“But what if he [INSERT AWFUL THING HERE]?”

This question tells me a lot about a person’s frame of mind, and how they see themselves in violence. They’ve chosen second place, victimhood, with a wait-and-see attitude that makes them perfect prey for the best predators out there.

Now, this is not a conscious choice — they’re not “wrong” in an absolute sense — and it really speaks to how little violence we are subjected to across a lifetime. The average experience is zero to a mere handful of incidents, not nearly enough to draw operational conclusions. Our collective lack of experience shows what a nice bubble-reality we’ve created here in the First World.

Don’t get me wrong — it is nice — it just leaves us woefully unprepared when the rare, “black-swan” event of real violence intrudes.

A lot of time and money is spent figuring out how successful people think. In business, for example, it can be shown that there are modes of thought that routinely lead to ruin; closer to what we’re up to we can look at professional sports where the winners envision themselves doing the thing they wish to do, pushing away or minimizing doubt and worry, and then act purely to achieve that imagined goal.

Predatory sociopaths, especially those in prison due to society’s recognition of their success rate, thrive because they never see themselves as the victim in a violent exchange — only as the giver.

This leads us to the question:

Would you rather go into life-or-death violence

a) wrestling with live snake,

b) managing a crying baby, or

c) none of the above?

(As for the snake or the baby, I couldn’t decide which would make things more difficult for you, hence the title.)

If you enter into such an interaction with your primary thought process being What will happen to me? then you are bringing along something that will impede your ability to succeed and win. Before you can deal with the other person you must first deal with the squirming thing in your hands.

There’s nothing anyone can do about the biological facts of fear — the body’s response to danger and preparations to handle it (fight or flight) — but the psychological response to those preparations is under your control. Making worry a priority is a great way to kick off psychological panic. You want to use your body’s response to your advantage, not his. Train defensively and you train to help him do whatever it is you’re worried about.

If your primary concern is not getting hurt, well, I share your sentiment, but that’s not really something you get to choose. Expect to get hit, thwacked, cut, shot. These things will happen whether you want them to or not. If we could choose not to have them happen, then believe me, we’d train them. We’d train the hell out of them. But it turns out the only thing you really have control of in violence is what you do to him.

If everyone involved is wrestling a live snake, then we dance around and chances are good no one’s going to get hurt. The real danger is when one person is doing the snake-handling… and the other is unencumbered, free to do whatever he or she wills. If both are focused on getting results then it’s whoever gets it right first.

How do we train, then, for the best chance of operational success? Again, we can take our cues from professional athletes: worrying about losing does not make one win — worrying about winning does. Train for the result you want. Practice smashing targets.

It’s really that simple.

Trade out that snake for “How about if I do [INSERT AWFUL THING HERE].”

–Chris Ranck-Buhr
   TFT Master Instructor

Hitting < Striking < Colliding

The most common mistake I see in training to wreck the human machine — beyond poor targeting and worse tools — is people lashing out with their arms and legs while they leave the belt buckle behind.

For most of us, our center of mass rests behind our belt buckle — if it holds still, or worse, moves away from the strike, then your mass is not involved. You’re hitting with the strength and mass of the limb alone. And while it is possible to cause injury doing this, a debilitating injury is not the most likely outcome.

Hitting, or limb-only punching and kicking, is not nearly as good as striking, where you move your entire mass through the target.

read this entry »

“Why would anyone EVER need to know that?”

Usually the question is leveled as a kind of shocked riposte, a condemnation for what it is we train.

Through experience I’ve found that the easy answer, “Well, wouldn’t you want to know how to do it if that’s exactly what you needed to survive?” fails, weirdly, as the initial question itself shows a revulsion for holding the idea—let alone the skill—within themselves.

It’s no more appealing than putting a live snake down their pants. The real answer is, “If a loved one needed it, wouldn’t you want them to know how?”

As distasteful as the idea is to see yourself thinking it, training it, doing it it’s just a tad more palatable to imagine someone you love surviving the worst day of their life and making it back home to you. Of course, the logical extension is wouldn’t you want to do the same for them? That is, take responsibility for your own well-being and do your absolute best to come back home to them?

Situations requiring the hands-on physical destruction of another human being are thankfully rare, the same way that you probably haven’t had to save yourself from drowning too many times. (I’ve personally had to not-drown twice, and I hope to never, ever have to do it again.) If what we’re training for is so very rare, why spend so much time and energy training for it? Why train at all?

read this entry »

To tighten up our seminars I spoke with a number of instructors to collect data on where they saw problem areas — what kinds of things did our clients have the most trouble with?

I had my list, but I was interested in getting some different perspectives, to create an exhaustive list and see where we could tweak things to whittle that doubtlessly huge list down over time.

Everybody hit me with the most common errors they saw over and over, I added it to my list and the grand total was…

…three.

It turns out we all had the same list.

The thousands of people we trained over the last couple years all had a hard time nailing down the same three things:

1. Being too far away.

   The natural proclivity is to want to stay at arms’ length and reach out with a limb to touch the man, usually connecting with the target only once the limb is fully extended, pretty much removing body weight from the equation. Also, if the man happens to stumble back from the limb-slap, you’re now two steps away from him.

read this entry »

Here we go again, if only because putting the loop on infinite repeat is less enervating than personally shouting into the whirlwind:

I claim “self-defense” as my moral imperative and as such, I will be able to plead it in the aftermath. But I cannot in good conscience use it to describe what I practice and train.

“Self-defense” as a moral imperative, preceding the action, means I am choosing only to use violence when provoked or threatened. I won’t go looking for it and will do everything in my power to avoid it. Many of the things badasses believe are worth the risk to their own lives and livelihood — a personal slight, loss of property, territory, or social status — really aren’t. I can think of few things more stupid than dying over a barstool. Or doing prison time for the same.

“Self-defense” as a legal ruling, after the action, is society giving you a pass for a criminal act, ruling a criminal act as non-criminal. Living by the moral imperative above makes it more likely such a finding will occur in your favor — if you didn’t go looking for it, did everything you could to avoid it and still found yourself in the middle of it, chances are good the State will understand. Not a guarantee, but better than if you use violence frequently to get your way.

“Self-defense” as an action, however, is balling up and hoping for the best.

read this entry »

When you look at this picture, which guy needs self-defense?

If you found yourself in the above situation, what would you do?

I look forward to your thoughts and further discussion.

–Chris Ranck-Buhr
   TFT Master Instructor

In the training environment, anything works as long as we all agree it does.

On the street, the only thing that works are the laws of physics.

If you don’t get an injury, nothing changes in your favor. Nobody’s going to “respect your technique” just because they’re supposed to. People will keep going as long as they can think and move. Remove one or both of those, and you stop the man. Affect neither and it’s the same as if you did nothing at all.

You can do the move, execute the technique, and touch the target — but if you don’t break something important, it doesn’t matter. And suddenly what worked so well on the mats is completely ignored by the guy you just did it to. If he doesn’t make the same mistake, he just might finish it in his favor by injuring you.

“Lucky” is what you call it when two people come together with the intent to cause harm but end up getting into a sparring match because nobody really knows how to cause injury — there’s a lot of commotion, a little blood, torn clothes, but everybody goes home just fine, if tired. If someone happens to line it up just right — one square inch on one square inch with enough mass-in-motion and follow-through to bust something important, we get an injury and have a winner.

read this entry »

Anonymous writes:

“I am becoming aware of things I learned at the recent Dallas live seminar that I didn’t realize I had learned during the seminar. Is this normal?”

Chris Ranck-Buhr responds:

Absolutely — it’s actually what we’re aiming for.

The purpose of the high-density format of our seminars is to get you into the physical practice as quickly as possible.

As much as we like the sound of our own voices, you don’t get any better at navigating the chaos of violence by listening to us talk about it… but you’ll “remember” everything you do with your bare hands.

You’ll “remember” the sight pictures, choosing targets, where you had to go and how you had to move to smash them, and how the body moved in response to that injury.

The more time you can spend doing this — making conscious decisions about what to do next while unconsciously recording the details of each distinct victory — the better prepared you are outside the training environment. In other words, the more uninterrupted mat time you get, the better.

read this entry »

Anonymous writes:

“I wanted to find out exactly what you are focusing on and your state of mind when you are practicing on the mats.

“After all the training you have had are you focused on the bullseye of the target? And what is your state of mind? Are you calm? Angry? Enraged?”

Chris Ranck-Buhr responds:

I would describe my state of mind as a kind of heightened mono-focus — the confident and distractionless excitement of the predator. I look at what I have in front of me, pick what I want to do and then make it happen.

None of it is about him, what he wants to do, or what he’s trying to make happen.

While it’s intense and mentally exhausting to keep it up for an hour, it’s ultimately calm and devoid of emotional content. It’s much more unconsciously analytical and physical, like catching and throwing a ball, than theatrical. While there might be emotional content before the ball is thrown to you (performance anxiety, what-ifs, etc.) and after you catch and return (elation at a good throw, self-criticism of poor execution), the act itself is best left untouched by emotion. Now imagine that moment of catch-and-throw extended across an entire mat session.

One thing I noticed recently is that I don’t see faces when I’m on the mats.

read this entry »

On March fifth & sixth I had the pleasure of teaching, with Tim and other instructors, a 40+ person seminar in Las Vegas. I taught 13 of these last year, and after a little break, this was the first one for me this year.

It was really, really good to be back at it. I consider myself only as good as the last class I taught, and through the participants’ hard work the resume I shredded Friday night was rewritten nice and shiny on Monday morning. Everyone truly gave it their all and I was more than pleased with the results.

Saturday is always the make-or-break day for the class — we do a “zero to 60 in no seconds” with a video presentation of real violence and graphic injury so everyone sees the same thing when we use the words “violence” and “injury”. This can be a hard start, and we go straight from that to the physical work. By lunchtime on that first day everyone knows how to wreck seven targets on the human body to:

• blind a man
• knock him unconscious two different ways
• make him asphyxiate
• knock the wind out of him
• cripple him two different ways
• kill him if they need to

All with their bare hands. And by this time they’re all making their own decisions about which injuries they cause and how they stitch them together, one after another. Simultaneously, we do our best to scrub the nonessential (& dangerous) social considerations that everyone naturally tries to bring into the work — the talking, communicating, deference for personal space that make social life work but gets you killed in life-or-death violence.

read this entry »