Integrated Fighting Systems Weblog

Swiss Ball Exercises

2012-01-19T15:48:00.000-05:00

Swiss Balls have become one of the most commonly available fitness tools in the industry today. Affordable and versatile, there is no end to the applications you can create with them. Here are just a balance, core strength and flow drills that I enjoy in my own training.

SWISS BALL EXERCISES VIDEO

WARRIORHOOD

2012-01-06T15:09:00.014-05:00

WARRIORHOOD
Excerpt from The Dragon Mind Method, by Kevin Secours

“A warrior always stands for something greater than himself. In the end, a warrior is a noble servant for a noble cause.”
--Richard Marcinko, Creator of Navy S.E.A.L. Team 6

Our early ancestors were insufficient creatures, lacking the fangs and claws of the more dominant predators in our world. Relying instead on our intellect, we compensated for our natural limitations by creating tools and weapons that would help improve our odds. Our intellect also brought with it advances in communication through the spoken and written word, allowing each generation to share their knowledge with the next in ways that other species simply could not. Eventually, our technical advances far exceeded any other predator. Unrivalled, we turned our abilities on our own species, becoming our own worst enemies, and in some capacity began to wage war on the planet itself, pillaging and destroying the ecology that supports us in our blind anthrocentric drive for superiority. To borrow Goethe’s words, we used what we call “Reason” just to “outdo the beasts in being bestial”. As Barbara Ehrenreich posits, this is perhaps little more than the unfailing insecurity of a now unmatched predator who still bears the conscious memory of an ancestry of victimhood.

It was in this laboratory of conscious evolution that the warrior was born. Combining the will to survive with the ability to contemplate, record and share traditions, as well as to construct, embellish and codify what was a natural drive into something ritualistic, the warrior emerged as its own social class. This new group became more than just the tribe of hunters from which it sprang. They became protectors and guardians. Their existence allowed others to be free to harvest crops and raise their young. with this greater freedom for the masses also came greater distance from the constant undercurrent of violence that flows through nature. All the while, the warrior remained vigilant, honing their skills, focused on survival. This awareness centered on an acute understanding of their motives as well as their own finitude as we have discussed in our previous blog entries. In the words or Rick Fields, the warrior are like thorns that protect the beautiful rose of their ideals.

The modern world is no exception. In fact, I would argue that the importance of the warrior today is greater than ever before. Beyond the confines of war and politics, and the seemingly ever-present need for the protection of national interests, the warrior has become an increasingly essential link to a decreasingly understood human nature. Warriors are not just guardians of our promise and future—they are gateways to our darkest origins. Warriors operate on the shadowy frontier of where beastly urges meet higher order aspirations.

My goal for 2012 is to build on the essence of Warriorhood for practitioners in my school in Montreal as well as throughout our training family worldwide. We have already begun through this blog and in our own training here to reassert the primacy of consciousness of mortality, celebrating the preciousness of living. During this season of resolutions, we have begun to access the deepest form of motivation there is—a diamond clear recognition of death to make our reason WHY we train bigger than the particulars of WHAT we train. Next, we will return to the mechanics of training to streamline our method to better match our motive. We must recognize that we each carry within us a complex personal protection system comprised of instincts and reflexes and a will to survive that has been hard-fought for and boldly gifted to us by the trials of countless generations of ancestors. The path will not be easy. Simply having clarity in your motivation does not ensure success. As Chuang Tzu wrote: “Great truths do not take hold of the hearts of the masses. And now, as all the world is in error, how shall I guide? If I know that I cannot succeed and yet try to force success, this would be but another source of error. Better than to desist and strive no more. But if I do not strive, who will?” Finding sustainable motivation for the warrior depends on balancing two opposing forces: the awareness and sensitivity that our study of violence and death brings us with compassion, tolerance and patience for the majority we seek to protect even though they may not share our understanding. The water is to be drunk by the many but drawn from the well by the few.

So here’s your homework: Think of at least one instance that you have experienced where you felt friction, aggravation or frustration precisely because you were a martial artist, a law enforcement officer, a bouncer or warrior of any form, where the others involved were not and did not share your awareness. For example:

-Your colleagues at work school or family members complained about an injury or series of injuries that your received while training. They warned you that it was unsafe to continue training and advised that you quit now. You know they have your best interests in mind but they still anger you because they could not understand the joy training was bringing you or see the positive changes it was making in your life.

-A spouse or friend complained that you were investing too much time in training. Perhaps this frustrated you because you felt the time spent training made you more present, more vital and a better contributor in the remaining time that you were available but the other(s) failed to see it this way.

-You entered into a discussion with an acquaintance or stranger at a party. The other(s) involved claimed to be pacifists and were abhorred by the idea that you trained in the martial arts. They perceived you as only contributing to the perpetuation of violence. This angered you because you believe your training brought understanding, awareness and the ability to detect, diffuse and avoid danger far above the untrained masses. You feel that your training actually serves peace and not violence.

Now these are just a few examples but you get the idea. Deeply think of one incident like this where you were angered or frustrated by what you regarded as the ignorance of a non-martialist. Remember the emotion fully. Allow yourself to feel it again right now for a moment, feeling the rise in your pulse, the tension in your chest, the increase in your breathing. In this state, it’s very easy to be dismissive and divisive, to mock or disregard the non-warrior for their naivite. Like that famous speech by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, you just want
to rip into the noob for their stupidity and explain that warriors have always existed and will always exist and that in fact the sheep owe gratitude to the sheepdogs for guarding them from the wolves. Now take a deep breath. Recognize that you are not in that situation right now. Getting angry about something that has happened or something that may yet happen will not undo that reality. We can’t control the situation, we can only control our responses to them.

Let’s take this a step further. How do you think you look from that outsider’s eyes? If you were to write down 5 words on a giant sheet of paper that described how that person saw you at that moment, what would they be?

-Violent?
-Aggressive?
-Barbarian?
-Arrogant?
-Scary?
-Uneducated?

Would any of those words be “sensitive”, “attentive”, “listener”, “understanding”? What types of actions could you have taken, what type of body language could you have adopted, what kind of questions and language could you have used to increase the chance that you would be described with some of these alternate words? Could you have taken a deep breath and asked: “what makes you feel that way?”. Could you have listened far more and far longer than you actually talked? Could you have kept the conversation lighter, lowered your speed and tone of your voice and encouraged a more civil dialogue.

The fact is, as warriors, we exist for a higher cause, to protect and to serve. While it is tempting to say that I train only for me and my family and not to police the world, and while to some extent that may be true, denying your connectedness to your society will not bring you closer to your acceptance of death, your appreciation for the preciousness of life and ultimately to fearlessness. Only understanding can bring about growth. As frustrating as it is, learning to see yourself from the perspective of your greatest opponents, both on and off the battlefield, is a cardinal rule of strategy.

If this seems like more than you can manage right now, treat the scenario as an exercise in self-defense. Act as if this were only practice for verbal diffusion in a combat scenario. We can never get enough practice in this type of work so why not use arguments as practice even if you aren't feeling the deepest compassion for your enemy yet. Use the body language, tone, speed and language necessary to calm your protestor, to hear your opponent and maybe even to find neutral ground. It is an exercise that will have direct relevance in the verbal dynamic of a street encounter while planting the seed for long term growth and healing.

In the end, while the path of warriorhood may isolate us from some of the pleasures and happy leisure you perceive in the masses, we cannot let it lead us into isolation. Returning to fields, the thorns exist to protect the rose. As different as those thorns may be from the soft and beautiful petals of the flower, they still must share the same stem.

The Mortal Coil

2012-01-05T13:31:00.027-05:00

A few days ago, I posted an article revisiting the self-defense principle of putting the "self" in self-defense, through creating a value inventory and through distinguishing between what really matters (the true self, the individual and their loved ones) and material property. Today I would like to spring-board from this notion by delving somewhat deeper into what initially might seem like a rather unpleasant concept.

Mindfulness of death and of our own finitude is a central component of most of the Asian martial arts. Certainly, few warrior groups in history succeeded in balancing the dichotomy between the pursuit of enlightenment and the problem as violence as did the Samurai of Japan. When considering the adoption of Buddhism by the samurai in the 13th century one must be careful not to overly-romanticize its role in Japanese culture. Certainly, what was intended as a tool of peace, became
manipulated by culture, serving both political and military roles throughout various periods. Even the samurai's exposure to Buddhism was due to the earliest exposure of this religion to the royal families and in itself speaks of the class inequality of the time. Nevertheless, after being adopted as the country's official religion by the ruling Soga family, the religion was to permeate all of Japan's function, including its powerful military machine. Even the earliest roots of the legendary "warrior monk" according to Kenji Matsuo, may well have arisen from the employment of government sponsored monks who function covertly as warriors despite public commitments to non-violence. Ultimately, what naturally arose was that the Samurai, a full-time professional warrior caste, constantly exposed to the stress and terror of war, turned to what was readily available to solve their existential dilemmas. Zen Buddhism, with its strict emphasis on discipline, its commitment to detachment from impermanence and fearlessness in the face of death, were perfectly suited to the demands of the Japanese warrior.

"Conscousness of death prevents unconsciousness in life" promises the Zen proverb and while this insight was widely embraced by the warriors that forged some of the modern world's most popular martial arts, this fundamental understanding has been all but lost. Early in my own Buddhist training, I came across a very simple, albeit a somewhat unorthodox method of combinging death awareness with my personal visualization training that has remained a very powerful, awakening and important component of my own training. Recent conversations with a colleague of mine who works by day as a psychologist, reinforced the absolute importance of this and so I share with you now an excerpt that first appeared in my book DragonMind.

A central drill for awakening greater mindfulness, involves simply imagining your own death in the literal, visual form of an executioner. The principle is simple: rather than seeing your death as an event, see your death as an actual physical human being. Visualize your executioner following our basic viusalization guidelines, using all 5 of your senses to create as detailed an image of your killer as you can. Let your creativity go wild ehere. There are no wrong answers. Take however long you need to create a complete and thorough image. How does you executioner look? How does his mere presence make you feel? What is he wearing? How does he sound? How does he smell? Does his presence change the tastes in your mouth? Deeply invest in visualizing his presence. Once you have a clear image, think of what each characteristic means to you. For example:

-Was your killer large and muscular? Is this because you feel intimidated by bigger people? More deeply, does it point to an inner feeling of smallness and of your fear of being over-taken by a uncaring power you don't fully understand?

-Was your killer shrivelled and sickly, like a grim reaper, possibly drug-addicted or infected with some disease? Do you fear the insensitive, ruthless logic of an addict's appetite or more profoundly perhaps even your own addictions? Do you fear a slow and torturous death?

-Was your killer masked? Do you fear dying unappreciated and being forgotten?

-Was your death quick or slow? Do you fear the pain of the onset of death more than the final act itself or do you fear judgment and punishment after the grave?

-Did your death involve a weapon? As a martial artist, do you feel confident against empty handed attacks but fear a weapon? What was the nature of a weapon? Was it an industrial, mechanized contraption, a machine, or a gun? Does it point to your fear of urban pressure and city living or of being lost in the rush of modern society? Was it brutally primitive, like a spikey blade, a gruesome hook, or a blunt club? Does it highlight your dominant terror of basic, primal rage and aggression?

-Do you fear certain physical attributes? Does this suggest racial or sexist judgments or scarring from previous experiences? How does this affect your daily life?

Think honestly about every aspect of your executioner. You are your own therapist here, so please be absolutely honest. You will never need to share this with anyone but do at least share it with yourself. Often, we don't allow ourselves to think of some of our darker feelings and thoughts. If you are utterly genuine with yourself, this exercise will serve a massive purpose in awaking you to the most primal, intrinsic drives that fuel you. Returning to the language of my previous blog entry, this will make your reason WHY you train even larger than WHAT you train.

The Executioner Drill not only forces you to admit specific fears and weaknesses that might otherwise have remained buried, in doing so it re-affirms your dirve to survive and fans the flames of thriving. By simply acknowledging your fears, you become at once better positioned to control them when they surface again. From experience, I have found that you only need to perform this drill periodically to gain full effect. A daily repeat of this drill might be necessary for a short period of intense realization but at some point it will become more than one can comfortably bear. Practice it as you feel the need to monitor changes in your perspective, your self-honesty and your outward actions. I strongly suggest that anyone who is serious about personal improvement in any way, not just personal protection, should maintain a log of some sort. Every time you perform this exercise, consider jotting down some of your reflections in the time that follows. Reflecting back on this at a later date will preserve the honesty of your self-discovery and be an incredible roadmap for continued growth.

While on this tipic, I'd like to note that the most common fears which students have shared with me are the ones that I have outlined in the bullets above. The fear of larger and stronger opponents in a literal sense is something that will pass with training in any effective self-defense system. Size matters. In a battle between martial myths that state otherwise and Newtonian physics, Newton wins. That being said, correct training will increasing your awareness, make your acutely aware of what is possible, and fix your goals on what you cna do and not what you can't. If you are having trouble with this aspect, you might consider seeking outside styles to view alternate strategies for handling larger opponents, or taking a brief boot camp in reality based self-defense. Often, what we enjoy as a martial path for day-to-day study, serves multiple roles beyond simple self-protection. Many people train in measurably less effective styles simply because it is more palatable on a daily basis whereas constant exposure to reality training might be too much at this juncture. Whatever the solution, accept it without judgment.

Usually, these cosmetic concerns are simply masks for deeper feelings. Feelings of invisibility, of insignifigance and of anonymity can all be reversed by reaffirming your importance and by embracing your mortality. I return to Marcus Aurelius. In his meditations, Aurelius noted we are like incense falling at the alter, every day closer to death. Our physical structures are constantly dissolving. Our skin is flaking, our hair is falling out and growing back, even our organs are regenerating themselves one cell at a time. As Deepak Chopra has noted, the majority of household dust is composed of human skin, pointing to the reality that we are constatnly shedding and regenerating. It has been theorized that every breath that we take should contain at least one molecule that at one time was in the body of Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, or Jesus Christ and so on. Stretching back even further into cosmic time, as Carl Sagan noted, the heaviest elements in our body would have required the heat of a super nova to fuse them, meaning that we are literally comprised of star stuff.

In every breath, we are changing states. We can use this time to bring us closer to self-realization and growth or through self-doubt and denial, continue on our path away from them. You alone can decide. Ultimately how you choose your martial path and how you walk it will be defined entirely by this resolve.

PUTTING THE “SELF” IN SELF-DEFENSE:

2012-01-04T10:36:00.013-05:00

With a new year dawning on the horizon and the air thick with fresh resolve, I thought it fitting to revisit a series of concepts in my first blog entries of 2012, that are at the core of the success we have here at the Montreal Systema Academy.

The topic for the first of these installments is something that dates back
to some of my earlier writing (i.e. The Dragon Mind Method and The Path of the Ronin)and features heavily in The International Combat Systema Association curriculum. So, it suffices to say that this will be familiar territory for those who are well acquainted with our work. Nevertheless, given the absolute centrality of this concept, and given some recent events, I would ask that you indulge this concept with a fresh set of eyes.

This first concept is what I term “Putting the ‘self’ in self-defense”. Simply put, it entails making your motive matter more than your method, and making the reason why you train bigger than the cultural, aesthetic, political or stylistic trappings of what you train. This involves making a value inventory, or a list of everything that matters to you. This list should certainly include people ranging from your family and friends, idols, heroes, etc., but should also include things including your favorite foods, songs, movies, places, possessions, hobbies—you name it. Anything that you deeply enjoy and that is a component that defines the “you-ness” of you should make the list. Just brainstorm what matters to you without judgement. The order of the list does not matter—if you happen to realize that you love mangos before you list your mother, it doesn’t mean you love mangos more than your mom and even if you did, it doesn’t matter. This is your list and no one else needs to approve of it. Be fully honest with yourself.

After cataloging as many random thoughts as you can in a few minutes, take a second to take a step back. I like to visualize actually taking a physical step back and looking at the list. Sometimes I imagine the list is scrolling across a massive IMAX screen that stretches from one side of the cinema to the other. Other times, I imagine an incredibly long scroll of paper stretching out in front of me from the furthest extent of my vision. The bigger you can make this list, the better. Take a minute to realize that this massive, unique combination of preferences, experiences and understanding is uniquely your own. No one else’s list will ever be exactly like yours. This is an awesome thought when you let it sink in. It always brings to mind the opening verse of Richard Dawkins’ classic, Unweaving the Rainbow: “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”

When we embark on the path of warriorhood or even less romantically on the
path of simple survival and self-preservation, it is precisely this unique combination of attributes and likes and experiences that we are preparing to fight for and preserve. If we cease to be, that uniqueness ceases. Naturally, we feel and know this at some level or else we wouldn’t be training to defend ourselves in the first place, but like so many things, when we assume our motive is strong without reinforcing it, we risk easily going astray in our training. The moment we deeply accept that the entire reason for training is self-preservation (whether through literal self-defence, improved health and longevity or increased quality of life) we can more readily begin to see the logic in choosing our fights wisely. Which brings us to the issue at hand: imagine a mugger asks you for your watch. It could well be an expensive watch. Imagine that your grandfather gave you that watch before he died. Now the perceived value of that watch is exponentially greater. The mere thought of losing that watch begins to stir powerful emotions in us. How dare this stranger invade the sanctity of my life and try to take this from me. Who is he? What gives him the right? The desire to resist or even perhaps for justice and retribution is naturally great in most of us and this simple, brutal invasion of security begins stirring powerful emotions even as we think of it.

Now imagine that in our refusal to give up the watch, perhaps in our attempt to fight back, we are killed. What is left? The watch is still there, the mugger is still there, the injustice is still there, but you are not. As Christopher Hitchens said so poetically before his own demise from cancer, dying is not just getting tapped on the shoulder and getting asked to leave a party, it’s knowing that the party will go on without you. With you gone, so too is all of that special sentimentality that made that watch so incredibly valuable to begin with. The thought of losing the watch when you were alive and being left only with the cherished memory was too hard to bear, but how does it now compare to the thought of that watch still being taken from you, but you now being dead, with the watch now little more than a trophy in an unappreciative criminal’s collection. Or what about that watch laying anonymously like some discarded hunk of metal and glass in the nearest pawn shop. The treasured sentimentality will have long since trickled down the pavement and into the nearest sewer along with your last pint of blood.
This is why I advocate self-defence for the protection of the self, your loved ones and other innocents and not for the protection of property. Do not fight for material possessions. In this same theoretical encounter, consider the many scenarios wherein complying to some degree with the aggressor and willingly sacrificing the watch could massively increase your survival odds by the simple factthat you might avoid engaging in needless violence. As I have written elsewhere, there is a calculus of violence—an immediate intuitive appraisal of the opportunity cost of engaging. Every fight carries huge risks. In the animal kingdom, this is something deeply understood all too well. Animals will fight to defend their young, perhaps the rest of their kin, or to define their territory since it bears a direct relationship to their food, but even then they favor almost ritualistic shows of force and then often a reluctant escalation to actual physical engagement, because in nature, it is understood that there are no winners in violence and survivors sometimes die not long after due to the severity of their injuries. Amongst humans, ego it would seem often mutes this animal intelligence and leads us to project unmerited value on inanimate objects.

Now I realize that the flags are going up and the sirens are going off formany of you. Is he saying not fight for what is rightfully ours? In short, yes. I am saying, don’t risk your life over property. In complying with an attacker, I am not proposing that we just mindlessly agree with anything they say. There is a complex balance of communication, including degrees of compliance that are inherent to any successfully diffusion. What is lost in the complexity however, is the simple truth that we should not risk our lives for material things. Consider the recent case of Lt. Col. Karl Trenker who, while meeting a supposed buyer from Craigslist for a necklace he was selling, was shot repeatedly. The two thieves stole the necklace and started to run. Trenker, a soldier, pursued them, at which time, one of the suspects turned and fired 10 shots at him, hitting him repeatedly. Trenker is lucky to be alive and all of the headlines brought attention to the fact that he had never been shot in two tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and yet gets shot when he is back home. The irony is thick. They bragged about how he plugged his bullet holes with his fingers, how his experience as a soldier kept him alive and how the criminals were ultimately caught by police. All fortunate twists in an unfortunate situation. I want to be clear here, that Trenker’s ability and resolve is admirable. It speaks to each of our inner desires for justice to be done. I’m not judging the behavior. I’m not even saying that I also wouldn’t be prone to doing the same thing—in fact it is because I feel the same desire to give chase that I am bringing this up. Trenker had his children waiting in the car. When we put this situation in context and you look at what matters, would you be willing to endanger your children for the ideal of justice and a necklace? If your own safety doesn’t matter to you, what about the kids? In Trenker’s case, he has two in the car and five more at home. Certainly his value to his family exceeds anything that catching those thieves and regaining that necklace could bring. When we are in the context of a crisis, we will revert to our training—Trenker was a soldier, he was used to hunting, to getting the bad guys and he naturally switched into autopilot when the situation arose. This is why it is commonly taught that soldiers make bad body guards, because they invest in the fight and not in the client. They run towards danger rather than running away from it with their client.

As civilians or at least in our civilian life, we need to maximize our survival odds by running away from danger, as hard as that is to swallow in the vestiges of our ego. My goal is always to get home to my family through any means necessary. No amount of money or possessions changes that. I have to reinforce this constantly because I know myself, I know my emotions, I know what I would rather do, but I also know the reality of violence. Every week at the academy, someone walks in because they have survived violence, because they have been beaten down, because they have been stabbed, because they have been raped. And this is in Montreal, a famously safe city in a country that is so safe it is the butt of jokes. Yet, this dark undercurrent of violence flows through the veins of this city and I see just a glimpse of it every week.

When we lose sight of this simple survival compass, of this golden principle of urban survival, as Aristotle said, this small error in course leads to a massive error in destination. So it is, as we stand here at the outset of a fresh new year, that I ask you all to revisit this fundamental tactical principle and to reinforce it with new resolve. You are each too important to allow this to be forgotten.
More to come in my next blog entry. Stay safe until then.

Off With His Head

2011-12-13T10:45:00.026-05:00

This past weekend hosted a wild gala MMA action as UFC 140 delivered some of the best fights in recent memory. While everyone is talking about Frank Mir's brutal arm break via kimura in his rematch against Nogueira, less is being said about Jon Jones' incredible guillotine against Lyota Machida. I've already read a number of forum and blog posts talking about Jones' unorthodox style and how that even when he guillotines, he does something different. I read someone who said that Jones is so athletic he can get away with doing the guillotine wrongly. Others have said things like, "I've never heard of someone getting knocked out by the guillotine but that's just how strong Jones is". That's a lot of misunderstanding for two days.

Remember the basics guys. There are two ways to choke someone: 1-You either cut off the blood flow to the brain by sealing the arteries, or 2-you squeeze the windpipe and cut off the airflow. Affectations of the windpipe are far more dangerous and less reliable. The trachea can break and cause bleeding into the lungs that can literally drown the subject. In Judo and traditional Jujitsu, the Hadaka Jime or "naked" strangle is most commonly taught against the trachea. The difficulty with this type of tactic is that while it will create panic and pain in a lucid individidual, subjects that are highly resistant because of a heightened emotional state, chemical substances and the like,
are unlikely to submit because of the pain alone. This relies on the decreased flow of oxygen and acquiring that crucial oxygen deprivation is a tricky thing in full resistance, since it teeters on the edge of permanent injury.

A blood choke or vascular restraint, seeks to seal off both of the arteries. It is typically characterized by alignment with the subject's trachea with your elbow, which both protects the windpipe from injury while aligning one bicep with one artery and your forearm with the opposite artery. A correct blood choke should be
relatively painless and should immediately begin weakening the opponent. Subjects can fall into an altered state of consciousness if not completely unconscious within 8-14 seconds in most cases and everyone, no matter how big their neck is, is vulnerable to this tactic.

The hands can be clasped together to apply this type of choke or woven in a figure-4with one hand grabbing the bicep. The hand position is largely a matter of preference and capacity based on your size relative to the attacker. What distinguishs the choke again is that placement of your elbow crux with the subject's trachea. Just a quick google found images of the the choke being applied on the arteries as shown above, being applied more dangerously on the trachea and even being applied uselessly to the jaw as shown to the right. All of the photos were attached to articles denoting the exact same technique which shows you just how much confusion there is regarding this simple technique.

It comes as no surprise I suppose that the somewhat more subtle guillotine should be even more misunderstood. Typically, the guillotine choke is performed from a standing position by wrapping the head of your opponent with one arm and aligning your wrist bone with their throat. Your second hand is grabbed at the wrist or hand and pulled directly upwards along the contour of your own torso. This action should be like the motion of a an actual guillotine (a la French revolution) in reverse. In a real guillotine, the power necessary for surgical decapitation comes from dropping a heavy, razor sharp blade, straight done onto a captive subject's neck. Imagine how much force would be lost if that blade slid down on a 45 degree angle or worse still, along a curved arch. In exactly the same way, the submission should be performed by pulling the wrist straight up along your body, via the biceps and shoulders. You should not lean back to acquire power as this places you off balance and sets you up for easier counters via clinches and body lock takedowns. This is the way guillotines are typically applied, making them not only dangerous airway chokes but also tremendously violent towards your upper spine.

What seemed to throw everyone for a loop this past weekend was that when Jones synched in his guillotine, he turned sideways and brought his hand all the way around and up. Yes, the capacity to do this was based on his long and lanky arms and their length relative to Machida's neck. Two guys the size of Brock Lesnar would be unlikely to be able to apply this specific mechanic to one another. What is infinitely more important and what most people fail to address is that by doing this, Jones was effectively able to align his elbow crux with Machida's chin, transforming a typical breath guillotine into an arterial bloodflow guillotine. The effects were obvious. Machida went out so smoothly that his resistant hand stayed propped up in a show of mock vitality, causing the most seasoned ref in MMA, Big Jon Mccarthy, to not notice he was out for a second or two longer that he would have liked to wait and when Jones was ordered to release, Machida slumped to the canvas, like any of us would have, completely out.

Overcoming Inhibition

2011-12-09T13:07:00.021-05:00

One topic that comes up a lot in student emails and inquiries at the school is the issue of inhibition. Many students recognize that they feel a reluctance to harm or perhaps more correctly a fear to really "open up" on an attacker.

First off, inhibition is a huge and multi-layered issue. Certainly, arguments have been made in favor of a sinister inner nature to humans. Others have countered that altruism at some level would serve a higher evolutionary purpose--if animals of any species were fully competitive, the most industrious of the litter would simply kill all of the others while they slept--this however would leave that individual in a world of dwindling mates and eventually lead to the extinction of the species. Certainly, humans are proof that alone, we are not the greatest predator, but together, we were able to rise above our natural station. The motivations for the inhibition aside, the reluctance does exist in many students. In fact, few students even realize this, so being aware of this roadblock already places you one step ahead of the pack.

A few points to consider:

1-Inhibition is tightly connected to assertiveness. In the martial arts, we are
often taught, or worse still--we often teach--that training can help us overcome any fear or limitation. Modern research however is showing increasingly that while assertiveness may well be a blend of both nurture and nature, that nature may well be the more dominant of the forces. Simply put, it is likely that some people are just biologically more assertive than others and that even with training, some weaker and less inclined individuals may be less able to acquire the same heightened levels of assertiveness as others. What is important for us to understand here is that if you are one of the lucky ones, be patient with your students. If you are one of the meeker ones, you will have to work very hard at it to be on equal ground.

2-Assertiveness is not the only factor in inhibition any more than it is the key ingredient in a fight. Although you may be much less assertive than your aggressor and although a predator will choose the time of the attack and likely be more prepared than you for the event, you can turn the tables through a focus on efficient, survival-based strategies like striking pre-emptively, detaching and fleeing as quickly as possible, recognizing your limits and refusing to participate in the aggression. Too often, people volunteer to linger in a fight. They resist where they could flee. Remember the bottom line--your goal is to survive, not to fight in order to survive.

3-Some degree of inhibition is desirable. A psychopaths may well have absolutely no
inhibition. Would you be willing to sacrifice the very humanity you are training to defend in order to bypass inhibition? In training to bypass certain inhibitions, be careful about demonizing inhibition completely. It is not a shameful thing, it is a healthy thing. As Nietzsche said, be careul those who hunt monsters, lest they become one. Do not become so preoccupied with inhibition that you stifle it completely.

4-As humans, we are unique in that we have through communication, cognition and teamwork, overcome our natural weaknesses to move from the status of popular prey to dominant predator. Moreover, we retain an internal understanding of this and recognize that as naked apes, we are not very capable against other predators. In the words of Barbara Ehrenreich, we compensate through blood rituals and relgion and other mechanisms to assert our dominance, continually trying to re-convince ourselves of our dominance while superstitiously venting and scape-goating our fears on other victims as if by victimizing the one we protect the tribe. We recognize this as martialists at some intrinsic level and in some ways are afraid to open up against an attacker lest in the grand calculus of violence we ourselves get hurt. In short, fighting, in any sense, reinforces our own sense of mortality.

5-A good read connected to this very point is Ernest Becker's Denial of Death. He argues that all that we do is connected to our fear of finitude. Simply put, if I hurt the other, they are more likely to hurt me back--worse. Statistics however argue the opposite. In nature it is the young, the old and the wounded and the distracted who are most often targeted by prey. In fighting back, we become the unwanted fifth category--the difficult--and we need to reaffirm this, even in sport. In sport we are channelling those ancient drives to survive but often becoming distracted in our motivation. If you reframe your motivation and reaffirm that you train to improve your ultimate defensibility in the street, even though the tactics may not all apply equally, you then recognize that calculus of violence, you realize there are rarely winners and only survivors and you switch from measuring victory in terms of points or submissions and start looking for more universal qualities like emotional control, cognition, prudence and intelligence and the ability to stay mindful and to reaffirm why we are fighting.

6-If you haven't read it, I strongly encourage you to download one of my books, The Path of the Ronin. It's free, so this isn't a pitch. It has a number of drills including value inventories like "putting the Self in Self defense" and the "executioner drill" that are great for reaffirming purpose and placing motive over method. This is a huge first step.

7-From the opposite end of the spectrum of visualization and reframing is muscle memory. If you train repetitions without emotional excitement, working always at a level where you can monitor mechanical efficiency and correct movements and breathing, you in effect bypass the mechanisms of inhibition and numb yourself to the fear. Working mostly below our flinch and fear threshhold is a huge component of effective stress innoculation. Working exclusively in the fire of pressure testing only gets you burnt. The bulk of a boxer's work is in the gym, not in the ring as the old adage goes. There is no point in testing unless you've prepared.

8-Consider selecting inhibition-friendly tactics. If you already feel reluctant and timid, trying to reinforce brutal, invasive, blunt attacks like overhand rights, power punches and lunging kicks will likely only excite and trigger the same inhibition more. Research has shown that many people have resistance to stabbing over slashing, thrusting thumbs into eyes over gouging, etc. Work instead on striking to probe and measure distance rather than trying to destroy with every hit. Jabs and stop kicks are good for this. Circular slapping hits over hooks punches meld better with the grasp reflex. Clinching is also a vital component. In the Alexander method of bodywork the term "inhibition" is used in quite a different way--to denote the mindful slowing or stopping of action to correct reflex. For example, if I have a chronic injury or postural misalignment, I mindfully pause and then slowly stand when getting out of bed or out of a chair. This allows me to correct bad habits. In much the same way, clinching in a fight let's you get your senses back, take a few breaths and restructure your game plan.

In the end, inhibition is part of being human and some degree of it is integral to the very humanity we are seeking to preserve and protect. As Sun Tzu said so perfectly, to win without fighting is best so at the end of the day, don't confuse inhibition with mindful appreciation of what you have. Stay safe and get home.

The Arena of the Mind

2011-11-21T11:52:00.016-05:00

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I often think of that great scene in Spartacus where Kirk Douglas is waiting to go into the arena for his first fight.He’s been selected along with three other gladiators to fight for the amusement of his owner’s guests. Over the course of his training, he has developed a bond with one of the other gladiators and at first he wonders if he will now be forced to fight him. When he is spared this first horror, he is left sitting in a small holding cell made of rickety weathered boards, listening to the sounds of death and struggle on the other side as his colleague battles to stay alive. Stanley Kubrick weaves layers of complexity into this scene as Spartacus’ initial dread becomes relief and then swells into horror once more as the gladiators clamber against the wall of his cell. He can’t help but watch the struggle through the gaping slits in the wooden gate, and the remaining gladiator who he will fight, the ominous Ethiopian warrior Draba, smirks menacingly at his opponent’s anxiousness and curiosity. Spartacus has a moment of awkward self-consciousness, realizing that he is perhaps showing too much, then his posture changes, as he realizes he is in the sights of a predator and his body language slowly tightens as he hardens his mind to his new reality. Very shortly, one of them is about to die.

I often tell my students to visualize a similar scenario in their training: Imagine you were about to enter into an arena to fight for your life in 5 minutes. How would you use those minutes? The answer might not be as self-evident as you would first think. I have seen over years of teaching that the answer varies drastically from person to person. Some would use the time to make peace or to pray. Others would try to detach from fear and enter into the dynamic submissively, refusing to fight. Others have the first instinct to look for a way out. Some even when presented with the situation, balk and qualify it—why am I there? I don’t want to fight. What if I refuse? Presumably they would spend much of their time in the given situation with similar denial. Others immediately reply that they would prepare for combat, looking for makeshift weapons, places to hide to find a position of advantage or at the very least they would take the time to formulate a strategy or ready their mind. I like to think of that scene in Enter the Dragon when Bruce Lee has just taken out a throng of attackers only to get trapped in a tiny holding cell between steel doors. Realizing there is nothing to do but wait, he calmly sits down, folds his legs and hangs his nunchucks around his neck.

The reality is that many of us may likely be quite wrong about what we would do. Left untested, a theory is only that—so many survivors of trauma recount being surprised by their actions or being on autopilot. In all likelihood, most of us would run through a gamut of emotions and reactions. In Spartacus, we see a spectrum of emotions ranging from numb disbelief, voyeuristic interest in the fight ofcolleague Craxis, a dawning realization of his own fate, fear and self-consciousness, and then finally cold, stern acceptance and preparation.

A few weekends past, I got to catch up with some old friends at a seminar I was teaching in Georgetown, D.C. My good friend Stewart Breeding was there from Nashville Combat Systema. During one dinnertime conversation, Stewart was recounting some of the journey he had taken during his life, including months of isolation and mediation in ashrams in India. To paraphrase, he said he realized he had been constantly trying to kill the “self”, or to eradicate his perceived sense of it at least, but that he just couldn’t let go. He was too much of a survivor to allow it to happen and after some intensive work, this former special forces operative realized that his path lay not in trying to extinguish the self but rather in growing his survivor instinct. For those who are interested, this work resulted in Stewart’s excellent book Limitless.

Where does your path lead you? If you knew you would have to enter into an arena in 5 minutes would you dedicate at least some of that time to preparing yourself for the battle at hand? Would you try to ready the mind for conflict? Would you hope to resign yourself to quiet acceptance? Would you hope to rise to the occasion and perform heroically? Is it even up to you?

The burgeoning field of experimental philosophy is showing that our reactiveness to a situation may largely be linked to our cognitive capacities. Shaun Nichols at the University of Arizona has illustrated that there are two basic forms of human cognition—a capacity for abstract theoretical reflection and a capacity for immediate emotional response. These capacities are diametrically opposed to one another. Multiple independent studies have shown that people will generally tend to associate and process responses attributed to accountability if they perceive immediacy in the situation. For example, when test subjects are given a scenario in which a specific theoretical character takes specific detailed steps to cause the murder of an individual, most people interviewed will feel the character is responsible. Imagine that a 34-year old father kills his 5-year old daughter and wife with a hammer in a drunken rage—this is a very specific situation and is likely to create over-whelming support for the idea that the father is accountable for the murders beyond the shadow of a doubt. By comparison, when asked more general questions like: “Is it possible for someone to truly ever be fully morally responsible for their actions?” subjects were more likely to employ abstract theoretical reflection. The generalness and temporal distance of the example seemed to trigger a different cognitive structure.

One study went as far as to ask students to imagine they were hearing an imaginary philosophy lecture. In it, the details of a very specific murder were recounted. The only distinction was that one group was asked to imagine the lecture in a few days and the other was asked to imagine it in a few years. This simple manipulation was enough to trigger an entirely different cognitive approach in the subjects. Subjects imagining the lecture in a few years elicited cognitive abstractions. Individuals perceiving the lecture in a few days were far more concrete and inclined to accountability. (Knobe, Joshua, Though Experiments Scientific American, Nov 2011, New York)

While this might seem somewhat self-evident at first glance, the implications of this fundamental hardwiring can be immense—for one, morality itself could in some large way be relative to temporal context. For our more immediate concerns here, if we go back to my arena analogy for a moment, the urgency and real-life danger we feel can in a huge way determine the martial approach we pursue. For most of my life I have been trying to distill combative training down to the simplest essence for me and my students. Throughout all of this time I have had colleagues and friends who take drastically different approaches in their own training. While I respect the freedom of everyone to choose what approach works best for them, I am often baffled at how people can invest so much time in styles that seem counter-intuitive, or by how people can seem to deepen their affirmation and commitment to styles the more ineffective and inutile they prove to be. I’ve always chalked it up to a different sense of urgency stemming from a different life experience but what if this is less driven by context. What if there is more to it.

Certainly, research would suggest that as martial artists, simply minimizing the perceived threat, telling ourselves “my city is not that violent”, “this is not likely to happen to me” etc. immediately changes the cognitive hardware we use to process our training. If we give ourselves only long term abstract goals, we are more likely to adopt long-term, abstract approaches. Strategies and tactics become softened and distorted and the martial system becomes art, replete with aesthetic, ideological and philosophical concerns and perhaps divorced completely from any sense of reality. If by comparison, we accept and embrace the reality of violence, we will verifiably trigger an entirely different network in our brains. At a recent seminar I saw two students playing this light, soft, game of ridiculously dance-like motions in their knife defense. I asked them, if you knew you were walking into a knife fight in 5 minutes, is this the training you would be doing? The first student responded: “obviously not, this is just play”. I responded that tigers learn to fight for their life by playing but the difference is they play the same tactics they will use in a fight—do you think you will ever be able to use this in a fight? The second responded: “Not now, but maybe someday. What are the odds I am going to be attacked anyway?” And there’s the rub. If I convince myself I will never be in a fire, why drill? Why stop, drop and roll when I can think about doing it? Why physically line up and evacuate in a calm and orderly fashion when I can just blink to acknowledge understanding it?

While genetic predisposition will likely have some contributing effect to this research, cognitive modalities can be clearly seen to affect our choices. By embracing and reinforcing abstract, distant-thinking without balancing immediacy and accountability, we are sabotaging the very objectives and logic of our training methodology. In the end, the choice is your own. The cognitive mind can excuse and substantiate just about anything it wants to, but I ask you—what did you do in your last training session? If you knew you were about to enter into an arena and fight for your life tomorrow, would you train the same way tonight?

Closing the Gaps: A motor behavior look at close quarters fighting by Peter Jensen

2011-09-14T12:13:00.002-04:00

I realized published an article by Combat Systema instructor Major Peter Jensen in the ICSA newsletter. The feedback has been immense and since the newsletter is still in its first month I thought I would republish the article here to give it an even larger audience. Enjoy.

Closing the Gaps: A motor behavior look at close quarters fighting
by Peter Jensen

Nobody ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more. - George S. Patton

During the International Combat Systema Association’s first Certification Summer Camp, a principle taught was ‘closing the gaps.’ My understanding of this concept and its context within hand-to-hand combat is the delivering of a rapid and continuous barrage of strikes against an opponent so that the opponent has no opportunity to shift their attention to an effective response. ‘Closing the gaps’ continually keeps the opponent directing his/her attention inward, instead of directing outward to respond to the attack. Motor behavior is the science of how movements are controlled and learned by humans and research in this field appears consistent with the ‘closing the gaps’ concept. A look at motor behavior research in this area may expand our understanding of this hand-to-hand combat principle.

To address this issue briefly we will have to work with a few assumptions. First, lets assume that Person Number One (P1) is in a hand-to-hand combat situation with Person Number Two (P2) and that P1 is leveling a barrage of strikes against P2, seeking to ‘close the gaps’, and not permit P2 any opportunity to shift attention to an effective response. A second assumption is that P2 is facing P1 and initially reacting to P1’s attack based on information gathered from vision (this will become an important factor when addressing counters to ‘closing the gaps’). A third assumption is that P1 gets the drop on P2 and successfully lands his/her first strike against P2.

There are many motor behavior related factors that might impact a hand-to-hand combat encounter, but ‘closing the gaps’ appears consistent with the interresponse interval (IRI) concept. Research demonstrates that people have difficulty responding accurately to stimuli that are closely spaced . If two stimuli occur within a short interval of one another, a person usually cannot begin processing the second stimulus for 200 milliseconds (ms) because the brain is busy processing the first stimulus during that 200ms. In our scenario, if P1 punches P2 in the nose (stimulus 1) followed by a very rapid elbow strike to P2’s neck (stimulus 2), P2 may not be able to respond to the neck strike until 200 ms after the punch in the face. So what does 200 ms (two tenths of second) of processing time mean when compared to the speed of a punch?

Research shows a trained boxer punches at about 21.6 km/hr (13.4 mi/hr) . At one meter of distance between opponents, P1’s punch is going to reach P’s nose in approximately 167 ms. If the two fighters in our scenario are close enough to throw elbows, say 30 cm apart from each other, then strikes might arrive as fast as 50ms. The danger of needing 200ms to process a stimulus (aka punch in the face) before responding to a second stimulus (aka elbow in the neck) starts to become apparent in an ugly way. At 50 ms per close-range strike, P1 might connect with as many as three or four more strikes after the initial punch and before P2 can finish processing the initial punch and begin responding to the second punch.

There are undoubtedly other motor behavior principles at work in the complex maelstrom of a fight. Additionally, I suggest the IRI principle with some reservation because there is always a danger of distortion during attempts to transfer laboratory findings to the real world context. Nevertheless, the IRI principle combined with some basic math of close-quarters striking provides an interesting argument in support of ‘closing the gaps’. Is there anything else in motor behavior studies that might help P2 deal with his/her ‘gaps getting closed’ by P1? In a follow up article we will address what motor behavior research might suggest for a combatant to effectively counter or cope with an attacker attempting to ‘close the gaps’ during a fight.

Peter Jensen is a US Army Major assigned to the University of Tennessee for doctoral studies in sport psychology and motor behavior. On graduation he will serve as the deputy director for the United States Military Academy’s Center for Enhanced Performance. Major Jensen is a Special Forces officer with combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Pete has also trained in various martial arts for 20 years and is a certified instructor in Combat Systema. This views expresses in this article are those solely of Peter Jensen and do not represent or are specifically endorsed by the United States Army or United States Government.

The Vancouver Riots

2011-06-17T10:35:00.007-04:00

Wednesday evening, the Vancouver Canucks faced off against the Boston Bruins in the last game of the NHL Stanley Cup playoffs. For those of you just returning from an alien abduction, Vancouver lost. The following morning, reports of the Bruins ending their Stanley Cup drought were over-powered by images of riots and looting in the streets of Vancouver. For many, the initial reaction was one of complete surprise. How did come to this? How did the most “granola”, cumbayah of provinces in a country often equated to America’s boring upstairs neighbour erode seemingly overnight into an orgy of infernal violence? The mere thought beckons mind-boggling images of eco-sensitive hipsters igniting over-turned Priuses with Molotov cocktails made from wheat grass juice bottles clouds our sense of reality (that of course was a test to see who was paying attention—no self-respecting keener would ever drink bottled wheat grass juice. You need to get that stuff freshly squeezed to reap the benefits).

Once the initial shock wore off however, a far deeper shock and disgust emerged. People began to express embarrassment and shame as a nation, as images of senseless violence were beamed around the globe, branding us as galactically poor losers. Perhaps even more troubling, so-called “experts” in violence, from terrorism experts to martial instructors, began chiming in with their professional assessment that the world has been going down the toilet with an anchor tied to its neck for some time now and these recent events are just proof of this.

Certainly, the prevalence of these two responses speaks to the “naturalness” of
them, but what of the naturalness of the violence itself? I must be clear here: in no way am I condoning what occurred in Vancouver. The acts are senseless, hugely costly to shop-owners, tax payers, tourism and our world image as a whole. Similarly, I am not naïve. I recognize that violence like this is always simmering under the surface and that we cannot “hug it out” as one particularly misguided individual proposed. The difficulty I have is when self-defense experts take these types of riots as proof of the fundamental evil of humanity and as substantiation for the promotion of wholesale paranoia and sensationalism. We, as “experts” in violence, have a greater obligation in these times of social confusion. Gavin DeBecker, in his self-defense classic “The Gift of Fear” said it best. If we are concerned with the violence that surrounds us in our world, we must recognize that defense cannot wait until the violence is upon us. Often it is too late by then. Rather, survival must begin with the effective prediction and avoidance of violence whenever possible. As DeBecker notes, the effective prediction of violence begins with not making value judgments. We must train ourselves to see the violence from the eyes of the participants—at least temporarily. For many, the mere idea of empathizing feels like sympathizing, but we need to get past these knee-jerk reactions to get to the core of the issue. We need to realize that we can understand something deeply without needing to agree with it.

Mass violence is nothing new. Certainly, our species has achieved its dominance precisely through its ability to offset inferior physical capacities with superior collective ability. We learned to act in groups to take bigger and stronger predators down. The collective display of ecstasy, what Emile Durkheim called “collective effervescence” is tightly connected to the collective display of violence. Cultures throughout history have ritualized group celebrations in varying forms and for a long time, the Western world attempted to scoff and repress these most natural urges. European settlers promoted the idea of savagery of “primitive” cultures and positioned themselves as the antithesis of these baser urges. I am reminded of a dialogue in the movie Gladiator, where two characters are discussing the role of Rome in spreading its empire of civilization through barbarian territory. “Rome is the light” the protagonist insists in a characteristically Western monologue. History is written by the victors and certainly the many civilizations that were vanquished by the Romans likely felt differently about the imposition of alien culture on them.

In the 1930’s, the rise of social sciences sparked the dawn of modern day political correctness. Words like savage and primitive slowly disappeared from ethnographic vocabulary and gradually the concession emerged that these foreign practices must somehow be functional. As Barbara Ehrenreich has noted, certainly, the techniques for obtaining ecstasy in individual and group settings plays an important role in our collective human heritage. There is a widely promoted notion in modern anthropology that dance in particular served an essential evolutionary function. In his book Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, Robin Dunbar argued that the optimal size for a tribal society is roughly 150 individuals. Through a calculus of cost and benefit, he determined that this group size consistently appeared to provide the balance between protection through numbers with mobility and manageable strain on available resources. Dunbar notes that dance rituals traditionally played an essential role in managing a group of this size, often an even more important role than language. It served as “formalized spontaneity” that facilitated co-habilitation by providing a venting outlet for living pressures while encourage group participation. The first step to group defense was coming together.

As Ehrenreich so aptly notes, nature makes necessary activities enjoyable. Eating and sex are obvious examples of this, but she argues if synchronous rhythmic activity carried evolutionary advantages, it too would be naturally selected and reinforced. Since collective self-defense played such an enormous role in our survival, motor control, coordination and the capacity for collective function would have naturally benefitted our ancestors. Ehrenreich adds that a joy of rhythmic activity could have even helped overcome the fear of confronting predators. Marching music, war drums, and bag pipes are just a few examples of this. We’ve all likely had the experience of being swept away in a collective energy, from a rock concert, to a parade, to a political rally to a Boxing Day mob. We feel somehow connected to the group and our individuality is somewhat lessened. The Greek root of the work ecstasy means literally “to stand outside of oneself”. The combative advantages of divorcing ourselves from our fears in this way quickly become self-evident.

Although the traditional Western view was to distinguish themself from so-called primitive practices, our Western collective is no less guilty of this seemingly natural drive. Rome may be the light, but she was just as guilty of the darker pleasures. Ancient Romans centered their civic life around the arena, constructing one in every conquered city. It is fittingly ironic that the movie Gladiator casually espouses this idea of the supremacy of Western culture while simultaneously sensationalizing one of the most grotesque formalizations of group hysteria the world has known in the Coliseum. Certainly, lesser versions of this same energy permeates Western history, from Mesmer and group trances, to the hysteria of the Salem witch hunts and to Bieber-fever. Even in classical times, Bacchus/Dionysius, the god of wine and celebration, played an enormously central role in public life, laying the foundation for group orgies and indulgent public displays of excess. In fact, many of the themes of liberation, celebration and the sacrifice of the victim-god that popularized Dionysian themes can be seen in the early promotion of Jesus and Christian sects.

The history of the Western world is in many ways a history of the reformation and repression of these natural instincts. As Ehrenreich notes, the Western world necessarily evolved towards a forced order. The discipline required to have large numbers of ordinary men marching into battle and successfully using crossbows or guns likely required a level of social discipline that was incompatible with traditional festivities and ecstatic rites. The delirium of the Bacchanal was replayed by the static immobilization of plays, concerts and operas. Spectators drifted from the promiscuously interactive pleasure of carnival to the collecting numbings of their buttocks in more formalized group entertainment. This loss of the collective experience has been deepened in our modern age. Over-populated city centers, personal computers and home entertainment systems have made us into virtual cyborgs, socially dependent on technology to function. The grace of cell phones allows us to call our friends from the bus stop, while waiting in lines, or while sitting at the airport. In the greatest irony, we now feel rescued from the risk of loneliness but never truly experience solidarity or connection with those immediately next to us. The wide indulgence of prescription drugs similarly allows us to deepen this isolation and escapism at a chemical level. Where is the safety valve? All of that pressure has to go somewhere.

Just as the civic life of ancient Rome was built around the coliseum, our modern society appears to have come full circle. Sport has once again become a socially accepted venue for shared ecstasy. The wholesale commercialization of sports has led to dozens of cable channels dedicated exclusively to them, prime time sports coverage on major networks, and increasingly it would seem that the temples of the past have been replaced with the mega-stadiums of the present. Certainly, many religious organizations have adopted a sports model and brought their sermons into stadiums that rival the most popular games. Ehrenreich notes that in the 21st century, there has been higher priority given to stadium construction than routine expenditures for public services like education. Since the 1950’s, sports have become increasingly carnivalized. Mascots, chants, drums, pipe music, cheerleaders, fans in costumes and makeup, have all become common place. The fervour visible at many sporting venues rivals the passion of even the most motivated rock concerts or fascist spectacles. Certainly sport is not the only outlet. Marginal religious sects have become prolific in what is commonly seen as nothing less than a religious revival. All of these assemblies give the participant the excuse to volunteer their self and to share in a sense of mock power.

Many worship sports just as passionately as the classical man worshiped gods. We follow the soap opera lives of professional athletes as if they were somehow relevant. As George Plimpton so aptly noted after the first salvo of rape allegations against Mike Tyson: “to look to professional boxing for our moral compass is to take a very big bucket to a very shallow well”. Why should we expect anything more from a child that was raised in bleak economic circumstances, who was over-indulged, rewarded and celebrated for their proficiency in a specific skill set and then led to excess? What else could have happened? Why should we expect Kobe Bryant to be anything more than he is? We pay him huge sums of money to play ball, not cure cancer. Why do we care? Simply put, we care because we have invested in the athlete, in the team and in the collective loss of self in the sport itself. We care because our desire to connect in collective effervescence is deeply encoded in our genetic being. The reflex to connect and to merge with the whole which served us so powerfully in the past still lingers in our makeup. We want to belong and to release as a whole.

None of this excuses what happened in Vancouver. The misfortunate is still equally
huge, but it does at least explain why it happened. To simply throw our hands up in despair, declaring that the end of days is nigh or that humanity has lost all sense and reason is to forget the great history of identical instincts and behaviour that has preceded this one instance. We are defined by our instincts. In refusing to accept this, or worse still in villainizing them, we are condemned to remain puppets to these drives. Only through understanding them, accepting them and contextualizing them, can we hope to better understand our basest drives and transmute them to achieve our highest goals. While this should be the responsibility of every citizen, the obligation is even greater for those that have committed themselves to the martial pursuits and the protection and defense of the innocent. The true “light” is not the artifice of civility but rather the humility to recognize the lessons of history and the bubbling body of scientific knowledge that is available to us. Warriors cannot afford to indulge despair. It is precisely in these times of collective confusion when violence surprises the masses, that we are obligated to be the calm voice of reason and to let our greater familiarity be the light.

Fearful Teeth

2011-05-11T12:16:00.026-04:00

Last night I had the great pleasure of attending a book launch for my good friend and long time colleague and student Jeffrey Lamirande's new book on pressure point use for self-defense. The place was a veritable who's who of defensive tactics professionals in Quebec. It was incredible to have so many old friends together in one spot and it was probably the safest bar in the city last night. I ran through my entire repetoire of pressure point jokes surprisingly quickly however.

I had the great honor of sharing a table for the night with Vic Theriault. Vic is the brother of Jean-Yves Theriault, the legendary former kick-boxing champion of the world (he held the championship for 15 years and 23 defenses). Vic is a legend in his own right in fight promotion and also a life-long martial artist. (Vic is the gent on the right of Chuck Norris). To my pleasant surprise, I soon discovered that Vic is still heavily involved in the fight world and recently became affiliated with the protective gear company Brain Pad.

For those of you that aren't familiar with Brain Pad, its a revolutionary model of mouth guard that goes beyond simply protecting your teeth. Through its unique design, it carefully juts the low jaw forward slightly and keeps it braced, diverting pressure away from the jaw and jaw joint and in turn from the base of the skull and the brain. It sometimes seems a bit insane that I ever need to "pitch" the value of a mouth guard. The advantages one would think are self-evident. Still the resistance to wearing the correct gear is there. Particularly in the world of Russian martial arts that I am deeply connected to, there is a popular support of bare-knuckle training, with emphasis on no gloves, no headgear or other forms of padding, no mats (since they lessen your sensitivity to the ground), the use of increasingly realistic training weapons with an ultimate evolution to live blade (yes there are even instructors that teach gun defense with live fire) and a host of other such beliefs. You had better believe that no one is encouraged to wear a mouth guard.

Admittedly, I crumbled to this pressure on many occassion. I was guilty of ignoring my common sense, my previous combative experience and subscribing to this new hope that somehow it was safer to train without protection because I was more sensitive. Even at my most malleable, I always carried a mouth guard in my gear and slipped it in before particularly intense bouts of training. One time, when I was "caught" in the act, the instructor concluded "you have too much fear in your teeth" and he proceeded to work my face, jaw and neck over with medium force punches to exorcise the tension demons from me. To the uninitiated this hopefully sounds like complete madness but I know that there are some reading this who thinks this makes total sense and still others who are like I was, just reluctantly going with the flow.

What we do as martial artists, regardless of how soft or hard our choosen method may outwardly seem, carries huge potential risks. To begin with, our teeth are more than just a vanity issue. They affect our ability to chew our food, digest and a host of essential functions connected directly to our health. Second, force to the jaw in any form carries a risk of dislocation. Lastly, the jaw conducts force directly to the spinal cord and brain stem and hits to it can lead to everything from concussions, serious brain damage and even death.

Resistance to protective gear is nothing new or exclusive to the martial arts. In their heyday, professional hockey players would zip down the ice free of the cumbersome burden of helmets, the wind ruffling their heroic hair. Goalies were considerably braver, sitting with naked faces in front of a giant target as a team of five men competed to launch hard discs directly at them at speeds nearing 100km/h. Jacques Plante, the now mythic former goalie of the Montreal Canadiens, is considered by many to be one of the greatest goalies to play the game. During the 1959 season, a slap shot destroyed his nose and a good chunk of his face. Jacques got stitched up like a propper warrior and went right back out on the ice--with one slight exception. Now he was wearing a fiberglass face protector. As unbelievable as it may seem to us today, his coach was furious and insisted he take it off. How could Jacque possibly play with that thing blocking his vision? Jacque dreamed of a future where he possessed a working nose that resembled something human so he refused and since there was no reserve goalie available, he played. The team won. The coach assumed he had seen the last of the mask but Jacques went on to help the team win their next 18 straight games wearing it. When at last Jacques crumbled to his coach's insistence on the 19th game, the Canadiens lost. After that, the questions about the mask ended, the Canadiens won the Stanley Cup and gradually, goalie masks became increasingly popular until they were finally made mandatory.

Certainly, today's MMA fighter has evolved from the earliest days of No Holds Barred fighting. Rule changes, time limits, weight classes and mouth guards, cups and gloves are bare minimum requirements. Why would we provide ourselves with any less protection? Take a good look of this pic on the right. McGee, on the left, is wearing a brain pad as he takes a shot to the jaw stiff enough to knock the sweat off of him. Notice the position of his chin and jaw. Everything is still in alignment. His eyes are still forward facing. His childhood memories are still all unbruised.

The reality is, Brain Pad technology is becoming increasingly popular with pro athletes around the world. I started wearing one about three years back. The first few times I tried it, I hated it, but I had just come off a root canal of my front tooth and wanted no more of the dentist's chair. Admittedly, it took a month before I committed to the guard because every time I would wear it, I would whistle spit out of the air holes like a 6-year old playing a recorder. Then I hit my groove. After a week, I felt naked without it.

As the years passed, I came to realize the guard was about more than just taking shots to the jaw. For a while, I would use a much thinner, single mouth piece that had been fitted by my dentist when I grappled and only use my Brain Pad when I would spar heavily with hits. My thinking was, since there is no punching going on, there was no need for the heavy duty teeth protection. A few cross-face locks later and I came to realize just how nice it was to have that Brain Pad in there keeping my chin in line with my nose. Now it's standard issue when I spar whether I wrestle or box.

On a related note, the Russian arts are heavily invested in breath retraining to fight the effects of stress. Without getting into the heavy science of it here, a heavy component of this work is breath restriction and elongating the breath from a spastic 2-phase cycle to a longer 4-phase cycle (inhale, hold, exhale and hold empty). The capacity to instinctively develop these missing controlled pauses is directly related to the avoidance of over-breathing and learning to breathe sufficiently (only inhaling what we need and exhaling in a subtle and controlled manner when possible). Many pro athletes regularly employ breath restriction devices like snorkels. The idea is to reduce the amount of oxygen you take in (hypoxia)to stimulate the circulatory system to become more efficient at delivering oxygen. When
you return to normal conditions, it's easier for the body so it performs even better. Wearing a mouth guard of any type is an indirect form of this type of restriction training because it brings awareness to the force of your exhale (generally by amplifying it with spittiness). As this happens, you immediately are reminded to control your intake and in Combat Systema, burst breathing or similar devices are used to regain emotional and physical control. A unique benefit of the Brain Pad is that by jutting the lower jaw forward it more correctly emulates the rounded mouth shape and sharp exhale that is espoused in Combat Systema, mechanically helping the body avoid long, laboured hissing exhales.

So the short version is that your teeth matter, your jaw and brain likely matter more. This is hands down the best mouth piece I've ever worn and in 3 years I have taken some power shots and still remember my Shakespeare and can whip through my Sodoku. Beyond the protective aspects, it reinforces the breath practices I advocate and best of all, it's $40 and completely leaves my $200 dental mouth piece in the dust.

For more info check out www.brainpad.ca and www.brainpads.com

Adaptability

2011-04-28T13:42:00.005-04:00

In the Middle Ages, human cognition was transformed was the discovery of a practice that is now so common and ubiquitous that the mere thought of it not having existed initially boggles the mind. That discovery was the ability to read silently. If you are anything like me, reading that last sentence cause a record needle to drag across the vinyl of their brain. Can you imagine not knowing that you could read quietly? Then, the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. We had the need to speak first to communicate with each other, then to record those thoughts second. Reading those thoughts aloud would only be natural since initially the information being recorded was likely business transactions, then later more sacred texts--texts which were meant to be shared. In fact, St. Ambrose is on record as having been the first proponent of silent reading--a feat that astonished his fellow monks, including St. Augustine. It was of course like anything new and inexplicable immediately pronounced a miracle. Today, the act of silent study is perhaps far less astonishing to us, but it is no less miraculous in the potential for self improvement and independent growth that it permits.

Training is like this in many ways. For most, martial study is little more than a group reading session, where people get together to share and exchange. The true mark of discipline and passion is going beyond this to the independent study and the way that is walked alone. I am fortunate that I get to travel a lot and to meet incredible people. Geography and culture bring massive variety to the common foundation of our collective humanity. Martially, this means I am exposed to a constant stream of fresh perspectives, new well springs of passion, new goals and challenges in every trip and often in every email that I open.

In my recent trip to Norway for the second "Battle of the Vikings" I was heavily struck by the weight and power of this variety. My good friends there, Ola Skodvin and Aksel Johansen have done nothing less than build a rock solid foundation of training methodology and ethics in their school and have through the help and energy or their incredible student-base, they have established Norway as a Combat Systema hotbed. In addition, colleagues in attendance like Spyro Katsigiannis continue to forge new and exciting fusions of their Russian martial art experiences into something vibrant, vital and life-giving.

The Russian martial arts were forged in diversity and hardship. From these strenuous beginnings they earned a reputation for plasticity, adaptabiity and unorthodox strategies that contrasts sharply with the dogmatic apprenticeship of many Asian combative traditions. As a lifelong student of such Asian systema and as a non-Russian practitioner, I am perhaps more aware and appreciative of the transcendent power of this open operating structure. Change is the stuff of life. As Marcus Aurelius famously declared, the universe is change, life is opinion. We are but incense falling at a common alter, continually in flux. It is our acute awareness of our own mortality that makes us rage on against the dying of this light and seek to impose the dead patterns of tradition that Bruce Lee spoke about so passionately. We train to protect ourselves, to protect our family and our loved ones and even our own physical health through fitness. We train in a desperate effort to keep things the way they are, but change ironically is inevitable and constantly occurring, and the surest way to maintain some sense of stability and constance is not to fight the wave, but rather to surf it and to plunge headlong into the freeflowing current of training. As Giuseppe di Lampeduse said, "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

I would like to thank all my brave brothers and sisters out there who are fighting the good fight, and scientifically submitting their egos and their bodies in the quest for growth and to the benefit of the rest of us. As I write this, I am already preparing for my upcoming seminars this weekend in St.Hubert, where I will meet up with some of our Quebec affiliates, Phoenix at the end of May with Mike Malpass, a man whose passion and commitment drives my own to new heights and then Serbia in early June with Alex Kostic, one of my longtime role models in the Russian martial arts. All of them challenge me to excel, to prepare myself to be better, and to give my best in everything that I do. I wish this joy and calm focus to us all.

Training is truth.

Combative Resolution

2011-02-08T12:58:00.007-05:00

As a professional educator, I am constantly researching and refining what I teach and how I teach it. As most of you who are familiar with my work know, I am a huge advocate of principle-based education--meaning I believe in teaching the big picture and showing the transerrable and universal truths behind what works so that the student can learn more than just what's on the immediate table; they learn to teach themselves. Unlike many advocates of principle-based learning however, I am not a proponent to the exception of technique. I believe that a solid, clear, and repeatedly reinforced technical base is a still a must.

Added to this, I am a believer in a simple three-pronged approach to stress innoculation: education so you understand why you are doing what you are doing, rehearsal so you get to play with the idea and pressure testing, so you see what you are able to do under actual conditions. With that insight, you rebegin the cycle and educate with new clarity, rehearse with new refinement and pressure test with constant improvement.

I rarely endorse products. Something needs to be exceptional and filled with rare
clarity to earn my support. But one DVD that matches all of these criteria, both in balancing principle with technical insight and in teaching real-world, pressure tested distillment of knowledge, is Mike Malpass' Team Arrest Tactics DVD. Mike is our affiliate Combat Systema representative in Arizona. A S.W.A.T. officer in Phoenix, and former L.E.O. in Ohio, he is a 32-year veteran of the martial arts, a 5-time national kick-boxing champion, an active competitor in MMA, a second degree black belt in Burmese Bando under Dr. Maung Gyi and a first degree black belt in Shotokan and Isshinryu Karate. As well he is well versed in Naban grappling found in the Burmese Bando system, Catch-as-Catch-Can wrestling, Sambo and Brazillian Jujitsu. Beyond this, he has a slew of defensive tactics creds and has been involved in the creation of numerous L.E.O. and military curriculums.

Mike's DVD broaches the difficult topic of how to restrain and control a resistant subject who is laying prone on the ground. What is most refreshing about this DVD is that Mike teaches it from a standpoint of completely responsible power. He does not advocate hitting, but instead confidently illustrates from firsthand experience, the very real possibilities available to individuals with clarity, commitment and skills confidence, to induce a controllable state in even the most resistant subjects via
meticulously laid out tactics. The synthesis of insight presented in this DVD is immediately clear and understandable and distills a lifetime of training and firsthand combative experience into a pure, no nonsense curriculum that is accessible to any serious practitioner. If you are a professional, this DVD is an absolute must. If you are a serious practitioner, from MMA to street tactics, this DVD is a huge shortcut towards excellence. The principles and concepts illustrated are applicable to control of a resistant human in any dynamic. Absolutely world class material.

For more information on training and products by Mike Malpass, please visit:
http://combativeresolutions.com/

2011-01-11T11:59:00.024-05:00

COMPASSIONATE RESTRAINT
By Kevin Secours

Since my third DVD, Primal Power 2: Simplifying Restraint and Control Tactics came out back in 2007, I have received a rather continuous stream of emails expressing everything from thanks, support, and even surprise regarding the concept of responsible power that it depicted. As I detailed in the DVD, many of the combative interpretations filling our world have little foundation or merit for the individual seeking functional restraint options. Military defensive tactics necessarily are more concerned with distilling strategies down to the most brutal and resolute form. Many urban self-defense systems do the same, often to the point of irresponsible sensationalism. Traditional arts often maintain the ethics and responsibility but can lack the functionality or modern interpretation. Finally, sportive interpretations like Mixed Martial Arts are constructed for a purpose quite divorced from self-defense and cannot be expected to be applicable. Even more problematic is the unfortunate reality that many camps, in their ignorance, maintain the belief that restraint and control tactics are unrealistic at best and downright naïve at their worst. As I express in PP2 however, the reality is that there are numerous reasons why an individual might pursue restraint tactics. It may be a professional obligation for a law enforcement or security officer. It may be a moral or ideological one for an individual who wishes to minimize the risk of harm to the other. It may be for psychological grounds, for the conscientious defender who wishes to avoid crossing the barrier of harming and the risk of post-traumatic stress and related ramifications. Or it may simply be to avoid the legal repercussions of harming another human in an increasingly litigious society.
One area of concern which I mention on the DVD has been a constant area of interest for many respondents, and increasingly, I have realized that there is an urgent need for clarity here. When I teach, I often give the example of a drunken friend to personify a probable situation where we might want non-destructive tactics. Naturally, most of us would not use the same degree of force to restrain a loved one or the same ease or aggression that we might use on a street attacker. This is just the tip of the iceberg however. Many who have written in to me have recounted exceptionally specific and complex situations with mentally ill family members, delusional and elderly parents and grandparents, and a host of other painful and challenging scenarios. The particular situation that sparked this formal article was the request from the mother of an autistic child and I pose her dilemma here for the experienced reader. What tactics would you teach a woman to use against her ever-growing and far more powerful son in order to control his fits of regular rage? Imagine a rage so complete that it often fixates on destroying something; perhaps smashing a chair to splinters, perhaps throwing a lamp across a room dangerously near a sibling or yourself, perhaps the child is only at risk of destroying property. Perhaps there is significant risk of hurting themself. Perhaps the fits also have been occurring in public where the risks are even larger. The challenge as you can quickly see is an enormous one.

Obviously, a wide variety of tactics are immediately “off the table”. Most schools that advocate restraint tactics are quick to point out that obsessively seeking restraint and control against a highly motivated and resistant defender is near-suicide—that effective control often generally requires support from debilitating strikes, pressure points etc. The difficulty in the case of controlling an autistic child is that responsiveness to pain can be reduced. Many of the nerve centers commonly used in law enforcement can be either completely non-effective in a state of extreme emotional escalation. Others can be dangerous. Consider the idea of driving knee strikes into the side of the thigh—effectively giving a Charlie horse to the child. While extremely effective and widely used by law enforcement, would you be willing to resort to this to control your child, particularly given the reality that these fits can be routine and its implementation would need to be regular? Vital points and strikes also risk escalating the aggression, confusing and scarring the child psychologically and creating a dangerous precedence in your relationship that amounts to a growing arms race. Once you open that door, you raise the stakes for the next time around. Violence cannot be solved by adding more violence to the equation—it can only lessened only by adding emotional control to the situation.

Another important consideration is that violence may seem senseless, but it always happens for a reason. It is motivated by something. In the case of fits of rage for the autistic child, very often, the aggression stems from frustration stemming from differences in cognitive processing combined with limitations or differences in communication styles. This can skew both the child’s perspective and understanding of a situation while hampering their ability to effectively express themselves. Very often linguistic capacities are reduced and there is a heavier reliance on gesture or sign language to communicate. While a parent of a given child should be better suited to understand the individual child’s unique communication style, the outsider intervening on the same situation would not share that benefit. For the outsider stumbling into such a situation, the challenge is therefore even more daunting. I can only say, assume nothing and make a genuine effort to communicate through simple, clear, gesture-supported language. To the parent or caregiver of that child, I say make it your mission to learn that child’s “language”. Know their triggers. Understand what frustrates them. Help them detect irritants sooner so that they can better avoid them in the first place and distract them from these triggers whenever complete avoidance is not possible. Since this article will not be dealing with autism per se, I will leave this discussion here to focus on the more mechanical issues of restraint.

The first step in tackling this issue is to ensure your personal safety. This begins with a tactics we refer to as “elbow shields”. To do this, simply reach up with your hand as if you were slicking your hair back over your ear, stopping when the palm of your hand is touching the occipital protuberance (that’s the boney notch just behind the base of the ear). Press the heel of your hand firmly into this bone, wrapping your fingers snuggly and comfortably around the back of your skull, and tuck the point of your elbow inwards so that your wrist is protecting your ear and so that you’re the wrist and forearm are shielding the side of your eye. This simple technique provides a very resistant and reliable defense against blows to the head. First, it protects the surface of the skull from impact, reducing the risk of damage to bone and tissue by replacing it with the far more durable outer forearm. Second, it stabilizes and supports the skull to protect the brain from jarring impacts.

As self-evident as this tactic may appear, it is not as reflexive as you might first think. During a fight, the recipient of impacts more commonly elongates the arms, reaching desperately for the attacks in a vain attempt to catch the incoming strikes. The reason for this is quite simple when we consider the circuitry of the brain like a simple loop. When you see a threat coming towards me, the brain identifies the threat, processes the stimuli, chooses and action and sends the signal for that action into the nervous system. This happens extremely quickly but the processing still takes a fraction of a second nevertheless. By the time the response has been launched, the defender tends to reach for where the strike was at its origin, rather than where the strike is that fraction of a second later, where it is closer if not on its target. The result is you tend to get hit, which just interrupts the loop, causes the circuit to jump and then fires the same reflex continuously, even though it’s not working. A hockey fight is a classic example of what this looks like, with both fighters swinging and flailing with little efficiency.

Many martial arts seek to functionalize this desire to reach and finch byreinforcing blocks that meet the strike half-way, usually bending the blocking arm at a 45 degree angle away from the body. While potentially effective, this type of attack relies on positioning, movement and control of distance—qualities which are extremely elusive and require extensive training (and which therefore are unlikely to be available to the mother in question). Secondly, even the best fighters in the world can get cornered, sucker-punched, caught off guard and over-whelmed and when they do, they generally revert to this type of elbow shielding tactic.
When performing elbow shields, you may defend yourself with both arms simultaneously or using only the arm nearest the threat or attack (should the second arm be occupied or otherwise engaged). It is important to keep the hands open and snuggle fitted to the head. While many sport fighters have the reflex of keeping the hand in a fist, this is due largely to the fact that their hands are often taped and often limited in their movement by the types of glove they wear. In an empty-handed encounter, the risk of having the hand closed increases the possibility of injuries to the hands themselves while allowing a great deal of force to get through the shield itself. To be effective, the shield must be braced solidly on the head, keeping the hands behind the head for their safety, with the more durable elbows and forearms presented towards the strikes.

From the front of the shield, we see also that it is important to ensure that the points of the elbows directed towards the attacker. This keeps the forearms on an angle, which encourages incoming strikes to be deflected naturally and reduces the amount of force received on the forearms. Also, care should be take to ensure that the points of the elbow do night cross the center line of the body, particularly when you are using only one hand to shield. Crossing the center line with your elbow will obscure your vision, destroy your reaction time and cause you to absorb impacts needlessly. Instead, each shield should be trained to protect the respective sides of your head.

Some individuals prefer a slightly modified version of the shield. This second variation involves elbow shielding with one hand while using an elongated arm to shield and reach on the second side. The elongated arm feels more comfortable for some since it provides tactile feedback as you blindly enter into your attacker’s strikes. While every effort should be made to tuck your chin for stability, offering the bones of your hairline to your attacker rather than the far more vulnerable face, often, the defender will instinctively close their eyes, making the extended arm a nice option to compensate for affected vision. If you do choose to employ this tactic, be sure that the elongated arm is kept high, so that the shoulder of that arm can be rolled up to shield the ear, jaw and chin on that side. The extended arm will also:

• Facilitate grabbing

• Allow you to simultaneously obscure the vision of your attacker

• Can disrupt their balance and provide a host of other advantages.

Generally the hand of the open hand is kept open simply because it is more response, emerges from a submissive stance more easily and reduces the complexity and changes required to elbow shield or elongate. Ultimately, it boils down to a question of preference.

There are a number of ways you can easily train the elbow shield:

1. Stand in front of a mirror and practice slowly and smoothly shielding and then returning to a natural stance. Perform these movements as slowly as you can. Focus on grace and efficiency. Practice alone does not make perfect—slow, mindful, perfect practice makes perfect. Education is a chemical process. Go slowly and allow your nervous system to forge the new connections and pathways correctly from the start. Standing in front of the mirror will allow you to study your movement, to make corrections more easily and most importantly will allow you to get used to “seeing yourself” as a successful defender. Survival starts with acceptance and confidence.

2. Next, apply physical pressure to the shield to hyper-accelerate your learning curve. You can do this by kneeling on your bed or the floor and placing a pillow underneath your elbow points. Assume the elbow shield position and lay on your stomach, putting as much weight on the points of your elbows as you can take. The maximum test would be to stand in a push-up plank position on your elbow points and toes alone but this is not necessary. Don’t try to be a superhero here. Respect your capacities and simply add whatever degree of weight you can safely and comfortably manage. Even a few extra pounds will multiply the effectiveness of your training time.

3. If you have a friend or training partner you trust, you can consider shielding and having them gently push against them to test their confidence. Operate at a level where you feel challenged but do not work so intensely that you lose form and fail more than you succeed. You can progress to light slaps or even have your training partner hit you lightly with a pillow. Whatever degree of stress you can get comfortable with before an actual encounter will increase your performance capacity.

The next component of the elbow shield is your stance. For the sake of practicality, assume a stance that is:

• Stable enough to withstand impacts

• Responsive enough to permit defensive options easily and

• Passive enough to discourage aggression in the first place.

We often refer to this type of position as a natural defensive stance, or conversational stance. Your hands should be kept open at all times. This projects passivity to your subject while also being more direct and responsive should you need to either shield or grab. We have no interest in fists or punching in a compassionate restraint context, so get rid of the idea of making a fist. Your elbows should be kept tucked in near your ribs to protect your body from sudden impact and to concentrate your mass in one spot. This helps reduce the risk of getting your limbs grabbed and yanked away from you which can be injurious and destroy your balance. Keep your knees comfortably flexed so that you are both ready to absorb impact and kinetically loaded to enter quickly. To this end, your front foot should be flatly positioned on the floor, while your rear foot should have the heel elevated with the ball of the foot dug firmly into the earth.

The final component of the effective elbow shield is movement. When the hit does come, many people simply freeze. Often, there is physically very little space or time to move. Program your brain to think of changing levels in every situation. This involves simply squatting a few inches, straight down. Your body should be kept perfectly straight and should try to avoid bending forward or sacrificing structure, balance and make your head more vulnerable. Rather, you should simply plunge straight down from the hips as if you were getting ready to jump slightly. This simply movement achieve 2 important advantages:

1. It moves you away from your former position and affects your subject’s ability to target you when they are intentionally seeking you or else moves you below their more probable height of attack when inadvertent.

2. It “loads” your body like a spring, making it at once more stable to absorb impacts and more powerfully ready to either move away with the impact or else move forward into your restraint attempt. Even when you are stuffed in a corner and taking hits, shield and bob continuously like a boxer, constantly modifying your height.

Now that we have increased our personal security, it’s time to look at how we can initiate restraint efforts on our subject. I will reiterate here, our only goal in this article is compassionate restraint of a loved one, therefore any type of movement that would tackle the legs or otherwise sweep, flip, throw, trip or push the subject to the floor is immediately eliminated from consideration due to the obvious risk to the subject’s head. When you push someone to the ground, their head is like the tip of a whip—the entire coiled wave of energy you produce in their body, comes out at the end of their spine (in this case, their head), causing it to hit and bounce off the floor violently. Instead, we will prioritize only pulling actions that move the subject into our own bodies where their head can be better cradled and protected from inadvertent impacts with their environments.
Still, even within the domain of pulling tactics, many options are off limits. Chokeholds are off the table for me. For those that are unaware, here’s a quick history of the choke. Chokes can work by either cutting off breath by impinging the windpipe or else by cutting off blood flow by restricting flow through the carotid arteries that feed the brain. Most grappling arts rely heavily on the use of chokes and certainly, law enforcement saw the versatility and effectiveness of these tactics early on. Chokes are what I would term a moderately complex motor skill. They are not quite as simple and gross motor as some tactics like the elbow shield, yet they are certainly not as complex as most joint locks. Still, they do require a certain degree of training and even more importantly of pressure testing, repetition and reinforcing to become hardwired into a reliable “go-to” move. Budgetary cutbacks and loss of quality control led to a deterioration in the quality of what was being taught in some law enforcement circles and the use of chokes arguably became a little reckless. In a handful of incidences, some people were seriously injured or killed due either to misapplication or unfortunate responses to correctly applied chokes due to elevated emotional states, pre-existing health conditions or side-effects from drugs or other substances. The ensuing public outcry led to a massive revision of defensive tactics curriculums. For the large part, the removal of chokes or at least their augmentation to a lethal force response, placed far greater demands on intermediary weapons like batons, OC spray and Tasers. Now, years later, negative instances regarding intermediary weapons have mounted. Subsequent public outrage have led to investigations and consideration of objective statistics are placing choke holds, now more commonly known by their more fashionable name “vascular restraints” as a comparatively safer option and there is an increasing move towards chokes once more.

Chokes work. They are life-savers. To ensure they are not life-takers however, they must be applied on the arteries and not the windpipe. Chokes that place the forearm squarely across the trachea (as illustrated to the right) run the risk of rupturing the trachea and causing death through suffocation. While highly effective in some case, so-called wind or air chokes rely largely on pain compliance and will not reliably work on people under the influence of drugs, alcohol or heightened emotional states.

Similarly, cross-face locks, essentially the same movement but applied to the sideof the cheek, are also not open to consideration for our purposes here. The cross-face lock cranks the spine to its extreme, forcing the neck into a painful deformation where through loss of function and pain, the subject eventually complies. Again, some individuals when correctly motivated will fight through the pain and can seriously injure their neck and spine. Naturally, this is not an option for a loved one unless you have significant training and sensitivity.
So what then are we left with? In short, nothing that runs across the face with the intention of torqueing the neck, nor anything that wraps around the neck with the intention of choking or restraining breath or blood flow.

One of the first remaining options is a diagonal variation of the same grip that is instead applied to the torso. Often referred to as either a “diagonal body lock” or a “harness” this grip involves wrapping one arm over the shoulder and the other under the arm pit on the opposite side of the body and clasping the hands together in front of the sternum. This grip distributes the force of your hold over a wider surface area unlike chokes and face locks, thereby lessening the risk of injuries to any one point. Moreover, the diagonal orientation provides a strong potential for controlling the torso without placing the neck or throat at risk.

There are a few variations that can be used to close the grip. The grip can be done

either with both palms facing downwards as shown above (“double-under” grip) or else with the palms facing each other. To accomplish this, simply slap your hands together as if you were clapping a single time, with each hand perpendicular to the other. This can be done by keeping the thumbs and fingers together, often referred to as a thumbless grip or a “Gable” grip after the famed wrestler Dan Gable, who favoured this hand position. It can similarly be done with the thumb held away from the fingers so that the fingers of one hand wrap inside the web between the index finger and the thumb of the other hand—comparatively referred to as a “thumbed” or “preacher grip”. All of these variations present strong gripping options and ultimately it’s a matter of briefly playing with them all to find the one you prefer and then to reinforce that grip alone initially to develop skills confidence quickly.

A final variation that can be used is referred to as a “c” or “s” grip. This involves curling the combined tips of your fingers on each hand, turning the palms towards each other and then pulling the hook formed by each hand so that it interlocks with the hook of the other hand. This type of grip is not for everyone since it does rely on some degree of finger strength. Long finger nails can also make it difficult to employ. The advantage of the grip is that it lengthens the harness and allows you to encompass a slightly larger girth which makes it worth having in your toolbox for the serious practitioner but admittedly makes it a little too specialized for most casual practitioners.

The only form of grip that is not recommended is the finger weave, wherein the fingers of each hand are inter-locked into the fingers of the other. The difficulty with this grip is that is can easily slip apart when tested. Also, if there is any rotational force applied to the arms during this process, the individual fingers can be levered each against the other and badly damaged. This type of grip is often the most natural option that students reflexively revert to. It should never be used and should be corrected and trained out of them immediately. Interlocked fingers do not work. Do not permit this technique to persist.

The harness is generally our reference position. The difficulty with the harness is that it assumes a certain equality of size. A much smaller person will not be able to reach over the shoulder of a much larger person. In these cases, it is pointless to teeter on the tips of your toes, dangerously sacrificing your balance in the hopes of reaching the neck. When the subject is too large (either too tall or too wide to get around) the second option is to go around the belt.

When clinching the waist, it is once again important to bury one side of your face into your subject’s back and to shield the outer side of your face with your closest shoulder. Try whenever possible to squat as much as possible from the legs ratherthan bending from the waist to minimize the amount of strain that you put on your lower back. All of the grips discussed above still apply, however an additional option is uniquely present in belt grabs due to the generally smaller surface area that must be encompassed which is in fact often preferable to other grips. Often referred to a “figure 4 level grip” this position involves wrapping both arms around the waist of your subject from behind and grabbing your forearm as high up as possible with the hand of your free arm. This creates a shape that somewhat resembles a number 4, hence the name. This type of grip can be synched much more tightly than other hand holds plus will usually leave a long portion of the wrist and lower forearm free from your second hand. This can be used to press into the diagonal crease of the subject’s groin to help buckle their hips and lever them to the ground.

To summarize, when entering on a subject, begin by training entries directly to the back. Using the grip of your choosing, seek to achieve either a diagonal body harness or waist grip. Now the tricky part begins—gaining control of the subject. It is essential that we accept reality here—size matters—significantly. The old cliché that size does not matter was a marketing ploy designed to pitch the power of the martial arts. Anyone with even a slight bit of experience pressure testing technique against honestly resistant subjects knows that size matters significantly. It’s simple Newtonian physics. It’s why combat sports have weight categories every 7-10 lbs. Size matters and believing otherwise is psychological poison. Accept reality and deal with it. That being said, in most restraint situations it is imperative that we first weaken our subject through other means, which generally involves pain compliance, pressure and hitting. I have chosen to leave all of these aspects out of our consideration here as previously noted. Should you wish to include some based on your individual situation, contact me anytime and I would be happy to talk you through some of your options. In the spirit of absolute conservatism I have opted not to discuss them here.

The challenge therefore remains, how can we best obtain some degree of control without these essential tools? The first thing to accept is that your safety matters most. If you are able to stay at a safe distance and you can allow the episode to subside naturally, this is generally your best option. Many parents of autistic children have experience generally doing this. Many parents have felt either too frightened to attempt restraint or else have been injured in attempting to do it and have as a result thrown their hands up in despair and simply watched and waited helplessly. The first thing I would therefore like to submit for your consideration is that perhaps there is no magic bullet here. Perhaps, the option of waiting and watching, as frustrating as it may be, remains your safest option in most cases. Perhaps the most important step is not learning some vital trick or tactic that will control the situation—this is unlikely. Rather, perhaps what is more important is learning to reframe and re-contextualize these experiences to realize that tactically, waiting and watching may often be your best bet. I want to deeply emphasize that the tactics being shown here are to be used when you feel you have no other option. Never needlessly place yourself in harm’s way. Never needlessly risk your child’s safety by intervening. If allowing the episode to natural peak and fizzle is safer for everyone involved, involving only a small sacrifice of material destruction, this is likely your better option, albeit a frustrating one. When you feel you must intervene however, to protect the personal safety of those involved, throw up your elbow shields, change levels and enter resolutely.
Often, acquiring the holds described will be a messy process. Once you have them, be prepared to weather the storm. Hold on firmly and sink your weight. When sinking, avoid allowing yourself to stretch and smear away from the subject’s body. When you grab, think of gluing every square inch of your body to your subject’s body and maintain that contact constantly. When you sink, even if you are only able to sink an inch, maintain that full degree of contact so that you communicate your full weight and pull to your subject. If you simply slide down their back without adhesion, you will have little effect on their structure. While weathering the storm, this is time to do two things:

1. Control your breathing. Take a deep breath and brace yourself. This will in turn help you control your emotions and restore cognitive control and are in a position for step 2.

2. Fixate on your goal. The mind is vulnerable to negative reinforcement. If you do not actively set yourself strategic goals, your circumstance will provide your goals for you. When you are desperately hanging onto a violent child, struggling to assert control, your environment is bombarding you with negative messages. Fixating on these can encourage failure. Instead, focus only on the next step in breaking their structure and gaining control.

Imagine that there is an imaginary line running between the heels of your subject.

This is what we refer to as their “baseline”. This baseline represents their plane of ideal balance and structure. As the subject walks, this baseline is always in flux, just like a piece of string attacked to their ankles. The most efficient way to affect a subject’s balance at any time is to intersect their baseline at a 90 degree angle. Perpendicularly intersecting a person’s baseline will cause them to stumble and lose their footing with the least amount of effort because it moves their center of mass outside of their natural alignment. The body is a precariously stacked series of components that struggles to remain aligned. In reality, we are never actually in a state of perfect balance as we constantly teeter when we stand still and we perpetually fall from one leg to another as we move. Imbalance is the constant challenge of any two legged animal. By learning to identify and intersect the baseline, we learn to target the greatest structural weakness in a two legged structure.

Another way to think of this is to imagine what we would need to improve our balance. Simply put, we would need another leg. A chair with three legs is perfectly balanced. Only one extra leg is required to provide stability—not two as many of us initially assume. A familiar example of this in action is a camera tripod which provides ideal balance with just 3 legs. The moment you being to push someone’s center of mass outside of their baseline, they will naturally move to that imaginary third point—what we term a “triangle point”—which is exactly where that third leg would need to be to fight the imbalance.

Pushing in a perpendicular angle will drive the hips and the center of mass beyond the baseline and create imbalance. Ideally however, we would like to do more than simply move our subject. Simply pushing them horizontally will do little to control them, unless we are able to push them against a wall or into a corner, but again, if we are assuming a much stronger subject, we will have difficulty keeping them there. Instead, we should seek to bring the subject to the ground whenever possible. When we bring someone to the ground, we are able to use ground to eliminate the great majority of their movement potential while employing gravity to our fullest advantage. To maximize our effectiveness, when seeking to bring someone to the ground, we should always move along 45 degree angles. Think of it this way:
As bipedal creatures, we exist at a 90 degree axis to the ground. The center of that 90 degree expanse is structurally the weakest point, therefore if we push or pull towards the halfway point—45 degrees—we target the weakest aspect of their vertical structure.

To best move a subject upward, push upwards on a 45 degree angle. To take a subject to the ground, pull downwards on a 45 degree angle. Therefore, when seeking to enter in our subject, for simplicity’s sake to begin, let’s assume we are able to approach directly from the back.

1. Protecting yourself with your elbow shields, change levels to load your structure and then explode forward, driving into your subject. Unbalance them as you enter by intersecting their baseline at a perpendicular angle. One helpful visualization is to imagine there is sheet a glass stretched out between the subject’s legs. Think of shattering that sheet with your lead knee as you drive in.

2. Apply your grip. This can be either a diagonal body harness or around the waist if the subject is too tall.

3. Pull your subject’s upper body back towards you until they are leaning backwards to virtually a 45 degree angle. The subject will naturally fight this loss of balance and when they suddenly lose their stability, they will rely fully on you to keep them up. Be ready to support part of their weight. Keep your legs bent and elastic—never lock out your knees. More importantly, focus on stepping backwards directly. Never cross your feet or employ uncertain or complex footwork that may trip you up and cause you both to stumble. Simply step back, unbalancing your subject towards you as you go.

In the case of larger subject’s you may not be able to successfully use a diagonalbody harness. In these cases, it will be necessary to grab your subject around the waist. In the case of extreme disproportions in relative size, you may not even be able to get around the waist and may be forced to grab the subject’s belt or the cloth around the side pockets of their pants. While you may wish to clinch near the waist area to recoup and gather your focus, emotions and energy, is extremely difficult to pull the subject backwards by the waist, as this will usually cause their hips to buckle backwards but their upper body to lean forward to counter-balance which makes them more difficult to move. When the subject is much stronger than you, you are unlikely to be able to pull them down with this tactic. In these instances, seek instead to slide your grip up as close to your subject’s armpits as possible and to pull backwards. Again, if you are unable to reach around their chest, you may need to grab their shirt firmly or else the lateral muscles near the armpits. Whatever grip you employ, be sure to keep the side of your head protectively tucked against the subject’s back at all times to protect it from accidental impacts during the struggle.

4. Once the subject has been buckled backwards to a 45 degree angle, their body is under intense structural stress. Now step back to make room for them, lowering your body by either squatting or dropping while maintaining a snug grip and pull them backwards on a downward 45 degree angle. Ideally, you would like to remain standing or at least kneeling while sitting the subject onto the ground. This allows you to cradle and protect their head to protect them from accidental injury, while maintain strong control of their head and torso and through it their limbs.

5. Depending on the severity of the situation, the relative size difference between you and the subject and the degree of clutter in your surrounding area, it may be possible to maintain control from this position. In more extreme situations however, this is unlikely. When faced with a subject who continues to resist, steer them to the ground to the side which is either more comfortable or else more easily and safely available to you. Remember, your personal safety is always your first concern. If you get injured or knocked out, you will be unable to protect either yourself or your loved one(s). Make sure that you keep the side of your head snuggly tucked against either the back or shoulder of your subject to minimize their capacity to hit it. Once you get them to the ground, your next concern must be to minimize the amount of pressure that you apply to their torso. Surprisingly little pressure is required against the torso to cause positional asphyxia or injuries to the ribs and lungs. Often, subject will continue to resist or give signs that are interpreted as active resistance, while they are on the verge, in the midst of or after having suffered an injury. The body can even continue to contract and spasm after unconsciousness or death. We must therefore be extremely vigilant to avoid applying any weight or sharp pressure to the torso and not rely solely on indications of submission. Notice in the photo above that the defender’s body echoes the shape of the subject without injuring it. In the instance illustrated, the shin and knee are leaning on the hip and outer thigh area to avoid injury to the spine or organs.

6. If you are able, you may similarly wish to step over the subject’s body, in effect hooking your heel into their hip area. This allows you to add additional control against their ability to roll away from you. Again, notice that care is taken to avoid sitting on the subject in any way. A less athletic variation is to simply roll onto your side behind the subject as if you were spooning them, while hooking your leg over their hip or thigh in the same way. In some instances, the subject’s continued resistance may in fact merit you rolling to the opposite side and hooking your second leg around the opposite hip, in effect scissoring them from behind. This position permits excellent control options while requiring a minimal amount of energy expenditure to maintain it.

In extreme situations, particularly when working in tandem, one additional tactic to consider is the use of soft restraints such as a blanket. Blankets allow you to affect a fuller amount of the subject’s surface area and offer strong potential for grips and control. The danger with soft control is that there is a risk of lacking sensitivity. Blankets can easily ensnare and choke the subject accidentally. There is also the lesser risk of torqueing joints, particularly small joints like the wrists and fingers. Large pillows are also often used to shield and smother. The danger with pillows in particular is that they increase the risk of positional asphyxia. Nevertheless, the potential advantages of these types of improvised restraints should not be completely ruled out or judged. They should simply be approached with caution.

The purpose of this article is to provide a brief introduction to the challenges presented by compassionate restraint. This is a huge topic with a world of variables. The intent here is simply to eradicate some of the more common misconceptions regarding restraint tactics and to provide a foundation for effective and logical thinking regarding the resolution of this challenge. Regardless of what approach you take, remember 2 key things:

1. In every circumstance, be prudent. Whenever possible, avoid getting physically involved if the risks outweigh the advantages.

2. Secondly, a topic of this importance merits dedicating time to practice. Working either solo in front of a mirror as mentioned, or with someone you can trust to work slowly and safely, go through the motions of these tactics. Remember, slow and mindful practice is the key to developing efficient and smooth technique.

Above any tactic or trick, remember the motivation behind these pursuits—compassion. Govern all of your actions with love and caring above all else and work towards constantly improving your sensitivity to your child or subject.

Stimuli vs. "stumu-lie"

2010-12-16T11:22:00.003-05:00

We've all heard the old maxim: "you are what you eat".

Let me ask you: of what does your psychological diet consist?

In your training, what truths or deceptions are you feeding yourself?

All self-defense minded individuals seek what they feel is the best path to lead to personal protection and security. As self-defense pioneer Tony Blauer has said, training can never fully replicate the reality of the street, therefore we each must decide what degree of deception we will settle for. I would add, it's essential that we are aware of that deception and not blindly allegiant. Faith in the martial arts is a dangerous thing. Celebrating unthinking loyalty is tantamount to revelling in fatal idiocy. Your life is on the line. Why shouldn't you demand evidence? Why shouldn't something be measurable and provable rather than ambiguously intutive? Isn't your life important enough to ask for results?

The martial arts world is wrought with blind faith--the Russian martial arts are no exception. We see so many practitioners blindly obedient to dogma and lost in the attitude of the ideal rather than in the thing itself. Students chicken run around with noodly arms dangling limply at their sides, waving and wiggling their bodies to the point of near OCD compulsiveness in their efforts to manifest their relaxation. Many students, regardless of the scale of the questions, are told they are too tense and to simply breathe. Grand maasters make statements that anything that brings your pulse above 80 bpm is bad Systema whereas most evidence and military research on the Inverted-U of motor performance shows that optimal arousal and performance occurs somewhere above 115 bpm. Many senior practitioners become proficient despite their training, integrating past experiences but giving credit only to their current training and in most cases rely solely on attributes and physicality. As teachers, we must understand that you can't teach attributes. Demonstrations of your own do very little to foster skill in your students. Worst of all, many instructors, rather than humbly submitting to experimentation with the students, contributed to an ever-widening gulf between themselves and their students, as they sit securely on the roof and kick the ladder down so others are uncertain how to get up to the same level.

All of this leads to blind devotion in training, with zombified students keeping arms outstretched and walking into punches like they are on rails and being pulled through a car wash. Everyone involved is deluding themself. The student is investing in the hope of a disproportionate level of mastery which they believe their teacher wields but which does not exist and the instructor gradually becomes contented, lazy, and even believes their own hype. There is no longer authentic stimuli in their training, only "stimu-lie".

This is a very real danger for us all. The antidote, is to get on the mat, as equals. To show yourself as mortal and to create an environment of realistic expectation that is infused with a celebration of struggle, effort, earning and self-discovery. As I've said elsewhere, learning is a continual process, not a destination.

"The true teacher knocks down the idol that the student makes of him."
- Rumi

A Fistmas Message

2010-12-14T15:31:00.002-05:00

Since Christmas and the entire holiday season has become a politically-correct affair, I would like to wish everyone a festive and non-denominational "Merry Fistmas"--the holiday for martial training everywhere.

When 2010 started off, I certainly had no expectation or idea that my dissatisfaction with the ultimate direction of my Systema training would drive me to break off and create my own association. Certainly, since the beginning, I had always been more concerned with keeping things real and making them clear, both for myself and my students. I had very much been doing my own thing since the beginning, but after some fateful events at the beginning of the year, I bit the bullet and forged a path off the beaten trail.

I didn't anticipate much notice or attention. I have loved Systema since my first encounter with it and was looking only to "keep on keeping on". I had no expectations that I would create an uproar and receive hundreds of death threats and throngs of hate mail. As I joked with many, according to what the dude who threatened to burn the Koran in Florida admitted, he somehow got less threats than I did. It speaks to the passion and faithfulness with which many study their martial arts I suppose. While I don't share that type of zeal, I get it and hope that my continued existence irks these individuals less by now.

I also didn't expect to have such positive feedback. Far exceeding the hundreds of death threats were the thousands upon thousands of positive emails, and all of you will be my happy thought for 2010. In seven months, you have all helped me forge a new direction for the integrated study of Russian combative arts and traditiona Slavic folk systems that is dynamic, vibrant and coursing with life. You have contributed to the contribution of what I know to be one of the largest and most detailed curriculums ever constructed and made available to the martial community, filled with sincere sharing and clarity. At the time of writing, we already have over 110 groups pursuing our interpretation, busily working the material and earning instructorship. Others, fully certified already, plan and structure their schools and prepare for openings and others still are waiting in queue just to be posted. You are the fires of our forge. So this holiday season, I would like to sincerely say to each an every one of you, thank you fully for your passion and open-mindedness. As we teeter on the brink of 2011, I can happily say, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Reflections on Sonny Puzikas

2010-10-04T10:55:00.002-04:00

There is a quote from Seneca that I have featured on t-shirts and certificates from my school that reads:

"Times of security should be used to prepare for harsh circumstance."

This is something I deeply believe. This past weekend, we hosted our first seminar with Sonny Puzikas and quite literally I cannot think of any investment of time in the past 4-5 years that I have made as a serious practitioner and instructor to honor this sentiment that can match these last 2 days with Sonny.

Sonny is a former Russian Spetsnaz operative who is already legendary in certain circles for his specialized expertise. His Beyond the Firearm DVD series and appearances on various television shows and films, have made him the go-to man for information on Russian tactics involving the AK-47 in particular. His website gospelofviolence.com is a standard bookmark for everyone I know who is serious about personal protection. This past weekend however introduced a glimpse of the many levels of complexity and skill that exist within Sonny to an entirely new audience.

There are very few individuals that have had the special combination of good fortune and skill to have survived what Sonny has. The brutality and intensity of Spetsnaz training is now a matter of public record. Rarer still, as I said at the outset of our seminar is to then find such an individual who is willing to share their experiences with others. Perhaps most exceptional of all is to find someone who then has the clarity, insight, patience and passion to impart his knowledge with others.

Sonny is a meticulous professional who has parlayed his military discipline into a machine-like regularity and dependability in his instruction. Progessive, systematic and clear, he strikes a perfect balance between clarifying principles, building progressions from specific technical repetitions to soft flow, all the way up to safe but honest pressure testing. Many participants initially had admitted that despite their over-whelming interest to train with someone of Sonny's obvious capacity, that there was something about his experience and skill that almost frightened them and people who had not met him anticipated a cold and lifeless dictator with one speed of execution that would leave them awed but none the better as practitioners. Sonny of course is the furthest thing from this. Warm and charismatic while being brutally honest, Sonny is a perfect guru for self-discovery. His tremendous life experience and insight resonate with even the non-initiated, introducing the uncomfortable world of violence with just the right blend of shock and support. Realizations of the absolutely chaos of true violence is rarely pleasant. Most people shy away from it in their daily life or else become impotent with fear when they encounter it. Sonny was admirably able to present the full reality of a gun fight, without sugar coating or glossy hyperbole but at the same time without alienating, discouraging or abandonning anyone in the room, from the complete novice to the consumate professional. It felt very much as if we were the idealogically wounded stranded in the wilderness of violence and Sonny was there to bring us back to the chopper. This stemmed in my opinion from his absolute humility. At no point were there any grand claims, maxims of invincibility or efforts to elevate himself above the practitioners. Sonny's teaching was more about discovering than proving and it became thoroughly apparent that here was a man who had never stopped learning. Always adapative and open to the group, he moulded a complex and often over-whelming topic into bite-sized pieces so that everyone present was able to walk away with plenty to think about and tangible and measurable improvements in skill.

My deepest belief is that Sonny deserves a far wider audience than his already loyal fanbase. Practitioners, find a seminar with this man and get yourself there. Instructors, host him. I guarantee you that you will experience a change in your game the likes of which you have rarely experienced before.

Thank you Sonny for coming to our city on a rainy and cold Canadian Autumn weekend. Next time, I promise to bring you during the heat. Thanks also to everyone that came out to make this event possible. I am looking forward to the next one already.

The Rules of Slow

2010-09-15T10:22:00.002-04:00

Slow training drills are a large training component in many interpretations of the martial arts. While widely used, they are a somewhat wiggly squid to wrestle with that is more easily misused than correctly optimized. The reason for this is that there are 2 very simple rules which must be maintained which are constantly being challenged by our fear responses, our ego and our bad habits.

The first, is that for slow training to be realistic preparation for anything, it must accurately replicate a slower version of the end state. Since we are dealing with combative preparation here, this means that our slow sparring must include a number of essential components. These include:

-Realistic intensity. Too often, people mistake speed with intensity. They think that just because they are moving slowly, they must also attack with floppy wrists, flacid kicks and poorly held training weapons. That's not the intensity you'll be using at full speed, so why train like that at slow speed? This includes retracting your strikes, pumping with knives rather than stiffly stabbing once, using your free hand when attacking with weapons, as well as your legs and elbows and knees, grabbing and pulling and mauling. It may be slow, but keep it real. People who grapple, know that you can grapple slowly and still fully represent the endgame. When it comes too striking, too often it becomes a sterile game of zombie tag. Mix it up. Attack slowly but use the intensity you would in a fight. It boils down to recognizing the need for intention and maintaining focus.

-Realistic trajectories. Most attacks are going to happen at the fastest possible speed an attacker can muster. If we trained at full speed all the time, it would be impossible to learn within the context of the drill and difficult even to deconstruct the event afterwards, since faster speeds can challenge the accuracy of our perceptions. By slowing things down, we are better able to see what we are doing, like watching a slow mo video of ourselves. We are able to gain a better understanding within the context of the exercise. Most importantly, we are more likely to understand what happened after the fact and make corrections in our future training. The problem is too often people begin to play too much, weaving and meandering excessively in ways that will not be reproduceable under full speed conditions. I've heard people argue: "But I'm training to stay relaxed. If I'm relaxed, I will be able to move more easily." That's true, but noone violates the laws of physics and biology. There are minimal amounts of time needed to perceive, to process and to react. Forensic specialists use these limitations to help formulas reconstruct accidents, knowing that as speeds increase, the ability to respond hits a ceiling. Muscles contract and need time to relax. Nerves and snyapses can only fire so quickly. Even a heat-seeking missile has mechanical limitations on how quickly it can adapt. And this is all at a purely physical level. If we add cognitive decisions in the equation, as the British psychologist William Edmund Hick showed us, the more choices we have, the longer we take to respond. In a real situation, reaction time doesn't suffer indecision. These realities need to be used to temper our slow training. Trajectories need not be robotic or stilted. They can certainly include fakes and deception, just keep things simple. We need to constantly limit ourselves to the most effective responses, using the closest tools to attack the closest targets.

-Speeds need to be congruent. Too often in slow training, the attacker moves like a zombie while the defender moves like a hummingbird. The attacker swings a stick and leaves it hanging. The defender evades, deflects, jams the elbow, chops the wrist, twists the neck and sweeps them to the ground. Realistically, does anyone really believe they will be able to fold space and teleport through the spectrum of their attacker's actions like this? When we train slowly, we need to recognize that even if we are physically faster than our attacker, we will never be that much faster than our attacker. Moreover, our attacker will likely be better prepared, possibly attacking with the element of surprise, giving them even greater advantage. If we always move more quickly than our attacker during slow sparring, we are setting ourselves us to be rudely surprised in a real encounter.

The second major component is that slow training needs to speed up, it needs to escalate. When we are learning to drive, eventually we leave the parking lot and transition to the city streets and then the highway. We crawl to walk, then run. While slow training may constitute the bulk of our training, since it is easier to learn from and easier to protect the body from injuries in it, there needs to be some progression towards our thresholds. This type of pressure testing is precisely what corrects and informs our slow training. It's what forces us to recognize when we have deviated from reality. Pressure testing needn't be injurious. With a safe partner, correct parameters and the propper equipment, it should be stimulating, fun and invigorating, but it must be present.

Ultimately, monitor what you are doing in your slow work. It can be helpful to film yourself to see if your movement is congruent, logical and feasible. It can be helpful to limit yourself, imitating injuries, binding limbs, limiting tactics, or even to allow yourself to be surprised and put into a bad positon so that you also become familiar with fighting through discomfort. In the end, the key to training "real slow" is simply to begin with "real" and then slow it down.

Tendons vs. Muscles

2010-09-13T10:13:00.003-04:00

One question I often get regarding Russian Systema is this notion of "exercising the tendons". Often, instructors refer to exercises as being for the tendons or good for the tendons. Others talk about wokring with tendons and not muscles. Most instructors or practitioners digest this unthinkingly but when pressed by others to explain why and how an exercise can work only the tendon, they are at a loss.

First, when we place physical loads on the body, it is impossible to isolate just the tendons. We cannot stress the tendons without also in turn affecting the muscles. Their function is related and tightly contingent each upon the other. Much of the confusion likely is a matter of being lost in translation initially. In turn bad interpretations and less than full resolution photocopies of those poor initial translations get copied and recopied until ultimately we have an almost mystical reference to tendon exercsies without really knowing why.

A more helpful way of thinking about these exercsies for me is to focus on 1 key point:

Perform every excersise mindfully. Every exercise in my interpretation of Combat Systema should be done consciously, generally quite slowly (at least at first) and with emphasis on studying the body. Every exercise should make us become more aware of our structure and of our breathing. In my opinion, correct Systema fitness exercises should be the complete opposite of the guy who drops to the floor and whips off 60 short, choppy, gasping push-ups. Mindfulness does a variety of essential things which are consistent with the goals of Combat Systema:

-One, it prevents injuries by making the practitoner communicate with their body rather than trying to enforce a state of fitness on the body. Fitness is not something we do "to" the body, it's something we do "for" the body and "with" the body. The Zen scholar Alan Watts said that trying to force relaxation is like trying to calm water by beating it with an iron rod. Many people view fitness in this same manner. The old nugget: "No pain, no gain" is one of the most ignorant measures of successful training that I have encountered. Granted, when we train intensely, we can be sore. Those of us that train a lot, may well always be sore in some respect or another, but to use soreness as an indicator, as a measure of success, is skewed at best. Lots of things can make me sore that have nothing to do with becoming more fit. By slowing things down and becoming conscious of every repetition, or our structure and the changes the load we are placing on it creates, we are laying the foundation for safe and healthy work and greatly reducing the risk of injuries.

-Two, mindful exercises cultivates adaptability--a combat attribute Systema deeply seeks to cultivate. When we work slowly, we study, listen and learn from our body. We are constantly seeing where we are at and making micro-changes, heightening our sensitivity and yielding and adjusting. When people come to me to learn how to fight, some want to learn how to flow. Others want to learn how to adapt. Others are so frightened by the mere idea of violence, they want to start by learning basic assertiveness. All of these attributes begin with slow and mindful fitness. When we workout mindfully, in some way, we are each alone with our fears and limitations. The simple context of a slow and honest 30-second push-up forces us to adjust our body constantly, to take responsibility for our own performance, to adapt. It forces us to face our fears, to address our internal self-talk, to overcome our doubts and to assert our will. Mindful exercise makes us get into the driver's seat and take charge of our selves. I have yet to meet someone who can face their fears in combat, adapt and flow and find survival solutions, who cannot first do all of these same things in their workout. I have also yet to meet someone who rushes through their fitness, who flounders through their exercise routine with mindless and careless abandon who is not also a one-trick pony in combat. If a slow push-up makes you doubt yourself and quit, what will a stab to the gut do to your self-esteem?

-Three, when we work slowly and mindfully, we become more aware of our breathing. We are in turn more entitled to learn how to improve our breathing and fuse it with our physical actions. What value is there in charging through a set of push-ups just to say that you did a certain amount? If we perform a motion just a little more sloppily and incompletely everyday, sure we can raise the total number of reps that we perform, but to what end? By the end of the month, you may be able to perform 100 tiny, humpy, spasmic push-ups and then roll over gasping, eyes bulging and nose bleeding, but what investment have you really made in yourself by doing this? Mindful exercise will always cultivate relaxation, efficient function and correct breathing--all attributes that lead to health and longevity.

-Four, we are more likely explore a fuller range of motion. This is where the notion of "tendons" comes in. Even in the most linear and two-dimensional exercise like a push-up, slow and mindful work at least promotes fuller push-ups, longer motions that work out the fullness of the muscle rather than just the belly. Systema is very much based on the idea of working out all of the body, not just strapping ourselves into a machine and enslaving our body to a preset fixed range of motion. Life comes at us from all sides--the fight occurs in 360 degrees. As such, it demands body capacity in every direction. Slow and mindful work is the key to this. From the more simple, fixed, stability exercises like the four basic exercises we often use (push-ups, squats, leg raise and sit-up) hail an endless variety of work that more fully explores the dynamic sphere of movement that surrounds us. When we explore this range of motion, loading and unloading the body throughout it, we cultivate strong and flexible muscles with long and elastic tendons and connective tissue. We are not working out tendon at the expense of muscles, rather we are working out the fuller capacities of our bodies and not simply focusing on our muscles at the expense of our tendons. We are gaining functional strength without losing range of motion, and gaining stability throughout.

One final point that begs mentioning here is that weights are not the spawn of Satan. Too often, Systema practitioners stand polarized on the notion of whether or not they "can" or "should" use weights yet all of them partake in body weight exercises. The body does not discreminate between where the load is coming from. Whether it lifts 20 lbs of metal or 20lbs of partner, it works the same way. Load is load, stress is stress. Weights in all of their forms can be employed safely, effectively and healthily, provided they are used in a mindful manner as described above and we don't revert to the habits of the common gym enthusiast. In this manner, no matter what method we find pleasure in, we are entitled to unlock our fullest possible potential.

Combat Systema: Principle vs. Technique 2

2010-08-02T08:32:00.002-04:00

My last blog entry has stirred up a lot of interest--and passion--both ways. Many proponents of technique have come forward insisting that technique is far more necessary that I alluded to--that principle is only an explanation of technique which could never make sense without the technique to manifest it. Proponents of principle-based education insist that what I call technique is actually personal interpretation. That there is never just one "best" way to do something, including something as mechanical as shooting or loading a gun.

Good points on both sides. As for technique being a manifestation of principle, absolutely. This is entirely the point I was making in the first installment. Without concrete examples, students are left in a void. Without principle however, you simply have a mishmash of rote memorization. Too many styles flounder in the void of endless arbitrary forms and combos. Instead, transcend at some point. To use Ed Parker's example: first you learn to read music, then to play riffs, then other people's compositions, but ultimately, the goal should be able to compose your own, to jam, to just play.

As for there being no one best way, I appreciate the sentiment, but disagree. Force can be measured. Resistance can be measured. If 3 people espouse a certain breathing technique for controlling pulse rates under conditions of stress and in application one measures consistently better than the rest, than that technique works better. The whole notion that everything is equally valid that is so couched in faith-based instruction allows people to hide from empirical evidence and measurement. It doesn't make sense to me that in our search for combat truth, in our efforts to erode fear and face our challenges, we should hide from our objective. It's tantamount to ignoring financial debt in the hopes it will go away. Somewhat like a 3-year old closing their eyes to turn invisible. Again, this logic may work well for you and make sense for you, but in my universe, it does not. The next time I find myself caught in a unicorn traffic jam and I find myself out of leprechauns, maybe I'll consider it, but until such time, I will stick with evidence and fact.

The reality is that good training should have some degree of both principle and technique. The real difference shows up best during pressure testing--again, measurement and proof. Sometimes people see Combat Systema clips and say: "it's messsy. Your "technique" isn't good. The gun is moving across the center line during your defense. The knife is stabbing you during the fight. etc. etc." I always find these comment interesting.

Consider boxing or grappling. In these sports, technique rarely go off as planned. One thing flows into another. A boxer may train for years to have a perfect jab, but he will rarely end a fight with one. People move. You get hit, injured, tired, etc. Yet, no one would say that Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard were bad boxers because they keep getting hit. The moment we come to "martial arts" however, fantasy media has conditioned people to expect one fancy technique against one punch that ends the fight. The attacker swings and it's done.

Granted, MMA is doing a lot to educate those who see the truth, but still others persist that in the street it's different. In the street, it's not about combat, it's about ambush. You don't have time to fight, you have to survive. Semantics. Yes, there is a difference between sport and street. Yes, there is a difference between ritualized combat and getting sucker-punched, but if you can't handle the ritualized stuff, if you can't take the challenge of a preset, prepared, safe environment, what makes you think that you will suddenly fare so much better on the street? Are you hiding behind that old nugget--that your arsenal is too deadly. That on the street you would bite and headbutt and gouge? I would rather bet that a world class grappler who can move like an octopus on the ground, would have a better chance of escaping those feral attacks than someone who simply trains gouging without movement.

The difficulty is that any system that becomes inundated by the tools they advocate, whether they be gouges or loopy punches, rather than cultivating a pressure-tested delivery mechanism, is all warhead without missile. If you can't move well, you can't move well. If a padded fist rocks your world, a real one will be exponentially more shocking. If push-ups and basic fitness cause you to quit and if sparring scares you from the building, a street fight isn't going to suddenly bring out your inner Ares. The fact is, if you arent' training messy, fluid, continuous, non-stop resistance at some point, you are ultimately training technique and not principle; you are ultimately cognitively adhering to art and aesthetic, and creating something far more ritualized than any sport rather than building true adaptability and fighting skill.

Combat Systema: Principle vs. Technique

2010-07-17T18:14:00.005-04:00

There is a popular descriptive used to distinguish Russian Systema from other martial arts that goes like this:

"We're principle-based. We don't believe in technique."

This is a classic example of something getting lost along the way in translation. Granted, this notion varies a bit from camp to camp. Kadochnikov and Retuinskih for example are scientifically precise and extremely technical in everything that they teach. How they interpret those principles varies significantly, with Retuinskih exhibiting far more pressure testing through jacketed wrestling, modified boxing and generally more contact and Kadochikov floudering in my opinion somewhat in the excesses of soft and slow exploration. Ryabko Systema by comparison has migrated increasingly away from any structured specifics, committing more fully to an intuitive path of self-exploration. Verily, the distinguishing factors between Ryabko Systema and Kadochnikov is the difference between faith and science. But does this need to be the case? Does creating a matrix for learning based on sound principles necessarily mean that technique must be shunned like a leper at a game of twister?

Why does a style stray from teaching technique? Is it a question of instructors teaching at their current level and forgetting the steps they took to get there? Is it a question of laziness? Is it a question of intentionally burning bridges to prevent students from understanding how to acquire the fullest possible ability--the ancient habit of hiding secret knowledge? Perhaps it's a combination of many motives. Even if it were nothing more than the pure belief that technique in any form were some form of distraction from true adaptability and learning, we are left with Infinite Monkey Theory--eventually a room full of monkeys, typing on an infinite number of typewriters, should logically create a work of literature equivalent to that of Shakespeare.

The problem with this approach is that we do not have infinite amounts of time or resources. If I need to teach someone how to use a gun and I put 5 people in one room and let them play and 5 in another room and teach them basic safety procedures, handling skills and the finer points of shooting, I am likely to not only have a faster learning curve in the instructed room, I am also far more likely to have 5 people come out alive. The fact is, some degree of technique is necessary. So often, I encounter Systema people who don't know the first thing about applying a lock who in return spout: "If you lock another, you lock yourself". That's true. There is a risk in lockng that you become static and prone to multiple attackers, but if you are a law enforcement officer or security agent or simply a civillian concerned with less than lethal control options, you need to know how to put on a few basic locks, a basic choke etc. Once you have the foundation, then you can focus on continuous movement, when to abandon it, how to intensify it, etc. I see Systema practitioners practicing ground defense against people who couldn't earn a white belt in BJJ, practicing kick defense against people who have trouble standing on one leg and working against "boxers" who are simply their chums wearing boxing gloves. There needs to be a little more concrete in the foundation in my opinion otherwise we'll soon find ourselves posting fights with our drunken uncles on youtube.

Technique is not a bad word. There are best ways to throw a punch, specific nuances that should be known about locks and holds, tactics that work best against specific situations. To simply float on the current of "principality" is to hide from the need for specificity and certainty. I have seen across the world what only investing in flow at the expense of core technique can do--it can create a mass of delusional individuals who think that wiggling and breathing is enough. You wouldn't trust a surgeon to just follow their intuition. You would expect that they had learned specific techniques and approaches but then transcended to the point where they can adapt. You would expect a musician to know how to play basic notes and riffs, perhaps cover other songs, before they could jam. You would expect a pilot to understand basic operating procedures before you would expect them to be able to handle a crisis. Why should we expect anything different from something as essential as the skills needed to protect our own lives.

Some degree of technique will always be necessary. Principles are the glue that holds them all together in one coherent direction, that explains how they work and deepens our understanding of them. Techique is the bridge to trancendence and the path to intuition. Balancing both the intuitive with the specific, faith with fact, technique with principle, is the key to excellence.

Changing Direction: The Roots of Combat Systema

2010-06-13T13:17:00.002-04:00

Recently, as many of you know, I have made the decision to stop representing Ryabko Systema. After 11 years in the style, this was one of the toughest decisions I have had to make in my martial career, particularly given the tremendous amount this style has given me and the generosity of Vladimir Vasiliev throughout all of my training. Those who know me or my work through DVD's and publications, likely anticipated this. Certainly, at best, my interpretation was always on the fringe of the established community and increasingly over the past 2 years it was simply no longer an accurate indicator of Mikhail's interpretation. Those who do not know me, have been somewhat more shocked and already in my first week I have been overloaded by emails and inquiries so I would like to pre-empt more speculation by setting things straight here.

1-I have the highest level of respect, love and awe for Vladimir. He is without question among the most generous teachers I have ever had, giving knowledge constantly to the point of overflowing. I consider him the highest personification of what it means to be a martial artist, utterly genuine, skilled beyond comparison and as I've said elsewhere, he has forced me to readjust my expectations of human potential. This will never change.

2-In leaving the community, I will never allude to continued connections with Vladimir and Mikhail. I will sell out old DVD stock that may list their web site on the sleeve, but even then, all of my dvd's have always begun with a preface indicating the work was my own interpretation, giving them the fullest respect. At the end of the day, these dvd's will just give them free advertising if anything until they are sold and its time for reprints. Certainly, all of my new material as well as everything else I do, will speak of no affiliation. I have no interest in misguiding people to my teaching. I know already that there are students for every teacher on this planet. The right ones will always find the correct destination eventually.

3-Many people have already begun to ask, why bother to refer to what I do as Systema at all. This is a perfectly valid question, particularly for those who regard Mikhail's interpretation as the only true Systema. The simple answer is that while for a long time I regarded Mikhail's interpretation as the best approach for me, I always knew that it was not the only one. Systema is a generic term, like Jujitsu or Karate, that refers to an approach. I have always been deeply interested in other Systema approaches and most notably, as a man of science, have been heavily influenced by Kadochnikov's approach (whose own style far predates Mikhail's)throughout all of my work. This is obvious in many of the principles I teach. As well, I have looked at Reutinskih's Systema (whose heavy inclusion of boxing and grappling has always been more in keeping with my own nature and previous experience). In more recent years, I have looked at 2nd generation interpretations of these styles, trained with many different enthusiasts, and begun to look at the root Slavic systems. All of these experiences have been hugely influential along with my own discoveries. What I teach today, what I practice myself, still remains Systema. It has infinitely more in common with all of the other Systema lineages than it does with Jujitsu or Aikido or Karate and simply calling it defensive tactics or combatives would attract the wrong attention and not be accurate. I have researched and published extensively on behalf of the Systema community. I have produced a highly successful best-selling DVD series on my interpreation of Systema. I have dedicated myself to understanding and exploring and finding my own interpreation of the art in complete honesty. In addition, I have taught tirelessly at my own school and around the world and answered literally thousands upon thousands of emails, often in great detail, sharing whatever experiences I have with any who would ask. All of this leaves me feeling justified that what I do is very much Systema, a living and breathing Systema, my own Systema--and as such it merits maintaining the label.

4-I do not pretend to be anywhere close to as good as or better that Vladimir, Mikhail, or anyone else on this planet. This has never been my interest. My first goal is staying healthy and safe and following my heart on the path. My second goal is teaching what I deeply believe in to help heal my students, remove some of their fear and make them as safe as I can. Vlad and Mikhail's life experiences alone place them on a quite separate echelon from anything I will match. This was literally one of the reasons I could no longer represent Ryabko Systema. In my opinion,their method was not providing me with the steps to achieve or get close to their skills. They never could. Few among us would likely be willing do go through what they have to get those same skills. As a result, I feel they were teaching at their currently level, sharing their current joy, but not respecting the basics that got them there. I joinged Systema because of Vladimir, particularly his early work. I have seen a huge change in that work over the past decade. Many regard it as the greatest evolution of skill and understanding. I respect that view. I simply do not share it. I prefer the old stuff and I take my direction from it. I was not able to teach the current approach and see satisfactory results in my students. Other interpretations are simply achieving better results for me. For over the past 2 years, I maintained loyalty to the style, literally hoping I could make it work, largely because I did not want to disappoint Vladimir after he had given me so much, but in the end, I fundamentally did not agree with many elements of Mikhail's interpretation on a personal level and it was dishonest of me to continue representing his approach. As Nietzsche said, a student repays a teacher poorly if he remains a student.

5-Given these motivations, the distinctions of my style will come as no surprise. I believe in a clear cut curriculum--I come from a teaching background and have always attracted and appealed to people who are more analytical than intuitive perhaps and who like things broken down. Again, my work has always shown this. My approach will continue in this direction, simply now, free of guilt or burden. I believe in pressure testing and simulations. I have seen the amazing effects of this work in military and law enforcement training as well as civilian. I am a doubting Thomas. I need proof. I cannot have confidence in my skills without feeling that they work and this is what I need to see them work. With regards to principles and techniques naturally, there will be even more distinctions but this has long been visible in my teaching style and my dvd's and writing as well.

Lastly, thank you to the community as a whole for their incredible support. I hope everyone cotinues to follow the path best suited for them and wish everyone out their the best. I apologize to the many who are insulted by my decision. Absolutely none is intended.

Training is truth,

Kevin

TOTAL SUBMISSION by Kevin Secours

2010-04-04T00:58:00.003-04:00

Recently, we have had an influx of younger students at the dojo, ranging from youth to teens. This demographic shift has reinforced a very interesting reality. The very young come into training unabashed, full of zeal, ready to try anything. Many, wait in line to spar with me at the end of class and their energy levels seem to know no bounds. The sparring it would seem, could continue indefinitely were it not stopped. The teens however, particularly the young men, also have an eagerness to spar, each and every time, but often discourage quickly. I am extremely conscious of sparring to the level of my partner and this notion is an important part of my teachings. I do not tolerate an environment where larger, older or more experienced students refuse to train with smaller, weaker, less experienced students. Everyone can learn by sparring with everyone. The purpose is not to win a competition, but rather to lose ego, attachment to impermanence and a host of other damaging shackles. When I spar, I give openings to less experienced students. I test them. Challenge them. In the process, I work on other attributes in myself as well. Yet still, the adolescent male particularly seems so prone to discouragement.

I've seen similar patterns with older men, particularly when they are large and well muscled. No matter how much I insulate or conceal it, losing to a skinny boy like myself can be too much for many. It violates the laws of their universe and questions perhaps their misplaced motivations for working out. I should stress, many large, well muscled men do not have this misplaced motivation, and have zero problem tapping me or being tapped, lest I raise the ire of a nation of biceps hungry to squeeze me :o

All of this has reinforced just how important the essential attitude of the martial arts should be. Rickson Gracie said many years ago, that being a master of submission fighting, begins first with submitting the self to defeat. Victory is the easy part. No one gets there without getting tapped thousands and thousands of times. Hit millions of times. Frustrated endlessly. The lessons are in the losses. The moment we take the mat in an effort to prove, we fail to grow. Granted, sometimes students come at me with more to prove, guns drawn. Sometimes, you must shut their game down resolutely and aggressively, at both the physical and emotional level. What is infinitely sadder is that some students never get to the realization that training is not about competiton. They constantly hit the mat with something to prove, scoping out the dojo for the weaker students they can dominate and insulate their ego with. These types never learn. They never even begin. They invariably acquire a base level of knowledge and then plateau in the most obvious and disappointing way. Like a purgatory, they are condemned to stay at that skill level, unable to get the challenge, the feedback and the partners they need to break free of that orbit and slingshot themselves to the next level, unless they ultimately learn to originate from a more humble place.

I have said elsewhere that harming is no great thing. A baby can throw a fork at someone and accidentally kill them. Having the ability to harm is not a measure of value or matter. Having the ability to control, the self and the other, is true greatness. Everytime we hit the mat, we have before us many individuals with many variables, different egos, different emotions. It's easy to slip into a rut, fighting to our strengths, holding back, frightened to face our limits. As Zig Ziglar said, a rut ain't nothing but a grace with the ends kicked out. But ultimately, the ocean covers the earth because it kneels beneath the sky. There is also someone (actually armies of someones) out there who are truly better than you. On top of them are those who are lucky and have your number today. You can't beat everyone and training to try leads to self-destruction. True training and true bushido, begins by first submitting the self and giving yourself safely and mindfully to the partner before you.

Hyper-Accelerated Slowness

2010-03-26T12:37:00.004-04:00

A central learning tool in Ryabko Systema is the use of slow training. As we have discussed previously, since adaptability remains one of the primary goals of Systema training, slowness is favored in the majority of training, to allow students to explore options in a more organic manner. Repetition of specific moves is never encouraged, nor is the emulation of the instructor or other advanced practitioners. Rather, students are encouraged to genuinely experience the threat as a stimuli, to see what reactions, tensions, reflexes the stimuli triggers and to see not only how to resolve the threat but also how to resolve said reactions in the body. It's understandable that the outsider misunderstands this approach to training, but my goal today is to clarify some suggested guidelines for its proponents to help optimize the tool and ensure fellow practitioners don't go astray.

First off, slowness is nothing new. In most other training domains, we accepted crawling before we toddle, toddling before we walk and walking before we run. I've yet to meet anyone who was lacing up their Nikes in utero, We learned to drive in all likelihood in parking lots and quiet streets first, then earned our way to the highway. The examples are plentiful and obvious. The notion of slow training in Systema is exactly that. Whereas most martial arts encourage slowness at first, they do so through the slow repetition of specific set patterns or movements. Even individual strikes are drilled identically, whereas in Systema, the slow repetition is of constantly changing and adaptive responses.

Second, slow training is not an island. As I have also outlined previously, training should consist of three portions. 1-Education. We must understand why we are doing what we are doing. Without cognitive clarity and agreement, there will always be a lack of conviction or certainty in our responses and conviction and certainty are essential in life-and-death situations. 2-Rehearsal. We must be allowed to explore and investigate the principles in application. This is the domain of slow training and where we spend the bulk of our time. 3-Pressure Test. We must bring the water to a boil and steam out the excess movements. Only by pressure testing, can we gain understanding with the reality of resistant, dynamic combat and go back to the drawing board of the Education phase with newfound intelligence and understanding, thus rebeginning the circuit of growth with ever-increasing clarity and conviction.

Next, we get into the mechanics of slow training. As I have also said elsewhere, a key component of effective and successful slow work is to ensure that both you and your attacker(s) are moving at congruent speeds. Too often, practitioners get into the rut of moving much faster than their attacker. It's easy to overlook this reality if you are only moving at 1/4 speed since it feels like you are moving so slowly, but if your partner is moving at 1/8 speed, you are moving twice as fast as them and training for a reality that is unlikely. The fastest among us are unlikely to be that much faster than an average escalated attacker. Constantly monitor your work. I tell my students to scan youtube and watch Systema demos. We tend to watch them, and study the work of the defender. After you've watched it once, go back and watch it again, focusing on the mock attacker. Are they moving at a congruent speed? Are they slowing down because of fear or respect? Often they are virtually entranced by the anticipated consequence of their attack. While, granted, this is also a component of combat psychology worthy of study, it's important to keep the majority of your slow training honest, particularly as a teacher. Choose new students regularly. They are less likely to be compliant or understand the drill. You work should function on all skill levels and body types equally well. Where things begin to erode, you are likely indulging in fancy over function.

One good training tool is to delay your response. While some degree of slow training can be used to reinforce pre-emptive action, be cautious of falling into that rut permanently. Allow yourself to be surprised, delay your response, see, even at slow speeds how things change when the distance is decreased.

Directly connected to speed is the matter of trajectories. In a real fight, muscles are likely to be tense, and bodies racing with hormones and natural stimulants. Attackers are more likely to move short and twitchy or else large and gorilla like. This notion of complex weaving angles and meandering strikes that waver like slow heat-seeking missiles is highly unlikely. Likewise, the likelihood of fully elongated robotic attacks with outstretched overhand stabs and clean, stiff angles is almost nil. Keep it real even though you are slow. Practice slow jabs in your boxing, slow, short slices in your knife work and slow feints and reaches in your grappling. Minimize the simplistic single reach, solitary punch and isolated kick. This isn't how people attack.

Special mention should be made here of eliptical attacks, since Systema advocates and employs weaving strikes that often use a wave-like figure 8 pattern. Take a minute to trace a sideways figure-8 or infinity symbol in front of you with your fist. Feel and see how that infinity is composed of 2 "s-"-like shapes. Imagine each of those halves, in turn is composed of 2 antagonistic curves (each composing 1 quarter of the 8). Each quarter can be either a loading phase of the strike, or the impacting phase. I can load my hand, arcing it up and then strike as I drop it, or strike on the first rising arc and recover on the drop. That recovery in turn sets me up for the subsequent strike of my next curve. Each quarter can be weaponized as a strike, used to set up for a subsequent strike, or to recover from a preceding strike. This can be most clearly seen if we swing a chain or flexible weapon in the same pattern. If you employ figure 8 patterns in training, remember this idea of loading and unloading the motion. Too often, practitioners get into the habit of simply waving the arms without being in range to impact or releasing the energy. They simply swim through the air like a child waving a sparkler rather than prepare, deliver and recover from the force of strike (muted and fictional in this case as it may be). At full speed, you will not be able to strike continuously through every quadrant of your infinity motion. You will always need a quarter to load and unload. Keep this in mind.

Also, remember to keep the intensity realistic. Slowness does not mean lack of pressure. Attackers will generally jab and retreat or else pressure forward. They will rarely stand at mid range, single strike outstretched, as you run around them like a small monkey hopped up on RedBull. Be careful of this pitfall. The best analogy I can give is to box and wrestle slowly. A boxer will never leave a limb hanging out there. Neither should you. A wrestler will never grab and freeze. Neither should you, not even as a mock attacker. Be a good friend. Give a taste of reality and help prepare your partner rather than insulate his ego. Under conditions of actual combat, attackers will flinch and freeze, grab and wrestle. Integrate grappling with your striking and vice versa. Particuarly be certain you retract your strikes. Blocking, deflecting or evading a punch or stab is essential, but thwarting it's retraction and continued delivery is equally vital. If we fail to include strikes that retract and pump like pistons in our slow work, we will be overwhelmed by this reality in the street. Relying on one touch or one hit finishes is statistical suicide. Attackers will keep on keeping on, loading and striking with improved intel against your defenses, against ever-weaking and wounded limbs and torsos in all likelihood. Integrate this in your slow work.

Pulse rate is another keep factor. Systema seeks to prioritize relaxation in its training. The notion is that stress erodes performance and like a sniper, surgeon or pilot, we seek to replace fear with familiarity and learn to keep our cool and optimal performance in the worst cases. Relaxation is a relative term in my opinion however. We are all prone to flinch, freeze and panic and likewise we are all entitled to recover our wits, but to what degree we will be able to recover those senses while under attack can run a massive gamut. Many Systema proponents feel that employing sparring where pulse rates rocket or resistance becomes too elevated "deteriorate" the essential pillars of form, breathing, relaxation and movement. I am of a different opinion, though I respect and understand the concern. Therefore, even if you are not of the camp that wishes to integrate occassional simulation training, I strongly encourage the next best thing. Throughout your slow work, consider occassionally integrating breath exercises that tax the body and elevate the pulse rate. Controlled breath holds or respiratory restrictions are excellent. This can be from simple breath holds, restraints, gags, bags, etc. There is slew to choose from in Systema's combat psychology library. Exercises using selected contractions can likewise tax the body quickly and safely and lead to more realistic slow work immediately after. Even if you intend to employ simulation training, this type of step is an essential bridge towards it as I discussed in my DVD Warhead.

TELEOLOGY IN PHYSICAL TRAINING by Kevin Secours

2010-03-18T16:36:00.003-04:00

“The best is always the enemy of good enough.”
—Mikhail Kalashnikov—

In earlier writings on visualization training, I mentioned Dr. Maxwell Maltz. Maltz was a plastic surgeon that dedicated much of his life to studying the role of self-image. You may remember that Maltz noted how our nervous system was a "teleological" or goal-oriented servomechanism. Like a heat-seeking missile, our nervous system is able to adapt to obstacles in its course without getting distracted from its ultimate goal. Dr. Maltz determined that by understanding this principle, we can maximize the power of our subconscious to achieve any goal we give ourselves. Just by visualizing ourselves performing a task perfectly, we can actually imprint the success into our nervous system and accustom it to experiencing success.

Having goals is hugely important in self-defence training. Whether we’re experimenting with a move for the first time or training a scenario that we’ve experienced 1,000 times before, it’s important not to get too wrapped up in the HOW of our performance. The mechanics are much less important than our fundamental motive to perform them. For example, imagine you locked a blood-thirsty psychopath and a pacifist in a room. The psychopath is armed with only his bare hands but the pacifist is armed with a knife. I’d put my money on the psychopath—the reason, he has superior motivation, freedom, confidence and creativity whereas the pacifist has moral and psychological resistance to harming. As we learned early , we simply can’t perform in a manner that’s inconsistent with the way we se ourselves or our goals. That’s why it’s so essential that we focus our minds on the WHY of our training; why are we performing this technique? What is the ultimate goal of this movement? Motive matters more than method.

If I use the example of learning how to defend against a knife held to your throat, we might consider using a submissive feint to bring our hands closer to the weapon before retaliating—another example of a Physical Delivery System. If we feign an emotional response as well, engaging our aggressor in dialogue, establishing eye contact to take your attacker’s stare away from your throat, then we begin to engage an Emotional Delivery System as well. Then you might train the various tools and attributes, practicing how to safely deflect the blade away from your throat or face to less vulnerable areas of the body, neutralizing and trapping the weapon. All of these would be very positive reactions, but without the motive for the actions clearly defined, the movements themselves are empty and hollow. As Sensei Sali Azem has said to me, there is no blood in those bones. Every movement should have a goal or purpose. There must be intent.

One easy way to tell when a student has become more concerned with HOW they are defending themselves rather than WHY they are fighting back, can be seen when a student gets “cut” in training. A student that has lost sight of their motive for defence will make an “error” in their practice and then stop, insisting on starting over until they get the technique just right. This instinct to perfect every component of the movement is natural, but if we indulge it, we will train our nervous system to freeze—in this case the moment we make contact with the weapon. In the case of a knife fight, the obvious advantage is that your opponent has a blade in one hand. Anything that we do to fix our attention on that weapon empowers the blade and gives the opponent too great an advantage. As the Zen monk Takuan Soho wrote, this is a “stopping place”. “If you put your mind in your opponent’s sword, your opponent’s sword will take you.” Or more simply, as the old Kali expression goes, if you watch the knife, you will watch it go into you.

By comparison, if instead we realize that our goal is not to succeed in a particular technique or to reach a quota of a certain number of hits, but rather to simply get out alive, then our habits will be quite different. Then, even should we fumble or slip, then even if the training blade whizzes across your throat, you do not stop. Sometimes, the lightest cut to the neck can be fatal while in another situation, you might survive being stabbed to the heart. You don’t decide when you die—Nature will take care of that for you. The true Warrior understands that once the decision to retaliate physically has been made, they must enter and continue to enter until the situation has been resolved. We refer to this as the “reflex of continuance”.

To illustrate this example a little more graphically, imagine that you’re defending yourself against an attacker who is armed with a knife while you are with a loved one. Despite your best effort to appease the attacker and to resolve the situation without fighting, the aggressor is escalating. They have begun to bully you and your loved one, invading your boundaries, pushing and shoving and swearing. Their bodies are heaving with heavy breathing. They are not responding to your pleas for mercy or your efforts to restore reason and then suddenly they lunge at you, stabbing with lethal intent. If you’ve programmed your nervous system to stop the instant you get cut, even if it is a relatively minor injury on your hand our the back of your forearm, then you’ll give your attacker all of the time they need to finish the job and attack again and again until you are dead. You will have in effect trained yourself to induce tonic immobility. Getting cut and freezing will trigger the bully/predator archetype that is sleeping inside your attacker and even if he wasn’t originally intending to seriously harm you, like a shark that has tasted blood, he may now be more likely to finish you off. Moreover, since you’ve allowed yourself to freeze, since you are dwelling in a “stopping place”, he’s more likely to hit you with each subsequent attack and the freezing will develop its own form of negative momentum.

We often hear of attacks where people were stabbed dozens and dozens of times. Can you imagine the degree of shock their body went into to permit this attack to continue? No one would volunteer to be stabbed dozens of times. Now imagine that because you “froze” that your loved one will in turn be raped or killed, that your final sight as you die will be of your most cherished person being viciously violated. How would that make you feel?

It all comes back to the foundation of motive over method. It’s the essence of everything. If you have trained yourself correctly, emphasizing your motivate to survive over the flash and label of your method, if you’ve entered into every training session with honest humility, calmly, safely and intelligently experimenting to see what works, absorbing the useful and discarding the usless, then you will be poised to survive. Then your goal—survival at all costs—will be clearly defined, unshadowed by doubt. Then you will have forged the reflex of continuance and try as your attacker may to stab and slash, you will charge continuously forward, unleashing your full potential, fighting until the combat has ended and you and your loved one are safe.

We are designed to survive. As Maltz noted, if we give our nervous system negative goals, it will become a negative mechanism but if we give our nervous system success goals, it will become a success-seeking mechanism. Commit yourself to your goals and remember always why you are training. You matter. You are worth protecting. Do what you must to minimize the risk of harm to you and those you protect. You deserve to survive.

MOVE IT OR LOSE IT by Kevin Secours

2010-03-08T15:34:00.003-05:00

A key distinction of the Russian martial arts is movement. Russian Sambo is often compared to modern Brazillian or Japanese Jujitsu as being "transitional" rather than "positional". Similarly, Russian Systema advocates continuous movement as one of it's central tenets. As obvious as the advantages of this seem to some however, there are still misconceptions and argument made against this logic.

I was confronted with the argument against most recently while reviewing an episode of The Deadliest Warrior depicting a fictional match up between Russian Spetsnaz and Green Beret soldiers. Representing Russian Spetsnaz are Systema instructors Sonny Puzikas and Maxim Franz. In one exchange, the Spetz soldiers are explaining how their training is superior because they learn to move more effectively and shoot and fight from all ranges and angles. The Green Beret proponent responds that if you need a back flipping hatchet attack, then call the Spetsnaz. His response to their fluid combat roll is to lower his barrel an inch to adjust his aim and shoot again. You can watch the clip in question here.

This is a common critique, and on the surface, a valid one. If someone was randomly rolling towards me and I was calmly standing still with my wits perfectly about me, I would lower my barrel an inch as well and squeeze off 2 controlled shots and call it a day. The difficulty is that to dismiss the Russian training approach so coyly is to miss the global point. In my first DVD, Primal Power, I assert that if you can't move your own body effectivfely, efficiently and gracefully in solo training, on your own, in ideal conditions, then adding a resistant attacker on top of you, raining down punches, certainly is not going to suddenly make you better. As I posted recently in previous blog entries, stress does not improve your performance--it erodes it.

The counter argument therefore would be, who cares if I can move gracefully? This is after all combat and not dance. The difficulty with this tempting logic is that in dismissing grace, we are dismissing efficiency and no one can argue against the value of maximizing efficiency. Training must convert us into the most confident pilots of our own bodies that we can be. In my years of teaching, I have seen law enforcement officers, who carry handcuffs as a part of their daily duties, become completely inept when the tables are turned and they themselves are cuffed (a very real possibility--if you carry something into a conflict, you must be prepared for it to be used against you). I can recall numerous training seminars, where the mat was filled with a sea of squiriming LEO's unable to get back onto their feet simply because their hands were cuffed (to say nothing of their ability to handle the reverse threat of being pushed to the ground in the same situation). Teaching the Coast Guard, I saw the very real challenge of working in diving suits and life jackets, bullet proof vest for officers, large back packs and related gear for military. You get the point. The idea is not to volunteer for a needless roll in the midst of combat or to invest in fanciness for the sake of aesthetics. The idea is to dissolve any notion of range or any distinction between standing and the ground. As Martin Wheeler has said elsewhere, there is one range and it is combat.

In a conventional situation, with a conventionally trained individual marching forward, arms stiffly forward in The Weaver Stance (cup and saucer position), the notion of changing levels and squating to one side while simultaneously shooting can feasibly be enough to evade and counter. This can be easily tested and experienced with paintball or simunitions as many Systema practitioners have seen and yes, it works against non-believers. While critics can easily dismiss this in isolation, in reality, the counter measure is no where close to as convenient or guaranteed. The strategies work on paper and in application. No Russian practitoner is claiming they are a guarantee, only that they are a more sensible counter measure to invest in than standing still and squeezing or laying and spraying.

Many opponents base their critique on their own lack of physical capacity--a valid one. If you can't do something, obviously you will not invest your training in this direction--but to dismiss a tactic on the basis of personal inability is unsound. You may not believe in fighting on the ground, kicking or knife throwing--you only need your attacker to believe in them and to be committed to cause you to have a bad day. As Sonny Puzikas has said, "Chaos is the law of the universe. Control is a dream of man. To fight without control, one must have faith."

In assessing the movement principles of the Russian martial arts, particularly within a military context, I am reluctant to call upon their widespread use as proof of their validity. That something is done by many does not make it valid or logical. Many illogical things have been used for centuries. The merit lies in testable results. Only through open-mindedly assessing and training both methods under conditions of stress, can the full value be perceived. I have and I have no doubts. I wish the same willingness to think outside of the box and to try something different to you all.