The chief problem with technique-based training is one of sufficiency — that is, people are led to believe that if they ‘do the move’ and ‘touch the target’ they will get the promised result. This leads to an almost magical thinking that it’s the waving of the hands and counting coup on pressure points that makes the bad man go away.

The reality is that violence is work.

Breaking the human machine is a process of applying overwhelming physics to vulnerable physiology. Can a prescribed movement break ribs, dislocate a shoulder, cause a concussion? The answer is yes — sometimes. When it does work, it will be because the forces applied to the tissues were more than those tissues could handle without failing. When the move doesn’t work it will be for the absence or insufficiency of those forces. In other words, it’ll bust because you busted it; if it doesn’t bust it’s because you didn’t put enough into it.

When you think — and train — in terms of techniques, you see yourself reaching out with your limbs to make contact with dots on the skin. That’s fine for sport, competition and non-lethal situations. If you’re dealing with a human being, trying to change his mind or behavior, this is appropriate (if not roughly non-verbal) communication.

If what you really need is to render him nonfunctional, you need to approach the task the same way you would demolishing a cinderblock wall with a sledgehammer.

Touching the wall with the hammer does nothing. Just because it’s the tool for the job, and applying the hammer to the wall is the preferred manner of doing that work doesn’t mean that simple contact between the two is what gets it done.

You also know that tossing the hammer at the wall won’t do it. You’re going to have to roll up your sleeves, take a deep breath, grip it in both fists, brace yourself and swing as hard as you can. You’re going to swing it to put your entire self through the wall with each strike.

The wall is hard and relatively solid and can withstand a certain amount of abuse. If you’re going to demolish it you’re going to have to put more kinetic energy into it than it can take. Not just little bits at a time that you hope add up, but all at once, with every swing. A swing that falls under that threshold is wasted effort.

You already know this — if I gave you a hammer and sent you after a wall you’d naturally employ your body to do the work. But faced with doing the same work on the human machine and most people pull back, dance, lash out to touch instead of break.

This is the legacy of viewing violence through the social lens — as a social interaction — and then training accordingly with techniques that satisfy the needs of that interaction. In the realm of monkey politics it is sufficient to communicate your displeasure with a fellow primate by pushing, slapping, cuffing and grappling until they submit.

In lethal violence this falls short because killers don’t quit.

To render the human machine nonfunctional — to make quitting (or not) moot — you have to ditch technique in favor of principles. You have to start with the desired result, “I want to break his knee,” and then create the situation where that’s most likely to occur.

What does it take to tear out a knee? The largest amount of kinetic energy you can muster (your entire mass in motion) and a little bit of mechanical advantage (leverage) thrown through the knee in a direction it can’t bend.

While these requirements can be fulfilled by any number of techniques or moves, every time it does work it works for the same base reasons. It works because of the base principles applied the same way you’d demolish that wall. Regardless of the set up or the specific movements before, during and after the injury the results wind up being the same — a broken knee.

You have a choice in how to train for that broken knee. You can learn 50 different techniques for getting it done, some of which work all the time, some that work only sometimes, and some that really never seem to work at all, but in theory should.

It’s up to you to take the time to learn all 50 and sort them out… and hope for the best when a broken knee is what you need to survive. Or you could learn why knees break, learn the simple, base principles that are at work in every broken knee — regardless of whether it was on purpose or an accident, whether it was sitting, standing or laying down, with or without extraneous tools — the one small set of facts that encompasses all 50 techniques. That’s the question: learn 50 things that don’t always work, or the one thing that does?

Whichever way you go, in the end it works because you did the work. The man is blind because you gouged the eye, he’s crippled because you broke his knee, he’s dead because you smashed his head against the planet.

Not because you ‘did a move.’

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