Listen to TFT creator Tim Larkin explain why it's NOT about Self Defense!

Why You Must Learn
Self-Protection...
NOT Self-Defense

What you have as a distinguishing feature of Target-Focus Training is the tool of violence. Understanding how to use this tool of violence is really what you’re after whether you call it self-defense, martial arts, combat sports. It’s all about seeking how to protect yourself... specifically, how to protect yourself against somebody else that wants to use the tool of violence against you.

It’s important to note that Target-Focus Training is solely about when violence is unavoidable. We spend a lot of time talking to our clients about how to avoid violence. There are many situations out there that can be easily avoided. You can simply choose not to participate.

Beyond that, what you really need to understand is that to best protect yourself in what most people call a self-defense situation, you need to eliminate any sort of defensive thinking. A lot of what is called self-defense, and a lot of courses that are available, really spend all their time focusing on waiting to act. You have to wait until times where it’s really against your best judgment to not act sooner.

What TFT helps you to delineate is how to make better decisions when it comes to using the tool of violence and how to better protect yourself. The way you do that is you understand that the best way to survive a violent situation is to be the one doing the violence and in order to do that, you must understand how to properly injure an asocial criminal.

It’s really about how to effectively injure another human being and get verified results. That’s really what TFT puts out. We give you methods and principles to better use the tool of violence to protect yourself. And it achieves the same thing that most self-defense protocols call for.

Meaning, ultimately everybody that’s teaching combat sports, martial arts and self-defense is hoping to protect you, they’re good people, they want you protected, they want you to be able to use whatever information they’re putting out to protect you against a violent act against yourself or any of your loved ones.

Unfortunately, the methodology that most self-defense, martial arts and combat sports courses teach are not relevant when it comes to dealing with real violence. There’s a real disconnect on understanding that you can’t afford to think about blocking. You can’t afford to think about anything defensive. You can’t have anything in your arsenal that causes you to hesitate when you’re dealing with unavoidable, imminent violence.

Target-Focus Training really emphasizes that, “here is the best way to protect yourself. Here are the methods and principles that will get you the best results.” Yes, it’s somewhat controversial at times but It’s controversial because people often times do not want to recognize what real violence is. That’s why it’s so easy for the predators to take advantage of most people.

Even highly trained people have frozen when faced with a real violent situation. They just weren’t mentally prepared for it and they certainly weren’t physically prepared for it. They were waiting for certain permissions to happen because the way they were trained was to wait for certain things to happen. A punch had to be thrown, a weapon had to be shown, an aggressive act had to predicate something.

What happens is all those opportunities that you had to handle the situation before it got dangerous, before you were susceptible to injury, are lost because you have these self-defense protocols and these techniques that you’re trying to make work in a very chaotic situation. With the principles and the methodology available to you through Target-Focus Training you simply have a much better response for violence.

That’s one of the things that is hard for people to get around because everybody likes to talk about punching and kicking. They like to talk about using tools such as knives, guns or clubs... and how to better use those tools, how to fight against those types of things.

But really, has anybody ever talked about when to use violence, when it’s okay to initiate violence or when it’s okay to stop a situation from ever getting to that point? Those are the areas and methodology that Target-Focus Training really hones in on. We want to make you not only competent at doing physical training, but we want you to be able to recognize asocial violence. That’s a very difficult thing if you are trying to use rules or self-defense approaches that hinder you in any way with defensiveness and you’re blocking or using any sort of self-defense limitations that are put on people. You just can’t survive violence if you are trying to fit in with social protocols.

It’s really a very clean, clear-cut subject. People really don’t have to look very far. Inherently we all know when a violent situation is going to happen it’s best to be the one to injure the other person first. I don’t want to find out how much bigger, faster or stronger this other guy is. Why? This guy is not going to give me a chance.

If he’s a committed criminal, I don’t get a second chance. I don’t get to find out whether or not I’m going to be able to counter whatever he is doing. If he comes up and he’s going to do violence on me, it’s his goal to injure me right off the bat. If it’s my goal to try to protect myself from being injured by him rather than focus on hitting a target and creating my own injury in him, I’m in real trouble. Instead I need to create an injury in the other guy, so he is so busy reacting to that injury that it takes away all of the threat that existed prior to that.

It’s a different way to wrap your brain around the idea of self-defense and self-protection. But, it’s a far safer way... with results that are far superior.