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The fastest way to ingrain the TFT System into your subconscious is to follow a specific path of instruction. Now there are two ways to accomplish this.
Training women is hard. Not because of anything they themselves do — women are far more receptive to the message than men and “get it” much more quickly — the problem lies with the men they must train with and the ignorance and prejudices those men bring to the process.
Women are precisely as capable as men at causing injury; when a thumb goes into an eye socket the universe doesn’t stop everything and check if the cells in the thumb have XY or XX chromosomes before deciding if the forces exerted are enough to destroy the eye ball. Either the forces exceed the elasticity of the tissue or they don’t. Male vs. female is not a part of that equation.
In a physical world where a five-year-old can rupture a grown man’s spleen by simply falling on him, injury is anyone’s game. The person who gets it right first wins. In the artificial world of competition, size, speed, strength and training matter. Put that kid in the ring with the grown man and he’ll get one-shotted with a swift kick into next week.
Women tend to be smaller and physically weaker than men — which is why we teach them (and everyone, really) to injure instead of fight.
The idea that using your hands is somehow safer than a gun arises from a potentially deadly combination of ignorance and dumb luck.
Common sense says that using your bare hands to shut someone up or make them stop what they’re doing is a viable — and desirable — alternative to pulling iron and killing them. No one really expects to kill or be killed during an ass-kicking. Fighting is viewed as a relatively safe manly pursuit.
For the most part, that’s true. The vast majority of scuffles don’t end in death. But is this due to a lack of will (kicking ass is not killing) and the relative safety of the endeavor? Or, as I stated above, ignorance and dumb luck?
When people do die in a fight it’s seen as a terrible accident.
The killer claims the outcome was not his intent, that a general ass kicking was in order and things went horribly wrong. For such an accident to occur things have to line up just right. The number one way to die in a fight is to fall and strike your head on the pavement, causing an irrecoverable brain bleed. If you think about all the people who will fall today and strike their heads and not die, you can see what I mean by things having to line up just so to result in death.
In fighting, ignorance saves lives.
The Topic: Injuring the Lower Margin Of the Rib Cage
I decided to tackle an area of the human body that provides numerous opportunities to injure the other guy and put him down with an array of options and methods.
The problem for most people is understanding what is going on when it comes to blunt trauma and internal bleeding.
My goal here was to give you a good overview with two videos that really highlight the results from this type of injury. I cover all the instruction in my video so I’ll let that do its job.
I’d like to thank you all for your feedback on using this medium to deliver information to you. I’m still a greenhorn but feel I am improving. Still a few too many ‘umms’ on this one for my taste… but I think you’ll like the info.
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.
Tim Larkin
Founder, Target Focus Training
PS. From all of us here at the TFT Group I’d like to thank you for your many kind words regarding our loss of Vonnie last Saturday. The countless stories and comments are a testament to how many of our members she personally touched in one way or another. Her death leaves an emptiness we’ll all be feeling for a very long time.
Many of you have asked for an update on Vonnie’s status.
(For those of you new to TFT, Vonnie was a personal assistant to all of us, and perhaps more importantly, our main customer interface almost since the day Target-Focus Training began. She was diagnosed with brain cancer in late May of this year).
Sadly, she lost her battle against cancer Saturday afternoon.
With the discovery of new tumors a couple weeks ago and no clear evidence of the source, we all knew it would be a difficult struggle. Still, she remained upbeat and courageous until Thursday, when suddenly something changed. And in just 3 days she was gone.
(**Note To Readers: I’m expanding my horizons and getting into video blogging. I think this format gives me the greatest range to communicate the ideas I want to share with you. Bear with me as I cut my teeth these next few weeks gettin used to using this format. Also please let me know if you find this format useful so I can gauge how this is being received.)
How To Learn Good Information
From Bad Instruction
This week’s video shows 2 Marine CQC instructors discussing a “knife hand” strike to the side of the neck.
I make the majority of my points in the video I created and even if you think you’ve seen this video please watch my presentation so you can get my various takes on this clip.
The point I’m making in this clip is that the instruction is incomplete. The good result of the other guy getting knocked out is in spite of the instruction.
Most people would watch this and come away with incomplete information that if they tried to use it in a life-or-death situation, the results would be iffy at best.
Also I pointed out that both guys were damn lucky that this ended up just a “funny” YouTube video rather than high cervical damage or massive head trauma to the recipient.
Your car? Your cell phone? The contents of your wallet? Twenty bucks?
Everybody’s going to have a different answer, and if you don’t already have one you should think about it.
But there are a couple things you should know before you decide where the line is…
I began training when I was in high school, around the same time I worked as a cashier in a really terrible seafood restaurant.
One night two guys came in to rob us, armed with a handgun. I remember being distinctly aware of having a choice — I could give them the money or get to work injuring them. I weighed the choices, seeing branching outcomes, but in the end my read on the situation — their faces, body language, the tone of voice — was that this was purely antisocial. They wanted the money and to get the hell out there. They were nervous and in a hurry.
Processing what was happening, reading the situation and making a choice all happened in a blink of an eye that seemed to take minutes. I felt no fear, just a cold calculation, and so I made my choice. They could take property, but if they went after people, I would cross the line, too.
It was over in minutes and when the police arrived I was the only person with enough composure able to provide a detailed (very detailed) description of the men. The officers marveled at my recall and commented that they wished they had more witnesses like me.
Meanwhile, my coworkers were shocked into either silence or terrified crying jags.
Of all the people there, I was the only one who slept that night.
I was also the only one who could identify the weapon and point the two men out in a line-up. (My coworkers freaked at seeing the men in the line-up and played stupid so as not to be involved.)
I was the only one to turn up in court and take the witness stand.
Now, while all of this sounds like superhuman braggadocio, the simple (far less legendary) truth is that the only thing I had that my coworkers didn’t was a choice.
To tighten up our seminars I spoke with a number of instructors to collect data on where they saw problem areas — what kinds of things did our clients have the most trouble with?
I had my list, but I was interested in getting some different perspectives, to create an exhaustive list and see where we could tweak things to whittle that doubtlessly huge list down over time.
Everybody hit me with the most common errors they saw over and over, I added it to my list and the grand total was…
…three.
It turns out we all had the same list.
The thousands of people we trained over the last couple years all had a hard time nailing down the same three things:
Being too far away.
The natural proclivity is to want to stay at arms’ length and reach out with a limb to touch the man, usually connecting with the target only once the limb is fully extended, pretty much removing body weight from the equation. Also, if the man happens to stumble back from the limb-slap, you’re now two steps away from him.
10 years ago Tim trained a group of business executives in a Target-Focus Training class held just blocks from Ground Zero.
The class ended only 2 days before the tragic 9-11 events at the World Trade Center towers in New York.
In 3 weeks we’re hosting a 2-day live session in Las Vegas that will wrap up on Sunday… the 10th anniversary of that fateful attack.
We’re planning a few special things for the class to be announced next week (including copies of the DVD video series shot back at that class in 2001).
Time is short… as is space.
Flights into Vegas are cheap… as are hotels compared to even 3 years ago.
Here we go again, if only because putting the loop on infinite repeat is less enervating than personally shouting into the whirlwind:
I claim “self-defense” as my moral imperative and as such, I will be able to plead it in the aftermath. But I cannot in good conscience use it to describe what I practice and train.
“Self-defense” as a moral imperative, preceding the action, means I am choosing only to use violence when provoked or threatened. I won’t go looking for it and will do everything in my power to avoid it. Many of the things badasses believe are worth the risk to their own lives and livelihood — a personal slight, loss of property, territory, or social status — really aren’t. I can think of few things more stupid than dying over a barstool. Or doing prison time for the same.
“Self-defense” as a legal ruling, after the action, is society giving you a pass for a criminal act, ruling a criminal act as non-criminal. Living by the moral imperative above makes it more likely such a finding will occur in your favor — if you didn’t go looking for it, did everything you could to avoid it and still found yourself in the middle of it, chances are good the State will understand. Not a guarantee, but better than if you use violence frequently to get your way.
“Self-defense” as an action, however, is balling up and hoping for the best.
…Is the fact that the prison gang enforcer in the last post only ever sees himself as the attacker… the standing man… even when he’s on the ground.
He just plain doesn’t identify with the downed man — for that would be identifying with the loser, the victim, the one getting done. In the absolutes of his experience, that means identifying with the dead. And in his world, anyone who does that enters into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
He enjoys an impressive win rate and continued life due entirely to the directness of his action, which can only proceed from an uncluttered perspective. When looking at the picture of the upright man and the downed man he never sees a puzzle or a problem to be solved, but only a solution almost completed.
