Social-Asocial Archives - Injury Dynamics

Hitter or Quitter?

August 19, 2024/0 Comments/in Social-Asocial/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Most of what goes on in martial arts and combat sports works because people quit. They quit because it hurts, or because they’re exhausted, or because they start to listen to the little voice that’s telling them everything will be a lot better if they’d just give up and give in. More often than not it’s a combination of all these things at once; the question gets asked often enough, with each blow, “Why don’t you just quit?”, until they hit that personal threshold and just can’t take it anymore.

Any technique that isn’t about career-ending, crippling injury is about compliance, about making the person submit—trying to convince them to quit. This is fine when the outcome isn’t critical, when what happens next is nice and social. It’s great for competition and the dojo. In fact, without this, sport becomes impossible, filled with sickening “accidents” and truncated careers; the dojo runs out of students as they succumb, one by one, to the brutal endpoint of their training.

Relying on your ability to make people quit, to have a higher pain tolerance, better conditioning, and an indomitable will—to outlast your foe while working them to the point where they cave—will get you killed in the place where those things don’t matter. If your would-be murderer is a quitter at heart, chances are you’ll be fine. But if they aren’t… if they don’t care about pain, or how tired they are, or if they lack that little voice that the sane call caution, well, then they’re not going to quit. Unless you know how to remove choice from the equation, they’re going to kill you. Even if it takes them a little bit of work to get you there.

If they’re a killer, they know it’s not about making you quit. They know it’s not about technique, or speed, or strength. It’s about results. They won’t waste their time engaging or setting you up. They’ll go straight for those results, breaking you, shutting you down to the point where there’s nothing you can do—not even quit—they’ll remove choice from the equation and treat you like meat to be butchered.

Your only hope is to know how to get those results, too—to know why those results happen so you can make them happen every single time, and get it done first. Toughness, bravado, ego, superior technique—these things mean nothing in violence. Going against a killer when the prize is your life is no time to hope for the best with a suitcase full of techniques you don’t fully understand—techniques that you hope will work but can’t articulate why they do. If you don’t know, with surety, the result you’re gunning for, and why that result occurs, you’re out of your league when it comes to violence.

And in violence there are only two kinds of people: those who know what they’re doing—precisely—and the dead.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2008)

Scenario-Based Training vs. The Hard Knot

July 9, 2024/0 Comments/in Social-Asocial/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

When people say “scenario-based training”, it’s code for “all the crap that comes before the actual violence”. The yelling, the approach, the grabby man-dance. Of course, once the violence starts it’s all the same old, same old: injury, injury, injury. Pedestrian, predictable, and downright boring. All the stuff that comes before, all the stuff that people are fascinated with, is, for our purposes, a waste of time.

The lead-in to violence for any given scenario is typically antisocial in nature, leading to questions like “How do I deal with his behavior?” and “When do I decide to injure him?” You already have the skills to deal with the former—talk him down, capitulate, or get the hell out of there. As for when to tear into someone, that’s a personal judgment call you have to make in general terms ahead of time; in specific terms it’s based on your read of the situation. If you recognize a threat and you think you can’t live with it, then get busy shutting him off. If you think it’s something you can live with—merely antisocial in nature—then act accordingly. Use your social skills, or set a new 100-meter dash record, or tear into him as you will. In other words, act according to your comfort level.

This threshold will vary from person to person based on life experience. Some people can stomach all kinds of crazy antisocial behavior; others will brook no threat whatsoever. Either way, it’s a personal judgment call. This means your response to that stuff is up to you to figure out, for yourself, on your own time. We’ll hand you the tool—you have to decide when you’ll swing it.

Another reason people want all the upfront stuff is because they are not in a hurry to get to the wreckage. They’re afraid. They want to stay in the semi-social realm for as long as possible and want to hang onto the idea that they are the Good Guy. If we maintain an attacker/defender dichotomy, i.e., “He came after me, so therefore he’s the Bad Guy, which automatically dubs me the Hero,” we keep things nice and social. And for us sane humans, social equals comfortable. Remember, we have, as a species, a natural disinclination to violence; society wouldn’t function if it were otherwise. Violence turns our stomachs. People will go to great lengths to avoid discomfort.

Do you really want to spend your precious training time working within your comfort zone in contrived, antisocial scenarios, with only a small percentage given over to the actual work of violence? Or do you want to work where actual change occurs, the point where all violent acts become the same—the point of injury?

Look at it this way: we could waste your time by having you role-play stage productions of Serpico such that for every 20 minutes of mat time you only get two where you’re actually booting people. Instead, we have you experiencing violence for the full 20 minutes. Yes, half of that time is spent reacting for your partner, but you are still working where the buzzsaw hits the bone, at the point of injury. If you know what you’re doing you can actually learn more about violence while reacting than when it’s your turn. Ask anyone who’s been used by an instructor for a demo. It’s a difference you can feel. (Sometimes unfortunately so.)

Free practice is the only “scenario” you want to train in. To maximize your skill, you need to practice that skill. In this case the skill is injuring people; it stands to reason that you want to spend as much time as possible at the point of injury. That’s what free practice is. It’s you, changing everything in your favor, taking control of the man, the situation, through injury. What came before is immaterial—it has no bearing on what you’re doing to him. Did he yell? Or pull a gun? Did he grab you and knock you down? His ruptured groin doesn’t care. Neither should you.

Now, for all that, the single caveat: if your job is hallmarked by common occurrences that lead to violence (as in law enforcement or the military) then working those specific scenarios has merit. Car stops, room clearing; these scenarios are useful exercises for those who can expect to encounter them—but they’re pointless for the rest of us.

Here’s what it comes down to: use free practice to wrap and entwine the hard knot of skill within you, learn to use your mind as a weapon and your body as a tool for violence. Then you can walk the Earth free of “rehearsal anxiety”, free in the knowledge that if your current problem—no matter how it developed or came upon you—can only be solved by shutting down a human being, you know where the off switch is. And once you reach for that switch, all violent conflict becomes the same.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)

Knowing the Stakes and Acting Accordingly…

July 2, 2024/0 Comments/in Social-Asocial/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

…is a ton of crap.

Let me rewind a little bit.

The concept of the universality of violence is a key idea that we come back to time and time again, that is, treating all violence as equivalent, with no such thing as “dash”-fighting, e.g., ground-fighting, knife-fighting, stick-fighting, etc. The reason we have to keep coming back to it is because a lot of the time you don’t treat it as equivalent; add a firearm, for example, and you think the stakes are different, and you suddenly want your performance to reflect “how serious” you believe the situation has become. Sometimes you think it’s just social status at stake, or mere wounding. But when the knife or the gun comes out, then it’s different, right? Now you’re playing for keeps, and so you have to get serious. Now you know the stakes and want to act accordingly.

I call bullshit.

Let me put it this way: you really don’t want to know the stakes. You never want to find out if it was life or death, because you know how you’ll know? When they’re killing you, that’s how. That’s a stupid, behind-the-curve way to find out. It’ll be the last thing you ever know. At that point the information will do you no good.

If your mat time is focusing on the idea that your workout partner is “empty-handed” and so the stakes are a mere beating, you’re probably being sloppy with distance and penetration—letting them have too much of the former and not doing enough of the latter. Then, when you add a firearm into the mix, now it’s on, right? Everything changes, you have to tighten up, “get serious”, etc. You know what you’re really doing? You’re training to get yourself killed.

Every time you go physical it’s for keeps. Every time you yank out the fail-safes and go off on someone it’s serious. Every. Single. Time. You need to take every turn you get in training as the “real deal.” Treat your partner as if they were armed with a firearm, or a knife—because they just might be armed with something worse. They might be carrying what I carry:

A bear trap and a pack of wolves.

I never leave home without them. In fact, they’re with me constantly. Now, you might think I’m being funny or losing my mind and to that I would ask that you review any video you have of instructors free practicing. Notice that once it starts, there is no escape. The reaction partner doesn’t get the opportunity to do much of anything other than react, fall, and get torn apart.

This is what I think of when someone asks me if I’m a sheep, a wolf, or a sheepdog. (Actually, the first thing I think of is that I’m Homo sapiens, a human being, something much, much worse than any of the above. But then, we’re all human and probably far too close to it to see just how incredibly powerful an animal we are. Hands-down the apex predator of the entire planet. But I digress.)

So, if I have to pick a different animal, I’ll pick the way it feels when I free practice—like a bear trap and a pack of wolves. The trap set, powerful springs straining beneath a hasty cover of leaves and forest detritus, and a pack of lean, tawny wolves circling in the shadows. Once the trap is sprung, there is no escape—after the steel jaws of the initial strike splinter bone and sunder flesh, the wolves are free to tear the crippled person to pieces.

Why does instructor free practice look like this? Because the instructor knows the stakes ahead of time. It’s all or nothing, every time. And once that trap is sprung, there is no escape. Starting right now, here are three things you can do to get there:

– Throw out the idea that the stakes are variable.

Treat every turn on the mats as if your partner has a knife, or a firearm, or, worst-case-scenario, a bear trap and a pack of wolves.

– Be the bear trap and the pack of wolves.

Once you start, it’s all about you. They get to do nothing but react, fall, and get torn to pieces. They don’t get to stagger back. They don’t get to roll away. Get inside and stay there, right on top of them—the maximum distance between the two of you should never be greater than one step/strike. Ideally, you’ll be pretty much torso-to-torso the entire time. Make “there is no escape” your personal violence motto—and then make it a reality.

– Work on making universality a reality for you.

Violence is not a bunch of disparate things all duct-taped together into an unwieldy Frankenmass. It’s a singularity. It’s just one thing. It has a single use. You can’t dial it up and down, “go easy” or be nice. You do not inflict it upon the “unarmed” man any differently than you would an armed one. (Think about how dangerous you are, naked, with nothing but your bare hands and intent. As dangerous as a steel bear trap and a pack of hungry wolves, perhaps?)

You need to walk into every mat session with these three things in mind because you need to act identically in every violent situation—spring the trap and maul at will. Every free practice should feel the same—guns, knives, batons or not. If it feels different with the gun, if it feels stressful or “more real”, you’re missing the point when it’s not there—it means you’re not taking any of the rest of it as seriously as you should. The obvious, projected intent of the firearm is taking you where you should be all the time in your free practice. Buckle down, focus, and free practice to make the tool in the hand truly immaterial—get the job done so that it really doesn’t matter what they have, even if it’s a bear trap and a pack of wolves.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2007)

It’s Not About Naughty or Nice

June 25, 2024/0 Comments/in Social-Asocial/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

It’s about what works & survival. Period.

I was recently reading an article on “self-defense” in which the author was speaking of violence as if you could pick and choose the level of seriousness of the interaction, e.g., if they just want to “kick your ass” you kick their ass back, not really hurting them, but teaching them a lesson. If they’re a little more serious, then so are you—and if they want to kill you, well, that’s the only time you’re going to use certain serious techniques and targets like eyes, throat, and so on.

This idea illustrates a fantasy disconnect between fighting and violence, one that deserves a fantasy name: I like to refer to it as “dialing in your Spidey-power.” (With apologies to Stan Lee & Steve Ditko.) It’s the idea that you can choose to hit someone with, say, 60% of what you’ve got—and that you’ll only ever hit someone with 100% when your life depends on it. It’s being able to look at an impending “fight” and say, “Well, they’re not really serious, so I’ll dial my Spidey-power down to 50%,” and then sock them hard, but not too hard, because, after all, you don’t want to kill them, right?

Here’s the problem: holding back can get you killed. There are many ways to hold back:

1) You can wait and see to try and suss out what their intentions are,

2) You can make certain targets off limits because wrecking them is awful (you’ll never hear me say otherwise)—like the eyes or breaking a knee, both permanent, crippling disabilities, and/or

3) You can “go easy” on them by not striking as hard as you can.

Any one of these leads directly to reduced effectiveness, poor results, and in the worst case, can get you killed.

The idea that you can suss out their intentions is a fantastical delusion. If you don’t have psychic powers (and my guess is… wait for it… you don’t) or know the evil that lurks in the hearts of men like the Shadow does, then you’re screwed. You’ll know they want to kill you because, well, they’re busy doing it. That is not the time to find out. In fact, it’s never a good time to find out, right?

Making targets off limits ahead of time (“I’ll never go after the eyes,”) will give you a hesitating hiccup if your next—and only—opportunity is that target. You will stop. And try to get restarted. If you’re lucky, it means nothing. If you’re unlucky, the opportunity is gone and you just got stabbed/shot/whatever (perhaps again) and you just better hope they got it wrong, too.

You always want to strike as hard as you can. Always—as hard as you can. “Holding back” reduces the chance of injury. Now we’re into the realm of slapping each other around, pissing people off, and delivering nonspecific, superficial trauma that is neither a persistent disability nor spinal reflex-inducing. It’s wasted motion that lets them know it’s on.

The author did believe, however, that in a real worst-case scenario a magical transformation would occur—that even though you’d been neutering and watering down your training by waiting, making targets off limits and slapping at them, you could suddenly rise to the occasion of your impending murder by crushing the throat or tearing out an eye with full force and effort.

That’s a neat idea, but it flies in the face of “you do what you train.”

So, to that point, how does the way we train serve you? It would seem, on the surface, that we onlytrain for the worst-case scenario, that to use what you know in any other situation would be like using dynamite to open your car door.

Let’s put it this way: the “worst-case scenario” encompasses and includes all other possible scenarios; going in purely to cause serious injury, put the person down and then pile it on (e.g., start kicking a “helpless” person on the ground) covers, handles, and takes care of anything and everything they may have wanted to do to you.

But the real beauty is that you can stop at any time. You’ll typically do this the moment you recognize that they’re nonfunctional. Let’s say you start out by breaking their jaw at the TMJ. You get the minimum expected reaction—they turn slightly, somehow keeping their feet. You come back with a shot to the groin and get a HUGE reaction, they go down face-first and try to curl up into a fetal position. You break their ribs and then strike to the side of their neck, knocking them unconscious. At this point you recognize that they are nonfunctional (to your satisfaction) and stop.

(Notice that I didn’t mention any techniques or tools—that’s because they don’t matter. Results matter.)

This sequence could have been different at each node of injury—you break their jaw and they spin around three times and lie down, out cold; you stop when they go fetal after the groin strike; you stop after breaking the ribs because as far as you’re concerned, your read on them is “done.” You also know how to carry it to a more final conclusion with a stomp to the neck or throat. But always as an informed choice—not out of desperation, and not after having been trained that it is “wrong” or morally less-than.

You also know how to start right off with the eyes, throat, or a broken neck—but again, as a conscious choice. If killing is what will see you through, you will kill them. If killing is not appropriate, you can still operate because you know where the line is. This is because you are trained in the totality of violence, understanding it for what it is—a single-use tool that does not have an intensity dial on it. You can’t make guns shoot “nice.” And what a bullet does is the purest expression of everything we’re ever talking about. All violence is the same.

So, what does this mean for you?

First and foremost, it means you understand that violence is not a plaything—you won’t goof off with it any more than you would with a loaded firearm. This is healthy. It means you won’t get sucked into stupid (antisocial) shenanigans thinking you can use what you know without any negative repercussions. It means you’re going to be smarter about when to pull it out and use it. This is going to save you tons of wear and tear, not to mention legal troubles.

It means that when you do use it, you’re going to use it the only way you can be sure it works—with no artificial social governors restricting what you can and can’t do. You’ll strike them as hard as you can to cause injury. And you’ll take full advantage of that injury, replicating it into nonfunctionality.

If we view this through a social lens it is savage, brutal, dirty, unfair, and very probably illegal somewhere. This was the essential thesis of the self-defense author. But the question you have to ask yourself is are you going to bet your life the other person is playing by the rules? If they are, well, then you’re a jerk, aren’t you? If they aren’t, you’re dead.

The moral of the story? Screw around with hand-to-hand violence the same way you’d screw around with a firearm—don’t.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)

The Final Word in Context: Murder

June 18, 2024/0 Comments/in Social-Asocial/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

There is a baseline level of confusion about what exactly it is we do; confusion that I am, quite frankly, tired of hashing and rehashing. There are deep-seated biological, psychological, and societal reasons for this confusion—and so it is perfectly natural for it to persist—but as an instructor it frustrates me because treading back and forth across this well-worn rut doesn’t make you any better at doing violence.

The only thing that makes you better is getting the mechanics down pat—where and how to cause injury, and how to best take advantage of the results. Everything else is just mental masturbation that feels important because it tastes like philosophy with a little bit of work mixed in. You think you’re working—while avoiding doing any of the real work that will make you better at violence, namely getting a reaction partner and hitting the mats regularly.

And so I am going to flog a dead horse again today, but my goal is to flay it to the bone (or finally sell it off if you take the original meaning); I want to take it to its absurd, logical conclusion beyond which there is no more jaw-flapping:

What we teach is violence, which is what you need to do when someone wants to murder you.

So where’s the confusion? That seems pretty clear-cut. And that’s what I think, too. But then the questions start:

Why would I ever need to know how to kill someone?

Won’t I get in trouble if I use this in a bar fight?

But what if he’s got X and/or Y and he’s coming at me like so?

How do I do it to someone who knows what you know?

What if he does it first?

Or one of the other infinite facets of the question that tells me you don’t really believe that bigger-faster-stronger doesn’t matter. You want to believe, but you don’t.

Where does all this confusion come from? It arises because you think you know what you’re seeing, but you’re looking at it through the wrong mental porthole. When fists and feet are flying, you see monkey politics. You see competition. It’s all great apes working out dominance and submission. Don’t feel bad—you’re hardwired to recognize and respond to this. It’s only natural. Which is why I want to start the violence conversation off with one person shooting another person to death.

Watching one person kill another with a firearm won’t ping your monkey brain. It’ll go far deeper, down into the lizard-level, the primeval predator level. You’ll see it for what it is: killing. If we look at the underlying mechanics, we have:

kinetic energy delivered through anatomy, wrecking it

And now we have the perfect model to work backwards from. Keep the killing context, keep the wrecked anatomy in mind, and now look at other ways of causing that outcome. A fist, a boot, a pipe, a shin, etc., etc.—it doesn’t matter what as long as it’s doing the work that a bullet does, if only in a generic sense. So now if we line up a series of killings and look at them side-by-side—a shooting, a stabbing, a bludgeoning, getting hit by a car—we should be able to see the clear, underlying principles that govern all of these equally and immutably. Learning how to wield these principles is “getting the mechanics down pat” I mentioned earlier.

All clear, right? No—back to the confusion: you get the gun and the car, but you feel iffy about the pipe and the knife, and downright scoff at the fist, boot, or shin.

Why?

Because you read it with your monkey politics filter and think there’s something you can do about it. “I can’t dodge bullets, but I can block a punch.” This is the ultimate in hubris and sends you down a negative feedback spiral: If you can “handle” a punch, then of course they can “handle” it when you’re trying to do it to them. You’re pissing in your confidence reservoir and your training will look hesitant and spotty. And that’s exactly where your skill will go. You’re thinking that you’re fighting when we really want you doing something completely else.

We are trying to teach you how to kill murderers. Everything that fits that narrow model benefits you. Anything that sounds out of place or silly in that context is useless.

That’s why “murder” is the final word in context. Almost no one knows what to do when that’s what’s up. “Fighting” and “defense” are worthless in that arena—remember that defense wounds are found on corpses and tell the coroner that the person “fought for their life.” You’re not going to fight anyone for your life. You’re going to kill a murderer.

Armed with this new context, let’s look at the common questions:

Why would I ever need to know how to kill someone?

If that someone is a murderer, then ipso facto. It’s like asking, “If drowning can kill me, why train to swim in water?”

Won’t I get in trouble if I use this in a bar fight?

Yes. Yes, you will.

But what if he’s got X and/or Y and he’s coming at me like so?

Would you ask the same question with a gun or a steering wheel in your hand? Of course you laugh, but a crushed throat and a gouged eye don’t care if it was bullets, hood ornaments, or boots that did it. So why should you?

How do I do it to someone who knows what you know?

Injured is injured, dead is dead, regardless of talent or training.

What if he does it first?

Then you have nothing to worry about.

Bigger-faster-stronger?

The murderer doesn’t care—in fact, that’s one reason why he’s successful. And that should inform your thinking on the subject.

Here’s the bottom line: check yourself and stick with what matters. Is your question, your doubt, your worry rooted in the mechanics of injury or is it stuck in monkey politics, in “fighting”? Be honest with yourself. If it’s the mechanics, we can work on that, show you what to do and how to do it. After that it’s on you to hit the mats with a partner and take ownership of it. If it’s competition, monkey politics, or has anything to do with communication or changing behavior, then it’s immaterial and meaningless in the context of killing a murderer.

Because you don’t talk to, try to best, or even fight with murderers. You kill them.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)

ABOUT

TRAINING

MEMBER RESOURCES