Ben F. writes:

“In your ‘Surviving the Most Critical 5 Seconds of Your Life’ 17 disk DVD series, all the ‘attackers’ have their hands down and really aren’t portraying realistic attackers.  This is discouraging because it does not translate to a real attack where the aggressor is in a fighting stance and coming towards you with arms up at chest or head height.  I will not be totally confident in this DVD series or material until I see how to defend myself in a REALISTIC violent scenario.  I recently bought your ‘Human Weapon’ package, and am not discrediting you just yet but am wondering if the scenarios become realistic in further DVDs in this series.”

———-

Ben,

Your concern is not uncommon — I’ll do what I can to explain what we’re training for.

And it all revolves around the fact… we’re not learning how to fight but how to hurt people.

When you look at what the winners do in violence, they hurt people.

They don’t worry about defense, or countering what the other guy is doing.  They just hurt him.  The victims in violence are usually the ones trying to block, counter, cover up and otherwise prevent the violence from happening to them.  Meanwhile, the winner is left free to keep doing whatever he wants.

The answer to this unfortunate reality is to… train to be the one doing the hurting.

To that end we teach people where and how to strike to cause serious injury.  It’s target practice on the human body. And the goal is to be able to see those potential injuries from all angles — in front, behind, over the top or underneath.

We can’t know where that guy will come from or how he’ll present, so we keep the targeting generic.

This prevents you from getting stuck and needing a particular profile as your “go” signal.

For example, if you only train while squared-off, you’ll hesitate to act from any other position. But if you get used to accessing targets and causing injuries from all around the human body, be it bent, folded, standing, on all fours, etc., then all you need to get into it is a good enough reason.  Like someone coming after you.

It’s also important to note that in violence you should expect to get hit.  If there’s a knife you’ll get cut.  The gun always goes off.  We don’t get to pick whether or not we get punched.  Anyone can blindside anyone else.  What matters most, then, is the first thing that comes out of you when you realize it’s a bad situation.

We train to make sure that first thing is an injury.

Not getting ready, not creating distance, not getting into a fighting stance or countering. But instead doing the only thing that’s going to make a difference:  hurting him.

Once you get this target practice down and can reliably slam your entire mass through one square inch of him, it’s a simple thing to do so to a moving target.

Here’s a video of some of our students doing just that:

Hope this helps.

-Tim Larkin

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