|
I had been receiving Larkin’s email tips for about eight months and found the information they contained both refreshing and informative. Although, like most people, I was very sceptical of these ex-military guys; you know the type, the ‘I’ve trained everyone from the SAS to the Soviet secret police.’ Did the close-combat and reality-based systems of the world always deliver everything they claimed? I doubted it.
The TFT product, however, seemed to be saying all the right stuff and so I invested in one of their DVD packages. I was very impressed with the content of the Striking series and was starting to thirst for more when an email came through notifying me that Tim Larkin was coming to Sydney. He was coming to run his two-and-a-half-day live training seminar, so I signed on the dotted line and sent in my credit card details.
I arrived in Sydney on Thursday afternoon, settled into my hotel and contemplated what I would be greeted with at 8.30am the next morning. In my head were images of huge, muscled-up types in camouflage pants and singlets grunting with approval as a ‘Sergeant Major Larkin’ yelled at us to “get down and give him 20!”
How wrong I was!
Tim Larkin, the man, was an impressive sight with a bodybuilder’s physique. However, he was not the stereotypical military type I had imagined. He was articulate, respectful and humble as he gave us an insight into his life so far and what he expected us to leave with after our two-and-a-half days under his expert tutelage.
Larkin was undergoing the training required to become one of the US Navy elite, a member of the famed SEAL team, when a diving accident left him with ruptured eardrums. His superior officers recognised he had a talent that they didn’t want to lose and so kept him on in the Naval Intelligence Section. He was responsible for revamping much of the hand-to-hand combat syllabus for the Naval Service. After a distinguished career in the military he teamed up with like-minded people who shared a similar passion, to create an effective fighting system. Thus TFT was born.
Larkin also introduced his course assistants, Mike Allan and Mick Valentine, who are both TFT ‘Master Class’ students based in Sydney. During the course of the weekend, we found them not only extremely friendly and helpful but also very capable and dedicated practitioners of Target Focus Training.
We spent the next half-hour getting to know one another. The group consisted of male and female participants with ages ranging from early twenties to late fifties. There were all different body shapes and sizes, various occupations from a taxi driver to an acupuncturist and even a genuine con-air pilot. However, what really struck me as unusual was that half of the participants had never done any type of martial arts training whatsoever and yet they were here with an ex-Navy SEAL trainer learning how to use violence to their advantage.
Before a single punch was thrown, we were given a lecture and watched a series of videos depicting violent acts. There was video footage of police officers getting attacked, prison stabbings, street fights and surveillance footage of random violent acts. These videos were all designed to drive home the fact that violence is everywhere and it all follows a pattern.
I was impressed by the level of research Larkin and his master instructors had amassed when constructing their curriculum; large amounts of data from law-enforcement, crime statistics, military reports, prison and gang violence was analysed to get this system operational.
Larkin explained that the wealth of information gleaned from prison officers and prison reports, along with video footage of that violence, was invaluable to his team. Prison violence is an integral part of a gang’s business — they go to great lengths to study human anatomy and psychology in order to kill and injure more effectively.
“Violence is just a tool and what makes it dangerous is the brain of the person using it,” Larkin said. “Take out the brain and you take out the threat. There’s nothing pretty about it; no flashy, cool moves; no magical, heart-exploding death- touch. It’s just violence, pure and simple — and we show you how to use it effectively in a life-or-death situation,” he said.
He went on to explain that there are no defensive moves in TFT; there are no blocks or deflections. We hit the attacker with everything we have, we use every ounce of our bodyweight when we strike and we cause injury every time.
“Why take a rock from a sack and throw it at someone when we can smash them with the whole sack?,” he said. Larkin also went to great lengths to explain the different social and asocial violence. “You don’t use TFT in an argument over a barstool or a road-rage incident,” he said. “If you do, you’ll find yourself in jail pretty quickly. This is only for when your life is in serious danger — when someone is intent on hurting or killing you.”
Next up, was the anatomy lesson and this is where it got really interesting. I have studied human anatomy for four years and it felt like I was back at university for a refresher course. The depth of Larkin’s anatomical knowledge was very impressive.
We were educated on the working of the central nervous system and its reflex response. When someone receives a blow to an area, the body reacts with a reflex reaction and these are the same with all people. For example, a finger in the eye will cause a person to lean their body back and take their hands up for protection, which opens up the body for the next strike. A kick to the groin, whether to a male or female, will cause the person to bend over and take their hands to their groin, at that same time throwing their head back and exposing their chin and neck.
This is where our ‘reaction partner’ has an important role in our training. They have to give us a realistic reaction so we can get a feel for what it will be like in that situation and move onto our next target.
We worked through all the vital points of the body, how and what to strike them with. In addition, we learnt the best way to attack them from a standing position, kneeling on all fours and lying on our backs as if we had been knocked down. We would study a point, go off with a partner and practise our strikes. Nothing was rushed and we didn’t move on to the next point until we had mastered the previous point.
If an outsider had walked into the class they may have been thinking they had walked in on a tai chi class, as all our free-fighting was done in slow motion with our partners giving the correct reflex response. Larkin explained that if we try and go too fast, we are not concentrating on targeting correctly.
The only time he got annoyed and raised his voice was when there was too much talking while we were practising techniques. “Don’t be polite in here; introduce yourselves during the lunch break. What you do in training you do out there — just get the job done,” he yelled. “Injury, injury, injury — take the man out and get outta there!”
In fact, he drilled one message into us over and over: what we do in the dojo, in our training or in our sport can get us killed — and he had the evidence to back it up. He shared a story with us about one of his students, a grappler, who was attacked by a guy with a knife. He pinned the arm and put the guy in a choke. End of story? No, the guy with the knife tapped out and the grappler let him go, and got stabbed. Luckily, he survived. “Pull your punches and kicks, and that’s what you will do on the street,” Larkin warned.
He explained his ‘Triad of Violence’. The triad includes penetration, rotation and injury. We penetrate into and through the attacker. We get in his space and hit our target. We follow through with rotation, as all our musculature and momentum drive into the attacker, taking the ribs we just broke and forcing them through vital organs to maximise the injury. We repeat the process until we are satisfied that the attacker or attackers no longer pose a threat. Every strike results in an injury.
As a testament to Larkin’s teaching method, we were all very effectively free-fighting by lunchtime on the first day.
Friday afternoon, Saturday and Sunday were spent working through more targets, refining our skills by free-fighting, joint-breaking, working against multiple attackers and attacks with knives, batons and firearms.
Larkin explained that a ‘weapon’ is simply a tool for expressing the violent intent of a human brain; we don’t focus on the tool, we penetrate, rotate and injure the person. Shut-off the brain and the tool is useless. He was right — this system was easy to learn and effective against all weapons.
In conclusion, TFT delivered all it promised. If a sociopath is intent on hurting you, it will enable you to level the playing field and save your life. When violence is the only answer, then TFT is, in my opinion, the ultimate survival tool.
About the author: Wayne Stafford is a Melbourne health professional who holds Dan-grades in karate, Muay Thai and aikido. A qualified yoga teacher, he also lectures in anatomy and physiology and is now a student of Target Focus Training.
|
