A couple months ago, we allowed a company that creates short news videos to shoot a segment from one of our live training sessions. We had expected to see the finished piece before it was offered to network television stations for use in local news stories. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

While the included video footage of the class was pretty good, its the stuff they included at the end from ‘other’ sources that’s causing quite a stir. Here’s what I mean…

Earlier last week I emailed everyone on our TFT mailing list a note explaining why SLOW training in TFT is not only incredibly effective… it’s also extremely safe.

At the end of the email I included a link to a news story (based on the video I described above) produced by the largest CBS affiliate in New York. I did this (even though the reporter was obviously highly biased against TFT — it was a story on women’s self defense) because I wanted you to see the footage from the class showing how slowly (and safely) everyone was training.

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Someone asked, “How would you define effective self defense?”

The short answer is “hurting people.” Much in the same way that using a firearm for self-defense is really shooting to kill. Trick shooting, like shooting to wound or trying to shoot the gun out of his hand are not seriously considered when training to use a firearm for self-defense. It’s just straight-up center of mass and keep shooting until he stops moving.

And so it must be when all we have are fists and boots. We need to have a direct one-for-one correlation between action and results.

Strike him through the side of the neck to knock him unconscious. Gouge his eye to blind him. Crush his throat to make him asphyxiate. We have actions that directly result in debilitating injury. They’re the hand-to-hand version of shoot center of mass.
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Which Is More Important in Self-Defense, the Physical or the Mental?

The knee-jerk answer is “both,” and one that I would have agreed with until recently. But the longer I’ve trained and the more experience I’ve gotten the more I’ve drifted from one extreme to the other.

When I first started training back in the ’80s, I put the physical before everything else. After all, if you don’t know what to do and how to do it how can you hope to mount an effective self-defense? Punching, kicking, targets, techniques, joint breaking & throwing — these are the nuts and bolts of self-defense. With them you have a chance. Without them you have nothing.

How to explain, then, the superior technicians who were getting their asses handed to them on the streets?

And how to reconcile that with the crude bruisers I knew who had no training but plenty of notches in their knuckles?

As I moved my personal training slider from an infatuation with the physical execution and toward the attitude to get it done I noticed a direct effect on that physical execution.

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Do words matter when you train for your own self protection?

Indulge me as I look at the 8 year “War on Terror” (I know the current administration has banned this phrase but let’s call a spade a spade) and compare words and methods from 2 opposing sides.

First, here’s the opening paragraph from a captured Al-Qaeda training manual:

“In the name of Allah, the merciful and compassionate…To those champions who avowed the truth day and night……And wrote with their blood and sufferings these phrases…The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates…, Platonic ideals…, nor Aristotelian diplomacy. But it knows the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing, and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine-gun…. Islamic governments have never and will never be established through peaceful solutions and cooperative councils.

They are established as they [always] have been:

* by pen and gun
* by word and bullet
* by tongue and teeth

Next up is a video from the US Army touting its modern “Combatives” program:
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