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The fastest way to ingrain the TFT System into your subconscious is to follow a specific path of instruction. Now there are two ways to accomplish this.
“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,
And if the other guy has anything to say about it, then that’s just too damn bad. For him.
Over the years we’ve tried many different ways to talk about ‘the attitude’ you have to have to enter into violent conflict. Most recently we’ve talked about ‘intent’ and ’cause-state’–in the former you have to want to do it, and in the latter we give you all the reasons why you want to be doing rather than getting done.
In the end, all the different ways of talking around the subject swirl into the singular drain of ego. Namely, YOU. Violence is all about YOU, all the time. It’s about what YOU want, what YOU’RE doing to him and getting all of that done to the exclusion of all else.
The other guy has no say in the matter–if he’s busy doing something, that’s his problem, not yours. You are here to commit base acts of savagery on him, and he’s just here to provide motive and venue. (Injuries don’t happen in a vacuum, people…)
For him, his only hope is to escape or kill you. If he gets away, it’s merely annoying. If he kills you, well, by definition there was nothing you could do–so don’t sweat it.
This leaves you free to concentrate on YOU doing things to him. If he tries to block or counter he’s just delaying the inevitable. If he gets in the way or screws with your technique then do as my brother says and “take it out on him when you get him on the ground.”
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.
The other day I posted this video on my Facebook page and got some interesting responses to it. First off, watch the video for yourself:
I posted this video because it showed excellent examples of strikes that cause injury… as well as punches and kicks that are ineffective. That alone was all I wanted people to comment on and learn from this video.
Most, however, focused on the fact the video showed security guards using excessive force against drunken thugs.
I got loads of private messages as well as comments to this effect. In fact, others reposted the video on their FB pages, decrying the fact this was outrageous behavior on the part of security and explaining how it would never fly in their country.
The general point they drove home was this type of response would land security personnel in their country in jail for excessive force. There were calls for better training for supermarket security personnel (really?).
I found this outcry humorous due to the fact that this was CCTV footage from Siberia… yes, Siberia. That part of the world has quite a “different” view on “excessive force”. As one of my Russian friends noted, he thought the security personnel were rather “restrained” in their response. Gee, maybe the world isn’t so black-and-white when it comes to violence like so many well meaning North American’s wish it were. read this entry »
The title refers to the way I like to answer questions that have nothing to do with the needs of violence — questions about legality, appropriateness, blocking, defending against this or that attack, “but what if he–”, etc.
I’m the first to admit it’s snarky and over-the-top — racing straight to an extreme to make the point. But the point stands:
The worst among us are the best at violence; they are feared because they are socially unencumbered and shockingly direct in their action.
The winners in violence aren’t thinking in terms of what their victim will do, or about protecting themselves. They just hurt people.
The losers (and potential losers) in violence are preoccupied with a whole host of things that just don’t matter.
…Or, another way to look at it, anything that doesn’t result in an injury is a waste of your time.
Much is made in the media over our brutally direct and stripped-of-sugar-coating training for life-or-death self-defense. Tim’s experiences in London last year and our recent coverage by a CBS affiliate focused almost entirely on the shock value of “killing with your bare hands” and the obvious moral and legal distance between stomping a downed man and what constitutes both a fair fight and “reasonable force.”
The chief problem here is a disconnect between what we’re teaching and the civilized person’s understanding of what’s acceptable to do in a “fight.”
I’ve illustrated this ridiculous gap in the past by writing about how you can append any problem you think may result in or require violence with “…so I gouged out his eye.” Let’s go straight for the bone on this one and change it out for “…so I broke his neck.”
“A guy gave me a dirty look… so I broke his neck.”
“A guy called me names… so I broke his neck.”
“A guy wanted to ‘kick my ass’… so I broke his neck.”
“After emptying the clip into the crowd he started to reload… so I broke his neck.”
Only one of those comes close to making any sense at all, and yet it’s the first three nonsensical constructions that the media focus on. Why?
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, “
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.
Below is a question we recently received that I imagine might be on your mind as well.
“In some of your DVD footage the eyes are the target for the first injury and in other footage the eyes are, say, the third injury target.
“You emphasize the importance of going for a throw only AFTER creating an injury. Shouldn’t this advice apply also to striking the eyes? Because of peripheral vision, which you do refer to in the training, the eyes are NOT easy to strike successfully in the alert subject. Blinking, closing the eyes or moving the head can all diminish or completely negate the effectiveness of an eye strike. Furthermore, if you go first for the eyes and miss, the subject will be on guard against another strike and you will have lost the element of surprise.
“In consideration of the above, would it not be good advice to approach the eye strike like the throw — to be used only AFTER you have effected a prior injury?”
This is a great question, especially since, as you note, the body invests a lot of effort and energy in protecting the eyes. The bony protrusions of the orbits, the powerful bands of muscle that actually press the eye balls into the back of the sockets when the eyes are squeezed shut, as well as the overwhelming strength of the blink and flinch reflexes all add up to a near-impregnable fortress to keep those delicate structures intact. When all of this is working as it should the eyes themselves tend to escape injury, with most of the brunt being taken up by the soft surface tissues — seen when most punches to the face cause the lids to swell shut and bruise, leaving the eye ball itself untouched.
There are several things we must do in order to bypass all this automated protection:
Strike from outside/beneath his peripheral vision,
Put an appropriate tool all the way through the target, and
Strike with our entire mass so we end up standing where he was standing.
All of these factors can be seen at work in basketball, the number one place to find information on eye injuries. It’s also interesting to note that in basketball everyone knows it’s on, is alert, and is expecting to see hands near their faces.
If we stand in front of the man and reach out with our arm to do the work, he’s going to see it coming. Even if he only catches a shadow of movement, the blink/flinch reflex is powerful and automatic. If he closes his eyes and turns his head, you may not get the eye injury proper — but you are still making him react to what you are doing — and now he is blind (eyes squeezed shut) and off balance (more on this later).
To minimize the chances for this on an initial strike, you want to come up under a 45 degree plane off the cheekbones. (Notice that if you stare straight ahead, you can’t see your feet. This is the space you want to move your hand through.)
It’s also important to understand that we are not going to be able to injure the eye with the ‘ninja cat scratch.’
We are not trying to make contact with just our fingertips. We have to break the plane of the body.
Fighters think in terms of the sanctity of the skin, and think to the surface of the eyes. Killers deny the sanctity of the skin and think all the way through the body.
You’re not going to touch his eyes with your fingertips — you’re going to put your hand through his skull, driven home with your entire mass. You’re going to get your hand wet to the second knuckles in his eye sockets. In addition, you’re going to shot-put his brain for traumatic brain injury (‘TBI’ — a concussion).
You need to end up standing where he was standing, driving your entire mass through his space, forcing him to stumble backwards off balance. This not only ensures that you struck with your mass but also puts you into position to break the next thing without having to run after him. And if he goes down (which is likely, since the mechanisms of balance are in the head, which you just struck and drove through) then you can start stomping him on the ground.
None of these three things happen in isolation — it’s all one strike.
If it all works perfectly then you end up giving him a full-bodied strike through the head — a knockout blow — where your fingers happen to get wet in his eye sockets with resultant injuries to the eyes.
If you don’t get the eyes: you’ve still momentarily blinded him (blink/flinch reflex), given him a TBI, and taken his balance… all of which give you the time and space to break something else.
So even if it goes wrong (no actual eye injury) it’s all right, as long as you know what to do next and take advantage of what you made him do.
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.
The intelligent use of violence involves every means available — all bets are off and no holds barred. You literally do whatever you want to the man (this is, after all, what we mean by ‘free’ in ‘free fighting’). We have the ages-old rock to the head; we can break his joints by putting the torque in Torquemada; we can use the happy constancy of gravity and other assorted physical laws to line up the ultimate rock to the head, by throwing him into the regolithic embrace of Mother Earth.
But which one is better? Which one is a more intelligent use? Is there veracity to the implied hierarchy of striking, joint breaking and throwing?
The answer to all of those questions lies in the definition of injury in violence: body weight in motion applied through a target. We all know that injury is the only thing that means anything in violence, it is where violence begins and simultaneously ends, it is the ultimate goal. We also know that striking, joint breaking and throwing all result in injury when done correctly. What most people don’t realize is that these three seemingly disparate ‘techniques’ for causing injury are really all one in the same — they are three different expressions of the same idea.
Striking is easy enough for people to grok; body weight in motion through a target, the rock to the head. Or, to ‘fancify’ it, the fist through the ribs, the stomp to the throat. Every human being has an innate understanding of this, whether they know it or not. Add a stick or a knife to the outer end of this and we have what looks like choreography for the six o’clock news. Everybody, everywhere, is doing it!
Joint breaking is where almost everyone gets left behind. It puts the ‘fancy’ in ‘fancy pants.’ Now you must possess the wileyness of the monkey, the speed of the cheetah and the suppleness of the cockroach, right? Probably not, given that an excellent joint break can occur ‘accidentally’ in an American football game from nothing more advanced than one guy falling on another.
Throwingis even more ‘advanced’ than joint breaking, right? I mean, it’s last on the list, and who really has the inhuman strength to pick up and hurl a 300 pound screaming man to the deck? Well, very few people, if you put it in those terms. If we change those terms, say to defining a throw as an uncontrolled fall into the ground (uncontrolled for him, not you), then literally anyone can do it. If a two-year-old can trip a grown man such that he ends up with a broken wrist, then so can you.
All three of these are still body weight in motion applied through a target. Striking is obvious because the body weight is yours and the target is something obvious, like a knee or a groin. Joint breaking is still body weight in motion through a target, only now the target is a joint that is stressed at its pathological limit, i.e., ‘ready to blow.’ Throwing is the only truly deceptive one — you will typically use your body weight in motion to get him off balance and falling, using his body weight in motion applied through a target (him falling on his head) with the striking surface being the planet rather than one of your body parts.
Let’s take a look at a truly simple application of all of these ideas simultaneously: you’ve injured him, he’s down on one knee, his back to you, slightly off to your right. You have his left wrist held fast in both of your hands, his arm straight out from his body (parallel to the ground). What happens if you lunge through his arm, striking the back of his extended elbow with your hip, and then rotate 180˚ to your left (a lunge with a full pivot into the other forward stance). Well, let’s see: his elbow will break and he’ll be hurled to the ground by the drive and full rotation.
Is it a strike, a joint break, or a throw?
Rhetorical, I know, because you already have the answer — it’s all three at once. Body weight in motion applied through a target results, in this case, a strike that breaks the elbow and powers a throw.
So which one is superior? Does this mean that striking ‘comes first?’
Hardly. What it means is that joint breaking and throwing are just special cases of striking — striking can’t come before either because they are themselves strikes.
There is no hierarchy. There is only ever body weight in motion applied through a target. It’s how you mix up those two elements that decides whether it ends up being a vanilla strike, or a broken joint, or a hard fall.
And injury being injury, they are all equal in the eyes of the ER radiologist — and so they should be to you.
The title refers to the way I like to answer questions that have nothing to do with the needs of violence — questions about legality, appropriateness, blocking, defending against this or that attack, “but what if he–”, etc.
