Tim Larkin’s Target Focus Training Combat Training Principles

“Secrets For Staying Alive When ‘Rules’ Don’t Apply”

The Mindset To Survive And The Will To Win

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“A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he’s not a man of action. You must act as you breathe.” – Georges Clemenceau
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So what was lacking in the training of the 3 survivors mentioned in my newsletter titled, When Surviving Isn’t Enough: The Critical Reason Why You Can’t Just Survive An Attack — You Must Win?

To refresh your memory we had a seasoned martial artist, a woman who attended numerous self defense workshops, and a 10 year veteran police officer with extensive defensive tactics training.

Each survived their violent encounter but none of them survived and won. My question to you was what was lacking in the training of each of the survivors?

Well according to the literally thousands of responses you readers gave me, here are the top 2:

1. Mindset
2. Will

Mindset by far was the most popular response. Often it was coupled with another term like “aggressive-mindset.” Most who responded with this answer felt the survivors’ training failed to develop the proper mindset to survive and win these encounters.

Those that offered “will” as the lacking ingredient usually stated that the training of the 3 survivors failed to provide them the “will” to use violence.

Some of you provided some very well thought out responses and your efforts are much appreciated. This exercise helped me to confirm that most people are being led off track by buzz words and tough talk favored by many chest-thumpers in the self protection industry.

All the talk about ‘mindset’ in this industry makes everyone sound the same. Most people still believe you need to be in a certain ‘state’ to be able to respond to violence. Color charts are drafted and everyone feels good about how to get ready to ‘kick some ass.’

And then there’s ‘will’.

Some people stated that the 3 survivors lacked the will to do injury and this was a failure of their training. But how do you train will? Think about how useful will is when it comes to things like losing weight or working out.

Believe me, many in this industry will tell you that’s exactly what to do. They’ll lecture you on mindset and come up with numerous drills to ‘install the will-to-kill.’

But neither mindset nor will is what lacked in any of the survivors training.

Large amounts of the training in all 3 of the survivors’ cases were devoted to proper mindset and will. Yet, as properly noted by you, it was not there when they needed it.

That is because mindset and will are NOT training objectives.

Proper training develops everything needed to survive and win. The problem is there is very little proper training offered to the general public.

Here’s an example:

We just got word from a TFT instructor traveling through Europe who saw an old training partner. This training partner was short and obese and had not trained in years yet recently he survived, and won, a violent encounter with 2 thugs.

When asked what happened he said he was in the city walking home one night when these 2 thugs, much bigger than he, jumped him.

The instructor asked what happened next.

The training partner said, “I knocked out the first guy and ran after the second but I got too tired and couldn’t keep up, so I just walked home.”

The instructor asked if there was any more to the story and he said “No.” He’d just been attacked by 2 thugs and he pretty much treated it as no big deal, even though this was his first encounter with real violence outside of ‘training.’

The fact that he was trained properly provided this man with the ability to survive and win a nasty criminal encounter against 2 bigger, stronger and faster thugs.

Here’s the thing. He wasn’t concerned about mindset nor did he have to rely on will to take action.

He was never told his obesity was a detriment to his ability to injure someone. He was given the skills necessary to get the job done using his human machine not by trying to look and move like some athletic instructor.

When the time came for him to use the skills, he was able to easily recognize the situation and apply his training. He didn’t need a color chart, to talk tough or to practice sticking his thumb into oranges to have the will to attack the eyes.

When his time came, his training worked seamlessly in the real world — something that didn’t happen for the 3 survivors in the last newsletter.

So be wary if you navigate the world of violence relying on mindset and will.

Neither of these, together or alone, provides you with the proper training. And it’s proper training that seamlessly gives you the necessary elements to survive and win, something many hope to tease out of the ‘mindset’ and ‘will’ debates.

So now the question becomes, “How do we know what proper training looks like?”

I’ve written about this in the past but as we dig deeper into the subject of “not just surviving but winning” I’d like to hear your take on what you think proper training is.

Use this link to send me your thoughts:http://www.askdatabase.com/campaigns/?af=36081

Until next time,

Tim Larkin
Master Close-Combat Instructor,
Creator of Target Focus Training

“When Violence Is The ONLY Answer”

PS. New self defense training class: Las Vegas March 7-9, 2008. This is where you learn to win… not just survive. And you do it in just 3 days. And it stays with you forever… even if you never practice again.

At first, it may be hard to wrap you mind around because it goes against everything you’ve ever been told or trained for or even believed. But it’s what people who win use. And when you understand it, you’ll know how to win too.

Las Vegas always fills quickly so don’t wait.

(c) Copyright 2007, The TFT Group

INJURY
Injury is a crushed throat, a broken knee, a torn out shoulder.

I got an email this morning from one of our instructors getting ready to do a 15 minute TFT presentation in South America. An interested group sprung the opportunity on him at the last minute and he asked me if I had any ideas for the ‘closer’, i.e., the One Idea to get across so that if you get nothing else out of a TFT presentation remember This One Thing.

Here’s my response:

Get them off of the idea of ‘technique’ (which is what they’ll see & try to compare to other techniques they’ve seen) and into the idea of injury. Most people think about ‘fighting’ inside their own body, or, at the most, at the end of their fist. In violence they need to shift their focus outside themselves and deep into the other guy’s body. What’s getting broken? How will that effect him? What does that do for me?

This is the difference between technique and injury.

• Technique is a punch, a kick, a cool joint lock.
• Injury is a crushed throat, a broken knee, a torn out shoulder.

While techniques can cause injuries, injuries can happen sans technique. You can break an ankle by stomping on it, dropping your knee on it, even falling and sitting on it with your butt. The technique is immaterial; all we really need is bodyweight driven through vulnerable anatomy. If it’s precise and ‘fancy’, fine. If it’s haphazard and ‘ugly’, that’s fine, too–as long as it’s bodyweight through anatomy we’ll end up with injury.

Injury changes everything in your favor.

When people see and think ‘technique’ they see coordination and think difficulty. They see the need for years of practice to perfect that technique. They do not expect themselves to be able to do it until they’ve spent that time perfecting it.

When people see and think ‘injury’, well, injuries happen all the time, and often due to nothing more than clumsiness, whether on the part of the injurer or injured person. (As an aside, a simple fall is a great example of this: how does someone break their wrist when they fall? They throw their hands out to break their fall and if they land just right we get bodyweight (their own) through vulnerable anatomy (the wrist joint at its pathological limit, meaning it doesn’t bend backwards any further without tearing something). All of this is braced and driven home by the planet, resulting in a broken wrist.)

Injuries are less mysterious and easier to ‘get’ than techniques. While very few people have experienced ‘good technique’, most everyone has experienced injury.

So, if you can get them all to make the mental flip outside of themselves and into (through!) the other guy’s body, replace the idea of technique with the facts of injury, you’re well on your way. And so are they.

Chris Ranck-Buhr
Master Instructor
Target Focus Training

http://targetfocustraining.com/

The Essential Differences Between Social Aggression and Asocial Violence

Social Confrontation is:

• Avoidable
• Survivable
• Can be solved using social skills.

Asocial Violence is:

• Lethal
• Unaffected by social skills
• and requires decisive action.

The violence that comes from social posturing is avoidable; it is often loud, dramatic and instantly recognizable. You get to see it coming. And that means you can dodge it if you choose to.

If you don’t choose to (or cannot) leave, these sorts of problems can be handled with the social tools we’re all familiar with. We’ve all talked our way out of a bad situation-you wouldn’t have made it this far in life if you weren’t good at negotiating.

We all know how to calm someone down. We all know how to capitulate. We also all know how to act like a jerk and add fuel to the fire and turn an argument into a shouting match, a shouting match into a fist fight. The important point here is that in social situations, you have a choice.

Social aggression is also eminently survivable. The typical goal in a bar fight is not to kill anyone-it’s simply to best the other person and dominate them physically. Does this mean you can’t be killed in a bar fight? Of course not. What we’re saying is that the death rate in the typical Saturday night punch-up is far lower than one would expect, with the bulk of fatalities being accidental, and the rest because one person really did want to kill the other. You can get killed in a bar fight, or an argument over a parking space, or any other trivial social status confrontation. It’s just highly unlikely.

Asocial violence, on the other hand, cannot be handled with social tools and is far less survivable. Negotiating with a serial killer is like arguing with a bullet-if it’s coming your way words are not going to deflect it. If someone has decided to stab you to death, capitulation only makes their work easier.

Confusing the Two

The big problem arises when we confuse the two-when we don’t know there’s a difference between competition and destruction, between social and asocial violence. No one’s going to get confused in the ring; we are all very good at recognizing social competition, a contest of strength, skill and desire. We cheer for our favorite and the best man wins. It works out great as long as we’re all playing by the same rules.

The big problem is competing with someone who wants to kill you. As social beings we try to drag our rules into a realm that is completely devoid of them-the asocial violent act. This is where things go terribly wrong. While we try to impose our rules to keep everything fair and above board, the killer is only recognizing the laws of physics and how they relate to physiology.

In other words, he’s going to stab you when you’re not looking, he’s going to kick you in the throat when you’re down. If things don’t look so hot for him he’ll capitulate to get you to let go so he can pull a gun and shoot you. He’ll use your social baggage against you.

Violence has nothing to do with competition or communication. It’s purely about destruction. The scariest person in the room is not the shouting, screaming, gesticulating weightlifter making snarling faces-it’s the 5’4″ gangbanger quietly sliding a blade out of his pocket. He’s not going to draw attention to himself; if he wants to kill you, he’s not going to talk about it. He’s just going to get it done.

The good news is that true sociopathy is rare. The bad news is that you can’t really tell the difference. Nor can you read people’s minds to find out their intentions. Faced with these realities, you need a tool that is going to work 100% of the time on 100% of the population-one that is going to work equally well on everyone you use it on. Social persuasion techniques like pain compliance and submission holds require the other person to play by the rules and capitulate.

It’s not going to work on everyone, and the people you want it to work on most-criminal sociopaths-are just plain not going to cooperate. This begs the question: why is it that the people who are most successful at using violence have almost no training? What makes the criminal sociopath so effective?

Social Permissions: Monkey See, Monkey Do

As social, sane people, we tend to think of violence in social terms-either by framing everything as the schoolyard David and Goliath or by believing that if we take our social rules with us into the void place we can somehow hang onto our humanity and therefore not stoop to ‘their’ level.

We tend to think of violence as a force continuum where if he yells at you, you can yell at him. If he pushes you, then you can push him. If he throws a punch then you can hit back. We also believe that the worst kind of violence, that which results in death, happens somewhere out at the end of this progression, if it gets pushed far enough.

The problem is that it is not necessary to get “worked up” or walk through all these various steps to get to serious crippling injury or death; punching someone in the throat or stabbing them in the neck is readily available at all times, in all places.

This is what the criminal sociopath knows.

Can someone ramp up through all the steps and whip themselves into a frothy frenzy that ends in killing? Yes. But what the criminal sociopath knows is that he can get there instantaneously. He can go from smiling and shrugging to stabbing in the amount of time it takes him to reach into his pocket.

And the really scary part is so can you.

Violence is always available; you just have to choose to do it. You don’t need to walk through the social dance one step at a time to get there. You don’t need to get ready, or drop into a fighting stance, or give a verbal warning. You can swing the tool of violence whenever you wish, at a moment’s notice. And this is exactly what you must to do in the face of asocial violence in order to survive.

Wednesday… Part 3, the final installment of this Social vs Asocial Violence post.

All for now,
Tim

http://targetfocustraining.com/