Unlike most physical endeavors, ours has no target demographic. It’s not possible to tell whether or not our training will resonate by just looking at someone. I’ve seen young, smart, athletically-gifted people miss the point entirely and fail out of the first testing cycle; at the same time I’ve watched out-of-shape, “least-likely” people (who I’ve […]
Vetting Your Plan The purpose of a reaction partner is to provide a proving ground for concepts you want to test. In the late 1970s, when the army was putting together a combat shooting program for the soon-to-be Delta Force (SFOD-D), they invited “experts” from all over to offer their techniques. However, when applied to […]
“All fights end up on the ground” is right, but for the wrong reasons. We just completed our 53rd biannual testing cycle — yeah, we’ve been doing this a long time — where a bunch of people leveled up, including three new Instructor Candidates and several Instructors picking up degrees in the march toward Master. […]
What you want to know vs. what you need to know. In my previous blog I showed how the law is irrelevant to someone involved in a violent encounter; in this post I’d like to talk about how the legal system can be just as scary as a violent encounter. Two of the most common questions I […]
I did not enter this monastery by choice — I was born as another twist in the labyrinth, a monument to the winners who at one time had their hands around throats as a matter of course. We are all of us the spawn of killers. As predators we have “theory of mind,” the ability […]
Note: The following was sent to us by a female client who wanted to share this on our blog, but wishes to remain anonymous. ~~~ People who don’t know me well would never imagine that I know anything about or have any interest in hand-to-hand combat training and I like it that way. It isn’t […]
Your skeleton is just as hard, his eye just as soft — regardless of how everyone is feeling. In the human world — the one that only exists inside our skulls — emotion is power. As we might use a hand to grasp an object so we use emotion to grasp other people’s minds. It […]
Simulators require a large investment both to produce and utilize, so for most endeavors that require a high level of skill you just learn as you go. This is referred to as on-the-job training (OJT), and if you’ve got the time, it’s a great way to gain useful experience. The exception to OJT is a […]
Violence — The use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy. Criminal violence — The intentional use, or attempted use, of physical force by a human against another human, so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy the other human. Self-defense — An intentionally committed use of violence, by one individual […]
When a bullet enters an eye, there’s nothing in that interaction that is affected by the gender of the person who pulled the trigger. The universe doesn’t stop and check to see if it was a man or a woman before allowing the chunk of metal to tear through soft tissue — the only question […]
Anyone can train — but it’s not for everyone. And that’s okay. All I ever wanted to know was how to hurt people. The standard path for such things in the 1980s was traditional martial arts, and after sampling a multitude of various classes, schools and approaches I had resigned myself to the Sisyphean vision […]
There are no contradictions in the physical world. At the scale of our experience the universe is a perfectly tuned machine that simply does what it does — everything can be mathed out in a predictable dance of cause and effect. Contradictions only exist in human language, a necessary construct to provide flexibility in social […]
We teach the use of violence as a survival tool: how the human machine breaks, how to do that work with your bare hands, how to take advantage of the results. We cover striking, joint breaking, throwing, knife, baton, firearms, multi-man work, as well as grabs, holds and chokes. But what does that word salad […]
The truth about violence pervades the world like the music of the spheres — it’s out there, soundtracking the inevitable gyre of history — all you have to do is listen and you would know what the sociopath and the criminally insane know. You would be dangerous with nothing more than a little open-minded attention. […]
The way you’ve been taught to think and speak about violence is fundamentally flawed. How do I know this? Because you’re taking the time to read about it here. Dangerous people, those who already know how to use violence as a tool, don’t go looking for answers on the Internet. They know in their bones […]
