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
December 2, 2008 by Chris Ranck-Buhr
Whenever I talk about ongoing training, I like to bring up the idea of such work as being a lifelong process. Now, I often say this with a dreamy, faraway look in my eyes, as it’s one of the top three best things about doing this work — the idea that I can continue to learn, refine, and build the skill for as long as I draw breath.
Not everyone hears it this way. Some people think I mean that it actually takes a lifetime to master — and I’m the first to admit that’s not such a hot idea. Who’s got the time, right? (Well, by definition, you do — you got the rest of your life coming to you… but I digress.) You are right to be suspicious of anything that takes a lifetime — outside of growing a family & accumulating wisdom.
The use of violence is the very definition of a NOW tool. It’s silly to have something that you could very well need for survival in the next half-hour require a lifetime to be of any use to you. Good luck surviving long enough to master that!
When I say ‘lifelong,’ I mean that you could potentially spend the rest of your life working on it, constantly increasing and never get bored. How many avocations can you say that about? Music… maybe. This simple fact gets me excited about hitting the mats — in fact, just thinking about it makes me wish I was there right now in a good, solid tussle with high throws and contorted limbs, everything pushed to the edge in a rush of blood and total domination.
Back in the days of my martial arts training, I was resigned to having to spend the rest of my life studying as many arts as I could cram into my lifetime — not to mention having to manufacture my own coupling devices to get them to work together. What I really wanted to know is what you all have at your disposal, but it didn’t exist in a format like this. So, as I neared my Tae Kwon Do black belt test, I was getting my head screwed on at the right angle to put on a white belt again and study Aikido… Judo… Jiu-Jitsu… Kung Fu… Chin Na… Muy Thai… and on and on and on. Because, quite frankly, I wanted to know it all. And it was obviously going to take me the rest of my life to get there.
I wasn’t happy about it — it didn’t feel like opportunity, just a whole hell of a lot of work, much of it spent slogging through hierarchies and physical fitness challenges. And making Aikido work with Karate is tougher than you think — especially when the instructors find out you’re not just attending another school, but (gasp!) another system!
What I really needed were the base principles that underlie all violence — the common elements between striking, joint breaking and throwing; multiman and knife, stick, and gun; and a way to tie all those elements together between the pendulum swing of structure and motion.
This is why I get the Homer-drool look in my eyes. I don’t have to spend a lifetime to learn all of those things, one at a time, and then try to stitch them together through trial and (possibly fatal) error. I have the base principles, and like knowing the rules of chess I can play every game that’s ever been — or every will be — played. I can spend my life running as many permutations as I like, confident in the knowledge that it’ll never be the same twice.
And if every iteration is novel, that means I get to learn something new every time.
The principles of violence are easily grasped in less than three days of training. Everything after that is just rearrangement & recombination. It’s you, training your mind to wield your body. Sharpening that sword. But really, you’re done after that first live training. In that seminar we teach everyone how to:
- Seriously injure a man
- Drop him to the ground
- And kill him, should that prove necessary.
So don’t sweat that bit. Lifelong training isn’t a ‘have-to’ — it’s a ‘get-to.’ It doesn’t take a lifetime to master; you don’t have to be a Trained Fighter, or an Instructor, or a Master to be able to use the skill to shut off another human being.
BUT
If this information lights a fire in you, like it did in me, well, we got plenty for you to work on. To play with. No matter how good you get, we can give you material to challenge your abilities, to push your farther, to make you that much better. Better than you can imagine.
So relax, absorb, enjoy. I’m not going anywhere.
August 26, 2008 by Chris Ranck-Buhr
Our latest four-day training, at the San Diego Center, for TFT Mastery Program members was an unqualified success! With more than 50 clients attending from literally all over the globe for 16 sessions taught by 10 different instructors on topics ranging from no-hands fighting to multi-man situations to ‘how to kill without hurting yourself’ (and everything in between), it was a terrific four days of advanced training.
In addition, a record five people completed their three-year training and assessment for Trained Fighter certification (equivalent to a martial arts black belt) at the event. I have to say, they nailed the test and kicked a lot of ass in the process. They definitely raised the bar for the next group…
The instructor cadre enjoyed themselves immensely–it’s a great privilege to work with so many dedicated and hard-working people all at once. I find it very motivating and really do wish the entire Mastery Program roster lived locally so I could work with them several times a week.
In light of that, we’re looking in to holding the 4-Day training twice a year–in April and October–to give Mastery clients more opportunities for advanced training as well as letting us see you more often!
Already looking forward to next year,
August 6, 2008 by Chris Ranck-Buhr
Most warrior traditions have, as part of their training, the development of the war face — an intimidating, if not terrifying, visage. A furious look with eyes bugged or scrunched, brows furrowed, mouth wide to bear teeth, sometimes even a protruding tongue. It’s designed to let the enemy know you mean business and get them to crap their pants before you set to work on them. Ofttimes it’s combined with a blood-curdling shout, growl or scream. (This display of aggressive intent can also help ‘psych-up’ the user, as human emotion and the physical expression of that emotion are a two-way street; that is, while being happy makes you smile, smiling makes you feel happy.) Such displays are, however, a ridiculous waste of effort.
The war face is an attempt at communication. As you all know, in violence we’re not trying to communicate anything to anybody — we just want to shut off a human brain. Not frighten it, or let it know how angry we are, or how maybe this time we really really mean it and we’re coming over there to get serious actually maybe this time. It’s dragging social convention into violence. If you bark and snarl at a serial killer, he’ll stab you in the neck while you’re busy trying to intimidate him.
We don’t want to communicate — we just want to interface with targets as hard as we can.
On the mats, there are a lot of people who think that looking mean shows they mean business — that you have intent. Nothing could be further from the truth. When I see people making the angry face, I know they’re really afraid. They’re trying to cover it up with a modified fear face. But they’re not fooling anyone but themselves. I can tell someone has intent not by the look on their face, but by how they’re interfacing with targets. Period. Either you’re moving like a predator or you’re moving like a timid forest creature. Sometimes it’s like a cornered forest creature, all angry snarl and desperate speed. The squirrel trying to convince himself it’s okay to take the peanut out of the proffering hand.
Recently, at the San Diego Center, I had the pleasure of seeing a positive example of what I’m talking about:
We had two new people getting a demo and some assembly on at the Center. At the end I asked Luke (Instructor) and Bruce (Group 2) to roll through some free fighting to show where all that target assembly ends up. Luke was absolutely savaging Bruce (as often happens when we know we’re on stage), delivering a beating that was both brilliant and ugly at the same time, literally doing things I’d never seen (or dreamed of) before. I felt the warmth of a predator’s appreciation.
And then I looked at Luke’s face.
In the midst of all that furious action it was the singular dead spot. Flat. Slack. He looked, for want of a better term, bored. Only the eyes were alive, intent on each target in rapid succession.
As it should be.
While it warmed my heart to see such perfect execution, I could only imagine what such an apparent incongruity looked like to the uninitiated. Chilling, probably, as everyone can recognize the lack of compassion, or communication via the angry face, the human component set aside for a moment of base savagery. It was the face of the serial killer — emotionless, done with talk, here now only for the purpose of violence.
And it says, to the initiated, far more than the angry face ever could.
March 29, 2008 by Tim Larkin
3 new Target Focus Training live classes are confirmed!
San Diego, April 26: A short-notice 1-day session at our headquarters training site. People are always amazed at the skill level they walk away with after only a single day. Read about it here.
New Jersey, June 20-22, full 3-day training: First New York area training outside Manhattan. At a hot new facility.
After this class you’ll have more useable knowledge that can save you life in a violent street encounter than someone who’s spent 20 years in the martial arts. And your training will leave you more competent than 99.5% of law enforcement or military personnel.
Remember, we were teaching these courses at US Naval Warfare Command back in the late ’80′s before anyone else even knew what ‘reality’ fighting was about. And it’s not about learning a few simple moves that look cool and MAY work “sometimes.” It’s about quickly learning a complete system… in just hours… one that guarantees your subconscious can call up instantly, without conscious thought, to destroy an attacker REGARDLESS of the situation, whether he’s got a weapon, or he’s bigger and badder than you.
You learn how to not just claw someone’s eyes… but easily blind them if that’s your only available alternative. You learn to not just kick him in the shins… but rather to effortlessly break his knee joint if it’s your only means of escape. And you learn to take his life with your bare hands… if it means saving your own.
There’s nothing else that remotely compares… anywhere.
Dallas, July 18-20, another full 3-day training: Possibly the last 3-day session in the US for 2008. Don’t miss it if you’re looking to get these skills live this year.
Other classes:
- There’s another 1-day session in the works. Possibly Brooklyn. Stay tuned this week.
- And a brand new, 2-day advanced class for those that have been through a previous live session.
- And finally, an unusual situation will have us teaching for the first time a full, 3-day class in Sydney, Australia and London, England. In the past these classes have always been just 2-day affairs. Watch for an announcement on these in the next week.
If you missed the Google video that demonstrates what a real self defense class looks like, check it out here.
-Tim Larkin
September 4, 2007 by Tim Larkin
The special 3-day class in San Diego September 28-30 is a go!
I’m looking to do this class only once, so if you’ve wanted to attend a live training but haven’t because of conditioning, age, injuries… whatever… check this out now.
When you register, there’s another bonus we’ve just added that I know will get you excited.
http://targetfocustraining.com/email/1timeclass.html
Personal regards,
Tim Larkin
http://targetfocustraining.com/
July 27, 2007 by Tim Larkin
New classes, new locations, and a new format I’m testing for the first time.
Now there’s no excuse for not learning how to disassemble some dim-witted thug assaulting you by quickly mastering the skills needed at a live TFT self defense training session this year.
Here’s why.
I just rearranged my schedule to combine all 2007 training outside North America into one massive, multi-stop, 30-day ’round-the-world’ swing from mid-November to mid-December.
I’ll have details in the next week or so but for now it looks like stops in at least Hawaii, Australia (Sydney November 24-25), New Zealand, Hong Kong, South Africa, Italy and England (London Dec 8-9).
I’ll update http://targetfocustraining.com/live_events.html with dates as finalized.
Given that, here’s how North American training shakes out for the rest of 2007:
1-days come to the Northeast — Finally
Normally I give at least 3 months notice for live training classes; often more. But two speaking engagements popped open options to add 1-day classes back east. So even though lead time is short, here’s what we set up:
If you haven’t heard about how much we cover in one of these, check it out or register by going to: http://targetfocustraining.com/selfdefenseclass/1day.html
Because of the short notice, both these have minimum enrollment requirements. So if an eastern seaboard 1-day is your thing, lock it in by registering today. We’ll make the go/no-go decision on both classes Friday, July 27 or earlier.
If either class bites the dust, you’ll get an immediate refund that day or the opportunity to switch to the other session (or a different one if you like).
Brand New: The “I-Really-Want-To-Attend-But…” Class
If you’ve got a burning desire to learn all the TFT material quickly by attending a live training but haven’t because, frankly, you were a bit intimidated… you’re NOT alone.
Vonnie hears that a lot.
In fact, her comments spurred me to offer something I’ve never tried before… a class designed just for you EVEN IF you’re out of shape, have physical limitations that restrict your movement, worry you’ll be the only one without prior experience (or maybe just think you’ll be expected to work with a bunch of ex-biker bar bouncers).
Whatever, if you’ve had a concern about attending one of these sessions, for any reason, this one is for you.
Understand it’s a regular Fri-Sun class and will NOT be dumbed-down in any way whatsoever! We’ll cover everything as usual, it’s just that we’ll proceed a tad bit slower… and offer more assistance where needed. I said anyone can learn TFT. Now we’re gonna prove it.
There’s only one of these, and it’s coming up soon (San Diego September 28-30). Head on over and check out the details at: http://targetfocustraining.com/selfdefenseclass/special.html
We’re expecting this one could fill very fast but since we’ve never tried it, there’s no telling. So, same thing as with the 1-day’s above: we’ll pull the plug if there isn’t the interest we expect. We’ll make that call July 31 (and probably earlier).
Toronto & Dallas — you’re in too
The 1-day format lets so many more experience what it’s like to walk out the door at the end of class knowing you can make some unsuspecting thug wish he’d never seen you, we’ve added 2 more in spots where we’ve not held them before:
Toronto is the first TFT class ever in Canada.
As before, read about the 1-day classes or register by going to: http://targetfocustraining.com/selfdefenseclass/1day.html
A NEW 2 1/2 day in Miami, FL!
Finally, if you live in the southeast US and asked about a class in your neck of the woods — it’s here. November 2-4 in Miami.
Other than the special class in San Diego in late September, this is the only regular full-length session we’ll host for the rest of 2007.
Register for this first-ever Miami class here: http://targetfocustraining.com/live_events.html
If you have questions about any of these, don’t wait to contact Vonnie, as several are very time sensitive. Email her at: mailto:[email protected] (preferred) or call her at 360-582-9578 (US Pacific time).
Until next time,
Tim
http://targetfocustraining.com/
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.
