Teaching Smarts – Page 5 – Conflict Manager

Violence is so much bigger than all of us – Darren Norton

Unfortunately, we will never completely understand the human race, as we also never really understand a subject as twisted and complex as what violence is. If, you have not been exposed too much violence throughout life, then your training will be subjective. When talking to most people their belief of violence is mainly based off their own understanding of what they learn in the dojo, see in Sporting events such as Boxing or MMA, or even what they watch in a film. Sometimes it might come from personal experience’s working in such industries like the Police or the Prison Service or even working in the Security Industry as front line security. But how many people have to deal with or have dealt with violent offenders on a daily basis.

A lot of Instructors teaching Martial Arts nowadays tend to have little or no experience with real world, brutal violence and yet advertise that they teach Self Defence. There are very few who carefully look at what they are actually teaching or indeed what they have been taught. Now, because some people lack real world experience they will tell themselves a story about how they think it is rather than how it actually is in reality. As human beings we assume way too much. Unfortunately in the realm of Martial Arts and I’m in no way putting down Traditional Martial Arts as it is still a great love of mine but SEXY sells and we see this day to day in advertisements.

A lot of practitioners are seldom able to separate reality from the things they see in the films. Now this is a problem if they are teaching other people the same. People often use assumptions, reason, tradition, and recreation as a way of training for violence in the real world. Violence is ultimately about conflict and can come in many forms for instance: a group of people fighting in the local pub. Two Boxers fighting in the ring. A Nurse trying to help an aggressive, emotionally disturbed person in Accident and Emergency. A police officer attempting to handcuff a non compliant offender. A Door Supervisor escorting an intoxicated individual from the premises, someone who is being held up at an ATM at knifepoint. Armed robbers invading a jewellery store. A sexual predator following a young female home from a night out. Bullies who are bullying other children in the playground or even be a violent drunken spouse abusing their partner.

These are all different situations and all require different psychological, tactical, and physical skills, but they are all in the subject of violence and Self Defence. In fact, the only real experts are the criminals who commit violence onto others on a regular basis without any conscience of what they have done.
The million pound question is how do we train for something that is so hard to define?

Some Martial artists try to do it all. They offer self discovery and enlightenment, physical fitness, street fighting, fighting in the ring, and Self Defence. They try to be all things to all people. They may even throw in military and combat training for good measure to make it more macho. Whilst all these aspects can all be connected in some way, they are not compatible.

Training in a Martial Art is not necessarily training for Self Defence. Training to fight in the ring or on the mat is not training for Self Defence neither is training for combat unless you walk around with an automatic weapon in tactical gear on the street day to day.

Whilst all of these areas most certainly have practical applications that can be useful in Self Defence training, they are not, in essence, Self Defence training. Yet when someone rings up a martial arts school and asks, “Do you teach Self Defence?” the answer is always yes, Clearly money has become more important than integrity and our moral and social responsibilities. Let’s take a look at the roots of most traditional Martial Arts and how they still train, it has very little to do with dealing with modern day violence and assaults. If we take a traditional Martial Art like ninjitsu and look at its origins we will see its reason for practice was primarily for assassination by stealth! So then I think we can safely say many people are going to question its modern day Self Defence applications.

As I said earlier, I love traditional Martial Arts. I mean that’s how I got started in all this in the first place. I don’t think one style or system is better than another. But I think the problem lies in practitioners being delusional about what it is they are training for. While carrying a ninjato, climbing trees, and disappearing into puffs of smoke might humorously be considered useful strategies to avoid conflict, they probably don’t have practical application for modern day Self Defence.

Many systems often show techniques like this: Attacker assaults defender. Defender does technique (A), the technique is successful and so it finishes. This badly attempts to replicate real world violence. When you think about effective Self Defence training, does waiting for ideal circumstances to perform technique (A) seem like a great strategy?

In a lot of real situations, unless people are assaulted by a surprise attack there is both a pre confrontation and pre fight stage as some call it (The Interview). So why is it that individual’s are not being taught how to deal with the situation earlier in order to avoid the physical assault taking place? Many responsible Self Defence systems teach this before even getting to the physical aspects of Self Defence. It is very foolish to believe that the chance of you ever being attacked under ideal circumstances will happen. Attacks don’t happen in spacious areas with soft matting and good lighting with minimal contact.

Sound, solid training needs to address how to recover from the fear through fear management, pain, and shock of an assault as quickly as possible in order to survive. Stress inoculation through use of emotional invocation must happen in training otherwise we risk sending people out into the real world with false confidence.

There is a great chance you may be injured and in pain before you’re even aware of the conflict and what is going on around you in a real life situation. You must break free of the shock and surprise in order to beat your own fear and instantly change your mindset from victim to predator. This needs to happen in just a few seconds in order to survive the attack. Understandably, this is no easy feat. But it needs to be trained if people are to be successfully prepared for the reality of a violent encounter.

Self Defence training also needs to address how one can avoid violence and how to avoid not be assaulted in the first place, either through hard luck or plain stupidity. Training needs to be preventative and in order to accomplish this more time must be spent on learning prevention techniques. We should be looking to escape or avoid, de escalate or negotiate; adjust and respond or comply depending on the context. When everything else fails and it has to become physical, then we must train to do so on our terms as much as possible.

The idea of waiting for a person to bring violence to you before you execute your technique isn’t a great strategy. We really need to outwit, not just outfight. Non reality based training sets you up to become a victim rather than learning to take the upper hand with initiative. There needs to be a change in mindset from one of reluctant victim to wary predator in order to shift the odds of surviving violence in your favour.

Training beginners – Wim Demeere

I am often contacted by clients who want to learn self-defense , but have no prior training or experience. They are total beginners, blanks slates. The question for me as an instructor is then: what is the best way to teach them? Throughout the years, I’ve developed my personal approach to answer that question and it has resulted in a basic self-defense system. It isn’t anything new, nor is it revolutionary, but it seems to work well enough, which is why I want to share a part of it with you here.
First some background.

There are many different aspects to self-defense training and there are probably just as many different ways to teach this subject. As a result, it can be difficult to get started on imparting students the skills they need to survive a violent encounter. One approach to do so is to look at common denominators: which aspects keep coming back in a majority of situations a student might encounter? Once you establish those, you have a place to start. Each individual person has his own specific context to take adapt your training to, but working from those common denominators allows you to cover a lot of ground quickly.

One of those common denominators is the timing of the attack in relation to the individual’s awareness of it. I work from three basic scenarios:

– Ambush. You only know you are under attack when the first blow lands. There is no advance warning or awareness of danger.

– He goes first. Your attacker throws the first punch, not you. You have some advance warning though, anything form a few seconds up to a few minutes if it takes the guy that long to work himself up to taking a swing. You are aware of the danger, but for whatever reason you don’t act first and he does.

– You go first. You spot the danger, try to de-escalate and escape, but this fails. You decide to use a pre-emptive strike.

Regardless of the context, these three scenarios seem to come up more often than not. Take some time watching Youtube videos of street violence in all its forms and you will recognize them easily.

Now that we know where to begin we have some choices to make: which techniques do you teach a beginner? I favor versatile techniques and constructive laziness: each technique must serve multiple functions so the student doesn’t need to learn many of them. This helps speed up both the ingraining process and the skill development. I teach a binary system that offers a hard and a soft response: techniques that disable (elbows, knee strikes, some other close-quarters techniques) and techniques that control (head and spine manipulations along with a basic elbow lock.)

The next step is deciding where to start. I choose to begin with the ambush situation because it is often what students fear the most.

Ambush

When an aggressor lands his first attack, you are already behind the curve and things are unlikely to improve for you as time goes by. Your first goal is then to avoid taking additional damage and hold on to whatever capabilities you have left. To that end, I teach a modified flinch guard that covers both the head and vital organs. From there, the student learns to open up with a sweeping arm technique to help orient him on the attacker and then follow through aggressively with elbows and knee strikes. The counter-attack needs to be fast and brutal.

This rarely looks pretty, even in training, but that doesn’t matter. The goal is to fight through the pain and disorientation and turn the tables on the attacker before he can take you out. At that point, you have nothing to lose as you are already taking damage, so this becomes a full-on counter-assault.

Most students struggle with this at first, so I build up the intensity gradually depending on their tolerance to adrenal stress. Once they have some training, the difficulty levels go up and we incorporate drills and scenario training to mimic real-life situations. I have found that this helps give them the confidence to handle the next two scenarios.

He goes first

In an encounter where an attacker uses a form of interview or other set-up, the student has some time to assess the situation. In a perfect world, he would de-escalate and leave but that doesn’t always work out. Neither is it always possible to get the first shot in, so it helps to have experience handling things when your attacker throws the first punch.

I teach students to cover up with the modified flinch guard or use the sweeping motion to block what comes at them. They learned both techniques already and have ingrained them thoroughly by that point, so it isn’t too difficult for them to use them in a slightly different context. Their feedback is often that it is easier to handle an incoming attack because they already went through the stress of surprise attacks and scenario training in which I ambush them. As a result, they are both less intimidated by that attack and defend better against it. Flowing into the counter-attack is old hat as well by then and they typically do so with enthusiasm.

You goes first

Tactically speaking, it is often better to strike first when you know that violence is inevitable. However, simply knowing this doesn’t mean you can do it effectively. If you haven’t done it before, it can be mentally and emotionally challenging to “push the button” and launch that first strike, because this time, you are the one starting the dance. Remember that we are talking about students with no experience with violence; they often have reservations about using it.

My approach is to use the sweeping arm motion again and adapt it slightly to attack the eyes and other vulnerable targets with it. Once again, the student has already practiced this movement so much, it isn’t difficult for him to use it in this way. The same goes for the potential follow-up techniques.

This covers only a part of the technical aspects of what I teach them, but the other parts are beyond the scope of this article. My goal was to offer a framework you might find useful for your own training. As I wrote in the beginning, this isn’t the best method out there, nor is it cutting-edge stuff, but it works and is a good way to start the training. I’ve experimented with and fine-tuned this system for the last twenty years and found that the combination of versatile movement and the methodology of teaching the three basic scenarios in this specific order yields results quickly and ingrains lasting skills with beginner students. I hope you can apply some of this information in your own training.

Principles-Based Teaching, Part V – Rory Miller

Recap: the first four articles in this series covered the concepts behind principles-based teaching. Understanding the goals of training in general and your training in particular. Understanding what principles are. Auxiliary skills that every good teacher needs. Basic methods of instruction.

Teaching and learning are not just technical, physical processes but mental and emotional as well. On a psychological and emotional level, you have to prep people for learning. One of the most toxic things we have done in martial arts and in some of the reality-based systems is to make conflict special. People come to us convinced violence is alien to them, it is complicated, it is hard to learn. With new students, part of the teaching (cognitive) process is to explain that violence is natural. The physics are the same as any other physical activity and the mentality is part of our evolutionary heritage. It’s been hammered and brainwashed out of your students, but they are all natural fighters, all survivors.

For the physical aspects of self-defense, the teaching pattern is simply:

Game

Skill build

Return to game

Accelerated game(s)

Scenario training

I like having an over-all game that skills tie back to. The game has to be well designed:

Known safety flaws, minimal bad habits
Contact
A competitive element but not a competitive focus
No winners or losers

Every live training must have safety flaws. In the end, martial arts is about damaging a human being, yet we must not damage our training partners. So there is always an element of artificiality introduced for safety. You and the students must be conscious of the safety flaw.

Life is a contact sport, and fighting and self-defense are even more so. You cannot develop skill without contact any more than you can learn to swim without water. You must design games that work at different levels of contact, but each level of contact will have different safety concessions.

I like the game to have a competitive element to it, but no winner or loser– you are going to strive to be more efficient than me, but if you excel at that, you haven’t beaten me, just given me a more challenging problem to solve. The problem with full active resistance or any form of direct sparring is that only the winner learns that “it works against a resisting opponent.” The loser, who probably needs the skill more, learns that it fails against resisting opponents. Failure is not a lesson you want to teach at the beginning stage. Dealing with failure is an important lesson, but the student must be ready for it and you must have the judgment to teach that lesson.

I use three levels of play. Each level involves more speed but less contact. I start with the one-step. That’s the slow motion, taking turns, efficiency exercise described in Drills: Training for Sudden Violence, (That’s Smashwords. Link to Amazon Kindle.) Next level up is to blend that into a faster flow drill. The third level of play is infighting randori–fast, all techniques allowed, but very controlled contact.

The one-step helps the students see opportunity and experiment with multiple types of force simultaneously. It is safe, requires very little training and has many variations. It is particularly useful at pointing out the bad habits that come from fast training.

The primary flaw in the one-step is the slowness. You must face speed to be prepared for speed. A flurry attack is often mentally and emotionally overwhelming. The slowness can also be exploited to cheat, if the students can’t get over the winners/losers concept.

Drills are what they are and no more. I never call the one-step a fight simulation. It is a geometry problem made out of meat, and your job is to solve the moving meat problem as efficiently as possible.

The one-step allows thinking time. The flow level speeds up the action and decreases cognitive time, which is a good thing. But any increase in speed has drawbacks:

As the students go faster, they see less and thus they learn less
As the speed increases, the safety flaws become more necessary
As the speed increases the safety flaws have to become more automatic. Speed ingrains habits harder, including the bad ones.

Students need supreme control and confidence to play infighting randori well and safely, and frequently, this one has a winner. It integrates skills better than anything I know, because it is too close and too fast to process cognitively. The range allows all categories of attacks simultaneously: strikes, kicks, strangles, locks, takedowns, biting, gouging, etc. and because of the complexity and speed, it rewards and reinforces adaptability under stress like no other drill I know

Scenario training is an attempt to simulate real encounters. It requires the right equipment and a superbly skilled team to run scenarios well. Done well, scenarios force students to use judgment in tandem with their skills and integrates self-defense skills beyond the simply physical stuff.

Those are the games I use. A student will play the one-step first, before any instruction whatsoever (other than a safety briefing and a demo of how to play the game). This is important, because if they give themselves permission to play, it doesn’t require special training to be effective. This reinforces the earlier message that none of this is special, surviving is what you evolved to do.

The process, from here is simple. Play the game, do a breakout session for skill building. Put the students back in the drill.

Skill building sessions require you, as the instructor, to know your building blocks and principles inside out. You must come up with ways to demonstrate them and, more importantly, ways for the students to experiment, discover and experience the concepts.

One example: Joint locks breakout session.

First talk (Teaching): There are a few principles that are critical for making locks work, so leverage, two-way action, exploiting gravity, basing, and “gifts” (you don’t make locks, you find them) are explained. All principles are demonstrated and the students get to ask questions.

Second talk (Teaching) There are only three kinds of joints you can lock in the human body: Hinge, ball-and-socket, and gliding. Hinge joints are locked by applying force just above the joint and as far down the lever arm as possible.

First game: Challenge the students to come up with eight different elbow locks each. (Elbow locks are safer than knees or fingers at this stage).

First discovery— the students will see that there are both an infinite number of locks and only one.

Second talk and first game are repeated for each type of lock.

Special session on fingers because they are a doubled hinge joint in the same grip space as a ball-and-socket joint and close enough they can be spiral fractured against each other. Fingers are an especially target-rich environment.

Second game: After all the joints are covered, the next game is a lock-flow drill where students practice seeing the gifts.

Then the students return to the 0ne-step. Not to do only locks, but because locks are fresh in their brains, they will see a lot of them.

Repeat the cycle. Break them out of the game to work on something else, like targeting. Then put them back in the game.

Theoretically, you could, after each skill, increase the speed through the flow and randori levels.

I don’t do it that way. They can work on the principles in one-step forever. I move them to flow and randori based on their abilities and confidence level. Animals learn through play and the first exposure to randori should be fun and slightly overwhelming but shouldn’t make them feel terrified and helpless.

The last, critical piece to self-defense is to occasionally run good scenario training. That allows them to use their skills in tandem with their judgment. And use more force, because of the armor. That said, scenario training is very hard to do well and safely and easy to do poorly. And poor scenario training can mess up students, physically, tactically and emotionally. It is better to stay away from them completely than to do them poorly. You need not only proper instruction, but practice.

In the end, the goal of real force training is to be ruthlessly efficient. To achieve one’s goal with the absolute minimum of wasted effort and time. PBT is my attempt to apply that sensibility to teaching as well. To use everything we know about how people learn and how they react under stress to create a superior survivor in the minimum time. Principles-based training is a step in the direction of ruthlessly efficient instruction.

There are some caveats, though:

1) Done properly, it allows and encourages creativity. Which means your students will innovate some sneaky shit and beat you far sooner than if they train in techniques. PBT is not a good method for egotistical instructors.

2) It can be hard to measure and test. Using this platform for jointlocks, we’ve gotten untrained officers improvising locks under pressure in an hour. And some of those locks would seem to be advanced. But they wouldn’t have been able to name a lock or to demo a specific lock. Which makes organizations and concrete thinkers uncomfortable.

3) It’s incompatible with most martial arts business models. The student/teacher relationship will shift to colleague/colleague very quickly. I like that, personally.

To quote Melody Lauer, a handgun instructor in the US, critiquing a (completely unrelated to me or PBT) class she had recently attended: “The way the class is structured and the instruction method demands an excellent instructor to pull it off.”

Principles based training elicits excellence from the students, but it demands excellence from the instructor.

Basic Teaching Methodology, Part IV – Rory Miller

In my opinion, there are four ways you can get a skill into someone else’s head: Teaching, Training, Operant Conditioning and Play. All have uses, all have drawbacks.

Teaching is sharing concepts from brain to brain by juggling symbols. Lectures, writing, and diagrams are all teaching. This article is teaching. And almost anything taught is useless under stress. The neocortex is far too slow to handle the action of a sudden assault. No one can simply read a defensive driving manual and respond appropriately when a deer jumps in front of a speeding car.

Teaching is a first step to understanding. Teaching is what allows us to make connections with new information, to come up with possibilities to test. It is critical to laying the groundwork so that the students are prepared for the other levels of training.

Very importantly, teaching needs to be taught. Communication skill needs to be communicated. Learning to teach by trial and error can destroy a lot of good students.

Training is anything you do by conscious practice. It is all the drills and rote memory practice. The thousands of reps punching or stepping into a throw or transitioning precisely from a specific armlock to a triangle choke.(And, for the record, be careful with the language here. We are so used to using the word, “training” for all aspects of preparation that I may not distinguish training from teaching, conditioning and play consistently.)

Training is likely useless in your first real fight. According to Ken Murray in “Training at the Speed of Life” the Air Force set ‘ace’ at five dogfights because their best research showed that no one—no one—remembered their training for their first three to five dogfights.

Grasp that. With the best training in the world, you still got through your first 3-5 fights on instinct and luck.

After this threshold, training did kick in and you had an ace, someone with instincts, luck, and now he or she could use training. And that is damn formidable.

This is the abyss for self-defense instructors. “You will fight the way you train” is a lie. The first force incident will be a mess of your nature and your conditioning and past experiences and half remembered training experienced in a stew of hormones, brain chemicals and adrenaline. “You will fight the way you train” becomes true with experience. This is one of the crucial differences between teaching professionals and civilians. A professional in certain fields– policing, military or club security, for instance– will hit that threshold and will be able to access their training. But the average civilian should not face that much violence in a normal life unless they are making very poor decisions.

Part of the problem with training, like teaching, is that it wires to the wrong part of the brain. The thinking mind is slow, far too slow to be of use in an ambush. Training physical skills to the thinking mind makes them almost useless.

A certain amount of rote training may be necessary, but I am coming to doubt it. There is a very real possibility that, for fighting purposes, ‘reps’ do far more harm than good.

Operant Conditioning. We are not talking about physical fitness conditioning. That’s important too, but it isn’t learning. We are talking about Operant Conditioning.

Operant conditioning is fast and powerful. It can take hundreds of reps (training) to learn a new skill, but most people learn about touching hot stoves with a single rep. That’s conditioning. Skills trained are notoriously perishable, and conditioning is notoriously robust. Do you have a friend who gets sick when he or she smells a certain type of alcohol because of one event getting sick years ago? That’s conditioning.

The principles of Operant Conditioning are simple and a Behavioral Psychologist will argue that this is the model for all learning:

Stimulus

Response

Reward/Punishment

Something happens. That’s the stimulus. Then you do something, that’s the response. What you did either makes things better (Reward) or Worse (Punishment). You see a hot stove (stimulus) you touch it (response) you get burned (punishment).

Operant conditioning works at a subconscious level. There is no cognitive processing to it, which is why it is one of the few methods that can bring someone close to reflex speed.

To properly use OC as a training method, the stimulus must be clear, and the stimulus must match what you expect to encounter. A fist flying at your face is unambiguous. Punching people is a good stimulus. Also, the response must work. An effective response is it’s own reward. Punch to the nose, good stimulus. Bob or parry fast enough (response) to not get hurt equals a reward. A block too slow equals getting punched in the face, commonly considered a punishment.

To effectively use operant conditioning, many martial arts instructors have to change their teaching style. If you are used to correcting details, that is incompatible with OC. If the student must try to anticipate what you will correct, she must be thinking, and the whole point of OC for self-defense is to move faster than thought.

Understand that conditioning trumps training. Common example: A student trains for years to become good in a sparring session and one day scores on the instructor. Instead of celebrating, the “master” with the bruised ego proceeds to make an example of the student. The student trained for years to win, and when he did, he was punished. The years of training have been wasted because the hindbrain, the old brain, has learned that winning is punished.

One act of poor conditioning can erase years of training. Never, ever, ever punish someone for being successful at what you taught her.

Reward and punishment are very specific concepts in OC training. As are the words ‘positive’ and ‘negative.’ Reward is anything that increases behavior. It is almost always something that makes people feel good. Reward is different for different people because we don’t all like the same things. But even things as simple as saying, “Good job” are rewards. And saying, “Good job but this is wrong, do it this way” is not only a punishment (all corrections are punishments) put sends a mixed signal and makes the deeper part of the student’s brain trust you less.

Positive and Negative are not value judgments but only indicate presence or absence. Reward and Punish are the value holders.

Positive Reward (PR): Something good happens. Kid gets a new video game.

Negative Reward (NR): Something bad DOESN’T happen. Kid gets a night off from homework.

Positive Punishment (PP): Something bad happens. Kid gets a spanking.

Negative Punishment (NP): Something good is withheld. Kid gets grounded.

Timing on reward/punishment is critical. Just like you can’t punish a dog for a day-old stain on the carpet, it won’t do any good to tell your students they did a good job at the end of class. Reward and punishment must be as immediate as possible, just like in the real world.

Training, as said, doesn’t come out in your first fights. Conditioning will, good or bad. The things you have conditioned will happen too fast for your decision making process. In a life or death emergency, good conditioning is a life saver.

Play is the fourth method of learning. In my opinion, it is the most important. This is how all animals learn. This is how you learned everything you are really good at. You can memorize thousands of words in a foreign language and know all the rules of grammar, but until you can go to the market and haggle and argue and flirt, you don’t really speak the language.

It is an effective learning method and we are wired to absorb and integrate knowledge this way. How long does it take a kid to learn a video game? Most kids are proficient in hours at most. Because they run through the tutorial and then they play. If we tried to teach video games the way we try to train martial artists, how many years would it take to get to that level of proficiency, if at all?

Anything you teach, anything you train, will ingrain harder and be more available under stress, if you have made a good, hard physical game out of it. This was Kano’s epiphany about judo.

Play has operant conditioning built in. There is immediate feedback on what works and doesn’t and realistic stimuli. And this operant conditioning works in a framework of chaos and irrelevant stimuli and all the other things that make real encounters so difficult. Life is an awful lot like play, if you want to look at it backwards.

One caveat, and this goes for designing play and for conditioning: The game is the game. It will never have a one-to-one correlation to reality. Getting good at sparring or getting good at push hands or getting good at rolling are all pieces. You will get a visceral understanding of principles some of these games. But if you believe the game is the reality, you have just willfully blinded yourself, and that blindness can be passed to your students.

Confessions of a Martial Arts Instructor – Jeff Burger

I hate teaching self-defense.

I love the martial arts, all of them. I spent about thirty-five years running around the world trying to learn everything that I could from anybody willing to teach.

It all started with wanting to learn to defend myself. Now, I have been teaching over twenty-five years and love it. I love the science, the mechanics, the physical and mental challenges, the artfulness, the cultures, and being a part of other people’s growth….

But I have to admit, I hate teaching self-defense.

Why?

It is just too vast of a topic.

Ambushes, sucker punches, verbal Judo/de-escalation, dealing with fear and pain, awareness, freezing, punching, kicking, escape from holds, ground work, difference in weight, size, strength, multiple opponents, weapons … and so much more, and that is not even getting into the legal stuff that changes from state to state, country to country.

Think of how much we still don’t know about our own planet. Now imagine that every martial art is its own planet. As vast as that is, the Boxing planet has a beginning and end, the Judo planet has a beginning and end, and so on, and so on.

Self-defense is a universe.

Depending on your art, you may spend decades trying to master one or more of those self-defense topics and never reach perfection.

The icing on this giant cake of endless work towards an unachievable goal, is that people will expect you to teach them how to defend themselves in any situation in a short period of training time (maybe even one seminar) by just showing them some “moves”.

However as a martial arts instructor, I feel obligated to teach self-defense.

How do I approach it? Well, I start by making people sad. I am honest and break the bad news about how much there is to learn. Even if they did learn it all (which I haven’t in thirty-five years) their safety is still not guaranteed.

If they haven’t walked out and still want to hear what I have to offer, I start by prioritizing topics. I skim the cream and grab the most essential information from the most important categories.

From there, we go forever deeper.

Training Students with Trauma – Jeffrey Johnson

“The body is the armature of the self, the physical self around which the psychological self is constructed.” -Psychologist Nicholas Hobbs

Trauma can alter the relationship between the psychological self and the physical self. A violent event can turn the body into a foreign place, with all human interaction becoming somewhat distant and strange. Martial arts training, traditionally conceived as a mind-body practice, has helped many people to bridge the gap between their psychological selves and their physical selves. As a professional with experience counseling survivors of trauma and teaching self defense, I am proposing a method for self-defense instructors to approach their students who may have experienced trauma, as well as a subject for therapists and counselors to explore as a means of helping their clients to reclaim their bodies and heal.

This is intended as a brief introduction to the topic and the proposed approaches. Understanding fully that self-defense instructors are not clinical therapists, I am not suggesting that a person attempt to take on more responsibility than they are professionally qualified to handle. I am hoping to help instructors to empower their students and avoid re-traumatizing vulnerable individuals.

Trauma

How trauma impacts people can vary from person to person. What can prove to be a debilitating emotional experience for one person can easily be shrugged off by another. Everyone is composed differently, so professionals should be careful not to rush to judgment over how a person has internalized the event(s) they have experienced. We don’t get to qualify or disqualify the magnitude of a troubling event or series of events in the life of another person. We don’t get to tell them to “get over it.” Not if we are trying to help them.

I have had to develop a thick skin when hearing the stories. Vicarious trauma can occur when we internalize the stories of trauma survivors, but it can be a bigger problem if those survivors’ residual behaviors cause distress for us. We begin to emulate the psychology of those we have been tasked to help. Know what your limits are with regard to how much help you can give and where it ends and the help from other professionals (domestic violence centres, rape crisis centres, etc.) begins. Know when to step back from situations beyond your expertise and abilities.

Trauma can affect the brain in similar fashion to a blunt force injury. The brain will often re-wire itself in an attempt to cope with the injury and the “new reality” of danger and fear. Trauma survivors (note that I avoid the term “victim.” How we frame events and our definitions of ourselves has a lot to do with how we cope and heal) may experience a range of emotions connected with the trauma, such as depression, anger, feelings of hopelessness/helplessness, hyper-vigilance, and any other emotion or combination of emotions. Again, most self-defense instructors are not clinical professionals, so know the limits of the assistance you can effectively offer.

Triggers and reenactments are things that a person with no personal trauma history will not easily understand. A smell, a spoken phrase, a noise, or any other seemingly random and unrelated stimulus or bundle of stimuli can cause (or trigger) an emotional response that acts like an echo of the original traumatic event. One might assume that the males in the room are planning to physically harm him. Or one might tighten her fists and breathe rapidly anticipating an attack. The first response is a paranoid hypervigilance while the other is a physiological response. I have seen re-enactments run the whole gamut of wild possibilities at work, but thankfully nothing overly dramatic at the dojo. Having a sense of what may trigger a student is important, because we don’t want to re-traumatize (essentially recreating the traumatic event, causing even more emotional damage) anyone. For instance, a person who was robbed at gunpoint may not be immediately ready to do gun defense techniques. I am not saying that a trigger is always reason to avoid necessary training. I am saying that it may take some time and finesse to help a student reach that level of trust with you and comfort in their own readiness to deal with body language, object reference, and maybe even phrases that replicate a very bad experience.

Teaching Method

The challenge for all self-defense instructors is to help students become stronger, more competent, and more confident people with each class. To succeed at this, we have to do a lot of listening and observing our students, cross-referencing what we see and hear with what we know and have experienced. We mustn’t make anything up to fill gaps; we are obligated to give the best of what we know to our students because someone’s life and person may depend on what we have taught. A trauma survivor may come to us with “pieces” of their narrative missing or damaged due to physical, emotional, or sexual assault/abuse. We are trying to help them to fill in their own gaps on their own terms.

We are dealing with disturbing behaviors of a criminal element. This means I have had to explain to very young children that they have to establish safe boundaries, always tell trusted adults when these boundaries have been crossed, and what to do if someone makes them feel uncomfortable or unsafe. This means discussing even what to do if someone attempts to touch private parts or other such disturbing and inappropriate behavior. I can’t pull answers out of thin air. I have had to read books by professionals who work with children dealing with this same disturbing subject matter. I have had to discuss with professionals what the best practices are for dealing with what children report. All of this applies to adults, whose stories have been, in my experience overall, more terrifying and disturbing and more psychologically damaging. Knowing something about the best practices regarding what your students might report to you (i.e. A child reports that a cousin has kissed him on the lips and made him feel embarrassed or a woman reports that her ex-boyfriend has been showing up unannounced at her home. These are stereotypical examples, I have heard far more bizarre and disturbing stories and I advise instructors to learn what they can to help their students) is key and aids students and their loved ones tremendously since very few people have any idea how to handle these situations. In other words, I know where my role ends and where a rape crisis worker’s, or police, or a lawyer’s begins.

Training methods can be very fun, very rewarding, and very empowering for students and instructors alike. Survivors are pretty brave already if they are coming to your dojo/gym to learn how to overcome the events that they are struggling with, and we have an opportunity to help add strength to that bravery. There are some major keys to remember when developing your training methods for these and all students:

DO NOT EVER give someone the “you should have” lecture. In my experience, survivors have said “I should have…” and I listen first, but I always encourage them not to beat themselves up over how the events occurred. Sometimes my advice-my good, tried and true advice, like don’t hang out with people known for unsafe, reckless behaviours, or don’t continue dating someone who has little respect for your boundaries and tends to be controlling-is grounds for my students to feel guilty and ashamed. They replay events and can see and hear what I am describing in vivid clarity. I might say, “you did the best you could given what you knew then. Let’s plan for the future and use what you know now to help you make the best choices for you and your family.” Trauma can steal a person’s faith in the future. I try to get them thinking ahead, using the past as a learning tool only.
Know your students. I try to anticipate their feelings when we run a new or difficult drill. I try to use some emotional intelligence to get a sense for how relaxed, stressed, tired, etc., my student is. All of this can impact how they feel about their own ability to perform, which of course alters performance. If they are having trouble, I slow down. If they apologize, I encourage them to forget the need to apologize and focus on being here NOW. If they are survivors of trauma, they may be experiencing strong feelings of insecurity, defeat, embarrassment, and their self-consciousness can cause them to pack their things and leave in the middle of a class (I have seen this happen). We instructors like to yell to get the energy up in a group. Some students don’t need yelling, but instead our confidence in them to improve with every class. In my experience as a behavioral counsellor, I used a “10 to 1 ratio” rule for encouraging statements to corrective statements. Most people don’t need 10, but some people do. Know who needs some more attention and encouragement.
Breathe-I incorporate breathing from Qigong and Tai Chi for my more nervous students (I also use this for my hyper kids. It helps them to focus in the same way.). When I run a drill where they have to close their eyes and wait for me to attack them with the pad, they practice the breathing I taught them so that they can get some control over their adrenal and fear response. It worked for me in a lot of situations as well. It didn’t mean I had no fear or that the adrenaline stopped pumping. It just took the edge off enough for me to still be able to think and observe during a crisis. A student may experience a reenactment during intense drills and not tell you. I had that happen with a woman whose ex-husband used to turn the lights off and beat her. This I learned after running the “close your eyes” drill I mentioned above. I would not have run that drill if I had known that at the time, but thankfully she reported feelings of empowerment since this was the first time she’d ever confronted that memory. In getting to know her, I always knew when she was getting nervous, filling up with disturbing memories. We would take some time to breathe together, every class if we had to. It helped to get her focused on pushing through the drill.
Push students to a level just above their competency. My intention isn’t to make it too easy, because then they don’t feel challenged. I also don’t intend to make it too difficult, because that is defeating. Defeat for some trauma survivors is so familiar that it can be a default emotional space, entered in to upon the mere scent of impending failure. If I know they can give me 10 palm strikes, I might have them give me 2 more at the end. If I know they can give me 5 strong knee strikes, I ask for 2 more at the end. If they say they can’t, I respond that they can, it will just take some time and effort. Most people get it during class, some might take one more class to get the mechanics of a technique or drill. I assure them that I look and feel just as foolish when first learning something new. I have to relate my own power to them as something they can attain to.
Ask for permission. You don’t have to literally say, “can I grab your wrist for this technique?” as obviously they have given you an automatic degree of permission just by signing the waiver for class. What I mean is making sure you are checking in with them when it is appropriate to make sure you aren’t pushing them so far in to their discomfort that it is harmful. Some people will quietly suffer, assuming your word is law because you are the authority and they want to be respectful. Encourage them to speak up about their boundaries. I used to tell the kids I taught that not even I had permission to make them feel unsafe or uncomfortable with themselves.

I hope this serves as a good starting point for many instructors who will certainly have some students coming to them seeking help in regaining their wholeness. Reiterating that we can only do so much in our roles as self defense instructors, I encourage the counsellors among us to explore the potential therapeutic benefits of realistic self defense training from quality instructors.

Principle Based Teaching, Part III – Rory Miller

Paul McRedmond describes his approach as “Awareness Based Teaching,” or ABT. Mechanically, breaking people is not difficult. The human body is not a mystery, or, at least, it shouldn’t be for any reasonably active adult. We all know what hurts. We all know which functions can’t be disrupted (breathing, circulation). And we all know how to move, whether it is pushing a car or swinging a hammer. The mechanics of breaking people are no different than any other mechanics. Physics doesn’t change in a fight.

Once you understand this, self-defense is mostly a matter of learning to see. Learning to recognize opportunities and available tools quickly enough and exploit them ruthlessly enough. Hence, ABT.

Training awareness is broad and deep. “Situational awareness” gets thrown around a lot as a phrase, but it is useless unless you have the training and experience to know what to be aware of. Seeing things is not and never has been the problem. It has always been noticing the important things and recognizing the unimportant so that they can be disregarded. So, breadth: Awareness spans from understanding the uses of terrain to working in the social milieu and down to the nuances of targeting and power generation.

And depth: Each piece of awareness can be studied at many levels. Group dynamics can be a life time study and so can body mechanics and communication.

Principles-Based Training is dependent on awareness, in both the student and the instructor. Honing that awareness will be a lifetime endeavor.

The next aspect works on a more micro scale. You will be teaching physical skills. We know that teaching an endless series of technique is an incredibly inefficient way to teach. We also know that memorizing technique is almost worthless in a fight. Attempting to process information consciously is far too slow.

Caveat, though. There is one potential problem with this teaching method: If your measures of success (grading) is based on what your students can parrot back, students trained this way will not test well. They will be able (for example) to improvise jointlocks under pressure, but they won’t be able to name a single lock or demonstrate a named lock.

Whatever you teach, there is a way to break it down to make it easy for the student to grasp intuitively. Breaking it down to the right chunks, combined with the right training methodology, make for much faster gains in applicable physical and interactive skills. I call the classes of technique broken down to the sweet spot for fast learning “Building Blocks.”

This will be idiosyncratic. No two people will break down what they teach in the same way. All practitioners who have gotten to the unconscious competence level of skill will have slightly different intuitive understanding of what they do and why it works. In other words, there is no perfect list. This is about what works, not about what looks pretty.

For instance, “striking” is not one of my Building Blocks. I teach striking in three parts– “Power Generation” + “Targets” + “Conformation.” Conformation is just a fancy way of saying “How to use the right weapon so you don’t hurt yourself.” And Power Generation is a combination of three things as well– Conservation (structure) Stealing (using gravity, the environment and the threat’s motion) and Generation (the things you do with your own muscles to hit hard.) Broken down in this way, the student gets comfortable (and decent power) with a variety of handstrikes in about three hours.

But remember it is a deep study as well. Three hours to good, solid hits. But years to get the nuances of each piece and a lifetime to explore all the other ways to hit hard.

That’s my breakdown, my building block. It would be perfectly valid and work just as well to break it down as Hand, Forearm and Elbow; Power Generation and Targeting.

Homework. Breakdown whatever you teach into chunks that make sense to you. Try breaking them down in different ways. For instance, I teach takedowns as Momentum Ploys; Sweeps (Static and Moving, moving broken down into draw, cross, or stop); true throws (full entry, half entry, and reverse); Leverage; Locks (up and down); Base destruction and; Combinations of the above. But it is perfectly valid and would work just as well to break them down based on balance principles as simply “Getting the Center of Gravity off the Base”. Move the center of gravity, change the base, combine those two. If I had a class full of physicists, I’d probably go with that as the chunk. Again, there are many ways to be right.

I’m going to go a little meta on you for the next set of things to understand. You must understand what you are doing. For physical skills, when you go hands on, there are only three valid reasons.

You are either:

Trying to escape

Trying to get the threat under control

Trying to disable the threat

You must understand these because these are three very different things. The body mechanics are different. Grappling and locking arts are incompatible with a strategy of escaping. Doing damage to the threat involves kinetic energy going towards his core, which is the absolute wrong direction for your kinetic energy to be moving if you are trying to escape.

The physics of these three reasons are different, thus the body mechanics will be different.

The goals of these three reasons are different, thus the best strategies and tactics will be different.

Evaluate your system as it stands and evaluate what you teach as you teach. Are you teaching your students how to escape, disable or control? And be very, very careful, because fighting is nowhere on that list and the goals, strategy, physics and body mechanics of fighting are just as unrelated.

And the last. You need to understand the strategy of your system. Your priorities. The biggest weakness in modern RBSD (Reality Based Self Defense) systems is that they collect a variety of real cool techniques but usually have no strategic thread that ties them into a useable package. The human animal organizes information. Organized information, organized skills are far easier to use. Especially under pressure.

Garden Club Ladies – Kathy Jackson

This article is about and for Garden Club Ladies. You almost certainly know one; perhaps she’s your mother, your aunt, your sister, your grandmother. Perhaps she’s even yourself.

When I described this demographic to a friend and asked if they were a part of her culture too, she instantly responded: “Oh, yes. The matriarchy is alive and well here.” As my friend understands, Garden Club Ladies run the world. Oh, not unassisted, of course: it also takes farmers and carpenters and plumbers and shopkeepers and investors and more, to keep the wheels of our modern culture spinning along at pace. But Garden Club Ladies run their communities, and no doubt about it.

A Garden Club Lady in America drives a luxury SUV – a four wheel drive Lexus or BMW, perhaps even a Mercedes. She’s a retired professional woman, or a lifelong housewife married to an executive or successful business owner. She uses the SUV to haul her pedigreed pup to dog shows and agility trials, or to haul hay for her horses and other pasture pets. She likes her vehicle because it has enough room to conveniently carry her golf bag to her country club, where she plays once a week with a friend before their committee meeting for the charity pro-am golf tournament. She also uses it to collect boxes of clothing for the back-to-school donation drive she organizes every fall, and of course she enjoys having enough room in the back to keep a pair of weeding gloves and a few trowels for her volunteer work at the senior center. In the spring, you’ll find her busy helping the local parks get spruced up before the first big wave of tourism hits, and summer finds her watching over several of the exhibits at the county fair.

She’s a key member of the local Friends of the Public Library and other service organizations like the Elks or Kiwanis or Rotary Club. If her town has a Farmers’ Market, she was among the first to help get it organized and you’ll find her there every Tuesday morning helping to set up. One of her pets is a certified therapy dog, so on Wednesdays she’s busy at the nursing home visiting the old folks, and she spends Saturday afternoons at the public library so hesitant young learners can read out loud to her dog. She and her friends also organize meals for anyone they know who might be in trouble or in need, and they provide the endless succession of casseroles and three-bean salads that grace every potluck from one end of the country to the other.

The details might change. The Garden Club Ladies never do. They might be as young as 45 or as old as 85, but however old or young they are, they share several key characteristics:

They are wealthy by the standards of their communities.
They look wealthy: they drive luxury cars, wear expensive clothes, and like to be seen sporting the diamond tennis bracelets and other fancy jewelry they’ve amassed over the years.
They spend most of their waking hours in public. They are the first to arrive to set up local festivals, and the last to leave after dark when the event is over.
They are not young (except in their thinking).
They are female.

What do the Garden Club Ladies have to do with us, you wonder? I’m glad you asked! This demographic – female, older, wealthy and community-involved – is a prime victim group for muggers and home invasion robberies. They’re attractive targets for this type of crime because of their obvious wealth, their public visibility, and their age and gender.

Despite these factors, we don’t find many Garden Club Ladies working out in crossfit gyms. The very idea of one of these women joining an MMA or Krav Maga class brings a wry smile. They’re not going to show up for a Critically Dynamic Tactical Operators Carbine class or a training evolution of Extreme Close Quarters Handgun Battle Concepts. So it’s easy to write them off as defensive students. Since Garden Club Ladies won’t take “serious” classes, we think, they can’t possibly be serious about self-defense.

It’s a rare self-defense trainer who spends a moment’s thought about getting Garden Club Ladies into class, or who works at providing any classes that might meet their needs. After all, there’s no glory in teaching 60-year-old women how to defend themselves. There’s no glory in it because no matter what you teach these women or how well you do it, they are not going to make you look good by being a beast in the MMA cage, slaughtering the opposition on the competition mat, or dominating all the USPSA events at the shooting club for the next ten years. At best, they’ll still have the bodies and minds of 60-year-old women, though they may stand a little taller and look a little more alert as they carry cookies and juice into the building where the Red Cross blood drive is being held. Where’s the glory in that?

Let’s bring this home to where I live in the firearms training world. If you’re not into firearms, or if they’re prohibited in your neck of the woods, you’ll have to translate this stuff into your own terms. All I can do is tell you a little bit about my own experiences within my own style, and let you take it from there.

The conventional wisdom is that Garden Club Ladies don’t take classes because they aren’t interested in protecting themselves, or because they don’t realize that their lifestyles put them at risk for some types of violent crime. This is not true. Garden Club Ladies experience the same low-level, back of the mind fear of violent crime that nearly all women share, and they cope with it in a variety of ways.

When Garden Club Ladies purchase handguns, their stated purpose is more often self defense than any other reason. But they’re still unlikely to take a class focused on self defense. That’s outside their culture.

Fortunately, that’s changing. Slowly, but it’s changing. It happens sometimes that a group of Garden Club Ladies decides to take a class together. As an instructor, I’ve found myself fascinated by the group dynamics that drive such classes.

For instance, Garden Club Ladies love to feed each other and those around them. Food provides a shared human experience, and it’s often how these women share their love for others. They’re sometimes uncomfortable in venues where people eat together without sharing the burden of providing at least some elements of the meal for each other. I’ve found that whenever I teach a class that includes a lot of women and I tell students to bring a sack lunch, the first GCL who hears the plan will immediately offer to organize either a potluck or a catered lunch for the class. If the plan is to provide a catered meal, that woman and several of her friends will bring homemade cookies or another dessert to share. It’s almost the first thing they want to know about a weekend class: what’s the plan for meals?

When we hear something like this, it’s tempting to believe that these women – focused on frivolities like food! – therefore cannot possibly be serious about learning the skills offered in the class. That’s not actually the dynamic at work here. What these women are doing is helping to create an event that fits into their lifestyles, that meshes with their existing values and personal images rather than clashing with them. They’re not interested in changing their entire lifestyles to accommodate self-defense, but this doesn’t mean they’re uninterested in self defense. It simply means that they’re looking for ways to make learning about self defense fit into the lifestyle they already live and love.

When we reject these efforts to make the learning experience more closely match our students’ lived experiences, we’re actually rejecting the students themselves. We’re saying that it’s not enough for Garden Club Ladies to learn how to defend themselves as the people they are; they have to instead become someone else entirely. That’s not an attractive proposition, so it’s hardly surprising when potential students aren’t much attracted to it. Instead of fighting the Garden Club Ladies’ social expectations, how much better it would be to leverage their existing culture into a powerful force to drive these students to attend good training and practice together after class.

What else helps and hinders Garden Club Ladies and their willingness to attend serious training classes? Of course, one thing that keeps these students away is the usual excuse common to all students: money and time. Let’s examine those more closely.

Garden Club Ladies have a great deal of disposable income, and they spend it freely on products and events that are important to them. We can see by the clothes they wear that they’re as willing to spend their money on themselves as on other people. These women like to feel good about their purchases, and they feel good when they buy things praised by their peer group. This is true whether those things are tangible goods they can show off, or intangibles such as donations to charity events with public recognition. When the local GCL culture decides that training in self-defense is a socially laudable endeavor, Garden Club Ladies cheerfully invest in it.

Time is a paradox for Garden Club Ladies. Retired or working part-time volunteer jobs, they usually have plenty of opportunity to arrange their schedules around important events. But because they are so involved in their communities and charity work, finding time to attend a firearms training class can be a big deal. Plans have to be made a long time in advance, and should not conflict with the Garden Club’s annual tour of homes that raises funds for cancer research or with any other big local fundraiser. (Alternatively, the class should be scheduled on a weekend that coincides with the charity event, and donate a percentage of proceeds to it. Ask a Garden Club Lady to figure out the logistics that will make that work, then stand back as she mobilizes the matriarchal army to make it so.)

When a GCL says she doesn’t have enough time or money for a training class, it means she doesn’t believe she’ll receive enough value from the event to offset her investment. This demographic does understand the worth of both money and time. They won’t waste either one on anything that doesn’t provide an equal amount of value. “Value” here is measured in social status as well as in more tangible factors such as transportation or nutrition. Keep that in mind; when someone in this demographic suggests something you might consider frivolous as an addition to the class, they’re often trying to provide more value as measured by their culture’s standard of value.

When we do get these women into classes, we’re often tempted not to take them as seriously as other students. They’re usually more social and more chatty than fits into the regimented teaching style of most defensive handgun classes. We see them talking with the students around them, visiting with each other and paying attention to each other’s needs rather than grimly focusing on their own targets. We hear them talking and laughing on the breaks, and we think maybe they aren’t taking it as seriously as they ought. Again, this isn’t quite the dynamic that’s happening here.

Some time ago, I was working with students in a women’s shooting class that had around fifteen or twenty students in it. The students were each partnered with another student who would coach them as they fired. Another instructor and I were behind the line along with other trained instructors, all of us ready to help where needed. As we watched the students work together, the other instructor turned to me and gestured toward one particularly animated pair of students. “Those girls aren’t serious!” she hissed. “They’ve been laughing this whole time. Maybe we should break them up so they’ll learn something here.” And indeed, those two students were chatty and laughing, joking about their ability to hit the target and giggling about their errors together. But what my fellow instructor didn’t know was that one of those two women had been violently assaulted just a few weeks before class. She hadn’t come to class to trade jokes with her friend; she had come for the deadly serious purpose of learning how to save her own life, as she had tearfully explained in a heart wrenching conversation we’d had a few days before class started. She and her compassionate friend were doing everything in their power to make it possible for her to learn the material without falling apart.

Instead of fighting the social dynamic, it helps to move with it and use it. By pairing the students, we improved the instructor/student ratio and had the ability to leverage the students’ social instincts to help each other. When the class becomes too chatty or too loud for some students to focus, we can use the same social dynamic in a different way by challenging students to reach a specific goal. Garden Club Ladies want reasons to root for each other and cheer each other on. Setting competitive goals often helps achieve this, and works best with partners or teams competing together. Individual competitions often fall flat because they work against the social dynamic rather than with it, but shared competitions often do the trick.

That brings us to one common accusation leveled at women’s classes in general, which may be even more tempting to apply to classes where Garden Club Ladies attend: they’re too comfortable, with standards too low and no real bar of achievement to earn. Of course, that depends more on the instructor than on any one of the students. If a class full of GCLs fails to bring out each students’ full potential, that’s a failure of instruction and not the fault of the students.

As students, Garden Club Ladies don’t want to be treated like children, don’t want anything dumbed down, don’t want to be condescended to or laughed at (who does?). They do want standards. They do want the standards to be tough and fair and achievable. They want everyone around them to experience success so that they can celebrate their success together, but they want to celebrate it as an earned success – not a sinecure, not a pat on the head of a child, not a participants’ ribbon. They want to earn recognition for skills they’ve worked hard to achieve.

Personally, I believe that if a student has invested the time and money to come to class, they’re serious students no matter what demographic they belong to. Whether they remain so … well, that’s almost entirely up to me as their instructor, and what I do to help keep them engaged with the material and learning more.

Garden Club Ladies aren’t the easiest demographic to teach. Although they aren’t couch potatoes (far from it!), they also aren’t trained athletes or experienced martial artists who understand how to move their bodies for good results in class. They’re sometimes confused by the mechanics of manipulating the gun, and they’ll talk everything over – endlessly! – if you let them. They can be frustrating students and there’s very little glory in teaching them within the macho culture of the self-defense community as it stands today.

But if you’re teaching because you want to help real people learn to protect themselves from violent crime, there’s nothing like the satisfaction that comes from working with this demographic.

And the food is usually excellent.

Principle Based Teaching, Part II – Rory Miller

Part 2: Principles

I have heard, since the very beginning of my martial arts career, that there are a very small number of principles on which everything else is based. It always sounded good, until I asked exactly what those principles were. Usually I got a blank look or a fragment of philosophy: “Hit hard!” or, “Him down now!”

It sounds obvious, it is obvious, but you can’t teach from principles if you don’t know principles. And if your system is based on core principles, every instructor in your system should have an answer to the question, “What are your principles?” And, all of those instructors should have the same answer.

What is a principle? A principle is a law of physics or a property of physiology that makes your techniques work. As such, they are universal and apply to all styles and systems. Leverage, for example, is a universal principle. I personally identify something as a principle if:

It applies to striking, grappling and weapons

There are no exceptions

Leverage, for instance. In a sweep, the greater the distance between the high and low force, the less energy is required. Every lock has a lever arm that should be maximized. And sticks hit harder than hands because the lever arm is longer. And no exceptions. Perfect leverage won’t always get the job done– it would take a truly enormous lever and an impossible place to stand to move the world– but good leverage is always superior to poor leverage.

This articles is going to get a little interactive, so go grab a pen and some scratch paper. I’d like you to sit and think and write down a list of your principles before we go further. I’ll ask Garry to insert an advertisement about here so that you don’t scroll down too fast.

Got your list? Good. Now let’s talk about what isn’t a principle. You’ll probably wind up scratching some things off your list, and that’s fine. Because something isn’t a principle by my definition, doesn’t mean it isn’t important.

Things that aren’t principles, but show up on a bunch of lists are goals, strategies, tactics, techniques, concepts, and aphorisms.

“Don’t get hurt” for instance, is a goal. It isn’t a principle. Getting injured makes everything harder, so not getting hurt is a good goal, but it isn’t even a plan. It is the result of doing everything right and a lot of luck. Where you want to end up is a goal, but it doesn’t help you get there, so it isn’t a principle. It isn’t even a strategy or a tactic.

“Do damage” Is a strategy. It is the vague path to your goal. Again, desiring to do damage does not increase the efficiency of the damage dealing itself, so not a principle.

Counter-punching is a tactic. It can serve your goals and implement your strategy, but it doesn’t make things work better. Rather, it is one of the things you use principles to make better.

“Use the appropriate level of force for the situation” is a concept. It is a way to think that can be very important and can inform every aspect of training as well as fighting, but it is not a principle. Nothing in that statement makes the level you decide to use more efficient.

Aphorisms are little bits of wisdom such as “Hard to soft, soft to hard.” They are sound-bite sized pieces of principles that are not understood. “Hard to soft, soft to hard” is only sometimes true. A solid stick, which is hard, does more damage to exposed joints and bones than to muscle. The principle behind “Hard to soft, soft to hard” might be, “Choose a target appropriate to the weapon.” Does this hold true for striking, grappling and weapons? Are there exceptions? Is there any time where using the wrong tool for the job or applying a tool to the wrong target is a good idea? “Choose a target appropriate to the weapon” fits my definition of a principle.

Note here that aphorisms will be one of the clues to discovering your principles. Dig in deep and find what the underlying truth is.

Another thing to note: Training trivia, like, “You must turn your foot at 45 degrees in this technique” is almost always a clue to a principle. When a principle is not taught or not understood, trivia must be memorized to fill the gap. Once the principle is understood, the trivia becomes unnecessary because the reason becomes obvious. And the principle will also show the boundary when the situation changes and the trivia becomes untrue and ineffective.

Good? So power down the screen, pour yourself a cup of coffee or whatever, and take another stab at writing your list of principles. I will share mine at the end of this article, but it is imperative that you write yours first. Humans, like all animals are lazy. If you see a good enough list, part of your brain will turn off. If you see my list before you write yours, you will either turn off or, at best, your list will be polluted with my ideas. If, however, you see my list with a strong and complete list of your own, the ideas can cross-pollinate and become stronger. Don’t cheat yourself on this.

Rory’s list of principles:

Leverage: the longer the lever arm, the more power you can apply.
Structure: Using bone instead of muscle. Bone doesn’t get tired. Bones are levers. Use and understand your opponents skeleton and your own, offensively and defensively.
Balance: Understand the elements of balance (Base and Center of Gravity) and how those elements apply to you, the threat and the combined four-legged animal you become when you make contact.
2-Way action: When possible, hit things from two directions: push and pull locks; crash and sweep takedowns; exercise and eat right to get fit.
Gravity: Gravity doesn’t telegraph, it is stronger than you and you can’t accelerate at 32 ft/sec2. Whenever possible, use your weight instead of or in addition to your strength.
Action/Reaction: He who moves first lands first. Take and keep the initiative.
Gifts: Each of the Threat’s attacks comes with momentum you can exploit. The world is full of obstacles and weapons you can use. Learn to see.
Space and Time: A big one and complex. This includes ranges, fighting against emptiness instead of force, creating and using deadzones to be safe in a fight, controlling pace, mentally altering your opponent’s perception of time and distance, creating freezes, feinting… this one is big.
Line and Circle: The geometry of conflict. Linear and circular movements have different possibilities, power generations, strengths and weaknesses.
Environment: Use everything around you, from terrain to the social attitudes of the audience. This has strategic, tactical and immediate applications.
Targeting: Some places hurt more than others. Hit the one that hurts most.

There aren’t a large number of principles. I think if my understanding were deeper, the list above would be shorter, not longer. A future article will talk about how to apply the concepts to training. For now, it’s important that you have your list.

Fighting is complex, but it’s not complicated. Here’s what I mean. There’s a lot that goes into it– physics, physiology, social constructs, internal states of all parties involved– but the effective solutions tend to be simple. Physics in school can be hard and take a lot of math, but in the end there are only six simple machines and almost all work from variations of one principle, leverage.

And that’s why, as simple as training through principles can be, as quickly as students can make gains, it can still be a life long study. There is incredible depth available at this game. When I first learned of structure, it was simply a tool to keep energy from being lost. “All of your joints and muscles give,” I was told, “and when they give, that power is not going into the enemy. So hit with bone, not with muscle.” Like most young men, I couldn’t even tell structure from stiffness at that time.

Fast forward thirty years and in a short introduction to structure we still covered power conservation. But also power, unbalancing, bone slaving, void defense, vectors along bones versus angled against, structure disruption, resting in grappling, and structuring against a lock. All just structure.

And as cool as all that is, I know I’m barely scratching the surface.

One Little Word – Kathy Jackson

There’s a sentence I don’t like to hear people use in my classes. Actually, I hate it. Hate it so much that I used to stop them from saying it.

The sentence is, “I can’t.” I can’t hit the target from here. I can’t shoot as fast as you’re asking me to shoot. I can’t picture making the choice to defend myself. I can’t…

I can’t.

“You’re not allowed to say that in my class,” I’d tell them when they said it. “It’s not allowed.” I’d say it playfully, jokingly, in a friendly way, working for the laugh. And they would laugh. And we’d go on with the lesson.

But I came to realize that I was being profoundly disrespectful when I said that. Disrespecting my student, disrespecting their learning process, disrespecting their decision to be part of my class. Disrespecting my own skill as a teacher – and my own limitations.

It was profoundly disrespectful because they weren’t lying when they said they couldn’t do whatever-it-was. They were telling the truth.

They just weren’t telling all of it.

“I can’t” is an admission of failure. It hurts. And we hate to see our students hurt. That’s why I always wanted to flatly deny the place the students found themselves when they declared, “I can’t.” It’s a horrible place to be.

Here’s the shocking news:

By adding just one little word to that hateful sentence, we can their world upside down. And our own.

“I can’t do that” is an admission of failure.

“I can’t do that … yet” is a promise of victory.

Always add the yet.