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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.
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.
After eons of tearing into each other it’s all been done, cataloged and trained. Ad nauseam. There is, literally, nothing new under the sun.
What we do have from all that awful R&D is a vast spew of systems, styles, traditions, paths and ways. And in the squabble for recognition and dominance the principles underlying the reason why anybody who wins actually wins get overlooked in favor of arguing approach and technique.
Well, screw all that.
The only thing I’ve ever been interested in is results.
I don’t care who gets it or how they get it:
Debilitating injury speaks for itself.
Breaking something important inside the man is the only thing that makes a difference (unless you’re counting on him to quit, and you really shouldn’t).
Far and away from approach or technique are the two things that line up just right in every disabling injury:
In a blog post I wrote several months ago I noted how a number of major US television stations had aired 3-4 minute segments about our TFT approach to surviving violence.
Unfortunately each ended their stories focused on the comments of a university legal “expert” explaining (incorrectly) how taking the class somehow might leave you held to a “higher standard.”
Well, hats off to KABC television in Los Angeles and their experienced anchor/reporter, David Ono, for creating a video segment that gets it right.
Prior to creating this piece, David took time to attend an entire 2-day TFT seminar (as a participant not a reporter) to make sure he understood everything about the system he was reporting on.
Not unusual for David. He’s also trained with the FBI & the LA SWAT team’s Special Enforcement Bureau prior to other assignments. Add in the fact he’s gone into the jungles of Central America to report on drug runners and you realize… the guy understands the realities of violence. (and maybe why he’s won eight Emmy awards!)
Anyway, the resulting video is the first TV media piece that objectively shows the message TFT instructs to each of our new clients.
It’s a full 5 minutes long. Check it out below.
In the comment section below this video at KABC’s website, was this note from Black Belt magazine Executive Editor, Robert Young;
Again, our thanks to David and to Robert.
As always, feel free to leave your thoughts/comments below.
“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,
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.
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.
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.
Look for the full version to be published in their newsstand magazine as well.
The final US 2-day class for 2009
Since we’ve already had questions about the next US class, I know at least some missed the note in the PS of my last email.
The next full, 2-day live training in the US this year is also the LAST for the year in the states. It’s in Dallas, October 17-18, so just around the corner.
Registrations have increased dramatically with everything happening over here (and wait until coverage hits from The Sunday Times and its worldwide circulation).
It’s the first Las Vegas Target Focus Training self defense class in 2 years!
Lots of people were disappointed when we moved our base operations out of Las Vegas to San Diego.
Everyone loved attending the world’s #1-rated self-defense training classes here.
Easy in from anywhere. Great hotels. And it’s THE place to visit after your training ends.
And since I’m here much of the year, I was always on the lookout for ways to bring a new class back here.
It really just boiled down to finding a date that worked.
Well, we’ve got the date, and it’s the first live training session of 2008:
March 7, 8 & 9, right here in Las Vegas.
In fact, it’s the only training scheduled for first quarter.
Now, the location we’ll use is a great place to train. We’ve used it many times before.
But it has one drawback: size.
We can only get about 22-24 first-time attendees comfortably into the room.
That’s not a lot.
And unlike other locations where we often can reach out and grab extra space in adjoining rooms, here adjoining space outside the class is just hard rubber mats or concrete!
And while working outdoors on concrete is a great learning experience and one I’ll probably let you experience for a little bit, it’s not where I want you spending your first 3 days with us.
So that means you don’t want to delay securing one of the limited spots for this training.
Make this the year you give yourself andyour loved ones that special after-Christmas gift that keeps on giving… for the rest of your life.
Personal regards, Tim Larkin, Creator, Target Focus Training
PS. You can expect to complete your class with the same feelings as Gaurav Shukul, a financial professional from Massachusetts who attended the last Las Vegas training:
“It surpassed all my expectations by a mile & more. I’ve tried everything that’s out there – Muay Thai, Tae Kwon Do, Krav Maga, etc, and nothing comes close to what I learned from TFT in terms of the effectiveness and sheer simplicity of the principle-based approach, free of a 1,000 techniques. To be honest, I was worried I might get a more glamorized version of Krav Maga but what I got is unmatched in both mechanical and mental aspects of surviving violent encounters. Kudos.”
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.
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.
