Below is TFT’s response to the UK Home Office ban on Tim Larkin entering the UK…

“We believe the UK Home Office decision to disallow Tim Larkin from entering the UK is simply a misunderstanding on their part as to what TFT teaches. Our hope is that they will reconsider their decision, and that everything can be cleared up shortly.

“Based on the wording in their ruling it appears that virtually every martial arts and reality-based self-defense instructor would need to be banned as well.

“As everyone knows, TFT is extremely conscientious and responsible in all our instruction, making sure clients fully understand the importance of “avoiding the avoidable” type situations at all cost.

“We do, however, recognize there are unpredictable and unavoidable ‘black swan’ type events of random violence that do occur, and we provide clear information regarding what is required to survive these situations.”

–TFT Group, May 9, 2012

To see some of the press articles explaining the UK ban, go here.

For questions, please contact the TFT Group at 206-686-3469 or email [email protected]

How long do you think you’d last, conditioning-wise, in an all-out fight for your life?

A minute? Three minutes? As long as it takes?

The people at Force Science put together a study to measure law enforcement personnel’s ability to recall crucial details after a grueling obstacle course meant to simulate a fight with an assailant, a foot chase and other physically demanding, high-stress situations. What they found during the “all-out effort on a heavy bag” portion of the test is of particular interest to our training:

“Researchers recruited 52 officer volunteers (42 males, 10 females), ranging in age from 23 to 51, with an average of 8 years on the job. All were ‘familiar with officer safety training involving high aerobic physical engagement,’ according to Dave Blocksidge, a Force Science Analyst from the London (England) Metropolitan Police, and one of the research team.

[...]

“Most dramatic — and alarming — was the speed at which exerters depleted their physical resources. On average, the officers spent 56 seconds hitting the bag, although some either quit or were called out as thoroughly exhausted after as little as 25 seconds. The blows they were able to deliver ranged from a low of 73 to a high of 274. The average was 183. The overwhelming majority of hits were fist punches.

“Reviewing time-coded video of the action, researchers were able to count second by second the number of times each participant struck the bag. The average officer peaked at 15 seconds. After that, the frequency of strikes fell in a sharp and steady decline.

“‘The officers started out strong, driving hard with penetrating hits that visibly moved the heavy bag,’ [Dr. Bill] Lewinski reports. ‘But by 30 to 40 seconds, most were significantly weakened. They were not able to breathe properly, their cadence dropped, their strikes scarcely moved the bag if at all, and they were resorting largely to very weak, slowly paced blows that would have had little impact on a combative assailant.’

In effect, Blocksidge states in a paper he has written about the research, the exerters ‘delivering a concerted and sustained physical assault… “punched themselves out”‘ in a matter of seconds.

“Perhaps surprisingly, this seemed true even of officers with a high level of personal fitness and fighting skill. Blocksidge offers this explanation: ‘Fitter officers delivered faster and more powerful strikes,’ expending greater effort and thus exhausting their presumably greater reserves in ‘roughly the same time’ as those less fit and skilled.”

So. Regardless of conditioning most of us should expect to be completely spent in 15 seconds of all-out assault effort. If we assume you’re going for nonspecific trauma, i.e., to “beat the crap out of him” you better hope he has less than 15 seconds of nonspecific trauma endurance in him. Unfortunately, most people have far more — the human body can take an awful lot of punishment in the form of bumps, bruises, lacerations and whatnot.

Far better, then, to focus your efforts for maximum effect; break something important inside of him so it doesn’t work anymore. The essential difference between nonspecific and debilitating trauma is that in one you’re asking the man to quit and in the other you’re making the choice for him.

If you can only count on having 15 good seconds, then you better be training to be effective inside of that time limit. And while it might be tempting to think of increasing your conditioning in the hopes of giving yourself more time, that idea was unfortunately dispelled in the study. The fitter officers hit harder initially but just ended up expending more energy per strike, exhausting themselves in the same amount of time as the less fit.

With TFT we have always actively trained to be effective inside of five seconds — we assume three to five seconds of chaos that you resolve with the first real injury. So the scrap starts, and then you nail him in the side of the neck to knock him out. Done and done.

No wasted time, no wasted movement, no wasted effort. Everything is directed straight through a target, to smash it.

This is also why we stress the use of body-weighted strikes over the simple extension of the limbs (striking as opposed to punching and kicking) — when your muscles grow tired you can’t punch as hard, but you weigh the same whether you’re good-to-go or exhausted. Even winded you can still smash things with your mass.

It’s easier to train for results than to train to “go the distance”; it’s also easier to execute, and it jibes with a reality that, though constantly disappointing and often at odds with our own wishful thinking, must still be dealt with. If training for the fight is an illusion, then our only option is to train for the knockout.

–Chris Ranck-Buhr
   TFT Master Instructor

PS. The best way to understand what it truly means to cause an injury by using your entire ‘body weight in motion’ (even if the rest of you is tired) is by seeing it demonstrated in our TFT Striking DVD series. Even experienced professionals are surprised at what they thought they already knew… but in fact, didn’t.

And until the next blog post goes up, if you enter Special Code BLOGSTK on the order form, I’ll give you an extra $50.00 off the regular price just so you can prove this will work for you. Regardless of your size, speed, strength… OR conditioning.

True story:

“So Danny broke the guy’s arm, kicked his legs out from under him as he stripped the gun, and then stomped him between the eyes hard enough to crack his sinuses and sink his head to the ears in the sod. Just as he was thinking he needed to kill the guy, he recognized he was nonfunctional and stopped.”

Who was this other guy? What was he doing there? Why did he point a gun at Danny? What happened next?

The sane and social are fascinated by stories; sociopaths less so.

Where we seek to fill in the gaps of situation, characterization, and motivation, the sociopath sees only a threat or an obstacle and acts to remove it. For us the story above is woefully incomplete; for the sociopath it’s all that matters.

The story preceding the action has no bearing on the mechanical facts of that action whatsoever; what Danny did or didn’t do to attract the gunman’s attention, the gunman’s motivation and state of mind when he threatened Danny don’t make his arm impervious or susceptible to breaking. The story does not affect mechanical results one way or the other. It’s useless noise.

read this entry »

After my premier post here at Target Focus Training, I received a lot of comments, and many of them sounded something like this:

“Charles I love what you’re saying, but I have (insert injury of choice here)… I’m not sure if I can follow your recommendations, so what would you recommend?”

So for all of you who are dealing with injuries (past and/or current), and for those of you who are concerned about avoiding future injury, I’m about to spill my best advice on you right now. I do request one caveat however: as you read the 7 tips below, please make peace with the fact that every injury is different, requiring individualized strategies.

This “primer” on injury management employs a principle-based approach… there’s an old saying that “methods are many, but principles are few.” The take-home lesson is that when you’re dealing with a complicated, multi-faceted problem, falling back on principles is the best way to stay on track. At the end of this post, I’ll make an announcement for those of you who may be interested in more detailed supervision, which may certainly be warranted in some cases.

Now on to the tips. read this entry »

Training newcomers in our weekly sessions can be labor-intensive, especially when they show up with expectations and assumptions that are out of whack with the simple brutality of violence.

Most recently I worked with a man who had a laundry-list of worries that was so long he was never going to get to just crack him. His focus was entirely on what the other man might do to him, and as a result he worked really hard to assess the situation, create distance, get in a fighting stance, try to block, counter and look for an opportunity to counterattack.

Of course, this put him far behind the power curve of the person who no longer cares about proper engagement etiquette and chucks it all in favor of just crack him. It was a very frustrating training experience for both of us.

Frustrating for me only because I really wanted him to “get it” and know what the criminal sociopath knows; frustrating for him because of the difficulty getting any good work done. His assumptions were the primary impediment to effectiveness, and not for want of trying. He was giving it his all, but as soon as things got murky he would revert to his old assumptions and end up struggling.

read this entry »

The potential for debilitating injury is ever-present and all around us; it requires nothing more than the right circumstances and the wrong fall to break something we need to function normally.

Today, people the world over will trip and brain themselves, tear out their own knees, catch a hot one in the eye or groin and end up in the hospital as a result. All that’s required is body weight in motion and to have it land on that one square inch that can’t take it. And this is only considering single-person accidents—we haven’t even gotten to the stuff people will do to other people on purpose.

This is why the comparison of technique, style or system is pointless—everything has the potential to cause real injury. Every punch thrown can knock someone out, or at least make them stumble such that they fall and smack their brain against the concrete.

In other words, every punch can kill.

The physical laws of the universe (and the physiology subjected to them) don’t know—or care—if that punch was thrown by a boxer, a Karate black belt, or an MMA practitioner. All that matters is that the physical tolerances of the anatomy were exceeded. Even if the punch is an untrained, wild haymaker injury will occur given the right circumstances.

If technique, style and system don’t matter, then what does?

read this entry »

“But what if he [INSERT AWFUL THING HERE]?”

This question tells me a lot about a person’s frame of mind, and how they see themselves in violence. They’ve chosen second place, victimhood, with a wait-and-see attitude that makes them perfect prey for the best predators out there.

Now, this is not a conscious choice — they’re not “wrong” in an absolute sense — and it really speaks to how little violence we are subjected to across a lifetime. The average experience is zero to a mere handful of incidents, not nearly enough to draw operational conclusions. Our collective lack of experience shows what a nice bubble-reality we’ve created here in the First World.

Don’t get me wrong — it is nice — it just leaves us woefully unprepared when the rare, “black-swan” event of real violence intrudes.

A lot of time and money is spent figuring out how successful people think. In business, for example, it can be shown that there are modes of thought that routinely lead to ruin; closer to what we’re up to we can look at professional sports where the winners envision themselves doing the thing they wish to do, pushing away or minimizing doubt and worry, and then act purely to achieve that imagined goal.

read this entry »

What Is Strength?

There are varying definitions available, but in the global sense, strength is the ability to do work. More specific to our discussion here, strength could be defined as the ability of the neuromuscular system to create force. In strength-coaching circles, strength is classified as one of the many “motor abilities” that permit high-level human movement. Some other motor abilities include aerobic endurance, mobility, ability, coordination, quickness, speed, and power.

When developing physical preparation programs for athletes, strength coaches try to think in terms of which motor qualities are already sufficiently-developed, and which ones need further improvement in order to improve the athlete’s overall performance capacity. When working with “everyday folks,” I take the very same approach — I’m looking to see which motor qualities, if further developed, would improve my client’s performance, relative to his or her specific needs. In the process of conducting such a “needs assessment,” the need for improved strength usually presents itself, for at least three reasons:

read this entry »

Target Focus Training is a “principle-based” system, meaning that instead of starting with moves or techniques we seek to identify and understand the elements at work in every successful use of violence.

Once you know why the winners win and the losers lose it becomes a simple thing to discard useless movement and technique and replace them with action that makes winning the most likely outcome. Instead of doing what’s popular or cool or fun to train — or even what seems to make sense from a sane, socialized perspective — we seek to do what the untrained victorious do, to physically emulate those who spend no time on the mats and yet win in spite of that lack.

The reason an imprisoned sociopath wins is the same as a highly trained military operator… or really anyone who comes out on top in physical violence. Not because of hate or rage or training or practice, but because of debilitating injury. Period.

Before we can discuss the principles that underlie game-changing/game-winning injury, we must cover some baseline assumptions for how to make the choice to “pull the trigger” on physical violence, in other words, first principles to drive the decision-making process and initial contact.

The essential problem is one of variability in the amount of force used, or the fact that half-measures expose you to greater risk. read this entry »

For my first post here at Target Focus Training I thought I’d share my responses to 7 fitness-related questions that I’m commonly asked when people learn that I’m a fitness “expert.”

These questions reflect several common misconceptions that many people hold about fitness and the process of acquiring it. My hope is that my responses clear up some of your own questions and perhaps inspire some additional inquiry of your own.

If you’d like your own question in a future blog post, please send it to [email protected]!

1) “What do you think of that new “Insanity” workout?

This was recently asked of me by an employee at the Apple Store when he learned that I’m a fitness coach. I told him that sane workouts are a far better alternative. One of the most limiting attitudes people hold regarding fitness is the idea that the more it hurts the better it must be. While discomfort is the often unavoidable outcome of getting out of your comfort zone, it shouldn’t be a barometer for assessing the value of a workout.

Instead, focus on your performance: if you own your own business, you know that you get paid on what you produce, not how much work it took to produce it. Try thinking this way in the gym and you’ll be much better off.

2) “Am I too old to do this stuff?”

read this entry »