Most people only give lip service to them. Or pretty much ignore them altogether.

But are targets really... the magic bullet?

Before we get into what targets are and what they can do for you, let's go over some things they're not:

Targets are not 'weak points'

To say that targets are 'weak points' is to imply that it is 'easier' to break them. This misunderstanding leads to unfortunate outcomes - believing that it is 'easier' to cause injury to a target will lead you to give less than your all when you go after one. It's going to take everything you have, all the time, whether you're lacerating a cornea or tearing a hip out of its socket. To do any less is deadly tomfoolery.

Another problem associated with thinking of targets as 'weak points' is that it implies that if only you could strengthen them, you could make yourself impervious to harm. By extension that would make a bigger, stronger man's 'weak points' less weak than a smaller, weaker man. This is a load of poppycock. Take the skull, for example: resilient, flexible, and hard as all get-out. And easily obviated with a judicious application of concrete and gravity. Or a tire iron. Or something as simple-stupid (and ancient) as a stone in the fist.

Targets are not 'pressure points'

Call me old-fashioned, but I think of 'pressure points' as places on the human body where, if properly squashed, one can staunch serious, life-threatening bleeding. Period.

Thinking of targets as 'pressure points' implies that simple 'pressure' (pushing, pinching, squeezing or poking) will have some kind of desired effect. Does it hurt to have any of those things happen to a target? Of course it does - we've all been on the bad end of that sort of treatment during mat time. But the difference between pain and injury is an insurmountable gulf. Each can each exist independent of the other. While pain can be a result of injury, injury is never a result of pain. In short, pain and injury are two very separate things. Whether or not something 'hurts' him is immaterial - breaking things is everything.

Pain compliance and submission are not things to bet your life on - rendering parts of him useless is.

We also end up with the same problem of thinking in terms of 'weak points' - a reduction in effort. If you really think you can simply pinch-poke-squeeze instead of giving it your all, you're screwed. The magnitude of success is directly proportional to the magnitude of effort. Giving it your all gets you everything. 'Poking a pressure point' gets you nothing.

Targets are not 'mystical energy nodes'

Is there overlap between the target list and an acupuncture diagram? Sure. And there's also overlap between the target list and sports medicine. So I guess it's up to you to pick one.

Chi is notoriously fickle when it comes to the laboratory. Somehow it always manages to defy detection - truly, it is mysterious. I think it's safe to say that something undetectable and mysterious counts for nothing in violence.

Thinking of targets as 'mystical energy nodes' also gets us back to the 'pressure/weak point' problem - thinking that it's 'easy' to cause a life-wagering change in them. Once again by tapping, squeezing or even zapping your own chi at them. This is magic. Magic is fun at nightclubs and little kids' birthday parties - but you don't want it in the operating room, the cockpit, or the nuclear power plant. Or in your own head and hands when your life depends on what you do next.

If you want to try and pinch off his chi when your life is on the line, go for it and best of luck to you. I'll send flowers to your loved ones.

The only energy I'll bet my life on is kinetic.

The difference between what targets aren't and are is the same as the difference between a 'strike chart' and what we have, a target list.

A 'strike chart' shows places to touch. A target list is a litany of destruction.

Thinking of targets as places you touch, rather than destroy, leads directly to a lack of injury. This is due to a belief that 'hitting the target' is sufficient for results. But you can hit the target and not cause an injury. That's because injury doesn't come from touching or 'hitting' the target. Injury comes from blasting everything you are through the target to make it come out the other side.

So what exactly is a target?

Targets are places where injuries occur

Targets are prone to injury when people collide with people and people collide with the ground. They are the parts of the human body that turn up time and time again in sports medicine literature. This is distinct from trauma medicine in general - while a shattered femur is indeed an excellent injury, it does not tend to happen when people run into each other and then fall down.

Another way to look at this is that targets are virtual injuries. You need to visualize this in three dimensions, not as a dot on the skin. The 'knee target' is a potential broken knee, bend backwards or sideways all wrong and loud. It's falling and not being able to get back up. The 'spleen target' is broken ribs and a bruised (or ruptured) organ. It's the inability to breath and internal bleeding that can lead to shock. That's what those targets mean to me, that's what I see when I look at them, on you, standing at the lunch counter.

Targets are virtual injuries much like Schroedinger's Cat. It's not dead or alive until you tear open the box and check. Possibilities are a lot of nothing until you make them into certainties.

Targets are an anatomical structure that can be crushed, ruptured, broken or otherwise rendered useless

That's not to say they are 'weak' - we've covered that idea - but that they are important to normal functioning. Contrast this idea with 'socking someone in the pec.' Painful? Sure. Any guy worth his antisocial salt has both given and taken this kind of abuse when amongst friends or siblings. But socking the pec doesn't make something important stop working. Targets are the important places in the body. The eyes, the throat, the organs of generation, joints, motor nerves, etc. - these are things the body can't do without if it's going to run around and function at peak performance. Like kicking the legs out from under a chair: kick out one and it's a wobbly stool, kick out two and you can't even sit in it anymore. Snap the back rest off and it's no longer a chair. If you start by tearing the seat cushion off, well, it's still a chair (albeit an uncomfortable one). You want to wreck the important things. Those would be targets.

Targets are the entry point for a vector

This is really, really important. If you get nothing else from this rant, remember this:

A target is not a dot on the skin. It's an entry wound. And every decent entry wound has an exit wound. With a tunnel of wreckage between the two. This is what bullets do. And so must you.

The targets on the target list are aim-points for the vector of your body weight in motion. You are going to throw yourself through them, to make whatever tool you're using come out the other side. We don't bother showing this on the target list - though, come to think of it, that would be the most excellent way to get this across. A rotating, translucent 3-D model of the human body with vectors blown through all the targets. Instead of 'dots on the skin' each target would be a cluster of arrows poking through the body. Take a moment (now, or later) to visualize this. The body should look like St. Sebastian or Toshiro Mifune at the end of Throne of Blood.

Most people look at targets and see a point, a circle or dot that could be drawn on the skin that means 'hit here'. When you look at a target it should look like vector-infested 3-D exploded view of sundered anatomy complete with a precognitive overlay, a short-term view into the future where he's folded and broken, the virtual injury made suddenly real. (A dot on the knee looks very different from a broken knee.)

This is what I see when I look through a target - I fold space with my mind like Stephen Hawking. I see the vectors, the way through from here to the injury just on the other side of the veil of time. (And, yes, I'm waxing hyberbolic here.)

Don't merely open Schroedinger's cat box and check. Stomp on the box with the kitten in it. Just to be sure. Because targets aren't injuries until you make them so. And seeing them as dots on the skin is an awfully long way off target.

Labels: anatomy, injury, striking

The answer depends on who's doing the injuring and who's getting injured...

These are great attributes to have, if you know what to do with them:

If you have more mass, you can hit harder. If you have more strength, you can hang on nice and tight for joint breaks, and send people flying with throws. If you're quick, you can get in and get it done before he even knows what's happening. So, yeah, those things can make a difference for you if you have them.

If you don't, if you're not bigger or stronger or faster than most people (and let's be honest, most of us aren't) then that's where proper training makes a huge difference. You need training to know how to throw your 140 pounds through someone to get same results that a 240-pound guy gets accidentally. You need training in leverage and timing to break joints and send people flying as if you were amazingly strong. You need training that gets you to act earlier in the sequence of events rather than later if you're slow.

Notice that those attributes are helpful for doing violence, and that we can make up for deficits with proper training--but being bigger, stronger and faster do nothing to make you (or him) immune to violence.

Size, strength, speed and other assets of physical conditioning can help you absorb non-specific trauma--in other words, it can help you 'take a punch'--this fact can be seen in MMA or combat sports competitions. But no one--no matter how big, strong, fast and tough they are--can take injury as we define it. As the criminal sociopath defines it. No one can take a gouged eye, a crushed throat, or a broken knee.

The best example of this can be seen in American football. When a player gets his leg bent backwards until the knee snaps, what we have is a highly trained and highly developed athlete taking a crippling, game-ending (for him) injury. If bigger-stronger-faster conferred immunity to physical harm, these guys would have it. But they don't. They break just like the rest of us.

In the end, bigger-stronger-faster are positives for causing injury, but do nothing to protect you from it. As long as you take this idea the right way, it's a lot of good news, actually.

If you have those attributes, you just need a little training to put them to good use.

If you don't have those attributes, you just need a little training to learn how to make up for them.

If the other guy has those attributes, it does nothing to protect him from you. No matter how big, strong, or fast he looks, he breaks just like everybody else. He might be able to 'take a punch' (and probably more than just one) but you're not going to punch him. You're going to gouge out his eye, crush his throat, and tear out his knee. You're going to do the things to him that nobody can take, the things that work regardless of size, strength or speed--no matter who has them or who doesn't.

Labels: combat sports, MMA, self defense

Speed.

In Target-Focus Training, we make you train slow, or, at least not as fast as you could go if you went full-bore.

In order to understand why we do this, we need to look at what's required to achieve our goal of injuring an attacker.

Debilitating injury is the result of an interrelated chain of factors:

You have to drive your entire mass through a target and follow all the way through with your full force and effort.

A shorthand way of stating this is:

Penetrate & rotate through a target at speed.

So that's what it takes to crush a throat, gouge an eye, rupture a kidney or break a knee. All well and good until you try to figure out how to train for that.

If you keep it all as is, your 'training' is actually maiming. Every training regimen has to remove one or more of those elements in order to train without putting the practitioners in the hospital. (At least on a daily basis.)

So if you're going to go fast when you train, you have to lose something else. But what?

• Take away the follow-through.

Almost no one goes here. You still have bodyweight on a target at speed--train like this & even without the follow-through someone's going to lose an eye.

• Take away the target.

This is a typical padded-up sparring session. If we make the target indistinct, we can run around and hit each other pretty hard--but the minute it all lines up right, someone's screwed. You're also training to cause generic, non-specific trauma: bumps, bruises, lacerations, etc., and not the kind that results in a reliable state-change in the man.

• Take away the bodyweight.

This is a slap-fight. You're swatting at targets... but without your mass, there's nothing to compress the tissue, and effect the kind of volume change that breaks, tears, and ruptures anatomy. Some targets, like the eyes, throat and groin can still be injured practicing like this, which is why they'll almost always end up 'off limits' for safety.

The problem is that the result you're really gunning for is only ever going to occur through accident--when all the elements are present at speed. In other words, if you remove anything else other than speed, you're not training to get the results you need in violence.

And the funny part is that speed is the one thing everyone walks in the door with. It's the only thing on the list that you don't have to train.

The other elements... yes. No one walks in with good targeting, or the ability to control their mass such that they can drive it like a battering ram while maintaining balance, or the proper mechanics to really sink it with complete follow through. These things have to be learned.

And once you learn them, you just add the speed--which you already had to begin with--and you end up with injury, any time, every time.

Chris Ranck-Buhr
TFT Master Instructor

Labels: combat sports, mixed martial arts, self-defense training

Semantics can be a funny thing--reference the title, above: On the one hand, it could mean 'fighting on even though one is injured' or 'enduring in the face of adversity.' On the other hand it could mean 'using injury as a tool when fighting' or 'dirty pool.' Chances are you read it one way, and not the other; which way you read it, on autopilot, isn't up to me, the message-bearer. How you see it is something that happens entirely inside your own skull.

So, same words, two very different meanings. And no way for me to tell which way it's gone.

An essential problem we have in teaching and training violence is that most people have no real experience with the concept. (This is only a bad thing in the context of training. In the context of daily life, it's a good thing that the vast majority of people never experience violence to the degree we mean when we say the word... unlike, say, the population of Rwanda.) It is the never-ending job of the instructor to clue people in, give them physical examples to connect to the words, and to do our best to connect it to everyday experiences. (Like mentioning the 'funny bone' when we talk about nerve targets--nearly everyone's whacked their ulnar nerve hard enough to momentarily kill their hand.) Recently, however, it occurred to me that when speaking of the difference between sport and violence, martial arts and murder, competition and destruction, we've been coming from the wrong side of the argument.

While most people have not experienced life-changing violence, many have, at one time or another, experienced injury in sport. Whether as adults or children, we've all taken a hard hit, been knocked ass-over-tea-kettle, and/or had the wind knocked out of us. We've been contused, lacerated, pulled muscles, tweaked joints and taken a bump on the head that made us see stars. And we've all gotten back up, shook it off, walked it off, and pressed on and fought through for personal honor, for toughness, for the team, or maybe just because we didn't want to miss out on all the fun.

As nasty as some of those things may have felt, or seemed, or been they were not injuries as we must define them for violence--if you were able to push through and overcome the physical symptoms with force of will you were definitely hurt (perhaps even enough to make someone else quit) but you were not injured the way we mean it when we're talking violence.

If you've lived a full enough life to experience the above, you've probably had the misfortune of seeing the other side of it--people broken in such a way that no force of will, no matter how strong, can change the state they find themselves in. They're out cold, or flopping around incoherent, or screaming nonsensically; the match is stopped, the game is paused as medical personnel rush to the fallen's aid. They don't walk off the field triumphantly, they're carried to the hospital.

At a recent live training I recognized some 'sporting types' among the clients--people who were wearing gear associated with martial arts, full-contact and no-holds-barred-style competitions. It can be hard to make our case to such people--when I say 'violence' and 'injury' they nod like they know but it's very often a different picture they see in their head. They see the hard-won results they know can only be achieved in the ring through bigger-faster-stronger, and they are usually skeptical of injury as a show-stopper if only because of the number of times they themselves have 'fought through injury' and won the match in spite of their 'injuries.'

Instead of my usual competition vs. destruction rant I simply asked the question:

"How many of you have taken a hit, had the wind knocked out of you, seen stars, had something hurt like crazy in a game or match and yet you were able to fight through it, keep playing, continue to compete, etc.?"

Most people raised their hands. I was actually a little bit surprised by that. So far so good.

Then I asked:

"How many of you have seen someone go down in a match or game such that they couldn't get back up, the refs went crazy trying to stop the game so medical personnel could get to them, and they had to leave the field on a stretcher and go straight to the hospital?"

Fewer people raised their hands, but still a goodly amount.

"Okay," I said, "In violence, we're only ever interested in the second one."

And then I added, "Because, as you all know, you can shake off the first one, no problem."

I swear my third eye was blinded by all the psychic light bulbs going off. Everybody got it. Everybody. And I didn't even have to argue the point.

Best of all, the most hardcore of the competitors lost their skepticism and became acutely interested in getting to work.

Labels: combat sports, competition, fighting, injury, MMA, self defense