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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.
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].”
Target Focus Training is a “principle-based” system, meaning that instead of starting with moves or techniques we seek to identify and understand the elements at work in every successful use of violence.
Once you know why the winners win and the losers lose it becomes a simple thing to discard useless movement and technique and replace them with action that makes winning the most likely outcome. Instead of doing what’s popular or cool or fun to train — or even what seems to make sense from a sane, socialized perspective — we seek to do what the untrained victorious do, to physically emulate those who spend no time on the mats and yet win in spite of that lack.
The reason an imprisoned sociopath wins is the same as a highly trained military operator… or really anyone who comes out on top in physical violence. Not because of hate or rage or training or practice, but because of debilitating injury. Period.
Before we can discuss the principles that underlie game-changing/game-winning injury, we must cover some baseline assumptions for how to make the choice to “pull the trigger” on physical violence, in other words, first principles to drive the decision-making process and initial contact.
The essential problem is one of variability in the amount of force used, or the fact that half-measures expose you to greater risk. read this entry »
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.
Injuring the Groin – Part 1 covered the myths and misconceptions of strikes to the groin. I appreciated all the responses to that blog and now want to focus on illustrating real injury to the groin.
To do so I have 3 different videos that clearly show the effects of a groin strike as well as some graphic pics of male anatomy showing the results of strikes to the groin.
I don’t show this graphic material to be gratuitous but to educate and ( at the risk of offending some people) I feel strongly that you cant sugarcoat this information.
As always, please leave your thoughts and comments below.
Tim Larkin
Founder, Target Focus Training
PS: Some of you are asking me to increase the size of the videos. This may easily be accomplished after you start the video by sliding your mouse on the video and clicking the full screen icon at the far right of the timeline bar (it’s a little icon with arrows pointing out at a 45 degree angle). This allows you to view the blog video in a full screen mode.
PPS: Don’t forget our Thanksgiving sale that’s currently in progress. You can check it out here.
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?
The idea that using your hands is somehow safer than a gun arises from a potentially deadly combination of ignorance and dumb luck.
Common sense says that using your bare hands to shut someone up or make them stop what they’re doing is a viable — and desirable — alternative to pulling iron and killing them. No one really expects to kill or be killed during an ass-kicking. Fighting is viewed as a relatively safe manly pursuit.
For the most part, that’s true. The vast majority of scuffles don’t end in death. But is this due to a lack of will (kicking ass is not killing) and the relative safety of the endeavor? Or, as I stated above, ignorance and dumb luck?
When people do die in a fight it’s seen as a terrible accident.
The killer claims the outcome was not his intent, that a general ass kicking was in order and things went horribly wrong. For such an accident to occur things have to line up just right. The number one way to die in a fight is to fall and strike your head on the pavement, causing an irrecoverable brain bleed. If you think about all the people who will fall today and strike their heads and not die, you can see what I mean by things having to line up just so to result in death.
In fighting, ignorance saves lives.
(**Note To Readers: I’m expanding my horizons and getting into video blogging. I think this format gives me the greatest range to communicate the ideas I want to share with you. Bear with me as I cut my teeth these next few weeks gettin used to using this format. Also please let me know if you find this format useful so I can gauge how this is being received.)
How To Learn Good Information
From Bad Instruction
This week’s video shows 2 Marine CQC instructors discussing a “knife hand” strike to the side of the neck.
I make the majority of my points in the video I created and even if you think you’ve seen this video please watch my presentation so you can get my various takes on this clip.
The point I’m making in this clip is that the instruction is incomplete. The good result of the other guy getting knocked out is in spite of the instruction.
Most people would watch this and come away with incomplete information that if they tried to use it in a life-or-death situation, the results would be iffy at best.
Also I pointed out that both guys were damn lucky that this ended up just a “funny” YouTube video rather than high cervical damage or massive head trauma to the recipient.
Your car? Your cell phone? The contents of your wallet? Twenty bucks?
Everybody’s going to have a different answer, and if you don’t already have one you should think about it.
But there are a couple things you should know before you decide where the line is…
I began training when I was in high school, around the same time I worked as a cashier in a really terrible seafood restaurant.
One night two guys came in to rob us, armed with a handgun. I remember being distinctly aware of having a choice — I could give them the money or get to work injuring them. I weighed the choices, seeing branching outcomes, but in the end my read on the situation — their faces, body language, the tone of voice — was that this was purely antisocial. They wanted the money and to get the hell out there. They were nervous and in a hurry.
Processing what was happening, reading the situation and making a choice all happened in a blink of an eye that seemed to take minutes. I felt no fear, just a cold calculation, and so I made my choice. They could take property, but if they went after people, I would cross the line, too.
It was over in minutes and when the police arrived I was the only person with enough composure able to provide a detailed (very detailed) description of the men. The officers marveled at my recall and commented that they wished they had more witnesses like me.
Meanwhile, my coworkers were shocked into either silence or terrified crying jags.
Of all the people there, I was the only one who slept that night.
I was also the only one who could identify the weapon and point the two men out in a line-up. (My coworkers freaked at seeing the men in the line-up and played stupid so as not to be involved.)
I was the only one to turn up in court and take the witness stand.
Now, while all of this sounds like superhuman braggadocio, the simple (far less legendary) truth is that the only thing I had that my coworkers didn’t was a choice.
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:
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.
10 years ago Tim trained a group of business executives in a Target-Focus Training class held just blocks from Ground Zero.
The class ended only 2 days before the tragic 9-11 events at the World Trade Center towers in New York.
In 3 weeks we’re hosting a 2-day live session in Las Vegas that will wrap up on Sunday… the 10th anniversary of that fateful attack.
We’re planning a few special things for the class to be announced next week (including copies of the DVD video series shot back at that class in 2001).
Time is short… as is space.
Flights into Vegas are cheap… as are hotels compared to even 3 years ago.
“But what if he [INSERT AWFUL THING HERE]?”
