Training Archives - Injury Dynamics

Kill the Unknown

August 13, 2024/0 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

— H. P. Lovecraft

Fear is a biological fact. We are hardwired for fight or flight—remember, we’re the descendants of the ones who didn’t stop and think when the lion was bearing down on them. We’re the kin of the ones who literally “went ape” and flipped out with either a rooster tail of dust to the horizon or by picking up a stick and getting busy. But just because fear is a biological fact doesn’t mean that we have to give into it; we don’t have to feed the fear, allow it to grow fat on the shadows of our nightmares. We can recognize (and be grateful for) the ass-saving properties of biological fear without bloating it out into the grotesquerie of all-consuming emotional panic.

We do this by killing the unknown.

Most people have no idea what goes on in violence outside of agony, mayhem, and death. It is a Great Unknown; a bottomless, black abyss wherein we are free to paint our own personal pictures of horror with unthinkable outcomes. When you replace that unknown with knowledge, with understanding, governing principles, and expected outcomes you take away the power of the unknown, starve it back down to a manageable size. Fear of violence and the unthinking, blind panic it induces becomes simple biological fear. Flight means you get the hell out of there. Fight means you stomp and tear and wreak horror upon the other person.

There are two ways to make sure you’re filling in the blank spots on the violence map, changing “here be dragons” to “boot to the groin”: the first (and most important) is asocial mat time, the other is simple visualization.

Each session of asocial mat time is an expedition into that Dark Continent, to lay bare its secrets, to find out that, indeed, there is no such thing as a one-eyed ogre with three arms that hungers for human flesh. Every single turn of asocial mat time is you answering the question “What the hell goes on in here?” Turn by turn you answer that question, completely and with certitude: I crush his groin, I tear out his eye, I break his neck. That’s what goes on in here. Mystery solved.

Of course, we’ve all had the “zombie” dream—the one where you’re tearing into someone, breaking their leg, stomping their throat and they keep getting back up. So you do it again. You do more. And still they rise and come at you… Along these same lines we’ve all seen people that gave us pause, for one reason or another—he wasn’t just big, he was enormous; he had a swastika tattooed on his face and looked like he was at the end of his rope made out of a last straw; or, without knowing why, he was just… scary. This is you remembering the tales of those one-eyed ogres that used to keep you up at night, and you’re wondering if maybe there was something to the myth, and that something’s right here in front of you.

You know he’s human. He bleeds. And if he bleeds, you can kill him. You just have to remind yourself of this fact by taking a moment, whether right then and there or later (I recommend later… so you don’t set anyone off through body language), and imagine yourself breaking that person. One injury after another, putting him down and then ruining a perfectly good pair of shoes on him until he’s a twist of flesh in the middle of a stain. Imagine it in slo-mo, one broken thing at a time, or speed it up, watch your favorite parts over and over. This is you, replacing a lie with two truths: you know how to do violence, and no one is immune. This is you, taking the time to remind yourself that there is no such thing as a one-eyed ogre.

When violence is thoroughly mapped out, option after option experienced in real time on a real person, you know what to expect. There is no more “unknown” to swallow you up in blind panic. As we replace that unknown with knowledge, we starve fear down to its biologic roots and inhibit its ability to grow unchecked through your mind. Instead of giving in to it, feeding it, helping it, you’ll use it for what it’s for—and put your boot in the other person’s groin. After that the rest is academic.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2007)

Roadblocks, Plateaus, & Epiphanies

May 28, 2024/0 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

In thinking about how it felt to learn and process the tool of violence for my own use, I realized there were five distinct phases in the evolution of my thinking and, by extension, my training focus. As my understanding grew, the way I trained changed. Or, I should say, as my understanding became more simplified and streamlined, so did the way I trained.

Phase 1: Approaching the material from a fantasy angle

I originally came from a martial arts background, and so approached the new material as merely a “super-rugged” martial art. Or all martial arts crammed into one. We all bring our own appetite to the table; an all-in-one approach is what I was seeking on my martial arts vision quest because that is what I’d been led to believe was required when someone wants to kill you.

I was also well “informed” by the mass media. I was sure that the real deal would go down like the climax of a Schwarzenegger film. I was looking to square off and trade blows until I could pull out a really cool technique and impale my foe on a protruding fuel rod from a nuclear reactor. And then coolly declaim a pithy one-liner. Really.

I wanted to train for a duel, and was acutely interested in countering whatever it was he had in store for me while being able to get inside. What exactly would happen in there I had no real idea. But I did have the fantasies.

My mat time reflected my thinking; I wanted to look cool with all kinds of whippy-spinny crap. I went fast and slapped my reaction partners around. I probably wasn’t a lot of fun to work with. (Sorry, Joe!)

Phase 2: A more realistic angle, but not quite

I realized that movies and comic books were crap when it comes to useful instruction in violence—they require violence to be dramatic and climactic for effect. Real violence, in contrast, was often ugly, brutish, and short.

All that realization did for me was to make me aware of my own insufficiencies; it made me overly troubled by what the other person was up to. I sought to prepare for all contingencies. I worked over scenario after scenario in my head, trying vainly to cover every possible “what if”.

I sought ultimate, unassailable superiority as a palliative for my anxiety. I worked hard on “advanced” techniques, e.g., ever fancier joint breaks and throws.

Phase 3: Realizing he’s not my problem, I’m his problem

It’s great to say it—it’s another thing entirely to live it. I knew it was true, but I still wasn’t comfortable owning that ideal. I had a better grip on what was up, but I was still plagued by nagging concerns over what he might be up to. It was a lot of “Okay, I got that, but what if—”

This was the first time in my training where I began to concentrate on injuring him as a priority above and beyond what he was doing or what I thought would look cool. My mat time started to get ugly in the good way. (Sorry, Joe! But not really.)

Phase 4: Arriving at the singularity of violence

This is where it all came together. This is where I realized that all the seemingly disparate elements of violence were really just aspects of the same thing—every strike, joint break, and throw, with and without tools, were all one thing: injuring the person. This is where I made the shift from “fighting” into “injuring”. And it only took me 11 years!

This change came, to a large degree, from nine years of teaching. But it also came from anxiety fatigue. I was tired of worrying. I was tired of getting all tied up in knots over every little thing that might go wrong. The possibilities for fatal screwups were infinite; in the end it was just easier to let all of that go and focus on breaking the person. I realized I was my own worst enemy and decided to chuck it all and become the thing I feared most:

A person so narrowly dedicated to destruction that only death could stop me.

While dispatching the “bad guy” with flair and uncounterable aplomb is a nice idea, it’s nowhere near as good as beating the #%&! out of him. A solid, pedestrian game-ender to the groin is worth 10,000 of the fanciest techniques.

I began to own and live the truth that all targets are equal, as are all injuries; my workouts slowed and became inexorable. I simply took what I wanted. I laughed with unrestrained pleasure when people tried to grapple me, I taunted them openly as they tried to pin me, “Are you sure you got me?” Then I grabbed them by something unexpectedly fragile and dragged them screaming into my serial injury cave. Eyes and mouth wide, fingernails splintering on the stones as they vanished into darkness.

It was all about me all the time, and I was never sorry again.

Phase 5: Approaching the material from a sociopathic angle

The moral of the story? It’s not about what the #%&! he’s got or what the #%&! he wants to do—it’s about getting over there and beating the living #%&! out of him.

So what’s this mean for you?

It took me 11 years because there was no one there to tell me any different. We tell you how it goes down right now, we give you the tools to make it work and we show you how to swing those tools. You get the benefit of every last second we spent on the mats, every last second we spent thinking about it. Instead of making you relive every second we spent, we give you the end result. We’re here to tell you different.

So instead of reinventing the wheel, all you have to do is grab a body and hit the mats.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)

*I’m not sure why I chose to use grawlix instead of “fuck”—I’ve never shied away from expletives, especially such a venerable, storied, and versatile one. Maybe I just woke up soft that day.

Filthy Lies

February 28, 2024/0 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Every now and again something gets stuck in my craw, jammed in there so tight that the only things that are going to get it out are a tire iron and a liberal dose of bile. Here’s some of both for three things that got stuck in there recently—lies I hear people tell themselves, and each other, about training for violence:

⁂ Intellectual understanding of the material is key.

The criminal sociopath knows only one thing about violence—that the person doing it wins. And even that statement is too wordy. That’s not to say the average criminal is stupid, it’s just that they tend not to introspect on the topic much beyond a gut/operational level of what’s required. When asked to articulate what works in violence they’ll tend to speak to injuries, e.g., “Knee ‘em in the groin/stab ‘em in the neck/shoot ‘em in the head” sorts of answers.

Intellectual discourse on the subject is an exercise for instruction, not for doing.

Your best bet for getting good at violence is to practice doing it—not sitting around talking about it. You should really only be sitting down and talking about it because you’re wiped out from practicing so damn much.

⁂ The technique will take care of everything.

No, it won’t. Either you’re going to take care of it, or nothing’s going to happen. “Doing a move” is like throwing a hood ornament at someone—when what you really want to do is hit them with a truck that just happens to have a hood ornament bolted on the front end.

Knowing how to set up a specific joint break is not the same thing as breaking a joint. Likewise, knowing the precise “hand wave” to “claw the eyes” is not the same as causing a serious eye injury. A subtle distinction? It has to do with how far into/through the other person you’re thinking. A typical technique stops at the outer boundary of your skin—it’s a subjective, personal exercise that has very little to do with the other person or even realistic results. You know what it’s supposed to do, but because technique focuses primarily on hand waving and foot placement there’s really no way to be sure of the outcome.

Breaking out beyond technique means looking through an anatomical feature inside them and converting it into an unrecognizable mess. It’s starting with the result you need—injury—and working backwards from there to figure out how to get that result. Or, to put it another way, technique is like obsessively polishing an empty gun. What you want to do instead is study gunshot wounds and figure out how best to make those.

⁂ I can’t be expected to do it because I’m not ready.

You’re half right. You won’t be able to do it until you give yourself permission to. The only gatekeeper holding you back here is you. So why not take the time, like, right now, and decide that you CAN for a change?

Everyone reading these words has the potential ability to blind someone, make them vomit their own gonads, bust their leg and stomp on their neck to end them. The only thing missing is your full force and effort, the physical symptom of a little something we call intent, and that’s just you giving yourself permission to do what your inner predator wants to do anyway.

“I’m not ready” is kung-fu theater bullshit. It’s a responsibility dodge. What you’re really saying is, “I don’t want to be responsible for screwing up. I want to be able to blame the training.” You gotta wake up and own it. You gotta take responsibility for what you know and what that makes you. To do otherwise is to let yourself down—it’s participating in your own murder.

To be honest, nobody’s ready; nobody wants to go there. But the last thing you want when you do end up there is to be dragging a big, heavy sack of self-doubt along for the ride.

Can you kill someone with your bare hands? Yes, you can. Everything outside that mechanical fact is illusory.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2007)

All the Reasons Why You Can’t

February 22, 2024/0 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

No sane person wants to be involved in violence. If you did, all you’d have to do is run outside and punch the first person you saw in the neck as hard as you could. Getting involved in a violent act is easy—the fact that you don’t go looking for it is a testament to your civility, sociability, and sanity. Everyone’s willing to cop to this. Other than baseline humanity, the primary thing that keeps you away from violence is fear. This, no one wants to admit—so they come up with layers of excuses to cover the fact that they’re simply afraid. All the reasons why you can’t are really just facets of a single reason: you’re afraid.

There’s nothing wrong with being afraid—a little fear is healthy—and to paraphrase Eddie Rickenbacker, America’s top fighter ace in World War I, there is no courage without fear.

What’s wrong is lying to yourself about it, making up ego-salving excuses why you can’t do it.

Finally, collected in a single place (other than the inside of your skull), here are all the reasons why you can’t:

Physical

Not Enough Training

“I don’t have enough days/months/years/belts/levels, etc., to be able to hurt someone.” If only you had more time in, you’d be ready. Maybe next month. Maybe next year. The sad part is you typically don’t get to pick when it happens, so, ergo, you’re as ready as you’re ever gonna be. And the fact that most people who successfully use violence—professional criminals—have little or no training whatsoever blows this one out of the water.

Not Coordinated

“I can’t move like you guys do.” Neither could Frank the Lawyer, the self-proclaimed Most Uncoordinated Person in the Universe. I trained Frank for about a year, a year spent lying awake at night agonizing over his personal safety—he was the only person I ever trained who I prayed would never, ever be called upon to use it. He was literally the most uncoordinated person I’d ever met. He had two left feet—and that was just his hands. Fast forward five years later when I get a phone call from him and he tells me how he took out two muggers, one of whom had a knife. To quote him, “It was just like a movie.”

This was the guy who convinced me that if he can do it, literally anyone can. Scratch that excuse.

Not Able

The wheelchair-bound, the blind, a guy with one functional arm. What do they all have in common? Not this excuse. These are all people we trained—and they were more than capable of getting it done right. What’s your excuse? A bum knee? I got two of ‘em. You have no excuse. Even if it’s as severe as the ones above, it didn’t slow anybody I know down. It only slows you down if you want it to.

Mental

Not Cut Out for It

If you’re human, you are. You’re born to it, built for it, and the only reason you’re here is because all your ancestors did it to everything that got in their way. If we could bring back a Neanderthal, I guarantee he’d piss his hides at the mere sight of you. You might not think of yourself as particularly scary that way, but then you’ve forgotten that your kind wiped his kind out. Whether you like it or not, everyone’s cut out for the commission of violence.

“I could never do that to someone!”

This is typically code for “I had no idea people did that to each other and so I’m going to go unilateral for the peace-thing with the idea that if I don’t do it to anybody then no one will ever do it to me.”

You’d be amazed at what you can do when the social security blanket gets stripped away and it’s just the screech and sparks of your life rubbing up against the steel deck plate of reality.

A gentleman once openly scoffed at me and said, “I could never kick someone in the throat when they were down.” Really? Not even if they were down because they were picking up a crowbar to brain you with? You really are very sporting about your own murder. Closed-casket funeral notwithstanding.

What he was really saying was that he was afraid. As we all are. But he was lying to me about it, as if I wouldn’t notice, and worst of all, he was lying to himself.

If he’s lucky, it’ll never matter. And statistics are on his side. If he ain’t lucky, that ego’s gonna get him killed. And for no good reason other than he was unwilling to admit a small, universal weakness.

I have to tell you, Rickenbacker’s quote startled me. I mean, he was the top American ace in WWI. He once dove on and single-handedly fought with a formation of seven planes. Seven to one, by choice. A stone-to-the-bone killer. And he admitted to spending most of his time terrified out of his gourd. But then, as he said, courage is the act of overcoming fear.

So get over it. You have no excuse. You’re not saying you can’t, you’re saying you don’t want to. Well, none of us do.

Train hard, to the best of your abilities, and know that it’s more than enough. It’s served people who were smaller than you, weaker than you, less well-trained than you, when it counted most. And they’ve all made it back alive and well. So can you—but only if you quit with the excuses and get to work.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)

The Terror of the Last Resort

November 9, 2023/0 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

“What should I do?”

This is far and away the most frequent question I get when people find out what I do for a living, and what they really mean is, “What technique should I use?” My answer is always disappointing, because techniques are as useless as buying a gun and not training with it, as useless as never thinking about when you might pull it, what that might mean, and how best to prevent ever having to pull it in the first place.

So what should you do? The answer sounds simple, but it isn’t easy: You have to identify your risk factors, avoid the avoidable, and train a last resort.

In order to understand the motivation for even bothering with the first two, you need to understand the truth of a “last resort”—without sugarcoating, bravado, or ego. The terror of the last resort lies not so much in arriving at that awful moment (that dolly-zoom pinch-point where you realize your survival hinges on what you do next) but in arriving there entirely empty-handed—and empty-headed. Terror is finding yourself in the place where circumstance demands action and realizing you have nothing.

Lethal motivation does not lead to good decision-making. You’ll be stuck with however you prepared, with whatever you laid in ahead of time. Did you ever stop to consider the unthinkable? Take the time to walk yourself through the paces of the action you’d like to take in that crucial moment? Or did you bet your life on the sheer improbability of being targeted? “Chances are it won’t happen to me.” On ego? “I can take care of myself—I’ll figure it out when I’m there.” Or comforting lies? “Having a gun is better than any training.” The bottom line is if you haven’t trained a last resort, you don’t have one.

But even that’s not enough. Just buying a gun and learning how to shoot people dead does nothing to prevent the necessity of doing so in the first place—the only thing you can reliably do with it is kill people. (Brandishing to change someone’s mind is inherently risky and unreliable—if it works it was a lucky day, and nothing more.) Having a last resort is only as good as your training to employ it—and your training to avoid it.

When you understand that violence is a straight-up 50/50 shot—a coin-flip where somebody will get it right first, and win—then it becomes obvious that you want to toss that coin as rarely as possible, and really only when you have no other choice. Having a last resort means exactly that—it’s the end of a list of options, the one that is arrived at reluctantly because of the finality of it; you can’t call back bullets or raise the dead.

Identify Risk Factors

What behaviors do you engage in that make it more likely you’ll be involved in violence? Do you like to drive aggressively, tell people off in public, use the ATM after dark? How about running alone in isolated areas while your attention is compromised by headphones or earbuds? Think hard about the things you do that could expose you to unnecessary risk—even things you believe you should be allowed to do—and change your behavior accordingly. Whenever I realize I’m about to do something risky I pull that imaginary coin out of my pocket and think about having to flip it—and then I put it back and find another way.

Avoid the Avoidable

This is really about developing strategies for de-escalation and disengagement, figuring out—ahead of time—how to talk someone down or just walk away. If you’ve lived long enough you’ve no doubt done your fair share of both. The issue, always, is ego—it’s the fuel on the fire of heated words, it’s the hook that pulls you back in. Ego cannot be disarmed once things get rolling; safing it is something that takes time, effort and careful consideration long beforehand. It’s not weakness to talk or walk, it is the epitome of self-control. Strength is not just the ability to physically destroy another person, but also the ability to hold ego in check and successfully navigate potentially dangerous antisocial situations. It is an unfortunately rare but laudable thing. Think hard about it ahead of time, give yourself permission to do it, be okay with it before you even get there—because it is not an easy thing.

Really applying yourself to mitigating your risk factors and avoiding what you can takes care of 99.9% of the trouble lying in wait for you out there. With the first one you’ll never know how much you dodged (a Good Thing) and the second ends up as stories you can be proud of (“He was a jerk, but nothing worth going to jail for.”).

That leaves you with the final 0.1%—the stuff you can’t prevent or get away from. The stuff that only responds to action in kind. The stuff that will otherwise kill you. This is what the last resort is for, and why you must train one.

Train a Last Resort

Action creates opportunity. Action alters outcomes. Doing something is better than doing nothing. Doing the right thing is better than doing the wrong thing. Whatever it is that you end up training as your last resort it needs to be about hurting people so they can’t continue. It needs to produce results that you know in your bones you can replicate, without worrying about looking good or making allowances for social niceties. Whether it’s about shooting them dead or choking them out doesn’t matter—it’s about having something you’ve thought through, trained and laid in like clockwork, ready to be sprung when you find yourself at the end of all things.

Ultimately, everything packed inside “identify risk factors, avoid the avoidable and train a last resort” is a lot more complicated than “just kick him in the groin”—but it’s my honest answer to “What should I do?” It’s not about a throwaway magic trick or the brief pondering of a too-short news item. It’s about altering the very fabric of your life in order to preserve it. And then knowing what to do when all else fails.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

Be the Problem

April 30, 2019/0 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

“What did you do today to prevent being sexually assaulted?”

Jackson Katz, a social researcher, asked the men in the room that question; they laughed. Then he asked the women.

Image credit: Jennifer Wright

The data is telling: Women live in a very different world than men, and, on balance, already know the preventative measures. They think about them every day, and constantly make decisions and alter their behavior to avoid putting themselves in vulnerable situations.

I’ve learned so much about this from the women in my life — those who train with us, female instructors, my wife. Seemingly minor details like how her car only unlocks the driver’s door when she thumbs the key fob — something I found annoying as a passenger, having to wait while she opened her door, got in, and then unlocked the rest of the car — annoying, that is, until she told me why. With that shift in perspective it not only made sense — it was necessary.

This is why when I was asked to put together a video series of “10 tips for women to keep themselves safe,” I demurred. Women already know how to keep themselves safe. What’s missing is what to do when all those measures fail, and the situation goes physical.

We live in a society where women are not truly encouraged or supported in going hands-on physical for debilitating injury — oh, we pay lip service to it, *wink-winking* the whole time while death row inmates laugh at the resulting training. And so women are given weak-sauce options (“women’s self-defense”) based on socially-acceptable sporting frameworks put together by men who have no understanding of the real issues (i.e., not in touch with their inner psychopaths, so the solutions tend to be more social than operational). Everyone should be suspicious of any physical training for women that a man would not also find useful.

What’s lacking is verifiable, gender-agnostic information on how to put hands on someone so they can’t continue. I can recount as many situations as you’d like where something as simple as knowing how to take an eye would have prevented a murder. (See also: true crime TV shows.) These stories affect me deeply, because many times the outcome was entirely avoidable with the smallest bit of actionable information. The last three people who used what we do were women who found themselves over the event horizon of the physical — the place where prevention and social interaction cease to make a difference — so they doled out broken legs, crushed groins, unconsciousness, and gouged eyes instead. This is why we do what we do.

The real difference for women is in the profiles they’ll face — primarily being grabbed in an attempt to overpower them. But the solutions to those issues are found in injury, not in gender-specific moves. We trained the women mentioned above the same way we train military and law enforcement, the same way we train men. The same way we train everyone with a brain, a skeleton, and mass. In the realm of physics and physiology, minor differences in plumbing don’t affect the outcome.

So instead of telling women what they already know — and practice daily — I thought about what I, as a male hand-to-hand combat instructor, could offer as advice. After double-checking with the women in my life — those who train with us, female instructors, my wife — we agreed on these stair-stepped concepts:

• Do all the preventative things you already know how to do — but when that fails you must ATTACK & INJURE. Escape will occur as a side effect to you hurting him so he can’t continue!

• Your survival is up to you — and you alone. You can’t rely on others to save you. But you can do this. Don’t have a problem — be the problem!

• It’s not strength-to-strength — it’s effort-to-vulnerability. (Eyes-throat-groin & knowing what’s required to crush them.) A finger in the eye can change everything!

If just one woman sticks her finger in an eye instead of struggling to get away or, worse, doing nothing because she doesn’t think there’s anything she can do, then all our efforts as a training community are worth it.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

For Want of an Injury

March 31, 2019/1 Comment/in Training/by Matt Suitor

For want of an injury, the solution was lost.

For want of a solution, the intent was lost.

For want of intent, the initiation was lost.

For want of initiation, the target was lost.

For want of a target, the body was lost.

For want of a body, the mind was lost.

For want of a mind, the life was lost.

All for the want of actionable information… a life was unnecessarily lost.

An instructor in our program, knowing that I grew up a block from the ocean and still enjoyed beach culture daily, sent me an e-mail about a harrowing experience he and his wife had endured earlier that day while vacationing on the gulf coast of Texas. As a hurricane blew somewhere far off in the gulf, they waded in chest-deep water along the beach, unaware that the leading edge of the storm had kicked up enough wind energy to generate rough waves. The two quickly found themselves swimming for their lives—along with “Mr. Luck”—just reaching the beach before being overcome by exhaustion. “Luckily, I’m a really strong swimmer,” he said, “but what the heck do you do in a rip current?”

An ocean rip current is a relatively strong, narrow current that flows outward from the beach through the surf zone, and may present a hazard to swimmers. A lack of actionable information about rip currents can, and often does, lead to the death of untrained swimmers, barring the intervention of Mr. Luck. Just a tiny bit of immediately useful information, however, can mean the difference between life and death.

My reply e-mail was brief. What he needed was actionable information. He had some skills and data, primarily the ability to swim hard enough and long enough and the resolve to not give up or panic in the face of impending doom. Mr. Luck was also with him that day. The current could have been stronger, the waves bigger or more consistent, his wife could have given up or dragged him under, either of them could’ve swallowed sea water or succumbed to panic. I could go on… “Swimming and not giving up” was not actionable information under the circumstances. He needed something more. The points I included in the short paragraph described how rip currents work and what to do if you find yourself in the middle of one. I included an image from the National Weather Service that illustrated, in the simplest terms, rip current survival. I then told him his experience was a textbook example of what not to do. If you don’t know, well, you don’t know. I described the variables involved with engaging different wave action, as well the basic solution for a rip current:

1) Relax.

2) Swim parallel to the shore until you are out of the current.

3) Then swim to shore.

In life-threatening emergency situations, your survival depends heavily on the amount of actionable information that you possess inside your mind and your skeleton, and the degree to which the gods have sprinkled “luck dust” on your corpus. In moments of high stress and/or danger, your chances of survival increase if you focus on what you can control rather than what you cannot. Said another way, luck is a poor strategy in these situations.

If the solution to the emergency requires actionable information, then having no information prevents intentional action no matter how much you desire to act. Thus, you are likely to respond with useless or even disadvantageous action, like freezing up or actively working against your survival. If you don’t know what you are doing, doing so intentionally becomes, by definition, a nonstarter.

Further, if you cannot intentionally do something because you don’t know what that thing is, initiating the relevant action to begin the process of intentionally going after the required solution is like… trying to catch a train that’s already left the station. The failure to initiate what you don’t know leads to a catastrophic tipping of things out of your favor. And emergency situations, by definition, have a ticking-clock component: hesitation kills. That first missing piece—a lack of information—is the opening for a cascade of catastrophic results.

Enter luck. If you are “lucky,” the situation just rattles you with the horror of how bad things could have gone. If you are not lucky, the result is a chain of events that rapidly slips out of your control and into a catastrophic death spiral, irrecoverable and non-survivable. You are unnecessarily overcome by the situation for want of a little actionable information… and not quite enough luck this time.

Knowledge is power that is enhanced through experience. For the first-timer, a rip current presents unimaginable feelings of terror and hopelessness. And I highly doubt that the instructor (who barely survived his first experience) wanted to frolic anywhere near a rip current ever again… But if you’re an avid surfer, the rip current becomes just another datapoint in your decision-making process: sometimes you can use the rip to help get through the waves; sometimes the rip can make or break a particular wave. And sometimes you can get stuck in a rip and almost die despite all your knowledge and experience.

It’s important to understand that your knowledge and experience does not immunize you from the power of the ocean. Many big waver surfers have drowned pursuing their passion in situations where they had survived hundreds of times before. Yes, Mr. Luck is a big wave surfer, too. Even small wave riders have lost their lives in “normal” surf. I almost drowned less than ten feet from the shore in Hawaii, after breaking my leash and losing my board, and then trying to swim against a rip while navigating which four-foot wall of whitewater I was going to let rake me up the razor-sharp lava “beach.” Knowledge and experience give you a higher probability of success in an emergency, not a hall pass.

A few days later, I received a second e-mail from the instructor. While walking along the same beach, he and his wife were approached by a young boy in an absolute panic pointing into the stormy surf and screaming to help save his parents. With just his limited experience with rip currents (one horrific, uninformed, and damn lucky go) and the short paragraph of actionable information, the instructor swam directly out into the rip current that had almost killed him days earlier and, following procedure, swam the mother safely to shore. Unfortunately for the family, Mr. Luck got tired of waiting for the instructor to go back out and decided not to stay with the father long enough for the instructor to reach him in time.

So… what does any of this have to do with criminal violence?

In a criminally violent encounter, the first person to impart traumatic injury so that the other person cannot continue wins. If you didn’t know this fact, you’re swimming in that rip current right along with the instructor, his wife, and good old Mr. Luck. For want of a solution, intentional action evaporates. Frozen or flailing, you’ve got nothing useful. Like swimming against the tide, the injuries you receive progressively stack against your survival as your body fails and your mind fades shortly behind. You’re a statistic.

However, if you know this reality about criminally violent encounters, actionable information would include:

1) How the human machine breaks.

2) How to do that work with your bare hands.

3) How to take advantage of the results.

This would provide a solution that you could intentionally initiate, driving you forward to break one thing, and then another, until the other person stops moving or can’t continue. Now you’re a better statistic.

As is true with the rip current, surviving a violent encounter requires knowledge that is enhanced by experience. Let’s say you don’t live near any beaches, but you like visiting them, or you’re about to take an open ocean cruise. In both of these cases a two-day, all-inclusive educational course on open ocean and rough water swimming would be just the thing, where you could get hands-on experience from professionals who have spent their lives not only teaching the material but training the material week in and week out. Moreover, you would want these educators to be invested in your successful understanding of the material. The next best thing would be a one-day course that hit the basic principles and targeted your specific need to understand rip currents so you could enjoy all beaches…

This is what we do—and what we can do for you—when it comes to the use of violence as a survival tool.

— Matt Suitor

Stop! Hammer Time

February 28, 2019/0 Comments/in Training/by Matt Suitor

We don’t sell hammers—we teach hammering.

Search the google-sphere for framing hammers, you’ll see everything from a $345 all-titanium super-hammer to the good old fashioned $24 generic California framing hammer. Nothing too dissimilar from the rock our ancestors tied to the top of a stick to help accelerate a hard object into another object to increase the work being done to the object being struck. Just a bit more efficient and durable.

Originally, the object was struck to obtain food of some sort (opening shellfish, killing prey, etc.), or to prevent you from becoming food (killing another predator). And the reality of the way things worked out, pure necessity dictated that every one of our ancestors had access to this information for survival. We all learned and knew how to “swing the hammer” to smash something to eat and/or to survive violent encounters with other humans or animals vying for similar resources.

As societies developed along the way to modernity, hammer-swinging became compartmentalized, either removed from everyday use due to specialization by craftsmen and farmers or monopolized by “society” through governments and laws. These days the grocery store puts shellfish in a can for us, the butcher and farmer remove the laborious task of killing and harvesting animals ourselves, the carpenter builds our shelters, and the state “swings the hammer” of justice. The good citizen goes to the store for food and calls the police to intervene when the need to “swing the hammer” arises.

Over thousands of years of relying on others to “swing the hammer” for us, the skillset has been lost, buried deep in the DNA of the average citizen. The biomechanics of the human machine haven’t changed at all in that timeframe, leaving the ability to “swing the hammer” dormant inside each one of us: a concept proven day-in and day-out through the execution of criminal violence. Humans wisely relinquished the responsibility of daily “hammer swinging” so that we would not have to take resources by force and/or face potential violence on an ongoing basis, but as a side effect most have lost connection with or understanding of the utility of “the hammer” itself.

The human skeleton, when used to do violence to another human skeleton, is as utilitarian and design-ready a tool as the modern framing hammer is to a carpenter. Even without instruction, practice, or experience, an enthusiastic novice using either tool could get successful work done. With a little instruction, some common sense and a couple of errant shots to the thumb, you could probably nail some boards together and build a shelter to get out of the rain. Likewise, a couple of tips from someone well versed in How Swingeth the Hammer could end up saving your life.

A couple summers “humpin’ lumber” for your uncle’s construction company and you could pretty much get a job bangin’ nails somewhere again (if you worked hard and weren’t just there because your uncle owned the business). Ten to 15 years on the job, you could be a foreman or own your own company. A lifetime building homes and learning from the wisdom of hammer swingers before you, well, someone might one day call you a master carpenter.

The utility of the hammer as a tool has been proven out over thousands of years by the relatively small change in design. Because humans designed the hammer to increase the capacity of the human machine to do work, there are only so many efficient ways to swing a hammer. The road to master carpenter, then, lies not in the hammer used but in the experience wielding the tool, multiplied by the quality and breadth of that experience over time. (If you spend the first five years trying to hit a nail into wood with the wrong side of a claw hammer, or if your teacher is more interested in selling you his overpriced, signature series, all-titanium super hammer than training you how to swing your hammer yourself, well, your road might be longer.)

One thing to understand is that no one has a patent on “swinging the hammer,” including us. The hammer has been in the public domain forever, and can only exist there because when the law is gone the hammer remains. A broken neck (one potential result of “swinging the hammer”) extinguishes the need for patents, as the process to achieve a broken neck is immaterial to the result. A broken neck does not care that the person doing so was trained or untrained, what “style” or “technique” was used to break the neck, or who has the rights to said technique, or whether that technique was the most efficient way to achieve the result. Moreover, the broken neck cares not of the Laws of Man.

At Injury Dynamics, our training compliments any prior training and we are not interested in anything other than educating people about the confluence of physics and physiology with catastrophic results. With a body of knowledge and a curriculum for training that knowledge, the Injury Dynamics technicians are experts at showing people how the human machine breaks, how to do that work with your bare hands, and how to take advantage of those results.

What marketing people tell me is that if I really want your money I should sell you my Master Matt Signature Series All-Titanium Super-Hammer, which I used in some awesome story about myself that makes you feel good about giving me money for a hammer that doesn’t make you build (or break) things any better, or give you experience wielding a hammer yourself. I should tell you that in a few easy lessons, you’ll be able to swing nail-for-nail with the best craftsmen in the world (including myself, and being the most awesome person possible it’s going to cost you.) And all this because I’ve boiled down my years of experience into the three easy secrets of carpentry that cuts out the hard work of actually learning how to hammer. Which you can also have access to in my video series, Hammer of the Gods, in which I finally reveal to the Average Joe the Inner Circle secrets of master carpenters everywhere…

Unfortunately, with the proverbial hammer, all you’ll have is you, your experience wielding your hammer, and your willingness to do the work in front of you. At Injury Dynamics, our instruction is designed and committed to service those three goals.

So… grab a tool belt and a bag o’ nails and come swing the hammer with us.

— Matt Suitor

As we head into our 30th year…

January 31, 2019/2 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

…the work continues without pause, unabated.

We train and teach violence as a survival tool constantly, never off the mats for more than two days in a row.

We are in classes three days a week, with six-hour Saturdays every month (seventeen in a row so far). We continue to hold multi-day seminars, both public and private, and do private specialty training for people and groups who, for many reasons, cannot attend regular classes—and appreciate our discretion.

We just completed our 54th biannual testing cycle, and as a result we have four more instructor candidates on track to join the other 50 instructors this summer.

Last week I put the finishing touches on the 2018 compendium of the basic lesson books (more than a thousand lessons to train people from absolute beginner to instructor) and distributed it to the instructor staff—so no matter where we are in the world, we’re all pulling from the same page. And that doesn’t include the advanced lessons that take an instructor all the way to Master… I’ll be updating those on an ongoing basis.

To further support our instructors and students we’ve captured more than 400 of the basic lessons on video for our online program. While that’s something like only one-fourth of the total number of lessons, it’s a good start. The visual encyclopedia is growing.

Why didn’t we document all of this on social media, in real time, with breathless hashtags and yet another post of someone kicking a downed man in the groin? Because none of that dopamine-drip thumb-swiping has anything to do with doing the work. It takes an obscene amount of time to shoot, curate, edit, and post the junk mail of our era—time that could have been spent rewriting another lesson, taking another turn on the mats, helping a student get that neck break just right—you know, the stuff that actually matters. Our social media policy is that we’ll say something when we have something to say, and not just shout to hear our own voices go into the black hole of atrophied attention. We do not spam.

In addition, we refuse to trade on the reputations of the people and groups we train. What they’ve done is theirs and theirs alone, and we have not done those things. We are scholars and technicians keeping the information sharp, viable, and easily trained. We simply make it available.

Of course, this makes marketing a challenge—but that’s fine. We’re not here to talk about the thing—we’re here to do the thing. This means we rely on word of mouth—a far more difficult tack—but the results create a better experience for everyone involved. The people we’ve trained know what we do, and they tend to share it with the people they care about. That’s enough for us.

Actually training is everything, because we are only as good as the last course we taught, and the information is only as good as the last person who used it. By both counts we’re pretty damn good at what we do.

WE REMAIN STEADY

Come train with us!

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

Who Needs It Next?

October 25, 2018/4 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

That’s the question that has kept me sweating, bleeding, training — teaching — for 28 years. Whenever I’ve considered hanging it all up, I just thought of the last person who used it, who needed it, who would’ve been found by a corpse-sniffing dog in a ditch if they hadn’t known how to turn the tables — violently, shockingly — on the predator who thought they had found obedient prey. For me, it was just another chunk of time grinding in silence alone, hours of prep for every hour of class, hours on the mats and nursing all the dings, dents, concussions and limps that accrue across years of physical action — but for them it was everything. They would say it was all worth it — even the 17 years of doing this without making a living at it — and I agree.

I wouldn’t change a thing.

As a group, we work as hard as we do because of the last person who needed it — they are the shining example of why we keep getting back up. They were the one who needed it next, and our paths intersected just in time. And while it can seem “spooky” that someone used their experience from training shortly after completing a course, the only reason it’s notable is because of the nonstandard outcome. If they hadn’t known how to wield the tool of violence their story would have been mundane — assaulted, maybe even murdered, just another statistic, the same-old, same-old. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…”

The reason their story stands out is because of the twist: “He pulled up his shirt to show me the gun — so I knocked him out.”

Using their experience can come in more subtle forms, like standing up while the situation is still social (or even antisocial) — though it’s tilting on a trajectory toward violence — and declaring that no, this isn’t going to go the way you want it to. What allows them to keep their feet on that slanting deck is the confidence that if it does pitch everyone into the water, they know how to swim. They’ve done it before. If things go physical, they know how to put people down so they stay down.

That simple confidence — the result of physical experience on the mats — can dissuade the casual predator. And if he turns out to be the real deal, well, there’s no bluff to call. It’s even odds, with a slight edge to the person who actually trained. But if you don’t know the truth about violence — whoever gets it right first, wins — if you trained nothing, or in anything that is socially acceptable — that 50/50 shot is really 10/90, and your story will be just like all the others. Mundane, predictable, expected. “He pulled up his shirt to show me the gun — so I got in the trunk.”

We teach and train because we don’t know who needs it next — the people who did didn’t know they needed it next — in the end all we can do is maintain the information, provide a place to train, and make it available for those who want it.

We’re here for you now — come take advantage of the opportunity.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

Our last 6 Crash Courses have been for private groups — but now that our schedule has opened up, we can offer this training to you!

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Kill the Unknown

Roadblocks, Plateaus, & Epiphanies

Filthy Lies

All the Reasons Why You Can’t

The Terror of the Last Resort

Be the Problem

For Want of an Injury

Stop! Hammer Time

As we head into our 30th year…

Who Needs It Next?

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