Training Archives - Page 2 of 3

How many times have you rehearsed your attempted murder?

September 28, 2018/0 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

The brain can only go where it’s been before.

When it comes down to it, all you will have during your attempted murder is your experience — not your motivation, your strength, or even your training — the only thing you’ll have is what you’ve done with your own hands in front of your own eyes.

Experience is not the same as information — you can watch all the videos on rough water swimming you want, you can talk about it and read about it for hours and days and weeks — but none of that is going to matter when you actually hit the water. In that moment you’ll either swim or drown, and your success depends a great deal on how much time you spent actually doing the thing required to survive.

When we teach the use of violence as a survival tool we start with information — defining violence, describing actions and results, modeling movement — and then show you how to convert that information into knowledge: your ability to do it yourself. But even that’s not enough. When the time comes you won’t remember what we said or even what you know on a conscious level. All you’ll have is what you’ve done.

That’s where the hours on the mats come in. Our goal in a 2-Day Crash Course is to get you to execute a thousand turns — that’s a thousand times you recognized a threat, made a decision about how to destroy it, and then executed on that decision to end things in your favor. It’s rehearsing your attempted murder a thousand times — with knives and batons and firearms and grabs and holds and chokes and multiple people — so that if, God forbid, you ever find yourself there it won’t be the first time. You’ll be experienced… and therefore much more likely to get it right once more.

All those hours on the mats, doing serial target practice on the human machine, shattering anatomy one piece at a time, is where you will convert your knowledge into experience. This is the most powerful learning, and something we can’t do for you — only you can do it for yourself. We can show you what to do, and how to do it, and help refine your process as you convert knowledge into experience, but ultimately you’re the only one who can show yourself how you get it done.

A common refrain we hear at the start of the second day is “I don’t remember what we did yesterday!” And yet… when they step out onto the mats they just start doing. This is by design. What they mean is that they’re looking back through their declarative memory and finding it weirdly blank — they know they “learned stuff” yesterday, but they can’t recall precisely what in a specific, ordered sense. But that doesn’t matter, because the fact that they can step out onto the mats and just do it means that the experience of their 500 turns on that first day are firmly embedded in procedural memory — the place where walking and swimming and riding a bike are stored. The booby trap has been installed, the pit dug, the spikes set, the springs wound tight. And the whole thing covered over and smoothed out so it looks just like unturned earth.

They’ve weaponized their skeleton. It will be there for them, stealthily locked and loaded, for the rest of their lives.

What about you?

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

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When Is a Gun Like a TV Remote?

September 21, 2018/2 Comments/in Mindset, Training/by Taylor Good

During a training in Dallas, I visited my parents who live there, but whom I rarely get to see on account of living, working, and training in San Diego most of the year. While relaxing at their house between extended training sessions an incident occurred that got me thinking.

We had all decided to sit down and watch a movie, but my nephew, a toddler at the time, had recently been over to play and had moved the television remote control to an unknown location, as he is wont to do. My parents and I summoned what was left of our energy reserves to mount a thorough search of the house to no avail. I reluctantly suggested that we just go over and turn on the TV by hand and then manually select a movie.

It was at this point that my parents informed me that they did not believe manufacturers even put manual controls on new TVs — “Everyone just uses the remote these days,” they said. In utter disbelief I walked over to the set and scanned the edges around the front, along the side and just behind the display until I finally found what I was looking for. In the back there was a vestigial control panel with limited options that would not provide us access to some of the higher-end functions that were exclusively remote-driven, but would allow us to accomplish our basic goal: to turn it on, select a movie (any movie at this point) and relax my aching body on their very, very comfortable couch. With that done, I dissolved into that couch and tried to remember what it was like before the remote control.

Back in the day, if you wanted to turn your TV on or off, or even watch a different channel, you had to get up off your asset and physically go over to manipulate the controls by hand. As a result of this fact people tended to be more patient with whatever was on. Then along came the remote control to remove all that work. Soon, we became much more casual about changing the channel, and before long we became completely reliant on remotes to the point that TV manufacturers stopped putting manual controls on the front of TV sets. In fact, most people today, including my family, would probably tell you that you can’t actually operate their TV without the remote — however, if you know where to access the manual controls, you can still execute the basic functions of any TV set in the catastrophic absence of that remote.

In a way, firearms are analogous to the venerable TV remote control. Like the remote, firearms distill, into a handheld device, all of the hard work and intent normally required to motivate a person to the point that they are willing to take action — and all that control is at their very fingertips. Furthermore, as firearms have gone into mass production in recent history, people have become so reliant on these highly efficient labor-saving devices that they have forgotten how to roll up their sleeves and do that work by hand when necessary. It might even be said that modern people are incapable of implementing the tool of violence without a firearm. Sound familiar?

The truth is that firearms don’t accomplish anything that you can’t already do by hand with a little knowledge and elbow grease, and there is nothing inherently special about them — unless it has become your only solution to asocial violence. In the rare event that you are put in a position that requires direct action to take out a threat you can’t afford to waste time and opportunity desperately searching for your labor-saving device.

Keep in mind that you come from a legacy of violence: By necessity, your ancestors knew the principles of violence and implemented them serviceably when necessary — or you wouldn’t be here. Luckily for us not much has changed since the dawn of time. Gravity is still cruelly tugging our bones toward the unforgiving surface of the planet, the human machine remains just as vulnerable in spite of all our efforts, and the old “rock to the back of the head” is just as relevant today as it was for our ancestors’ ancestors. Handguns are just a little smaller, a little more convenient, and require nearly zero training and intent to cause objective injuries.

Weaponizing your skeleton is simply a matter of training in the core principles of violence. One of the great benefits of training is that it allows you to take control of the learning environment before it’s an emergency. And, with a little training, anyone can learn to hurl their mass through vulnerable anatomy. Nothing has changed in that regard. When you have a principle-based approach to navigating true asocial violence — with and without tools — you’ll never be unarmed again.

— Taylor Good

SKULL-SPLITTER

August 24, 2018/3 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

You are a mid-tier predator; your ancestors ate everything below them in the food chain, and were eaten by everything above. Big brains and fire dramatically altered that equation; we picked up a rock, then put an edge on it, then put that sharp rock on the end of a stick — and as that axe was handed down from generation to generation, so, too, the truth of it: the first one to brain the other wins. Eventually, the rock became increasingly durable metals even as the brain, and what had to happen to it, remained the same.

Walk that process of innovation far enough forward in time and it’s no longer necessary for you to know how to deal with a lion. But we’ve always had to know how to deal with each other. The information around how to hunt humans has been passed down in an unbroken chain of ever-finer refinement…

Like fire, the invention of writing changed everything. We were no longer constrained by what a single human brain could hold; the dead could speak to the living, freeing us to move forward beyond where they ended.

The advent of firearms lead to a slow bleed of what had, up until that moment, been critical knowledge: how to handle humans with your bare hands. This was due to a combination of the effectiveness of firearms, the reduction in the amount of effort required to achieve the desired result, and the natural laziness of the human brain. Why spend hours training mind and body for hand-to-hand action when you can just pull and point?

But the loss of that original knowledge means that without a gun you are helpless against those who have them. You are helpless against those who know that most people don’t know how to put a human down with nothing more than their brain, their mass, and their skeleton.

The loss of that vital, ancestral knowledge makes us cattle. Those who know the truth about violence — and how to use the threat of violence — have unearned power over the masses who don’t need that knowledge on a day-to-day basis (or perhaps ever across their lucky lifetimes)… until, of course, they suddenly do. And as violence is a critical life event — a bottlenecking that can pinch your lifespan short — a little knowledge can go a long way. Like the-rest-of-your-life long.

The information we teach has existed in written form for 100 generations, only three of which have been in the modern, Western, capitalist mode. That’s 97 generations where it was handed down purely because it was useful. It has been far less necessary for daily survival in those last three generations, which means it is in perpetual danger of being fumbled in the handoff.

We can’t be complacent and rest on the laurels of those who came before us, or even our own hard-won laurels; “But historically it kicked ass!” doesn’t mean it kicks ass today. Regardless of myth and legend the system is only as good as the last time someone had to use it to thread that existential bottleneck — which was just a few short weeks ago. For that one person in that one moment, the millennia of effort to research, record, maintain and transfer the information was more than worth it.

We draw an unbroken lineage all the way from the first human who put a rock in their fist and cracked another in the head with it to that most recent incident. The axe came into our hands from the deep past; we practiced swinging it, took it apart, cleaned it up, reengineered the haft, recast the head in modern alloys, and put a monomolecular edge on it.

While this sounds like we did something amazing, we really didn’t — we just took hold of it with one hand and figured out how to pass it to the other. We didn’t invent it, we don’t own it. It belongs to everyone with a brain, mass, and skeleton. We are merely the conduits through which it will get handed down to the next generation. This is an invitation to come and be a part of that — to claim your birthright — as we extend the haft to anyone with the strength to wield it.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

Action & Silence: How to Dress for Violence

August 17, 2018/2 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

We have a very simple dress code for seminar training — baggy, loose-fitting blue jeans and a heavy-duty, plain white T-shirt — and yet this generates a surprising amount of pushback from clients. They want to wear yoga pants, tactical BDUs, board shorts, anything but blue jeans; they show up in cute tops, T-shirts festooned with the standard iconography of aggression, logos, product advertisements and political statements. And all that in a spray of every color of the rainbow.

The class ends up looking like a riot at a beach barbecue.

And meanwhile, movement is restricted, no one can put hands on each other like they need to without tearing something, and brains do what brains do — read words and process logos. For your brain it’s a riot of clashing surface noise, obscuring the signal underneath.

Action

You need clothing that won’t bind or restrict your movement, while also being a useful tool for your partner to grab and pull without tearing. In violence, you can grab a fistful of skin or other soft tissue (like the groin) to use as a handle for causing further injury; with loose-fitting, tough clothing we can grab a fistful of fabric instead, saving you from all the screaming and handprint bruises. Tight-fitting and/or light-duty clothing means your partner either 1) can’t practice these things realistically, or 2) they can — but you won’t be happy about it. (Most people, being polite, and, well, people, will default to not practicing the groin-grab — a potentially deadly mistake should they ever need to do just that when their life depends on it. The brain can only go where it’s gone before, and you don’t want the first time you’re going to grab and pull a groin to be during your attempted murder. That’s what training is for — to do it a hundred times so the 101st is nothing new.)

When everyone in the room is dressed for the work, everyone can get the practice they need without interruption or hesitation.

Silence

The choices we make in what to wear on a daily basis are rooted in personal expression and communication — we want to blend and belong or differentiate ourselves (within certain socially-acceptable boundaries) and communicate something about who we are and how we view ourselves and how we wish to have others view us. Clothing is language, and what we need for the optimal practice of violence is dead silence.

The goal on the mats is to create and work in an asocial environment, one that is entirely devoid of communication. Just like at the shooting range, we’re not going to talk while pulling the trigger — because people are bad at doing two things at once, and because we don’t want to train to talk to our targets while we’re in a firefight.

If clothing is communication, then having everyone expressing their individuality through their sartorial choices that morning gives rise to useless noise the brain must ignore in order to get to work on other things… only the brain won’t ignore it because it can’t. (Don’t believe me? Next time you’re out and about try not to read. Ignore the text and logos in your environment. Don’t think about the pink elephant.) A shirt with logos will snag your eye. Words will cry out and demand to be read — and so you will give them voice, echoing in your skull. And while the room might be quiet — save for the sounds of breathing and bodies hitting the mats — that quiet will not be present in your head, where you need it most. We’re silent on the outside so we can be silent on the inside; we want that silence to seep into ourselves so we can do the work of violence with mechanical dispassion — cool, calm, focused.

When everyone you’re training with is dressed the same — blue pants, white shirt — it allows your brain to look for and recognize similarities and differences in SHAPE, to build a generic target map of the human machine. It’s the same machine every time, just a little taller, or wider, or shorter in the torso; but the groin is always where the legs meet, the solar plexus is always dead center in the torso. This is the process of learning the ways in which all individuals are similar — we strip out the individuality of dress and replace it with a flesh-robed skeleton… in blue pants and a white shirt: a blank canvas upon which your brain can paint anatomy.

The dress code isn’t for us, the instructors — it’s not about control, or institutional uniformity, or even looking professional — it’s for you, so you get the most out of the experience. If everyone in the room is quiet and useful we can all get straight to training in dead silence, to pack a thousand turns into the weekend so that the 1,001st — the one where your life is on the line — is nothing new.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

A Difference You Can Taste

August 10, 2018/3 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

In the 28 years I’ve been teaching, the most common question I’ve heard is:

“How is what you do different from self-defense, self-protection, or fighting?”

(The question is usually about specific schools or popular styles, examples of which I refuse to list for reasons you’ll find at the end.)

The simplest answer is:

“Injury. We’re far more concerned with what’s happening inside of him, rather than what’s happening inside of you.”

In other words, something crushed, ruptured or torn — not the “cool move” that supposedly does that thing.

For a more involved explanation, here are the fundamental differentiators, including the visceral one:

– We strive to model the successful use of violence in our practice, based on observable reality — instead of trying to defend or protect ourselves or get into a fight. We don’t want to “win a fight”, we just want to deliver a beating. What the other person wants to do is immaterial. Violence is unidirectional and heavily favors the one doing it. The defender, not so much.

– Successful violence causes and exploits debilitating injury as a first principle and sole goal — the only thing that means anything in violence is ruptured anatomy. We seek to cause results similar to firearms (stripping the man of function until we achieve a nonfunctional state), using the relatively slow, heavy bullet of our mass leveraged by our skeleton. To this end we use similar training methodologies — working more like a tactical shooting course than a sparring match. (Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.)

– The human machine only breaks when subjected to catastrophic volume change, when tissues are compressed or stretched farther and faster than their elasticity will allow before failure. The action of the limbs alone (punching and kicking with no overrun) can produce useful injuries, but usually doesn’t. (This is why fights go on and on — people can easily withstand nonspecific trauma.) Body-weighted collisions with overrun get us the traumatic volume change we need to break things inside of people.

– In figuring out how to get results we start with the injury first, then work backwards from there, reverse-engineering the process to make a given sports accident happen on purpose. We are only interested in what’s happening inside of him, not what’s happening inside of you — result vs. technique, a broken knee instead of a knee-break move:

It’s his knee, but you can feel the difference in your gut.

– Beyond the “one-and-done” crash course (for raw effectiveness) we have a 10-year curriculum in writing that incorporates striking, joint breaking, throwing, knife, baton, and firearms into a seamless whole — meaning we’re never suddenly having to switch gears into “knife defense” or “gun disarms”. It’s all the same because it all hinges on causing injury and then exploiting that state change. The 10-year curriculum is about efficiency (getting an effective result more quickly, with less effort) but does not improve upon baseline effectiveness — if we both knock someone out they’re still KO’d, regardless of our relative efficiency. This is the curriculum we use to produce instructors.

In summary:

– Pure offense — not defense, protection or fighting

– Entirely directed toward causing debilitating injury

– Looking at the physics and physiology of collisions rather than techniques

– A 10-year curriculum, in writing

It’s important to note that I’m not saying what we do is “better” than anything else — effective violence is as old as hominids and no one has a patent on concussions. All training has the potential to work. The best training is the one you know in your bones you can make work for you. If someone looks at what we do and doesn’t think they could make it work, then they’re right. If a specific school, style or system makes more sense to them, then that would be the better choice. In the end all we have is some technical information that you may or may not find useful. That determination is up to the individual.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

A Plan to Ride a Tiger

July 6, 2018/2 Comments/in Training/by Taylor Good

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 their newly constructed SAS-inspired training facility, dubbed the “Kill House”, very few of those techniques survived. It was that emphasis on a vetting process that forever separated Delta from what everyone else was doing.

Your Reaction Partner Is Your “Kill House”

In our two-day Crash Course it’s common to observe trainees over-leveraging snap-on tools (knife, baton, etc.). They attempt to employ them in unnatural ways where a simple stomp might have been preferable.

It’s often the first time someone has ever held a tool with the intent to use it on another human being (or maybe even held one at all). Consequently, they are so enthusiastic about their new labor-saving device that they try to use it for everything, every turn; essentially treating it like a magic wand instead of an ice pick. However, they recognize these kinds of errors in short order after working through the problem with a few reaction partners.

Get In Where You Fit In

You wouldn’t try to use your knee to access the eye of a standing person when you could just use your fingers. Likewise, you wouldn’t one-knuckle a person’s ribs with a knife in your fist… you’d just reorient the tip and slot it in. When you feed ideas into your kill house, very few of them will survive. The ones that do are keepers!

No Plan Survives First Contact

In follow-on training we introduce vectors (incoming punches, kicks, swinging baseball bats, slashes, stabs, tackles, etc.). When students have a preplanned series of strikes they want to execute, they ignore the incoming vector and end up getting clocked.

This is a good thing. You want to work problems with a reaction partner until the solution presents itself. If someone really comes at you with a meat cleaver, you don’t want it to be your 1st time… you want it to be your 1,001st time.

A Plan To Ride a Tiger is NOT the Same as Riding a Tiger

In elementary school, you get the lesson first and the test after. In life, it’s the other way around. When violence is the test, very few pass/survive on their first go-around, and, if they do, the lesson is often ambiguous or misinterpreted due to small sample size and altered consciousness. Using your reaction partner on the mats allows you to take the test — and fail — as many times as necessary until you learn the lesson.

— Taylor Good

THE STOMPENING

June 29, 2018/0 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

“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. The day was a veritable soup-to-nuts display of humanity’s predatory birthright.

After six hours of teaching, testing and training I was exhausted… but lit from within by the afterglow of the pure, unfettered freedom of it — mat time is the only place we can shrug off civilization’s straightjacket, Houdini-like, and vanish from polite society, if only for a brief lung-filling, horizon-striding moment before returning, resigned to buckling ourselves back in so we’re fit to order a burger at the drive-thru.

And this time I kept enough man in the human to remember to take pictures and video.

That night I settled in front of the screen, drink in hand, to scrub through the day’s good work, to find those moments in the vacation slideshow worth sharing, the ones that might let you feel the thing, a call from twilit woods you just might answer…

But instead of the drama of the hunt there was just the curl of bodies, a recursive infolding, each turn a crumpling of the human frame into a ball like the final page of an unfinished manuscript. Again and again they met and folded, half of them in the way it was built to go, the other half in the completely wrong direction. The video was a banal scrum of clumps of people oscillating open and closed in this fashion. To the initiated, there’s information in there — a finger in the eye, a fist in the groin, a wrist broken just so to chain up into the rest of the skeleton to put the throat at risk — but to everyone else it’s just the static hum of rolling bodies. Practice, it turns out, is not nearly as interesting as performance.

So I switched over to pictures. Surely the camera caught some kinetic moment, a frozen hurling, a brain inches from the deck after an accelerated fall, the face registering the power of what that might mean outside on concrete — but no. The pictures — all of them — showed half the class lying on the ground, the other half wound up over them, the cocked harbingers of busted ribs and cracked skulls.

And that’s it. Every. Single. One. Someone stomping, someone getting stomped.

What would have been more affecting? Combatants standing, brandishing tools, lighting up your brain with possibilities: “Who will prevail?” And your armchair quarterback pops the popcorn.

Real violence is boring — it’s not the back-and-forth drama of the fight, but the unidirectional gut-sick crunch of pedestrian-vs.-truck. There’s a moment as the parties vector for each other, lining it up, and then the brief flurry of action that makes us think fight and piques our interest, but as soon as something horrible happens we’re no longer titillated. The sane and socialized aren’t going to stick around while the loser gets set on fire, and even psychopaths are bored by inevitability.

Indeterminate, non-specific trauma and struggle — the fight — is a dominance display that speaks to deeper brain structures in the language of dance, whereas one animal destroying another says capital-N Nothing.

That’s why the four-year-old said of our training, “They knock people over.” The five-second sequence of any given turn looks like this: lance your skeleton through their soft tissue to pop it, foul their stagger to put them down, then the real work begins.

That’s what I’d do to me.

The needs of injury — catastrophic volume change in critical anatomy (you have to smash it faster, harder, farther than it can stretch) — are always at odds with dominance games. The body’s evolved penchant for yanking things away (organisms move away from negative stimuli) reduces pressure and gives ribs and spleen the best possible chance of mitigating the damage. (Eyeballs can only stand the massless feather-dusting of photons, after all.) Combined with the compromise of bipedalism — people who have their balance taken from them fall away, further reducing pressure — means that the calculation for the standing man is a full-throttle overrun of three feet, three inches. Inches for the amount ribs can flex before breaking, feet for the off-balance travel from the collision. This is why stuff socked at arm’s length sometimes breaks, sometimes doesn’t. But a spleen socked squarely 3’3” blows a gasket.

Ah, but on the ground…

The ground is where both of these incidentally protective mechanisms fail. The body is stuck flat, it can’t move appreciably when intersected at speed, and it’s done falling away, every piece of anatomy firmly fixed to the anvil of Earth. Now the falling hammer is all of you, accidentally, your entire mass jacked through the superior leverage of your leg, shod at the end in something sturdier than flesh. Your feet bear your weight effortlessly; now they will transmit it just as easily.

The goal of all violence is the offlining of the brain — whether by triggering hopelessness through attrition, or physically tripping the off-switch — and the easiest way to do that is with sudden, sharp acceleration, flooring the accelerator so hard the passenger slaps the seat, or angling the car into the bridge abutment so the passenger tries to flee through the windshield. And nothing romps an accelerator like a boot. When you lay him out, he lays his brain on the starting line. All you have to do is punch it to turn his consciousness into a rooster tail of smoke.

This is why bar fight fatalities spike when someone hits the ground — they strike their head at the end of the fall, and then they get the boots put to them, greatly enhancing the physics of the untrained drunk. All they have to do is accidentally line up the anatomy and their amateur efforts are magnified into professional results. “The ground is where you die” has to do with the fact that while most people can’t Bruce-Lee a standing man to the head, everyone can punt a brain laying on the ground.

And so in our attempts to make our practice jibe with reality it ends up looking like nothing more than a couple of thrown punches, a serendipitous trip-and-fall, and a gasp-inducing news clip of full-bodied stomping. It’s not sexy, it doesn’t look cool, and there are no bragging rights — everyone you meet has a frame that can knock you out — but isn’t that exactly how you’d want your attempted murder to go? I’ll take the boring, five-second physics and physiology workshop over the multi-minute fight to the death any day. Even if it won’t look good on social media.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

It’s Different for Me: A Woman’s Perspective on Hand-to-Hand Combat Training

June 8, 2018/1 Comment/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

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 comfortable social conversation to talk about what that really means and I don’t want to defend what I know, why I know it, and what that means for me. People take a step back and wonder about you when you admit, with conviction, that yes, you would jab your thumb into someone’s eye socket or stomp their knee to render their leg useless if necessary. If it is their life or mine, I will always choose mine.

I have trained with men—big men, who far out-muscle and out-weigh me. I have been fortunate that they are some of the best trained instructors in the world and they care about my safety and well-being. They train hard and when they pin me against a wall with their hands on my throat or grab me in a bear hug and lift me off my feet, they will not release me just because I tried. They will let me go only if I hit my targets and they are forced to let me go by the laws of physics and human anatomy.

During training you move slow, slower than a violent confrontation would be if this were real. I know it is to keep everyone safe and to pay attention to targets, but for me there is another reason for going slow—to connect with the fear. When a man who is taller than you by at least a foot, with biceps as big as your thighs, pins you against the wall, hands on your throat, make no mistake about it, there is fear. I must drink in that fear—I need to feel it and pay attention to it. I have known my instructor for years and I trust him, so my feelings of fear are less pronounced than they would be in a violent situation with a stranger; therefore, in training I must tap into that fear, feel it, focus on it, and pay attention to how my body and mind respond in a fear state. It is a gift to be allowed to train slow, to be able to pay attention to your physiological responses to fear, and to figure out how to stay focused on targets. I have learned what it feels like to stay focused on targets that cause injury to another human being when I am pinned against a wall with hands around my throat, my heart racing, and my mind consumed by the need to survive.

Early in my training I had not yet learned the value of paying attention to how my brain and body respond to fear. None of my instructors talked about it and I did not admit that I felt fear—we were only training after all, what was there to be afraid of? I honestly do not know if my instructors didn’t talk about paying attention to your fear response because they didn’t experience it during training or if it is one of the subtle nuances of training that you don’t realize is valuable until someone points it out to you. I still vividly remember learning this lesson. It was early in my training and I was doubting my abilities. I decided that to build my confidence I needed to put myself into a situation where I knew my fear response would be triggered, so I asked my training partner to sit on my chest and pin my hands to the ground. It was at that moment that I learned not only to pay attention to how my mind and body reacts in a fear state, but I learned an entirely new lesson—the dramatic increase in the intensity of both my fear and other emotions that are triggered when violence and intimacy intersect.

The intensity of the fear response at the intersection of violence and sexuality is an aspect of training that I believe may be unique to women or at least much more prevalent for women. It is not something my instructors ever talked to me about, and honestly I am not sure that I would have welcomed the discussion because it is deeply personal and difficult to express. Prior to training I did not engage in any co-ed contact sports that required close physical contact with men. However, during training there are times when I find myself in positions with my training partner that I had previously only experienced in non-violent, consensual, intimate relationships. It is in these moments during training that my brain will sometimes trigger the recognition of the potential for a situation to be sexual and because I am a socialized and decent person who respects her training partner, my first response is to ignore those thoughts. However, I believe for women to get the most out of their training they need to tune in to these moments when they occur and place them squarely in the context of violence. Women must seize these moments and become fully present in their thoughts, feelings, and physiological responses associated with sexual violence so that they can understand how their mind and body might respond in similar situations outside of training. I will admit tuning into these moments during training is a terrible feeling wrought with intense emotion and a feeling I would much rather avoid all together, but I know I am not taking full advantage of my training if I ignore these moments and turn away.

Our male training partners and instructors need to know how valuable these moments are for us. These situations provide us with valuable opportunities to push back on a lifetime of teaching that reminds women and girls that we are vulnerable to violent confrontations in everyday activities like jogging along a path or walking through a parking lot. To further compound this narrative, historically women in our society have not been trained to respond to violence with effective techniques using our own bodies as weapons. Instead we are reminded frequently through media and social stories that we are not capable of effective response to violence and that in order to be effective we need to use devices that someone, somewhere thought would help us feel safer such as carrying a whistle or mace. However, these tools and devices so often pitched to women promote the narrative that women are not capable of inflicting debilitating injury on attackers who are bigger and stronger than they are, but effective training changes all that. After all, a crushed windpipe from a knee drop to the throat is still a crushed windpipe no matter who delivers it.

It has been several years now since I first learned the value of leaning into my fears and walking along that dark edge of intimacy and violence. I think it is one of the most important aspects of training for woman. The sessions on grabs, holds and chokes can really surface these fears and emotions, and for women who are rape survivors the intensity of the response to this aspect of training is even more pronounced because of their ties to a history of sexual violence. Over the years I have also watched and listened as the instructors have learned more about this aspect of training and how it is experienced by their female students. I am impressed by the compassion the instructors show in these moments as they continue to teach, but lean into the fears and emotions of their female students and encourage them to pay attention to their emotional and physiological response while also channeling their energy and strength to continue fighting. It has truly been a gift to be trained by and to watch these instructors. They are fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands and they care for their students like family and give generously of their time to ensure that every student succeeds. In all of my training I have always felt that my instructors believed in my ability to deliver a crippling injury to an attacker and that my knowledge of effective techniques was the most important tool they could give me for my own safety. They train me with a level of intensity that communicates to me that my life depends on it because the reality is that someday it might.

— Anonymous

You Weigh the Same When You’re Scared

June 1, 2018/0 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

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 lets us reach out and affect behavior; we read it in others to intuit their motives. It’s absolutely necessary for effective communication — without it any message comes across as stilted, creepy, inhuman.

But when we’ve moved beyond communication and into a state of nature where the only thing that will be measured is how physics affects physiology we need a cold, impartial focus because emotions are weightless — they don’t make you heavier, they don’t make you fall any faster in the gravity field, and they don’t make his anatomy any more vulnerable.

Which is to say that a 45-pound Olympic plate dropped awkwardly onto an ankle can break it — and that means you can, too, regardless of how you feel at the moment of impact.

The reverse is also true: His emotional state does nothing to protect him. Personality is not a force field — who he his and what he knows do nothing to shield him from physics. Everyone is susceptible to injury, and those who claim to be immune believe that their ego makes a difference. If they can get you to believe it too, then they win.

While extreme emotion can drive intent to do work (you can “get mad” at a weight or kill someone in a “crime of passion”) it’s a rough, inefficient way to drive effort — like burning an explosive all at once instead of injecting refined fuel into the engine to make diamonds in the exhaust. It’s the difference between a bomb and a rocket.

Intent and intensity ultimately come down to focus, the mind driving effort through the body to wield it as a tool. But emotion can be decoupled from that — you don’t need to get angry at a stalled car to push it as hard as you can.

When thinking about how emotion can drive or hinder effort it’s important to differentiate between biological fear and psychological panic. Fear is the body preparing itself for action — fight or flight — while panic is what happens when the brain goes looking for information on what’s unfolding in front of you… and comes back empty-handed. For example, if you know how to swim and find yourself suddenly dunked into a drowning situation you will feel fear — the adrenal dump, heart racing, changes in perception — and then your brain will go looking for preprogrammed schema (“Is this similar to experiences I’ve had before, either live or in training?”) and you’ll start swimming like an adrenaline-pumped superhuman. If, on the other hand, you don’t know how to swim, your brain comes back with OMIGOD WE’RE GONNA DIE and you start drowning like an adrenaline-pumped animal.

This idea that the brain can only go where it’s gone before is why training matters — you need to practice for the outcome you want so when you find yourself there, literally scared shitless, you sidestep useless panic with actionable information. (Think about it this way: you practice “swimming”, not “drowning”, right? This is why we don’t do “self-defense”. Defense is the drowning of violence.)

Ultimately, all useful interactions in violence come down to pure physics and physiology — and while how you feel about it can alter your ability to act earlier in the chain of events, and affect how efficiently you apply your physics to his physiology, emotion doesn’t change anything at the most fundamental level: you weigh just as much, your skeleton is just as hard, his eye just as soft. Feeling the sudden jolt of biological fear — which, if you’re sane and healthy, you will — can only stop you if decide it can.

I say choose resolve, choose training, cleave into biological fear and wreck him while you’re terrified.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

Photo: PARCO ARCHEOLOGICO DI POMPEI

On-the-Job Training vs. the Violence Simulator

May 25, 2018/5 Comments/in Training/by Taylor Good

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 working environment that is so dangerous your lack of experience is likely to get you killed during the initial training phase. When the rate at which conditions will kill you exceeds the rate at which you can gain first-hand experience, then a simulator is preferred.

Flight simulators have been around for a long time, but they didn’t really take off until the 1970s when the training required to operate large commercial jets became so extensive and so dangerous that the death toll began climbing not only for potential pilots, but for all the instructors on board who were required to mess with the plane’s components and evaluate the trainee’s performance from takeoff to landing. If you wanted to test a pilot’s ability to handle an engine failure during takeoff, an instructor would shut it off, without telling the pilot what was happening, to see how they would handle it.

Ask yourself this: If an engine were to go out on your next flight, would you rather have a pilot who got lucky once in training or a pilot who had an engine go out a thousand-plus times in a simulator?

Modern flight simulators were expressly created to allow pilots to crash their planes over and over again until there was no doubt in their minds what was going to keep them alive… and what was going to get them killed.

Whenever a new pilot has a question about a long-standing belief they don’t have to take another pilot’s word for it—they can just take that question to the simulator and make it or break it in the safety of the laboratory.

This is the reason why we don’t spar, by the way. Sparring is useful in sport where the outcome is not critical (meaning people don’t die if you get it wrong) and the event being trained for is not designed to be life-threatening. Boxers, for example, can learn their trade as they go, through sparring, because the goal of the work is not the hospital or the morgue, but to win a game with agreed-upon rules—rules specifically designed to keep them as safe as possible during the contest. If they were each handed a machete instead of a pair of gloves… we’d have far fewer professional boxers.

Before an elite military unit ever blows a door and takes down a room full of tangos they have spent hundreds or even thousands of hours slowly practicing with unloaded weapons. They eventually graduate to a type of simulator called a “kill house” where they practice taking down a room at super-slow speed with unloaded weapons over and over again until they can perform correctly at full speed. Then they start over again at a snail’s pace with loaded weapons.

Why don’t they train from the beginning with live rounds against real combatants? Because they would either get lucky or get dead. Nothing to learn doing it that way.

Our training methodology is built around the simulation of life-or-death violence, and getting you to the point (inside of an hour) where you can “fly” the simulator on your own. Once you’re the proud owner of your very own Violence Simulator (VS), there’s nothing that we tell you that you couldn’t find out for yourself, or verify to your own satisfaction, with enough time spent in that environment with the object of interest (at least one other human machine).

Any question about the material that you haven’t yet run though your VS is not a valid question. Most queries are based on a misunderstanding of applied physics and physiology and cannot withstand the scrutiny of your own VS.

So don’t take our word for it. Grab your reaction partner and run your VS until you’ve crashed and burned so many times that you know exactly what is going to keep you alive and what’s going to get you killed.

— Taylor Good

How many times have you rehearsed your attempted murder?

When Is a Gun Like a TV Remote?

SKULL-SPLITTER

A Difference You Can Taste

A Plan to Ride a Tiger

THE STOMPENING

It’s Different for Me: A Woman’s Perspective on Hand-to-Hand Combat Training

You Weigh the Same When You’re Scared

On-the-Job Training vs. the Violence Simulator

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