It's All About Principles...
NOT Techniques

This is the guiding idea behind Target-Focus Training. When I started getting into combat sports and martial arts—self-defense—it became readily apparent that everybody was really kind of into—memorization. The whole idea was, “If you memorize a couple of good techniques, it’s going to get you out of everything.”

There’s a comfort in that because everybody can achieve it. It’s easy to basically memorize two or three good techniques. But what you quickly find out is if you’ve ever been exposed to any sort of violence—even in a combat sport where you were doing a competition—you quickly find out that things are so random you can’t rely on two or three things just memorized. It’s just a false sense of security.

What you quickly realize is that you need a more flexible approach to deal with the randomness of all the different things that can happen. And really, the only way you get that in just about anything in life—any subject matter in life—is you have to have a good grounding in the principles... and that’s what TFT is all about.

The one thing we’ve completely understood is that the only thing we can rely on is this: that violence is always going to be random. And therefore we have to take a principle-based approach. So what we do is give you good, grounded principles that are based in (and usable and understandable in) science... anatomy, physiology, kinesiology, physics… backed up with trauma data. Stuff that you could easily read about and the brain can easily understand.

And we couple that with some really effective training methods that allow you to be able to answer the question instantly as it happens. It’s like if you’re always prepared for an attack, say, on the right-hand side and all of a sudden it’s coming from the left-hand side... and you completely freeze. It’s just amazing.

The most recent example I’ve got of that is there is a police officer who was demonstrating a disarm—a disarm of a firearm—and he was showing a technique. And the person was holding the gun on the right-hand side with the right hand. And it got to the point to where the officer would show the technique over and over again. But then he went to show it to somebody else and this guy held the gun in his left hand and the officer was absolutely frozen. He didn’t know what to do... because he had memorized basically a set of movements. He hadn’t understood any principles. He didn’t understand the principles of what he was doing and therefore as soon as a slight variation occurred, basically going from your right to left hand, all of a sudden he shut down. He wasn’t able to do that.

And, it’s kind of similar—I mean the way most of us can understand it is basic mathematics. Imagine if the way you learned multiplication was just one equation at a time. Suppose somebody said, “Hey, go out there and memorize three or four good equations and that’ll answer every question you have about a multiplication problem.”

Well, we quickly understand there’s no way that’s going to happen. You memorize 3 x 3, you memorize 5 x 6, 11 x 9—and you think you’ve got everything covered. But then you walk out in the world and all of a sudden you’re handed 12 x 7. You’ve never seen that equation before and you have no idea what the answer is because you haven’t been trained how to multiply. Yet if you know how to multiply—if you understand the principles of multiplication—then it doesn’t matter what the factors are. You’re going to be able to come up with the answer.

And that’s the kind of the approach that we’ve taken with TFT. We’ve broken everything down to its base principles and methodologies. And we put it in very useable and understandable stuff. It’s extremely effective when you apply these principles. It’s deceptively simple. And I think that’s the hardest thing for people to get around. It’s, “How are these guys able to show us that so straightforward and so matter of fact?”

And yet it’s incredibly effective and incredibly brutal. And why do we always seem like these guys where, “nothing throws us off?” But we can... just show effective response after effective response, regardless of the situation because every TFT instructor is grounded in principles. That’s just a huge difference. That’s why there are no hidden answers. It’s why we want to put this information out and why it’s so easy to assimilate and understand.

And that’s why it’s also so much fun to teach—because you’re able to get people thinking this same way very, very quickly. So everyone starts solving their own problems... they’re not always having to come to us for another technique, another answer. You’re able to answer your own questions! It’s all about making this a self-education program.

We really want you to answer the questions. Why? Because we’re not going be there for you when that unfortunate asocial criminal action happens. We know we’re not going to be there to fight your battles; therefore we want to make sure you get the information so you know how to do it. That’s what we mean when we say we’re a “Principle-based” system