Frank Z. writes:

“I expect the idea of being able to condition oneself to take a real hit and continue as if nothing happened is BS. But I have seen people so unbelievably sensitive to pain as to render them helpless for a short time. I have developed a high pain threshold over my life by enduring pain. Not because I tried to endure pain but because I was in pain at times. I look at my grandsons, who have never even felt a lick on their butt and tell them to avoid a fight at all cost as the first hit will wilt them the other guy will beat the crap out of them.

“I would like to see you address this.”

Chris Ranck-Buhr responds:

read this entry »

Charley G. writes:

“I am an instructor in the art of Shaolin Kempo. When I train with my Master he makes it very clear that what we train in Kempo may look pretty at times but is also a good, solid self-defense system. There are a lot of techniques that are utilized in our system, and as instructors we are taught to use pieces of them to deal with real situations.

“However, we don’t do this with students until they reach a certain rank. I want those I teach to be able to use what they learn to really defend themselves. At the same time I don’t want to confuse them or sabotage their training.

“Judging by what I’ve seen on your website I’d very much like to try it out and perhaps incorporate it into my current training for my own benefit before adding any element of TFT to my teaching.

“Do you think it would be beneficial or harmful for me to add TFT to my training?”

Chris Ranck-Buhr answers:

[Before I get to your excellent question, a quick note on the title: I purposely chose the most outrageous one possible. I know that's not what you're asking (you're not trying to "fix" Kempo) but I have trained people who admitted that they were looking to do just that -- to find that ineffable thing they felt was missing in their training and figure out how to get the same results we do.]

The reason the various schools, styles and systems exist at all is because of a focus on technique over results.

read this entry »

Lou R. writes:

“From what I understand, it is physiologically impossible to access complex motor movements under the adrenaline dump of the fight or flight response.  Apparently, this is why “trained” fighters’ martial arts techniques don’t work when they are attacked.  The techniques are too complex; gross motor movements would be more effective.  My concern with the TFT training is that I would not be able to ”hit” a specific target during a confrontation while experiencing the physiological reaction induced by the fight or flight response (that is, I wouldn’t have the fine motor coordination required to execute the TFT techniques).

My question: Does TFT address how to manage the defender’s fight or flight response?”

——-
Lou,

While there’s nothing anyone can do about the biological facts of fear — the kickoff of the fight or flight response — there is a great deal we can do to prevent it from blossoming into panic.

The number one way to mitigate the response is by training to have something to do once it’s on.

You’ll often hear professionally trained survivors of bad situations say something to the effect of,

read this entry »

The answer depends on who’s doing the injuring and who’s getting injured…

These are great attributes to have, if you know what to do with them:

If you have more mass, you can hit harder. If you have more strength, you can hang on nice and tight for joint breaks, and send people flying with throws. If you’re quick, you can get in and get it done before he even knows what’s happening. So, yeah, those things can make a difference for you if you have them.

If you don’t, if you’re not bigger or stronger or faster than most people (and let’s be honest, most of us aren’t) then that’s where proper training makes a huge difference. You need training to know how to throw your 140 pounds through someone to get same results that a 240-pound guy gets accidentally. You need training in leverage and timing to break joints and send people flying as if you were amazingly strong. You need training that gets you to act earlier in the sequence of events rather than later if you’re slow.

Notice that those attributes are helpful for doing violence, and that we can make up for deficits with proper training–but being bigger, stronger and faster do nothing to make you (or him) immune to violence.

Size, strength, speed and other assets of physical conditioning can help you absorb non-specific trauma–in other words, it can help you ‘take a punch’–this fact can be seen in MMA or combat sports competitions. But no one–no matter how big, strong, fast and tough they are–can take injury as we define it. As the criminal sociopath defines it. No one can take a gouged eye, a crushed throat, or a broken knee.

The best example of this can be seen in American football. When a player gets his leg bent backwards until the knee snaps, what we have is a highly trained and highly developed athlete taking a crippling, game-ending (for him) injury. If bigger-stronger-faster conferred immunity to physical harm, these guys would have it. But they don’t. They break just like the rest of us.

In the end, bigger-stronger-faster are positives for causing injury, but do nothing to protect you from it. As long as you take this idea the right way, it’s a lot of good news, actually.

If you have those attributes, you just need a little training to put them to good use.

If you don’t have those attributes, you just need a little training to learn how to make up for them.

If the other guy has those attributes, it does nothing to protect him from you. No matter how big, strong, or fast he looks, he breaks just like everybody else. He might be able to ‘take a punch’ (and probably more than just one) but you’re not going to punch him. You’re going to gouge out his eye, crush his throat, and tear out his knee. You’re going to do the things to him that nobody can take, the things that work regardless of size, strength or speed–no matter who has them or who doesn’t.

Speed.

In Target Focus Training, we make you train slow, or, at least not as fast as you could go if you went full-bore.

In order to understand why we do this, we need to look at what’s required to achieve our goal of injuring an attacker.

Debilitating injury is the result of an interrelated chain of factors:

You have to drive your entire mass through a target and follow all the way through with your full force and effort.

A shorthand way of stating this is:

Penetrate & rotate through a target at speed.

So that’s what it takes to crush a throat, gouge an eye, rupture a kidney or break a knee. All well and good until you try to figure out how to train for that.

If you keep it all as is, your ‘training’ is actually maiming. Every training regimen has to remove one or more of those elements in order to train without putting the practitioners in the hospital. (At least on a daily basis.)

So if you’re going to go fast when you train, you have to lose something else. But what?

• Take away the follow-through.

Almost no one goes here. You still have bodyweight on a target at speed–train like this & even without the follow-through someone’s going to lose an eye.

• Take away the target.

This is a typical padded-up sparring session. If we make the target indistinct, we can run around and hit each other pretty hard–but the minute it all lines up right, someone’s screwed. You’re also training to cause generic, non-specific trauma: bumps, bruises, lacerations, etc., and not the kind that results in a reliable state-change in the man.

• Take away the bodyweight.

This is a slap-fight. You’re swatting at targets… but without your mass, there’s nothing to compress the tissue, and effect the kind of volume change that breaks, tears, and ruptures anatomy. Some targets, like the eyes, throat and groin can still be injured practicing like this, which is why they’ll almost always end up ‘off limits’ for safety.

The problem is that the result you’re really gunning for is only ever going to occur through accident–when all the elements are present at speed. In other words, if you remove anything else other than speed, you’re not training to get the results you need in violence.

And the funny part is that speed is the one thing everyone walks in the door with. It’s the only thing on the list that you don’t have to train.

The other elements… yes. No one walks in with good targeting, or the ability to control their mass such that they can drive it like a battering ram while maintaining balance, or the proper mechanics to really sink it with complete follow through. These things have to be learned.

And once you learn them, you just add the speed–which you already had to begin with–and you end up with injury, any time, every time.

Chris Ranck-Buhr
TFT Master Instructor

Semantics can be a funny thing–reference the title, above: On the one hand, it could mean ‘fighting on even though one is injured’ or ‘enduring in the face of adversity.’ On the other hand it could mean ‘using injury as a tool when fighting’ or ‘dirty pool.’ Chances are you read it one way, and not the other; which way you read it, on autopilot, isn’t up to me, the message-bearer. How you see it is something that happens entirely inside your own skull.

So, same words, two very different meanings. And no way for me to tell which way it’s gone.

An essential problem we have in teaching and training violence is that most people have no real experience with the concept. (This is only a bad thing in the context of training. In the context of daily life, it’s a good thing that the vast majority of people never experience violence to the degree we mean when we say the word… unlike, say, the population of Rwanda.) It is the never-ending job of the instructor to clue people in, give them physical examples to connect to the words, and to do our best to connect it to everyday experiences. (Like mentioning the ‘funny bone’ when we talk about nerve targets–nearly everyone’s whacked their ulnar nerve hard enough to momentarily kill their hand.) Recently, however, it occurred to me that when speaking of the difference between sport and violence, martial arts and murder, competition and destruction, we’ve been coming from the wrong side of the argument.

While most people have not experienced life-changing violence, many have, at one time or another, experienced injury in sport. Whether as adults or children, we’ve all taken a hard hit, been knocked ass-over-tea-kettle, and/or had the wind knocked out of us. We’ve been contused, lacerated, pulled muscles, tweaked joints and taken a bump on the head that made us see stars. And we’ve all gotten back up, shook it off, walked it off, and pressed on and fought through for personal honor, for toughness, for the team, or maybe just because we didn’t want to miss out on all the fun.

As nasty as some of those things may have felt, or seemed, or been they were not injuries as we must define them for violence–if you were able to push through and overcome the physical symptoms with force of will you were definitely hurt (perhaps even enough to make someone else quit) but you were not injured the way we mean it when we’re talking violence.

If you’ve lived a full enough life to experience the above, you’ve probably had the misfortune of seeing the other side of it–people broken in such a way that no force of will, no matter how strong, can change the state they find themselves in. They’re out cold, or flopping around incoherent, or screaming nonsensically; the match is stopped, the game is paused as medical personnel rush to the fallen’s aid. They don’t walk off the field triumphantly, they’re carried to the hospital.

At a recent live training I recognized some ‘sporting types’ among the clients–people who were wearing gear associated with martial arts, full-contact and no-holds-barred-style competitions. It can be hard to make our case to such people–when I say ‘violence’ and ‘injury’ they nod like they know but it’s very often a different picture they see in their head. They see the hard-won results they know can only be achieved in the ring through bigger-faster-stronger, and they are usually skeptical of injury as a show-stopper if only because of the number of times they themselves have ‘fought through injury’ and won the match in spite of their ‘injuries.’

Instead of my usual competition vs. destruction rant I simply asked the question:

“How many of you have taken a hit, had the wind knocked out of you, seen stars, had something hurt like crazy in a game or match and yet you were able to fight through it, keep playing, continue to compete, etc.?”

Most people raised their hands. I was actually a little bit surprised by that. So far so good.

Then I asked:

“How many of you have seen someone go down in a match or game such that they couldn’t get back up, the refs went crazy trying to stop the game so medical personnel could get to them, and they had to leave the field on a stretcher and go straight to the hospital?”

Fewer people raised their hands, but still a goodly amount.

“Okay,” I said, “In violence, we’re only ever interested in the second one.”

And then I added, “Because, as you all know, you can shake off the first one, no problem.”

I swear my third eye was blinded by all the psychic light bulbs going off. Everybody got it. Everybody. And I didn’t even have to argue the point.

Best of all, the most hardcore of the competitors lost their skepticism and became acutely interested in getting to work.

One of the key features of the sociopath is that he sees everyone as essentially the same–a piece of meat to be butchered. Sociopaths look at everyone this way, regardless of personality, skill, or ability.

A big strong guy with a black belt looks the same to him as a sleeping little girl. The sociopath understands that both their skulls open the same way, their eyes yield to equal pressure, and they both die when their throats are cut.

The sociopath disregards the things that set them apart; he will not interface with their personalities, or the big strong guy’s black belt-level skill, or his massive muscles. He will only concentrate on the things that they are both susceptible to.

In order to use violence successfully, in order to have an equal chance of survival, so must you. Don’t get caught in the sucker’s game of interfacing at higher levels, of showing respect for the person, his skills or physical power. Go straight for the meat.

The Four Levels of Interaction

As a person – social

This is trying to change behavior, mood, or motivation. This is where most people would like to keep the situation.

As a skill-set – anti-social

This is trying to out-wrestle him, or out-technique him in a 90 mph (144+ kph) chess game. This is a duel in which the most skilled practitioner will typically win. It is ‘civilized violence’ and seen as ‘fighting fair.’

As an animal (via strength, speed, stamina) – anti-social

This is pitting your strength against his, trying to out-maneuver or outlast him, going blow for blow – this typically looks pretty brutal and ugly. A lot of struggle where the best specimen prevails. This is seen as brutish, desperate and decidedly ‘uncivilized.’

As a piece of meat – asocial
This is regarding him as a physical object beholden to the natural laws of the universe. Paying no heed to the person, the skill, or the ability. This is seen as almost universally ‘bad’–people who do this naturally are classified as ‘evil’ in a social setting. This is interfacing with him as a thing that can be broken down and rendered nonfunctional.

It’s interesting to note that these four levels correspond to different ranges and comfort zones.

Interfacing with the person can be done from across the street, a distance from trouble where most people feel safe (they can always take off running if it gets out of hand).

Interfacing with his skill-set is almost always done at a pace away, with the contestants circling to get a feel for the other guy’s skill level, feinting and parrying and otherwise dancing around. It’s all about giving yourself enough room to see what he’s doing and try to counter it.

Interfacing with his physical abilities is done skin-to-skin, but that’s as deep as it goes.

Interfacing with the frailties of the flesh is done beneath the skin–true injury is about disregarding the sanctity of the body and simply destroying it.

What-ifs, Buts and Maybes

The kinds of questions people ask during training can tell you a lot about where their head is at and at which level they’re stuck on. The important thing to note is that none of their worries have any impact on injury whatsoever.

The ‘Socialist’
The person who is uncomfortable with the whole idea of conflict will ask questions that dance around the issue from across the street, like, “How can I tell if he wants to hurt me?” and such.

The Duelist
People trained in martial arts usually get hung up on interfacing with his skill. They’ll ask the most what-ifs, like, “What if he throws a spinning back kick?”, “What if he counters my joint lock?” and “What if he’s holding the knife like this?” They are also overly concerned with blocking–both in doing it and worrying about having it done to them.

The Animal
Untrained people who can come to terms with the idea of conflict usually end up fixated on physical attributes. For smaller, less athletic people it manifests as worry about how they’ll fare against bigger, stronger, faster adversaries; big, strong folks have the opposite problem–they typically believe they cannot be defeated by ‘lesser’ beings.

Sociopaths & Butchers
Almost no one shows up comfortable with injury as a starting point.

Another interesting thing to note is that progressing through the levels is not linear. Socialists don’t usually walk through the others to arrive at injury. They go one of two ways–either they dig in their heels and cram their heads into the sand and will never, ever cross the street, or they go straight from where they are to injury (though sometimes with a short stop-over at the animal level).

Duelists are another thing entirely. It is often very difficult to wean them off of the idea that they need to respect and/or thwart his skill before they can be effective. If they do move on, it’s usually with a long stop-over at the animal level. His skill bothered them before; now they’ve transferred that worry to his physical abilities. Those who have taken the long walk from skill to animal to injury are typically the most evangelical about the whole process. (As opposed to those who went straight from social to injury. They usually don’t see the whole experience as that big a deal.)

Animals are easier to nudge into interfacing directly with the meat of the matter. They’re pretty close, conceptually, and they just need to be shown how to direct their efforts away from strong points and into the weak ones. (Instead of going strength-to-strength, go strength-to-eyeball.)

If you’re reading this I’m going to assume that you don’t have a problem with violence in a general sense, that you’re not hung up on the social aspects from across the street.

So where are your hang ups? What are you stuck on? Are you worried about what he’ll do if he’s skilled? Or bigger-stronger-faster? Be honest with yourself. You’re letting yourself down if you lie–you’re not going to get any more effective that way.

If the idea of going after a trained Goliath makes you sweat (more than the usual, healthy amount, I mean) then you need buckle down and study up on injury. Seek out photos of sports injuries (for broken joints and twisted, nonfunctioning limbs). Autopsy reports from non-firearm killings–especially where the victim was beaten to death–are illuminating. Troll the internet for videos of prison fights and violent muggings.

Essentially, look for anything where the survivor is interacting with the other person as a piece of meat.

You’ll be repulsed and comforted simultaneously.

Most of what goes on in martial arts and combat sports works because people quit.

They quit because it hurts, or because they’re exhausted, or because they start to listen to the little voice that’s telling them everything will be a lot better if they’d just give in and give up.

More often than not it’s a combination of all these things, at once; the question gets asked often enough, with each blow, “Why don’t you just quit?” until they hit that personal threshold and just can’t take any more.

Any technique that isn’t about career-ending, crippling injury is about compliance, about making the person submit. Convincing them to quit. This is fine when the outcome isn’t critical, when what happens next is nice and social. It’s great for the ring and the dojo. In fact, without this, sport becomes impossible without sickening ‘accidents’; the dojo runs out of students as they succumb, one by one, to the brutal endpoint of their training.

A Killer Isn’t Going To Quit

Relying on your ability to make people quit, to have a higher pain tolerance, better conditioning and an indomitable will–to outlast your foe while working him to the point where he caves–will get you killed in the place where those things don’t matter.

If your would-be murderer is a quitter at heart, chances are you’ll be fine. But if he isn’t… if he doesn’t care about pain, or how tired he is, and he lacks that little voice that the sane call caution, well, he’s not going to quit. Unless you know how to remove choice from the equation, he’s going to kill you. Even if it takes him a little bit of work to get you there.

If he’s a killer, he knows it’s not about making you quit. He knows it’s not about technique, or speed, or strength. It’s about results.

He won’t waste his time engaging or setting you up. He’ll go straight for those results, breaking you, shutting you down to the point where there’s nothing you can do–not even quit–he’ll remove choice from the equation and treat you like meat to be butchered.

Your only hope is to know how to get those results, too; to know why those results happen so you can make them happen every single time, and get it done first.

Are You Out Of Your League?

Toughness, bravado, ego, superior technique–these things mean nothing in violence.

Going against a killer when the prize is your life is no time to hope for the best with a suitcase full of techniques you don’t fully understand–techniques that you hope will work but can’t articulate why they do.

If you don’t know, with surety, in your head and in your gut, the result you’re gunning for and why that result occurs, you’re out of your league when it comes to violence.

And in violence there are only two kinds of people: those who know what they’re doing–precisely–and the dead.

Recently I was lucky enough to have a sit-down conversation with some very talented and long-training martial arts enthusiasts. Talk turned to the idea of knock out punches. As the holy grail of any fight–in or out of the ring–I was interested in hearing their perspective on the subject, especially their mechanical understanding of the phenomenon. What it boiled down to was this: “When you hit him on the button, the body just shuts down.”

When I asked for elaboration, it turned out that that one sentence was pretty much the end of it. ‘The button’ was the chin, so the ‘how’ was covered–”hit him on the chin.” (Though this is an awfully thin ‘how’.) The ‘why’ was completely missing. No one had any idea, really. It was just something that sometimes happened, and when it did it was awesome; when it didn’t it meant you were in for a drawn-out scrap.

You can see hours and hours of video on the net of (mostly) young men getting knocked unconscious–and yet, there are almost as many instances (if not more) of people getting hit ‘on the button’ and powering through just fine. Why should that be?

Everyone who trains, whether a martial artist or combat sports practitioner, expects that what they know will work. They’ve been told it works, it worked when it was shown on them, and (hopefully) they were able to make it work in training. So the expectation is there–what you know works. You’d bet your life on it, right?

My question to you is ‘why does it work?’ Seriously. Think about it. Not just right now–spend some time on this. In the end, if you can’t articulate why something works, chances are you can’t make it work every time you need it to. And that’s not something you can bet you life on.

Next week I’ll be back with the answer. In the meantime, really give it some thought: Why does it work?