December 7, 2010 by Chris Ranck-Buhr
A man approaches you on the street with a proposition:
“See that guy over there?” He indicates a big, strapping fellow, his 6’4″ frame enrobed in 300 lbs. of muscle. “He’s coming over here to wrestle you to the ground and choke you out for a million dollars. If you can pin him instead, I’ll give you the million.”
“B-but,” you stammer, “I don’t want to wrestle him!”
The man sniffs. “Doesn’t matter — he wants the million. Here he comes — best of luck!”
How does it feel to suddenly have this contest thrust upon you? To have to worry about your performance, and how it will stack up to his experience level?
For all you know, he could be very good at wrestling — and even if you, yourself, are no slouch in the ring, he’s clearly way outside your weight class. And much, much stronger. As he begins to sprint toward you, you notice he’s a lot faster, too.
How’s it feel now?
Let’s try a different tack:
read this entry »
November 22, 2010 by Tim Larkin
“How do you deal with a Jerk?”
That’s the number one self defense question I get from people who still don’t understand what we’re up to in TFT.
Invariably at a seminar (and at least 10 times a week via email) someone will pose this question to me:
“Tim, (then he describes how some jerk is pushing this guy’s buttons, then says) …I don’t want to kill the guy… but… can’t I just hit him to shut him up?“
Then the guy goes on to ask what targets are “safe” to hit to “hurt but not kill him.”
Well, I guess all my writing and speaking on the subject just isn’t getting through to these people. So I’m gonna share 2 videos with you now that I think will help graphically illustrate my answer. Hopefully this will do the trick.
read this entry »
October 30, 2010 by Chris Ranck-Buhr
All successful violence is mechanically identical — the delivery of kinetic energy to disrupt human tissue and degrade function to the point of capitulation, unconsciousness or death.
That’s just a fancy way of saying all violence is about “beating the crap out of him” until he won’t, or can’t, get back up.
This is the truth about everything from fists and boots to sticks and knives and on up into firearms and explosives. The only difference in all those approaches is the amount of kinetic energy that can be delivered over increasing distances. The rules for how and why it works remain constant.
Likewise, a loopy haymaker thrown by an untrained person and a technically precise punch thrown by a Karate black belt are functionally identical if they both result in a knockout. Same goes for someone slipping, falling and striking their head on the ground. The exact “technique” used to shut that brain off is far less important than the result itself.
That said, there are ways of ensuring that the desired result is the most likely outcome — but that comes not from studying the myriad of techniques and training systems out there but from looking at the physics and physiology of the injury and reverse-engineering for repeatable ways to get that result.
read this entry »
April 9, 2009 by Chris Ranck-Buhr
We work both ends of the violence training
spectrum and all points in between — we go from the simplest application that requires no more coordination than you got up off the couch and all the way up to techniques that are a marvel of balance, timing, skill and athletic ability.
We do everything that can be done in violence — striking, joint breaking, throwing, knife, stick, gun, multi-man, standing up or on the ground,
all at once. We have a 10-year curriculum —
in writing — that can take someone from zero to Master Instructor. And for all that, we also do ‘rock to the head.’
What does this mean for you?
It means that no matter what your goal in violence training, we can get you there.
If you’re just looking for immediate, street-lethal ‘self-defense,’ we can do that in two days or less.
If you’re looking for professional-level hand-to-hand combat skills, we can challenge you, and keep you busy, for a decade.
Our seminars, videos and manuals are a distillation of more than 20 years of experience, designed not to impress but to actually teach you what you need to know to get the job done right now. We could have very easily chosen to make things needlessly difficult to make ourselves look good, to make you jump though all the hoops for 20 years just like we did.
Instead, we took our understanding of the material — the way we do it now — and teach it the way we would to members of our own families. Straight to the core principles with no BS. No screwing around with things that won’t matter.
So what is the information in our seminars and information products distilled from?
Our 10-year curriculum, as taught at the San Diego Center, consists of more than 1,500 coordination sets in writing, each one an example of striking, joint breaking, throwing, with and against various tools (knife, stick, gun).
Striking
The use of body weight as a battering ram to smash, break, rupture, or otherwise wreck vital anatomy so it doesn’t work anymore. When you combine the 58 target areas (that can be smashed with your bare hands) with the various body tools used in striking (fist and open hand, forearm, elbow, shoulder, hip, knee, shin and foot (blade-edge, ball of foot and heel)) and the various ways of employing them (straight and cross punches, hooks, uppercuts, backhands, forehand hammers; straight, side, back and crescent kicks) you end up with an enormous number of possible combinations. More than you could learn in a lifetime of study. Far, far more than you could ever conceivably need in a lifetime of violent action.
Joint Breaking
The use of body weight and leverage to break or tear out joints, deforming the limbs and denying him the use of the limb from the broken joint outward. This is crippling injury. When you combine the 10 discrete joints you can break with your bare hands (neck, spine, shoulder, elbow, wrist, fingers, hip, knee, ankle) with the six base leverages (the six degrees of motion that joints can move through, bending-twisting-rocking, both forward and back) you end up with 36 basic joint breaking techniques. (It’s important to note that not every joint can be broken in every direction — for example, we can only break the elbow in one direction, not six.) If we take into account that we can place our mass & motive force on either side of the lever — we can push it one way or be on the other side and pull until it snaps — we get 72 basic breaks. This can be further complicated (or, more correctly, expanded with more options) when we take into account the multitude of ways to set up, hang on to, and get it done (breaking the elbow with the legs instead of the hands and arms, for instance). Again, we end up with more possible breaks than you can learn in a lifetime.
Throwing
The use of body weight against structure and balance, with the ultimate goal of smashing the brain against the ground. We’re looking for traumatic brain injury and/or a broken neck. There are five basic throws (leg sweeps, base-breaks, drop, hip and shoulder throws) which can be concatenated upward into innumerable techniques when you add variables like front and back, standing or on the ground, and all of the various ways to set up, hang on to, and execute the throws. This becomes another possible lifetime of study on just this topic alone.
Tools
All of the above can be done with tools — knife and stick. A knife becomes an extra handle for a joint break or throw; a stick becomes an added lever for both.
Multi-Man
Our baseline assumption is that he’s bigger, faster, stronger, armed, knows everything you do (and is better at it), and brought his friends. Then we use crippling injury to make none of it matter. We show you how to move to put yourself on the outside of the group — and how to put people down as you do so.
On the Ground
Injury is injury, whether we’re all standing up or laying down. We do all the things that are forbidden in MMA competitions — eye gouging, groin crushing, finger breaking — the things that make grappling not work so well. Instead of wrestling or going strength-to-strength, skill-to-skill we go for that ugly, crippling injury.
All At Once
If you think that’s a lot, we haven’t even begun to combine them — striking into a joint break and then executing a throw; or using a joint break to drive a throw; or breaking a joint mid-air during a throw. Throwing the man and riding him down, striking him into the ground. While using a knife. Or a stick. From the ground. While he’s got a gun.
You are only limited by your skill and imagination.
For all that, all of those myriad elements are unified by a single overarching goal — injury. You don’t need to know how to do all those things, combined and practiced over 20 years to stick your thumb in someone’s eye. In fact, you know how to do that right now, just having read those words.
All you really need is one small injury to radically change the situation in your favor.
You can learn that from any of our information products, or, better yet, a hands-on seminar.
PS. If you’re lucky enough to live in San Diego and like the idea of hitting the mats — hard — three times a week and being kept busy for a year — three years — 10 years! of learning something new at every class — we’d love to have you join our training community. Please feel free to contact me at
February 12, 2009 by Chris Ranck-Buhr
How hard would you stomp on a man’s neck if your life depended on it? Hard enough to break it, right? And how hard to you think that is? Probably with everything you’ve got. You’d do it as hard as you possibly could, and that’s the right answer. The human body is tougher than you’d think — it can take an awful lot of punishment before it breaks.
What about the eye? It’s far more fragile than the neck, and much easier to injure, if by “easy” we mean “requiring less effort.” Does this mean we can get away with striking the eye less hard than we would the neck?
Well, yes and no.
Yes, in an absolute sense — it’s possible to cause serious injury to the eye with an almost trivial engagement of effort. If you lacerate his cornea with your pinkie nail, you’ll effectively blind the man. His eyes will squeeze shut and begin to water profusely. He’ll have trouble keeping them open.
While this injury is sufficient, meaning we put enough effort into it to overcome the natural resiliency of the tissues involved, it’s far from optimal…
So the answer is no in a real sense. While there’s a good chance we could get away with doing less to the eye than the neck and still ending up with an injury, there’s also a chance, because we’re coming in at the weak end of the scale for effort, that we might not make it over that threshold for injury. What does this mean?
It means that if I believe I can “go light” on the eyes and still cause an injury, I might not go hard enough to actually get that injury. And then I’m screwed.
Far better to go after his eyes the same way you’d break his neck: put everything you’ve got into it. Not only are you guaranteed an injury (as long as you actually hit the target and follow all the way through, like a bullet would), but you stand a good chance of getting additional injuries from the sudden motion of his head (concussion) and a knockdown if you successfully take his balance in the bargain. None of that can happen if you go easy just because it’s the eye.
That initial stomp to the neck — with all your body weight over it, driven down and through as hard as you can — is a great reference point for all striking to all possible targets. No matter which important piece of anatomy you’re going for, from crushing the throat to crippling the arm via the radial nerve, you must strike them all as hard as you can. Same goes for joint breaks and throws.
“Getting away with something” means you were lucky that one time; crushing it beyond functioning takes all the luck out of it and gets you the desired result regardless of how the dice roll or the cards fall.
When you max out the laws of physics you know you’re going to break that neck, rupture that eye, put that man down so he can’t get back up again.
Anything less is leaving injury to chance. Most of the time it won’t make any difference — until your life is at stake.
December 9, 2008 by Chris Ranck-Buhr
Now that I have your attention…
This post is about the moment it all changed for you, the moment you realized you needed to know how to hurt people. The moment when the puzzle that is your personality, your social network and the world beyond your driveway all fell into place with a kind of awful clarity and made you sit back, winded, with a newfound unease in the pit of your gut. An unease that could only be quelled by knowing how to beat a man to unconsciousness or death with your bare hands.
The moment you realized that knowing how to use violence was the only thing that was going to get you back to enjoying life like you did in your prior state of blissful ignorance.
I’ll tell you about mine.
Lucky for me, it was one of those easy-to-miss two-paragraph news items on page A21, stuffed down as filler between all those ads for tire alignments and mattress stores. And yet, it must have been the perfect time for me to see it, because it hit me like a ton of bricks. Here’s the gist of it:
A local San Diego college student went down to Tijuana for some bar-hopping with his buddies. At some point during the night he became separated from the group and vanished. A couple of weeks later he was found in central Mexico, all splayed out on a voodoo altar, having been ‘used up’ in some hideous ritual. Bled out and eviscerated.
I was a college student in San Diego at the time, and had, on occasion, been to TJ. My first thought was, “That could have been me.” My second thought was, “No matter what, I am NOT going out like that.”
Up until those two small paragraphs I had been training — but casually, and with some ‘funny’ ideas about how violence worked. I found the idea of taking a man’s eye or breaking his spine (or otherwise permanently crippling him) to be morally reprehensible. I devised an elaborate system of target selection based upon the intent of the other man. In other words, if he just wanted to duke it out, then I’d only stun or knock the wind out of him. If he wanted to kill me, well, then it was on. But still, that whole eye thing bothered me.
‘Used up in a voodoo ritual’ burned all that crap out of my system in a searing flash — the world was not what I imagined it to be. If I wanted to continue living in it I would have to get deadly serious about the staying alive part. And that meant doing ANYTHING.
If things went to violence, no matter who chose it, I was going to be the one doing all the ugly, awful things — not the other way around. Period.
January 21, 2008 by Tim Larkin
Free Combat Training Principles
Secrets For Staying Alive When ‘Rules’Don’t Apply
What Color Crayon Should I Use For A Ruptured Spleen?
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Everyone is entitled to be stupid, but some abuse the privilege.
-Unknown
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Internet chat rooms are interesting arenas.
I received an email the other day from a client who forwarded some comments made about the TFT Mastery Program from one of these “chat” forums. TFT Mastery is a program designed to educate and train clients who desire to become TFT trainers.
The program has rigorous physical and academic standards. It is designed as such to produce trainers who can instruct the system physically and explain the physical trauma accurately. The physical part of the training occurs at the live seminars held throughout the year. Training time is logged and candidates are tested at every juncture to gauge their progress.
The academic portion is done online in between the seminars and, again, lessons are given and knowledge is tested. One of the tools I use is the “Anatomy Coloring Book” which is a standard text most medical schools use to quickly train students on the human body and its components.
The method of color-coding different bones, joints, and nerves has proved to be a time-tested method for rapid assimilation of this information as well as providing long-term ability to recall the information.
A TFT trainer is not just physically able to show you how to fight but must be able to accurately explain the trauma inflicted to the other guy as you strike these specific targets on the human body.
A certain “chat room black belt” was deriding any program that used coloring books and wondered if Crayola crayons were issued to TFT Mastery candidates. Which just goes to show how one-dimensional most combat sport and martial arts practitioners are when it comes to trauma.
They just want to see a new “technique” rather than understand how to systematically shut down the other guy(s) by understanding how to effectively deliver trauma to vulnerable areas of the human body.
To be able to deliver a strike is only one half of the equation — to know where to deliver the strike for maximum effect — EVERY TIME — is truly the acme of skill in hand-to-hand combat.
So I’ll let the “internet warriors” have fun with my coloring book requirements but they may be surprised what you can learn with a box of crayons…
Until next time,
Tim Larkin
Creator of Target Focus(TM) Training
http://targetfocustraining.com/
PS. To see how to systematically shut down some thug even if he’s threatening you with a knife, a gun or a club, you must check out the TFT ‘Nuclear’ Weapons DVD series. You can see what it’s about
here: http://www.targetfocusweapons.com/
