training Archives - Page 2 of 2

Tag Archive for: training

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

The Silence That Comes After

July 13, 2018/12 Comments/in Rabbit v. Wolf/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Unlike most physical endeavors, ours has no target demographic. It’s not possible to tell whether or not our training will resonate by just looking at someone. I’ve seen young, smart, athletically-gifted people miss the point entirely and fail out of the first testing cycle; at the same time I’ve watched out-of-shape, “least-likely” people (who I’ve pegged as quitters inside of a month) end up going the distance with an eerie, natural ease. And I’ve seen everything else in between… with the only common feature among those who take to it being the fact that they took to it. Something spoke to that tiny sliver of sociopath lurking inside them.

Of course, this is a huge problem when it comes to running a business; what we really need is to know who this stuff resonates with — in terms of a marketing pie chart — and then aggressively market to that segment. But when that thing is the littlest bit of non-pathological sociopathy — essentially being lit up by hands-on domination and obliteration via the breaking of the human machine — well, you can see the problem in trying to figure out just who to send a postcard to.

The obvious answer would seem to be found in evangelism, with excited practitioners sharing their newfound experiences of happiness (the feeling as power increases) with like-minded individuals — and here we hit the other issue in spreading the word: the more people train, the less they want to talk about it. Talking about the truth of it makes you sound like a psychopath; watering it down to make it palatable is disingenuous and causes people to recoil when confronted with the actual thing:

“How do I defend myself from [insert Facebook terror of the week here]?”

“You don’t. The only available action is to hurt people so they can’t continue.”

“But I don’t want to hurt anybody!”

“Then you won’t.”

And so on until either you give up or they’re convinced you’re crazy.

So much easier, then, to never even mention it, to keep it as a delicious secret that only you know and no one else suspects — the credo of the ambush predator: While you were sleeping in front of the TV, I was practicing putting my fingers into people’s eyes.

I run into this in ongoing training all the time.

“Bring your friends and family!” I say.

Everyone looks back with pained faces. “Tried it once, got weird looks,” is the usual reply, “not interested in doing it again.” Besides, they think in quiet asides, It’s my delicious secret.

You’d think I’m writing this to admonish you, to get you out as ambassadors for this training, to earn hashmarks on your hilt for every body you bring into the fold — and you’d be wrong. I’m just as guilty as everyone else who’s ever hit the mats: I don’t talk about it, I don’t proselytize; when people ask me what I do I demur and get them talking about themselves. (This works great, by the way.) It’s my delicious secret that last night, while they were sleeping in front of the TV, I was puzzling out the smallest discrete set of movements necessary to dislocate a shoulder with a baton.

So this is here for no other reason than to wonder at the phenomenon: the fact that those who train shut up after having joined a silent cabal that meets in secret to study the undermining of Nature’s pinnacle.

— 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

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

The First Filter

April 2, 2018/1 Comment/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Anyone can train — but it’s not for everyone. And that’s okay.

All I ever wanted to know was how to hurt people. The standard path for such things in the 1980s was traditional martial arts, and after sampling a multitude of various classes, schools and approaches I had resigned myself to the Sisyphean vision quest of “take what is useful, discard the rest.” A neat idea — but man, what a mess to sift through. It was like an 1800s medicine show, the bright bottles of the actual cures indistinguishable from the glittering rows of abject quackery, and there was no way to objectively sort them…

That is, until Don spoke up at the water fountain after a great session on leg sweeps. Don wasn’t just a black belt at the school; it was understood that as a dockworker and mariner he had “seen some things” and so was the go-to source for information on what it actually took to beat a man into unconsciousness. He certainly looked the part: refrigerator-bulky, hands like spades that could be curled into rude clubs, a battered face set with calm eyes. My brother and I were gulping water between attempts to catch our breath when Don rolled up with his vast, lumbering stride, looked left and right, leaned down to us and said, in a fierce, conspiratorial whisper, “You boys forget all that bullshit in there — if it really hits the fan you stomp his knee as hard as you can to put him down, then kick him in the head until he stops moving.”

We froze, mouths agape. The water ran and splashed.

If that’s true, I thought as soon as I could think, why aren’t we practicing that?

This first piece of real information — an account from someone who had done these things — was the catalyst that got me off the merry-go-round. Of course, I wasn’t happy about it; the answer seemed to be “learn by doing in the French Foreign Legion!” Luckily there was a part of me that realized how stupid that would be, so I figured it was just something I could never really know, let alone train for.

Fast-forward months later to my brother bursting into the house, running to my room and hanging breathless in the doorway. “I found it,” he gasped, “what we’ve been looking for.”

“Sure,” I said sarcastically.

“No,” he said, “it’s the real deal.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

“Just come see.”

I figured it was a waste of time. I would walk in the door and see the usual: bits of information gleaned from ancient battlefields hopelessly mired in the garble of a centuries-old game of telephone, inert and useless, like a stinging insect in amber…

Instead, I saw a man holding another man by a fistful of hair — to keep him bent over — while walking him backwards across the room and stabbing up into his neck repeatedly with a training knife.

It was a dolly-zoom moment where the entire universe convulsed inside out — they weren’t training to defend themselves from this situation, they were training to do it.

And I’ve been doing it ever since.

Cool story — but what’s the point? It’s this: If I have to convince you to come train, it’s not for you. This training is for those who recognize the utility of it on sight. If you’re unsure, or don’t think you can make it work, you’re right. In the end, it’s on you to make it work. There’s nothing inherently effective about any training; all training is just choreography, movement that has the potential to be effective when intersected with the human frame. Anyone can knock someone out: an MMA fighter, a boxer, a traditional martial artist, even the completely untrained; and when they do, it will be for the exact same reason in every instance — because they did work (force times distance) on the brain and caused a concussion. It will work because they made it work.

I encourage everyone to train — the experience of putting hands on people and having people put hands on you makes you harder to kill — but you need to train the thing you know in your bones you can actually do. Seek out training that makes sense to you, and fulfills your needs, with instructors who are genuinely interested in your success.

It’s not my job to convince you — my job is simply to make it available. To maintain the information, provide a space to train, and teach.

We’re here if this speaks to you; and if not, I wish you all the best in finding what does.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

Injury Dynamics — What We Do

March 16, 2018/3 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

We teach the use of violence as a survival tool: how the human machine breaks, how to do that work with your bare hands, how to take advantage of the results. We cover striking, joint breaking, throwing, knife, baton, firearms, multi-man work, as well as grabs, holds and chokes.

But what does that word salad really mean?

Violence

Violence is physical force intended to cause harm. We call it what it is because padding language for comfort leads to indistinct outcomes. “Self-defense” is a moral imperative and a legal finding — it’s not a description of direct action with a concrete result. “Hurting people” is.

Discomfort with this idea is normal, natural and desired for 99.999% of your interactions with other people across your entire lifetime — but not during the black swan event of your attempted murder. There you will need to set aside all of the imaginary constructs that make up society and civilization and behave like a primate using physics and physiology.

Reality is disappointing and inconvenient, but we have to train for it as it stands, not how we wish it were. The bottom line is that in violence you have to hurt people.

Injury

Violence begins and ends with debilitating injury. It is the sole arbiter of success — the one who gets it right first, wins. This is a single piece of critical anatomy subjected to catastrophic volume change. You have to break it so it doesn’t work anymore. A ruptured eyeball, a crushed throat, a knee broken backwards — these things give us immediate advantages:

• Loss of function

• Involuntary movement in response to the injury

• Momentary helplessness

The goal is to break something, then use these advantages to break the next thing, and the next, and so on until we achieve a nonfunctional state, meaning you’d feel comfortable turning your back on the person and walking away. This can be everything from unambiguous incapacitation to unconsciousness or death, depending on the needs of the situation.

Striking

The most obvious way to cause injury is through blunt force trauma — body-weighted collisions of skeletons with a single piece of vulnerable anatomy caught in the middle. Instead of punching and kicking (the action of the limbs) we need to think from the ground up and crush things with our mass in motion. It’s not about how far you can reach, but how far you can step, how far you can move your belt buckle (center of gravity) through their anatomy. Think about how much you weigh, and then imagine hurling that three feet through a single square inch of them — their eye, their throat, their knee. This is how you break things — by minimizing the anatomy while maximizing the physics. Mass in motion leveraged by your skeleton gets it done.

This is the base engine of violence we will use to cause all injury.

Joint Breaking

Joint breaking is a special case of striking where we cause injury by using mass in motion and leverage to force joints beyond their pathological limit. This isn’t “joint locking,” submission or pain compliance — we will grind the joint to the end of its range of motion and then ensure that we have:

• Mechanical advantage (leverage)

• Body weight positioned to drive the work

• Space for follow-through sufficient to tear out or dislocate the joint

In other words, we will make sure that the only possible outcome if we throw our weight into it is a broken joint.

We train to break every joint in the human body — from the wrist (to cripple the hand) to the neck (for paralysis or death).

Throwing

Throwing is another special case of striking where we cause injury by using mass in motion to disrupt structure and balance and drive the person into a targeted collision with the ground — usually head first for debilitating head and neck trauma. This can be as simple as kicking someone’s leg out from under them or as complicated as a shoulder throw. Either way the goal is to bounce the brain off the planet.

Strike – Break – Throw

While anyone can be trained to be immediately effective (striking to cause injury), the highest expression of the work above is to strike, use that injury to effect a joint break, and then use that loss of balance to effect a throw. This is the path of efficiency, the goal of ongoing training.

Tools — Knife, Baton, Firearms

Once you have the base engine of violence thudding along — mass in motion leveraged by the skeleton — we can clip things onto the end of the skeleton to magnify our efforts and do things we can’t do with our bare hands. Knives allow us to penetrate deeply into the body and open up the circulatory system to cause him to bleed out; batons, being harder than the stuff we’re made of, allow us to access the entire skeleton as a target, breaking bones and directly accessing the brain. Both of these are nothing without that base engine: You must generate the physics for the tool to amplify. (Firearms are an exception as the physics are prepackaged in the powder charge.)

On the flip side — when the other person has a tool — the answer is the same: You have to injure them. We don’t practice knife-, stick-, or gun-defense/fighting; we practice hurting people who are attempting to use the tool.

Multi-Man Work

You never know how many people are involved until they’re all there — so we’re always going to assume it’s more than one. You can’t realistically injure more than one person at a time (this is why humans invented explosives and machine guns) so we need to use the initially injured person and movement (covering ground) to give ourselves the space and time required to injure the rest of them one-by-one. No one’s going to wait their turn like a kung fu movie, so you have to go on the attack and make them have to deal with you.

Grabs, Holds and Chokes

This is injuring people while they hang on to you, doing all the things that aren’t allowed in competition — gouging eyes, crushing throats, getting fistfuls of groin. All you need is that initial injury to get to the rest. The key is to be the problem, rather than looking at it as a problem for you to solve. Make them want to get away from you.

Everything above is what mat time is all about — serial target practice on the human machine to shut it off. We roll with training knives, batons and firearms on the mats; with our partners trying to punch, kick, stab, beat, shoot, out-number and grapple us while we strike, break and throw while using knives, batons and firearms. It’s a low-velocity scrum where anything goes and the answer is always the same: ATTACK & INJURE.

Training

All of this work is pulled from our 10-year curriculum — in writing — three massive tomes that describe the 1,560 stepping stones from absolute beginner to Master Instructor. We can literally show you something new at every class, three times a week, for a decade — with no repetition.

All well and good if you live near an instructor and want to take on the training as a lifestyle — but what about everyone else? The beauty of the curriculum is that it’s modular, and we can pull it apart and put it together in any number of ways to meet your needs:

“Dangerous in a Day” — This is a one-day course designed to make you baseline effective at violence. You’ll learn how to cause debilitating injury to 10 different targets, from the eyes to the ankles. At the end of the day we’ll use that new skill in a single module tailored to the interests of the group (grabs, holds and chokes; knife; firearms; multi-man, etc.).

2-Day Crash Course — This is our Gold Standard for training: two full days of hands-on mat work including knife, baton, firearms, multi-man, grabs-holds-chokes, as well as in-depth lectures on decision-making in violence (when to pull the trigger and when not to) and how the law views violence.

Multi-day courses / tailored events — We can do as many days with as much material as your group desires. Want five days with joint breaking and throwing in the mix? Three days with a special emphasis on firearms? We can do that. We can arrange something special here in sunny San Diego (have you seen our zoo?), or travel to you. Just get in touch and let us know how we can help!

When it comes to violence, we have it covered from the stupid-simple (finger in the eye) to the crazy-complex (a joint-break throw using a knife or baton). We can train short-term, long-term, or lifelong. It all comes down to what you need, and what you want — regardless, we can make it happen.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

Tag Archive for: training

SKULL-SPLITTER

A Difference You Can Taste

A Plan to Ride a Tiger

THE STOMPENING

On-the-Job Training vs. the Violence Simulator

The First Filter

Injury Dynamics — What We Do

ABOUT

TRAINING

MEMBER RESOURCES