay humble, keep that beginner's mind, and keep training and keep passing through whatever it is that I feel like I've, I've learned that's gonna be useful to people. And for the style as a whole, I'd like to see it more widely embraced, I'd like to see more people giving it a try and not least to dispel some misunderstandings about what it is and how it works of which there are many, I think, because everybody in this  can, you know, post a video on YouTube now, it seems like everybody from Russia is now on saying it Systema, and you've got people waving your arms and legs around and putting people down without touching them. You know, we had motions that aren't anything that I recognize, anyway. But, um, but so I would like to see, like more people trying systema for the benefits that it has, outside of martial arts, that there's a lot that you can do with it in terms of stress management, in terms of emotional control, in terms of helping to helping kids to develop in a healthy way. And in terms of interpersonal kind of relations and, and also practical kind of situational awareness, things that can get you out of emergencies. I mean, in my entire time that I've been training systema, I've gotten to, you know, the number of fights I've got into on I can't even count on the fingers on one hand, it's like it's maybe one or two or something like that. And even those didn't end with like bludgeoning and things like that, it's but I've got out of a lot of situations and accidents that that I think I might not have got out off so quickly or cleanly without it. I was in a car crash avoiding an animal near Jordan Lake, North Carolina and plowed into a rail and almost went into into a lake right and, and apparently somebody had drowned there the year before, gone straight through the railing and went into the car. And the entire front end of my car was caved in. And in seconds. I got out of the passenger window and I was just staring at this crumpled car. And, and somebody pulled up in the car and they're like, oh my god, who's in there? I was like, yeah, that was me. I was in there. And I was completely calm. You know, I wasn't adrenalized I just I just breezed I use the techniques. And it's no, you know, accident that we trained how to get in and out of cars, out of windows, how to get out of a car when the seatbelt is jammed, how to fight in around cars, we've done all this in seminars, right? So that stuff kicked in, and I was relaxed enough to get out. And if that car had been on fire or something or if I'd had to get my kids out that that would have made a really big difference. And as it was I escaped uninjured because I was relaxed enough when I hit and I fallen off a motorcycle. And now I sound like I'm comprend to vehicle accidents. But I'm not this is over a period of many years, right? And I came off a motorcycle, I came around the corner and there was a van in the wrong lane coming into me on you know the oncoming lane of the road that was coming through. And I turned hard and did what's called a high side fall on a motorcycle right you know, when the bike tips in the direction of travel. And I came flying off of it and just went into like a light roll and then ran back and picked my bike up like oh, my bike, my bike. I hope it's okay. And the guys in the van stopped him like, hey, man, you're okay? I'm like, yeah, I'm fine. And they walked and they drove off. And then it took me about three, four seconds to be like, Hey, wait a minute, but to be angry about the fact that they were on the wrong side of the road. I was so concerned about my bike, I forgot to be injured. And I just I landed in exactly the same way as I'd seen those guys all those years ago. You know, and as I've done many times before, since rolled around on a hard surface without really doing much I'd like a little scuff on the top of my crash helmet and that was it. So these things like stepping off a curb and rolling your ankle over and it doing nothing to your ankle because you've spent so long working on that loaded mobility as we do in systema, all these things that have kept me uninjured and undamaged and able to go about my daily life and work And my duties as a father and a husband, although these things to me are way more important, and whether or not I'm the biggest badass. And I think even though those are hardest skills to market, I'd like to see systema adopted more widely in more places as a path to resilience, strength, and self development, rather than as a path to like, will make you more badass than the other martial arts guy. You know, I think those days are done. And I don't think anybody, I don't know, I don't know if anybody's buying that anymore. Anybody that really wants to maybe 20 year olds are buying it 'coz they still want to fight people and things like that, but..

Jeremy Lesniak: 

They are it's dying, it's certainly dying. It's not as prominent as it used to be.

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah. And that's not the most useful thing it can do, or that I can do. So I'd much rather take somebody from, you know, I've worked with people who are 60, 70 years old, who have real problems, having like fused back vertebrae from an old injury or something or terrible knees. And they've got them from hardly being able to hobble around to doing like full flat footed squats and wrestling with, you know, guys who are 20 or 30. And just feeling healthy and breathing well, and then taking up jogging or something. And to me, that's way more valuable than taking somebody who's in route health who's already pretty healthy, and then making them like a more of an elite athletic specimen, right? That's, that's, that's, that has its benefits. And it's nice to see people become good fighters and good movers and things like that. But when you take somebody who's either psychologically, psychologically fragile, they've suffered abuse or an assault or something, and you get them to a place where they can tolerate physical contact, and they can tolerate quite a lot of, you know, impact or load on their joints and things and they're no longer fragile, right, you make them solid as people. I think that's what systema really does. It creates solid people. And I think we need a lot more of that right now. Especially right now.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

I agree. I like the way you you said something a few minutes ago, forgot to be injured.

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

And I think that that's, that's a great summary for a lot of the things that you said, you know, it's it's, it's mindset, but it's real. It's it's, yeah, I don't know how I'm gonna try to say it any better. People listening may wanna look you up, you know, website, social media, any of that stuff. Where would they go?

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah, they can go to an just NC as North Carolina Systema, which is just system with an A on the end of it .com. So ncsystema.com. And if they want to look into our online classes we're doing right now they're elsewhere. They're not they don't happen to be right where we are in North Carolina, it's just ncsystem.com/online. So you can train at least the physical foundations, the breathing, the structure, development exercises, and some of the weapons work and things at home. And then if you have a system of school near you, most big cities have at least one systema instructor. I can't vouch for all of them. But I know probably about about 75% of them in North America at least. But yeah, just look them up, try classes like anything else. It's there. The proof is in the putting of the instructor that I work with, really, you know, there are good and bad instructors in all styles and good and bad emphases of things. So just go try it out, see if it's for you.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Nice, sounds good. Well, I really appreciate you being here. And kind of anytime we have someone on who it's the first person to come on of that style, they they end up in this de facto place of having to kind of offer context for that style. And so I appreciate not only your willingness, but your ability to express it in a way that I think the majority of the listeners get. So that that's really valuable. So thanks for doing that.

Glenn Murphy:

Yeah, I'm not telling I apologize if anybody's taken anything the wrong way in what I've said, I've got my utmost respect for anybody who's training any martial art, to the path of self development, if they're doing it, to make themselves better people, please continue doing what you're doing. And if it's working for you do more of it. And I'm just offering an individual perspective on on my own path.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Yeah, we've got a pretty good audience, you know, they they've heard me put my foot in my mouth over the years, they've heard people come on and, and say things that they didn't quite mean. And, you know, catch up a little bit of hate once in a while but as a percentage of the listeners, it's very, very little. So I'm very thankful for this audience. They, they're, they're really supportive. And I think the majority of people here, get it, you know, Systema of works for you, is the thing that works for you, that you dig you you're passionate about it. Doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with what they do, or or what you do, because they do something different. And I think just about everybody here, understands that.

Glenn Murphy:

Okay.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

And so as we wind down, I mean, we've talked about a lot today, and I'm gonna record an outro in a few minutes. But how do you how do you want to lead out to the outro? What what final words what really powerful, no pressure, thoughts do you wanna wrap up this great conversation with 'coz it really has been a wonderful conversation.

Glenn Murphy:

I would just say whatever you're training, always start with the why, start with the motivation of why you're doing it. If you if you're doing this because you're afraid, and that you want to learn to defend yourself, then that will determine the ways, the mindset within which you train within which you train. If you're doing it to develop confidence or to better understand other people, you'll go that path. And it's easy to lose sight of the why, sometimes you can start for one reason. And then your training, you change over time, but your training doesn't. And you want to make sure that there's not a mismatch between what you're training and why you're training. So even to the microcosm of every single class, when you show up, like why am I here, right now, when the instructor is telling you to practice a certain drill, ask why would he be getting me to do this? What's the point of this? You know, just constantly ask yourself what's the motivation? Why am I learning this 'coz it's too easy to tune out and just do things by rote. And that way, misery lies I think. It's much better to be fully engaged in what you're doing and to understand why. And then you can enjoy like a lifetime of joy in your training, whichever style you choose to follow.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

This was a fun conversation. Mr. Murphy's a great storyteller, as you could tell, I had a lot of fun laughed quite a bit. And I came away with a better understanding of not just him and what makes him tick, but Systema and, honestly gave me some ideas for some new drills. It's good talk. And this is one of the things I love about the show, the variety. So thank you, Glenn, I appreciate you coming on the show and let's talk again soon. If you want more if you want photos and links and all the other good stuff, go to whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. And if you're willing to support us, buy something in the store or leave a review, or the buy a book, or the Patreon you know, whatever works for you. We appreciate it. And, you know, to those of you who have left reviews and shared episodes and stuff, we you know, I see that and thank you, really means a lot. Helps us keep the lights on. And if you see somebody out in the world who you know, has a whistlekick hat or a hoodie or something like that, just call up say hello, connect with them. We're all martial artists. And if you wanna reach out to me, if you've got some feedback from an episode or a suggestion for a guest or something like that, email me Jeremy@whistlekick.com. Until next time, you know how it goes, train hard, smile, and have a great day.