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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.
There’s a phrase that crops up about two thirds of the way through, that he must do what is ‘socially horrifying.’ It also talks about effort over skill, about doing what you’re not supposed to do. The relevance for our common interest is, I think, “substantial.”
The article is on the long side, but well worth the read. It gets right to the heart of why we train the way we train: I don’t want you to defend yourself, or play by the rules (even the assumed, unwritten ones), or go skill-to-skill or strength-to-strength.
…Because even if you don’t know what you’re doing, if you poke enough holes in someone you’ll kill them eventually.
The same goes for handguns and baseball bats.
Your chances of being accidentally effective increase with the use of a tool.
The tool doesn’t increase your skill or your accuracy — it only magnifies the trauma when you do manage to line things up just right.
With this perspective the knife, stick and especially the gun become not just desired, but necessary, to commit effective acts of violence.
There are two problems with this approach:
Lose the tool and you got nothing.
The _____-fighter is useless without the (fill-in-the-blank) knife, stick or gun. Lose it, break it or take it away and the person becomes helplessly unarmed.
When it’s you, you’re screwed. When it’s him and he doesn’t really care whether he shoots you or stomps you to death, you’re screwed.
Whether he does it with a gun, a knife, a club or fists & boots, you are preoccupied with stopping him from hurting you. And so you seek out things to mollify those fears — gun disarms, knife defense, stick fighting and self-defense techniques to block punches and kicks. All the while missing what makes him so powerful: not caring about any of those things.
If you have a gun, what’s the priority, shooting him or worrying about countering gun disarms?
Does the one doing the stabbing care at all about knife defense?
The last thing on your mind if you’re busting limbs and heads with a baseball bat is whether or not he’ll take it away from you.
Thinking it’s any different with fists & boots is what separates the person delivering the beating… from the person taking one.
In the training environment, anything works as long as we all agree it does.
On the street, the only thing that works are the laws of physics.
If you don’t get an injury, nothing changes in your favor. Nobody’s going to “respect your technique” just because they’re supposed to. People will keep going as long as they can think and move. Remove one or both of those, and you stop the man. Affect neither and it’s the same as if you did nothing at all.
You can do the move, execute the technique, and touch the target — but if you don’t break something important, it doesn’t matter. And suddenly what worked so well on the mats is completely ignored by the guy you just did it to. If he doesn’t make the same mistake, he just might finish it in his favor by injuring you.
“Lucky” is what you call it when two people come together with the intent to cause harm but end up getting into a sparring match because nobody really knows how to cause injury — there’s a lot of commotion, a little blood, torn clothes, but everybody goes home just fine, if tired. If someone happens to line it up just right — one square inch on one square inch with enough mass-in-motion and follow-through to bust something important, we get an injury and have a winner.
I get inundated with emails pointing to different training videos, all asking for my opinion on whether it’s the “real deal” or not. There are a lot of different flavors of Kool-Aid out there (ours included), a veritable rainbow of “ultimate” and “unbeatable” systems.
But who has the real Kool-Aid?
Well… serial killers do.
They tend not to be the best physical specimens (so there goes bigger-faster-stronger), they tend not to be trained (so there goes belt-levels), and they tend not to practice (so there goes ring experience).
And yet… they get results.
They get results because results are all they care about.
Our two-day base seminars are the distillation of more than 20 years of experience, research and the training of thousands of people to use violence as a survival tool.
In approaching a format for a weekend seminar we had to answer two questions:
1. “Knowing what we know, how would we use violence today, right now?”
…and
2. “How would we train a loved one or family member if we knew they had to use it — for their life — in just two days time?”
Both questions cut right to the heart of it — there are a lot of training methodologies that are little better than hoop-jumping, hazing or time-marking that are perpetuated for no other reason than tradition or simply because we had to do it that way to learn it. Just because we had to carry water through the 39 chambers in order to learn how to gouge an eye doesn’t mean you have to.
The answer to the first one is that I’d ignore the hand-holding through all the stuff people worry about — backing up, blocking, getting hurt — and get straight to it and do it like the guy everyone’s afraid of. Make him want to back up, make him try to block, make him worry about getting hurt. Focus solely on injury and taking full advantage of the injured man. Only stop when I’m done.
“I am becoming aware of things I learned at the recent Dallas live seminar that I didn’t realize I had learned during the seminar. Is this normal?”
Chris Ranck-Buhr responds:
Absolutely — it’s actually what we’re aiming for.
The purpose of the high-density format of our seminars is to get you into the physical practice as quickly as possible.
As much as we like the sound of our own voices, you don’t get any better at navigating the chaos of violence by listening to us talk about it… but you’ll “remember” everything you do with your bare hands.
You’ll “remember” the sight pictures, choosing targets, where you had to go and how you had to move to smash them, and how the body moved in response to that injury.
The more time you can spend doing this — making conscious decisions about what to do next while unconsciously recording the details of each distinct victory — the better prepared you are outside the training environment. In other words, the more uninterrupted mat time you get, the better.
…be the one that goes through the windshield… and takes out the driver.
Anonymous writes:
“I have been to your Vegas training course and have your New York videos. What I have a problem with is I freeze up when confronted in a real fight. I got into a confrontation a few months ago and fear locked my mind up. I could see the targets I needed to hit but I couldn’t move. After the fight was over I thought about what was happening in my mind — I wasn’t afraid of the guy. I was afraid of the thought of getting hurt. How do we overcome this? All the training in the world will not do me any good if I lock up when my life is on the line.”
Chris Ranck-Buhr responds:
What you describe is a common, classic issue — a “freezing behavior” in response to a fear-inducing stimulus.
You worry about getting hurt in a fight. You get into a fight and that worry overwhelms your ability to act.
One of the peculiar things I’ve noticed about people in all the years I’ve been training is the desire to have a static “start” position before getting to work.
It’s always the same — standing, facing one another just out of arms reach. No one’s ready to go until everybody toes that line and hits that zero point to reset the proceedings for another turn.
It’s almost as if they’re listening to an announcer only they can hear, “on your mark,” (everybody gets up), “get set,” (they turn and face each other), “go!”
The fact is they are listening to a distant voice — the one that thinks this is a social interaction, a fight… and everyone knows you square off to fight.
The only problem is it’s completely artificial and has the sad consequence of forcing you to try to stick to the script (“I get up, we face off, and then go,”) while he’s ad libbing – tackling you from behind, kicking you while you’re down, starting in before you’re ready, etc.
The belief is that it won’t matter — you’ll figure it out on the fly, highly motivated by the knowledge that this is really ‘it.’ That squaring off in practice won’t matter.
But we all know you’ll perform as you practice, and if you only start once you get up and square off on the mats you’ll struggle to do so while he beats you back down on the concrete.
It’s rare that I do video interviews so I wanted to make this one available to you.
Recently, I was interviewed, via Skype, by Michael Joyce of Combative Corner.
He ended up pulling some unique and candid responses from me that I never have shared before in my 20 plus years of teaching self protection.
Also towards the end I spoke of the very humble beginnings of TFT and how I built the biz into a world leader, with 45 instructors and training presented to people in over 52 countries worldwide.
This has spurred a great deal of response from people who have viewed it.
I’d like to hear your feedback and will field any questions the interview sparks in your mind.
This recommendation comes to us from Gregory, a TFT Cadre Instructor living in Colombia:
It’s rare that I do video interviews so I wanted to make this one available to you. 
