training Archives - Injury Dynamics

Tag Archive for: training

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)

Scenario-Based Training vs. The Hard Knot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)

Training to Wait & See

June 4, 2024/0 Comments/in Violence in the Wild/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

A frequent question we get is, “Okay, I get this whole violence thing, but what if—” and then it’s usually followed by something the other person is thinking of doing, trying to do, or just plain in the middle of doing. This is code for “I don’t want to get hurt.” Well, nobody does. If not getting hurt were something that you could reliably choose, it would be a central part of our training. But it isn’t.

The truth about violence is that you’re going to get punched, kicked, stabbed, whacked, and shot—whether you’re the “winner” or not. Any other outcome, e.g., you walked through it and put your person (or people) down and kept them there without getting a scratch on you, is pure luck. What you can realistically expect as the survivor is to limp out of there alive.

Accepting the reality of the situation ahead of time will save your life. It’ll keep you from quitting right at the point where things are at their worst. Let’s say you are trained in “knife defense”. And then you get stabbed. Your first thought will be omigod I screwed up which will lead to the result of screwing up—death. You’ll be thinking about the result of your mistake—I’m going to die!—instead of what you need to be thinking to survive, primarily take the eye.

Look at the difference there. We have an abstraction versus a concrete action. Which one do you want coming out of you when your life depends on it? It’s also important to note that the people who are best at violence completely ignore the “What’s he up to?” side of the equation; they simply put all their efforts into making violence one-sided, and keep it that way. They wade in and get it done, to the exclusion of all else. And so should you.

Success is our benchmark. We are going to do our best to model the efforts and behaviors of those who are successful at violence—in short, we’re going to act like the survivors. We are obviously not going to act like the dead (that goes without saying), nor are we going to model behaviors and action that we wish were present. Rather than accessing violence the way we wish it worked, we’ll look to reality for our training cues. This is a huge leap into uncomfortable spaces.

It would be really nice if we could impose our collective will upon violent conflict—if waving your hands a certain way meant you couldn’t be stabbed or shot. In a lot of ways, this is the definition of magic, and in many places such training is elevated to the status of superstitious tradition. You’d be best served to never forget that the intersection of magic and reality is often tragedy.

Instead of training the way we wish it were, we’re going to train the way it is. We’re going to start at the point of injury, and let the other person worry about waiting and seeing. They can wait and see what you’re up to while you do it to them.

Reality is a smog-belching bulldozer with the elves and fairy folk of nice ideas all broken and snarled in its iron treads. If you have a choice—and you do—then put yourself in the driver’s seat, and the other person beneath the blade.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)

Kill It Simple, Stupid

May 7, 2024/0 Comments/in Violence in the Wild/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Violence is simple.

How simple is it? We can answer that with two more questions:

1) How is it that untrained people prevail? and

2) How is it that untrained people prevail over trained people?

Because for all their blissful naïveté, the victorious untrained have a firm grip on the tool of violence. This fact stands because violence is much simpler than people would have you believe; it’s much simpler than you want to believe. The idea that violence is difficult and requires years of training—and that years of training will protect you from the untrained—are comfortable, comforting thoughts. I read somewhere once that the little lies we tell ourselves on a daily basis, the small untruths that shape our subjective realities, are what keep us happy. That the people who see the world and themselves as it “really is” are the clinically depressed. Accepting the simplicity of violence is an unpalatable dose of hard reality. To learn that you are never immune and that someone who is completely and conspicuously untrained can murder you is acutely unsettling. Even depressing.

If, that is, you’re a blood-bucket-is-half-empty kind of person.

I like to look at it from the other side—the blood bucket is half full, and I’m going to use him to fill it the rest of the way up. If violence is so simple that even the untrained can use it and prevail, then even a little bit of training is going to make you really, really good at it. And if you’re reading this, you’ve already had a lotta bit of training. You’re way better than you think, if only you’d let yourself be. (To wit: You know far more about wrecking people than a serial killer does. The only thing that could possibly hold you back is a lack of intent; what the serial killer lacks in technique he more than makes up for with a monomaniacal will to get the job done at all costs. But you already knew that.)

Violence is much simpler, even, than we present it to be. We have spent a lot of time teasing out the common elements and finding ways to communicate them to you. It comes across as a ton of material that people mistakenly believe they must master before they can be effective. For all that, we’re only ever really talking about the rock to the head… and what is the rock to the head but a big hunk of kinetic energy driven through a vulnerable target?

Everything else is just detail work, an exploration of all possible combinations and configurations for using your body as a human wrecking machine, with and without snap-on tools. Violence seems complicated if you think this detail work is required to be effective, if you think you need a black belt before you can seriously injure someone.

Forget everything you think you know about how it should go down: violence is you injuring people. It’s throwing yourself at them to break things inside of them—you are the bull in their anatomical china shop. Violence is you violating every tenet of polite society and destroying the only thing that any of us ever really own.

It’s simpler than you think because it has nothing to do with thinking.

Violence is all in the doing.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)

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!

Come learn an enduring life skill!

What people are saying about our training | Sign up now!

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

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!

Come learn an enduring life skill!

What people are saying about our training | Sign up now!

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

Tag Archive for: training

Kill the Unknown

Training to Wait & See

Kill It Simple, Stupid

For Want of an Injury

Stop! Hammer Time

As we head into our 30th year…

Who Needs It Next?

How many times have you rehearsed your attempted murder?

When Is a Gun Like a TV Remote?

ABOUT

TRAINING

MEMBER RESOURCES