Which Is More Important in Self-Defense, the Physical or the Mental?

The knee-jerk answer is “both,” and one that I would have agreed with until recently. But the longer I’ve trained and the more experience I’ve gotten the more I’ve drifted from one extreme to the other.

When I first started training back in the ’80s, I put the physical before everything else. After all, if you don’t know what to do and how to do it how can you hope to mount an effective self-defense? Punching, kicking, targets, techniques, joint breaking & throwing — these are the nuts and bolts of self-defense. With them you have a chance. Without them you have nothing.

How to explain, then, the superior technicians who were getting their asses handed to them on the streets?

And how to reconcile that with the crude bruisers I knew who had no training but plenty of notches in their knuckles?

As I moved my personal training slider from an infatuation with the physical execution and toward the attitude to get it done I noticed a direct effect on that physical execution.

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It boggles my mind sometimes, how we can be as careful and clear as possible in making the case for surviving and winning in violence and still have it come out garbled on the other end.

But I suppose people hear what they want to hear, and if all your preconceptions about violence have you in the victim role, then all violence is about victimization. And fear.

1. If they do it first, the situation resolves in their favor and,
2. They themselves are not immune to such an injury.

Number one is simple enough. It’s what separates the winners from the victims in violent conflict. The real power, however, comes from number two. If it works the same on you, then it probably works the same on every human on the planet.

If you’ve already been stabbed because stabbing is what he’s up to, ignoring it, trying to talk to him or running only keep you in the victim-space he needs to get the job done.

On today of all days, I can imagine at least one reason.

In the 14 years that I taught hand-to-hand combat through a university recreation department I got called on the carpet with this, and similar questions, about once every six months. My answer was always the same, and though uneasy, the powers that be were satisfied every time.

On the surface, there is no good reason. Or, more correctly, we don’t like to think we live in a world where there would ever be a good reason for the average citizen to know how to take a life with his or her bare hands. The natural reaction for anyone happening across this information, this training, out of context should be to recoil in horror. It stands in stark contrast to the world we believe we are building and would like to imagine we live in. A world where it would never be necessary for anyone — ourselves or our children — to know how to do this.

But you know better.

There’s the world we think we’re building, but that paradise of love, comfort and all the good things about being social animals really only exists where we can physically reach — the immediate space around us and the confines of our own homes. In those places we live in the world we make on a daily basis, a place where we actively work to do the opposite of acrimony, strife and violence.

But it’s all imaginary.

That’s not to say it’s not real — my own personal and home lives are the exact opposites of the work I do — but it is entirely dependent on me actively keeping it so. And it’s as fragile as a little girl’s tea party with pets and dolls. All it takes is a single person who has chucked the rules and believes in complete opposition as I do and is willing to step across those imaginary boundaries and impose his own physical reality upon me.

None of the imaginary ideas protect you from the physical facts of violence — not fairness, not personal dignity, not how much someone loves you, not even the difference between right and wrong. This is where we become such brilliant victims, when we think these things will protect us from violence. Living well and treating people fairly — being demonstrably good — may work to keep you out of trouble, making violence less likely to start, but it does nothing for you once the trigger is pulled.

I wish we lived in a world where those things did matter in the face of violence. I wish my children had no need or cause to learn how to hurt people. But ignoring it won’t make it go away. Wishing it didn’t exist only makes you a victim when someone who knows the facts picks you as prey. So while I work to build that world we all wish we lived in, I’ll hedge my bet by knowing how to break someone’s neck in case the world of ideas ever fails me.

It is demonstrated, with sickening regularity, that a single person (or small group) who knows how to use violence can wreak great havoc on much larger groups of people who don’t. Having a single person on the other side who knows what to do, how to act, how to meet that threat with an equal threat can change everything. The balance ceases to be one predator among many prey and becomes at least an even chance. Which is far better than most sane, law-abiding citizens ever get in the face of violence.

When confronted with the question, my answer was always the same. It’s easy to dismiss it when it’s just an abstract concept. Breaking someone’s neck is antithetical to everything we hope for. So I made it personal:

“If someone came to kill your mother, wouldn’t you want her to know how?”

It’s not nice, it’s not comfortable, it is the unthinkable. But grudgingly, in the face of the world of ideas parting like fog before the murder’s blade, the answer is yes.

You’ll go after what you’re worried about.

If your primary fear is getting hurt then you’re stuck reacting to his actions, pulling back, attempting to defend yourself. Distance-wise, this places you exactly where he needs you to be to get whatever it is he wants done. It also gets you behaving in a non-threatening way, leaving him free to finish it. This baseline ‘going defensive’ is what makes people spectacular victims.

If your primary fear is what he’s doing then you’re stuck going after his limbs to block or counter or otherwise thwart his actions. Distance-wise you’re still too far away, that half-step, arms’-length that means you can’t strike with your mass. This also leaves him in control of his mass and balance, with you as a target right in front of him should he decide to step in and use that mass to strike you.

• The winners have no regard for what the victim is doing.
  They conspicuously ignore the actions of the person they want to hurt.
• The winners don’t bother with blocking or counters.
  They put all their efforts into getting the job done.
• The winners hurt people.
  Their only goal is injury, lots of it, following the victim to the ground and making him nonfunctional.

When we see this in action the natural response is: “How do I fight people who fight like that?“

The answer is that you don’t. Either you take them or they take you. Trying to defend yourself from them makes you a victim. Trying to fight them makes you a victim. Operating like they do gives you an even chance — and even that can be bent in your favor with every hour on the mats.

Learn the lesson: it’s always about the brain. And you getting over there and shutting it off.

Chris Ranck-Buhr
TFT Master Instructor

There’s only one way to train — HARD.

If you think going slow means easy, soft, light and painless, you’re dead wrong. Slow means correct — spot-on targeting, constantly driving your body weight through his structure to buckle it, full follow-through. When it’s done right it’s implacable, methodically cruel, painful, and, yes, even bruising. As it should be.

There’s a huge difference between pain and injury. Pain hurts, and then it’s gone — injury is lingering and long-lasting. Pain tells you that what’s happening would be truly terrible at full-speed, it reminds you what you’re here for. If you know what to do with it, pain can help you focus your efforts and fan the flames of your intent. Injury simply removes you from training and teaches nothing you didn’t already know.

If I hit the mats for a painless hour and walk off not feeling like I’ve been in a fight — not a mark on me the next day — I might as well of gone to a Jazzercise class instead. Really. I hit the mats to feel it, not play at it or pretend. I carry with me for the next couple of days the badges of honor that show I trained hard for violence — bruises, scratches, the marks that training knives leave on the body. The best are the most accurate and controlled, like dime-sized contusions precisely over the heart target.

This is not limping the next day. Or a nagging ache that never leaves your shoulder. If it impacts your ability to train after a day of rest, it was too much — that’s an injury, no matter how small. Pick up enough of those and pretty soon you can’t train at all.

As we’re fond of saying, “Anybody can take a punch. No one can take injury.”

I’m not telling you to ‘beat the crap’ out of each other. I’m telling you to get it right, every time — on your turn, you take exactly what you want. Your reaction partner doesn’t get to pick what happens, or how it goes down. He or she just gets to react. And you should expect no less when it’s not your turn. In fact, you want to demand it. Otherwise your parnter is slacking off and playing at it. Laxity is a sure sign of not taking it seriously. Or of a potentially deadly misunderstanding of what we’re up to here.

Precision is about control. Control means everything is tight, focused, and right at the edge without tumbling over. I want my partner to have total control over what I’m doing and where I’m going at all times during his turn — so I don’t get dumped on my head, thrown haphazardly onto one shoulder, or get something broken because he held it loosely and went for the target with sloppy technique.

When he gets it right it’s going to hurt — even going slow he’s going to put one bony square inch of him through one soft & squishy square inch of me with immovable structure behind it, meaning my rib cage will bounce off his elbow, and not the other way around. It should feel like I ran into a steel knob at the top of a concrete-filled post. I’ll save myself from true injury by reacting, but only just.

I’m going to do the same to him on my turn because anything less is screwing around, and sloppy gets you killed out there. I must practice with total precision and control so I can drive that head anywhere — straight into the concrete or tucked under for a roll as I will. I’ll tuck it one the mats, exactly, and I’ll pile-drive it outside, precisely. Getting exactly what I want instead of hoping for the best. When done right in practice, it’s gonna hurt. Just not permanently.

They say that pain is a great teacher, and I know this for a fact; I seek nothing but instruction every time I hit the mats. I’ve learned that what we do works, I’ve learned that pain can’t stop me, and I’ve learned to use it to focus my intent.

The trick is to get hungry for it… in lieu of that, there’s always Jazzercise.

The words we choose to describe things shade and flavor our perception of those things; this can be to our benefit or detriment. Any given word gives rise to a whole cloud of associations, some better than others. For example, take the words attacker and defender. It’s easy to associate speed, aggressiveness, initiative, strength, power and evil with the role of the attacker and tasked, hounded, reactive, protective and good with the role of the defender.

So which one is better to be, if you had the choice?

Again, this is one of those trick questions where everyone shouts, “Attacker!” and then turns around and uses the language and posture of the defender when it comes down to action. Why? Especially when you know it’s better to be the attacker — it works great for the criminal, the killer, the survivor… it means you have the initiative, you are, by definition, in the cause-state, doing instead of getting done.

And all it gets is lip service.

You do it because socially, it’s wrong. It’s evil, it’s immoral, it’s not what your mom, your clergy, or the cops would like you to do. Such behavior is corrosive to the social fabric; behaving like a killer is to take on the mantle of the killer. It’s unsporting. It’s unfair. It’s the very definition of cruel.

And you can’t think of yourself in those terms.

Now, I’ve tried to talk about this before, but maybe I’ve been too vague or too nice, I don’t know. But I’m here now to tell you:

You either see yourself as the person stomping on the downed man or you are the downed man.

No ifs, ands or buts.

And again, before you protest, check yourself. A lot of the language I see floating around when people talk “reality self-defense” is the language not of killers, but of people trying to justify that role, to feel better about it. Trying on the mantle of the killer, finding it distasteful, and then looking for logical constructs to make it fit better, to give yourself sufficient reason to try it on in the first place.

Justification can only effect mechanical performance in one direction — to make it poorer.

The attacker has no justification. This is why, socially, we find it distasteful, wrong, and evil. But all the attacker has to do is attack. One simple thing.

The role of the defender is a justifiable one. We can explain away our need to behave in a socially unacceptable way by virtue of being attacked. Because we have accepted the number two slot, and dumped ourselves into the effect-state, it’s okay with mom, et. al. The only problem is that being a defender is a very busy job, with lots to try to do. We have to register the attack, attempt to counter it, and only then may we attempt a counter-attack. If you’ve seen our live “knife-defense” demo, then you know how well that works out… And for those who haven’t seen it, here’s the breakdown: it works like gangbusters for the stabber, not so great for the stabee.

Even if you are resolved to be a bloodthirsty and vicious defender, you’re still applying the loser moniker. Best of luck with that.

Ultimately, you have to ditch even the idea of being an attacker — lose the attacker/defender dichotomy entirely. Because really, what makes a difference in violence is not self-defense, or even fighting — it’s all about hurting people. It’s what you’ll do when there are people around you who need to get hurt. Who need to get maimed, dropped on the ground, crippled so they stay there, and maybe even killed.

That’s all I train. When people ask me what I do, the simplest answer is, “I teach people how to kill sociopaths.” Not only is it the simplest, it’s also the most accurate. And after that, I don’t waste my time or breath trying to justify it — and most people demand justification after a statement like that — because trying to make them feel better about it is really just me trying to make me feel better about it. And there is no feeling better about it. In a social context, it’s wrong.

But we’re never talking about a social context, are we? Not unless the Virginia Tech shooting was a garden party. So there’s no feeling good or bad about it — there’s only what’s mechanically correct. And trying to make it sound or feel better just convinces us it’s okay to be in second place. We all know that’s a lie.

Or do we?

Depends on how much mat time you get. The more you actually model the behaviors we present, the more comfortable you’ll be with the mechanical facts of violence, and seeing yourself as the person doing them. At that point it stops being words and becomes the only way to be in violent conflict.

Violence starts where choice ends.

For social and antisocial interactions, this means you get to choose whether or not to be involved, and how deep your involvement will go.

On the asocial side, you won’t have that choice.

This gives us a nice, clean delineator between violence and Everything Else.

As you’ve heard us say time and time again: if you have to ask, the answer is probably ‘no.’

The reason we say this is because once you commit, your choices dwindle dramatically. Once you cross that line, you’re in it ’til you finish it.

There are, to be sure, small choices to make–which target to wreck next, when to stop–but none of them involve ‘unviolencing’ him. Once you break that wrist, you can never go back to just holding hands.

Make the choice you can live with.

Be man or woman enough to be called a coward.

I’ve walked away from situations where I was legally and morally in the right and no one present would have objected if I’d laid the jerk out. I’ve walked away while dodging ego-withering epithets and slurs to the accompaniment of the loud and obvious sound of my social standing peg being taken down a notch.

I did this gladly because I was handed the luxury of choice and, to be quite frank, I just didn’t feel like it. ‘It’ being the stomping, the screaming, and then having to do it to all his friends while getting punched in the head three or four times, maybe getting stabbed or shot or killed, or arrested and spending the night in jail, making bail, paying a lawyer and then getting sued. Not to mention having to look over my shoulder every time I stop to take a piss.

All that crap is worth my life, but it’s not worth my time.

Social standing is a manufactured illusion; losing it is nothing compared to the loss of an eye, or freedom, or your life. If your friends are truly your friends they will remain so; everyone else can go hang.

Asocial means you have no choice, or, rather, the choice is something decidedly unchoosy like ‘kill or be killed.’ (Which one would you pick? Yeah, everybody picks that one, too.)

Because it’s hallmarked by a lack of communication, asocial comes on without warning, without preamble, like lightning out of a clear blue sky. One minute you’re worried about which curry joint to patronize and the next you’re getting stabbed. You’re down to those small choices, like which target to wreck next, and when to stop.

From a purely mechanical point of view, in social and antisocial situations he gets to choose whether or not a technique works. All of your sundry come-alongs, pain compliance, joint locks and submission holds fall into this category.

If he decides you ‘got him’ and gives up, all well and good.

But if he decides the pain in his wrist doesn’t matter, well, now you’re stuck holding the tiger by the tail.

And your Plan B better be really, really sharp. Especially if the choice he makes is to take it into the asocial and get to the work of injuring you.

The mechanics of the asocial, violent, interaction can be summed up in a single word: injury.

Injury removes choice from the equation.

He has no say in whether or not his eye comes out of his skull or if his throat crushes. He has no say in how his body will move next.

The physical laws of the universe, and how well you’ve employed them, are the only arbiters here. If you did it right, everything breaks. He may wish double-plus hard on a falling star it wasn’t so, but it’s not going to matter one whit.

Violence is the absence of choice, and he’s just along for the ride.

My wife came back from grocery shopping this weekend with a chilling story: a man stalked her in the remote parking lot behind the store. Now, the story obviously had a good outcome — nothing happened — but it was the way she talked about it, what was important to her and how she processed the event, that stuck with me enough to write about it here.

(Some facts about my wife: she’s 5′2″, had a couple months of training more than 16 years ago (and hasn’t been on the mats since). She also took out a guy who came after her in a parking garage around that same time.)

Her story:

“There was a guy across the street who was obviously unbalanced, homeless or nearly so. As soon as he saw me, he looked around, saw that we were pretty much alone behind the store, and then began to cross the street toward me.

“It was clear that I had triggered something in him, maybe I reminded him of a girlfriend, ex-wife, or his mother, I don’t know. But it was obvious to me that he was agitated by my presence.

“My first thought was what I would do to him if he came near me. I figured I’d smash him in the neck and sit on his hip to drop him, and then kick him in the head when he was down on the ground. It’s worked for me every time I’ve done it in training.”

(When I asked her to clarify, she said that she found she could dump larger, heavier men reliably into the ground this way.)

“Then I figured I’d give him the benefit of the doubt — up to a certain point — and loudly warn him off if he actually stepped into the parking lot, about 50 feet away. If he didn’t stop then I’d take him out.

“As he got to my side of the street he seemed to reconsider and paused at the sidewalk. I continued calmly putting groceries in the car, and making sure he could see I was keeping an eye on him. He seemed to come to a decision and slinked off down the street. So I got in the car and came home.”

Several things struck me about her narrative. The first one was a total lack of fear-language or a sense of victimhood. I even asked her, “Were you worried about what he might do to you?” She shook her head. “It didn’t even occur to me. I was preoccupied with what I was going to do to him.”

Note that is not bravado or empty posturing. She was resolved to hurt him, put him down and make sure he couldn’t get back up. Her body language transmitted that grim determination and probably played a role in getting him to wave off. His prey was suddenly giving off predator signals, and he had to make the choice between a hard fight or easy pickings elsewhere.

Of course, it might all have been a terrible mistake; maybe he just wanted some change or a bag of chips. But that wasn’t her read on the situation, and I trust her judgment.

The second thing that struck me was her confidence in her ability to get it done — even without having trained in a very long time — because she took ownership of the tool of violence way back then, and, unlike a specific technique or a spinning back-kick, you never forget how to hurt people.

It’s been a long, long time since she had to think about it… but when she realized it was a potentially bad situation, it was there for her. She knew what to do and she was resolved to do it.

She was, regardless of what most people might be led to believe, in her element. That kept her from behaving like a victim. It probably helped to change a would-be predator’s mind.

As much as this is a real-world, close-to-home reminder of why I do this work…

I’m just glad she’s back home safe.

Last week I wrote about how we have found it far more useful to keep training for violence grounded in the physical instead of the metaphysical. We received a lot of thoughtful responses to that, some of which I hope to respond to in kind (that is, thoughtfully and respectfully) in future installments.

One thing that stood out in the responses was the many ways people interpret intent. It seems to take on an air of philosophical mystery, to become Intent with a capital I, an ineffable, nigh unattainable Mystic State that the sociopath is somehow able to turn on and maintain. This is, of course, the danger anytime the conversation veers out of the physical.

In isolating what makes violence effective, you can clearly see that debilitating injury is key – it changes everything in your favor and converts that awful, scary man into an injured man, helpless to keep you from causing further harm. Injury is the result of penetration (body weight in motion) and rotation (the complete follow-through) through a vulnerable piece of anatomy. Again, this can be clearly seen in video evidence of successful violence. (As well as accidents involving people colliding with people and people colliding with the ground.)

But something’s missing from that seemingly perfect equation. The way that successful person gets it done. He’s not timid, he doesn’t dance around, he’s not counting coup, scoring points, or behaving as if he’s worried he’ll be countered, or even killed. He goes in like the result is a foregone conclusion.

How do you define that?

We also knew how we would do it – plow in, focused above all on getting that injury, not stopping until we got all the injuries we wanted. Was it the same thing we were seeing in the videos?

Again, how to describe this so others can do it too, not just the insane and the highly trained? Is it ‘confidence?’ ‘Pure offense?’ We’ve used both of those descriptors in past training, with varying degrees of success – ‘confidence’ clicked for some, ‘offense’ clicked for others. Still, both had almost metaphysical connotations for most, providing not a ramp to success but a speed bump.

We settled on intent. As in, ‘intent to cause harm.’ This felt like the cleanest, simplest way to express what we could see in the videos and feel for ourselves when we worked.

Intent is wanting this:

http://www.scrum.com/images/content/knee.jpg

To the exclusion of all else.

Now, this unfortunate image is not showcasing intent (one would hope). It’s purely a picture of gut-wrenching injury. It’s unambiguous, it’s horrible, and it’s what you have to want more than anything in order to survive. When you go after a man’s knee, this is the result you have in mind, and you won’t be happy with anything less.

This is what the sociopath wants, and it’s what he’s gunning for when he comes after you. Maybe not a broken knee specifically, but a broken something. A broken anything. He knows nothing changes in his favor until he gets it. So he goes straight for it. No fighting stance, no blocking, no engagement – just straight to injury. And he gets this idea not from a book, or meditation, or mental exercises… he gets it from the simple realization that he doesn’t have to do anything more complicated than ‘hurt people’ to get what he wants.

Intent is making a beeline for the desired result. In violence that result is injury.