TARGET FOCUS TRAINING PRINCIPLES IN A NUTSHELL
Last night, during our monthly conference call between Master Instructors and Mastery Program members, a question about our Target Focus Training principles came up: “How do I tell someone about what we do in such a way that it doesn’t sound crazy?” We have no shortage of material that talks (and shows) all about what […]
SELF DEFENSE TRAINING: KILLING WITH RULES
During self defense training, you learn that there are stark differences between competition and killing. And yet, when it comes to making the distinction, I’ve found that some people have a hard time differentiating one from the other. A common comment I hear from competitors (whether in boxing, karate or mixed martial arts) is that […]
SELF DEFENSE TRAINING VS. MMA TRAINING
Asking about self defense training and MMA training, R. R. writes in: “My concern is facing someone who is trained in MMA or some reality-based system. I’ve already had an altercation with a MMA guy and even though he didn’t beat me up he still got an ankle lock while I was standing and it […]
LEARN SELF DEFENSE: SHUT UP AND HURT HIM
You can’t learn self defense until your mouth stops. If we were training to be crisis negotiators, we’d need to talk to each other. A lot. All the time, in fact, to keep that line of communication open so it doesn’t collapse, go dead, and sink into the opposite of communication: destruction. If you can […]
ITS A MAN’S WORLD… OR WHY I HATE TRAINING WOMEN
Training women in self protection is hard. Not because of anything they themselves do. Women are far more receptive to the message than men and “get it” much more quickly. The problem lies with the men they must train with and the ignorance and prejudices those men bring to the process. Women are precisely as […]
THE ANATOMY OF A SELF DEFENSE SEMINAR
Our two-day base seminars are the distillation of more than 20 years of experience, research and the training of thousands of people to use violence as a survival tool. In approaching a format for a weekend seminar we had to answer two questions: Knowing what we know, how would we use violence today, right now? […]
FORGET FIGHTING. DELIVER AN INJURY.
To be invincible in hand-to-hand combat and be able to deliver an injury, you need to have at least a passable fluency in all the various forms it can take: Boxing. Kick boxing. Ground fighting. Stick fighting. Knife defense. Gun disarms. I have no doubt I’m missing some here. Once you get all those covered, […]
SELF DEFENSE IS A SHAM • PART 1
When you think of what self defense is, what do you see? I see nothing. Okay, maybe that’s a little too harsh, too fast… If I try really hard to cut through the ambiguous fog of those phrases, I can almost see someone getting attacked, desperately trying to get away, maybe getting backed into a […]
SLOW YOUR SELF PROTECTION TRAINING DOWN
People often ask why we insist they start with slow practice for self protection training when everybody knows that real violence is fast. One way to answer this is to think about firearms training, especially your first day on the range. If yours was anything like mine, you started with the firearm in a hip […]