Integrated Fighting Systems Weblog

Restraining Subjects With Excited Delirium

2017-03-26T19:44:00.000-04:00

One questions that I have received a lot since releasing 20 Steps to Verbal Mastery is how to handle individuals in various severe states of mental delusion. Some of the key strategies are to avoid arguing with delusions without agreeing or making commitments. Tools like empathy, reframing and reiterating are also still potentially valid strategies. Focusing the subject and reducing environmental distractions is also a normal first step, but in cases of individuals in a state of certain delirium, verbal communication may fail.

Dr. Gary Vilke and Dr. Jason Payne-James have authored an interesting chapter specifically on Excited Delirium Syndrome (ExDS) in the new anthology, Current Practices in Forensic Medicine,vol. 2, available through Amazon.

Their research is particularly tailored to law enforcement. For those that don’t want to drop $100, the key take-aways are:

1-The longer it takes to restrain a highly agitated and violently disruptive individual, the higher the chance of injuries to the subject, the officers and bystanders. This is something widely known by anyone with experience but if you ever need a reference substantiating it, this is a good one.

2- In the opinion of these experts, verbal de-escalation efforts are likely to prove futile.

3-.Physical struggles will probably worsen the risk to the subject and officers involved and a TASER electronic control device may be the preferred choice for hurrying the afflicted party toward life-saving medical care.

4-Given its association with stimulant abuse and mental illness, the prevalence of Excited Delirium is already a matter of increasing concern that is likely to grow.

5- There is no way law enforcement of interventionists can make an official medical diagnosis during the crisis, but some key warning signs include:

-Delirium

-Agitation

-Constant physical activity

-Nonresponsive to verbal commands

-Superhuman strength and endurance

-Immune to pain

-Nudity or inappropriately little clothing

-Produce animal like noises

-Heavy sweating

-Attraction to or destruction of glass and reflective surfaces

-Intermittent quiet periods followed by outbursts

*Interestingly enough, they’ve basically just described Bruce Lee in the final scene of Enter the Dragon. Think about it for a minute.

The article stressed that any control tactic needs to seek to shut the subject down before they can accelerate and begin exerting themselves. Pain compliance was deemed unlikely to work—again something that most of us that have experience know first hand all too well.

Wrestling or fighting with delirious subjects will stimulate heavy physical exertion and have deleterious effects on their body chemistry and contribute to a greater risk for cardiac arrest. Subjects that do die as a result of the struggle, do so within minutes of it having ended. The reasons for the disproportionately high rate is still unknown and likely due to the combination of physiological and anatomical factors. In the end, the use of a TASER to gain control and restrain someone exhibiting signs of these symptoms may be preferable compared to “significant prolonged exertion”. That being said, Law enforcement that rely on TASERS already know that it is far from a magic bullet and only an assistant to a skillful arrest.

For individuals without the luxury of a TASER who must still attempt an empty handed intervention, I strongly encourage prioritizing the trunk over the limbs. The use of the harness and body lock is consistently the highest probability tactic for taking down a subject. For some ideas on the harness, try checking out this old blog entry here:

http://montrealsystema.blogspot.ca/2011/01/compassionate-restraint-by-kevin.html

For some good video material on this and ground control, consider checking out:

https://kevinsecours.pivotshare.com/media/fundamentals-of-responsible-power-belgium-2016-day-2-clinching-%26-takedowns/45085

My other takeaway for individuals who do not have a TASER on hand, are:

-Early detection is key. Integrate these unique aggression cues in your assessment scan. The typical use of tactical eye contact and the tactical triangle between the subject’s face and hands discussed in 20Steps to Verbal Mastery to monitor the balance between the subject’s intent and threat is more important than ever.

-Standard tactics of approaching and speaking in a calm, firm voice, and of reducing environmental stimuli and distractions should still always be your first priority. Although verbal tactics can fail with individuals in states of excited delirium, they do often work with individuals in a wide host of other states which can share some of these symptoms, including drug use and states of severe emotional arousal. As the article stressed, you cannot expect an interventionist to make an accurate diagnosis during the stress of the moment.

-Attempts to establish verbal engagement, along with uses of softer levels of force, are essential steps in justifying your use of force.

One final note on restraining subjects in states of delirium, for my money, nothing replaces vascular restraints as an ultimate fallback in empty handed intervention. I cannot imagine how differently many of my experiences would have turned out had I not resorted to chokes. You can never train the correct mechanics of your blood choke enough. No one exceeds the responsibility of constant training. I will be posting a blog on some essential choke tips as a refresher shortly. The choke has so often been the one thing that worked, the one tool in my bag that I knew I could rely upon, that I will always be a proponent of it regardless of public opinion.

More to follow shortly.

Severed Heads and the Will to Fight

2017-03-26T15:36:00.004-04:00

In the early 1990's, I attended a
weeklong training camp in the U.S..

All four of the instructors were

ex special forces. They taught a variety of skills. During one hand-to-hand demo, a participant asked: "What would you do if your hands were tied?" The instructor nodded. It was a nod that said: "Well, that's a completely different topic but what the hell, here we go" and so he started to demonstrated a technique with his hands clasped together behind his back. The student interrupted shortly thereafter and said: "But how would you do that seated?" The instructor sighed and said, "well, obviously the chair limits your mobility so you would need to start by..." and off he went on the new tangent, losing control of the lesson with good intentions. "But what if you're tied to the chair?" the student chirped soon after, and once again the soldier had options, each time, more limited and resolute. "But, what if you're surrounded by guys with guns?" the kid asked finally. The soldier sighed and said: "Kid, I think you need to hang out with different friends. How 'bout you worry about learning how to throw a basic hit first" and everyone chuckled.

This exchange points to a very important topic in combative training. The energy of "what if" is what leads us to train and prepare. It's what cast explorers across oceans and into the reaches of space. It's what cures diseases and invents new wonders. It's also what shackles us with fear sometimes. That same energy of curiosity can often times endlessly subdivide solutions with new problems, making the challenge of that problem so complex and large that it can seem unbeatable.

I always recommend that students start training with a value inventory, remembering all of the things that matter to them and strengthening the very reason they are training. Motive matters more than method and while technique and strategy is good and necessary, WHY you are training always matters more than WHAT you are training in. A psychopath with the intent to harm will find a way to apply a flower arranging class with lethal intent. Conversely, even the best combative training in the world can not compensate for a lack of motive--though it can hopefully lead a student towards an identification and strengthening of it. I'm not saying how you train doesn't matter. I am simply stating that WHY you train matters more. It should be your first priority and it should be constantly be revisited and reaffirmed.

I will share another experience from the early 90's. Back then I was completing art school, with the intent of being a teacher of the visual arts rather than the martial arts. I was studying Gericault, among other artists, and came upon a selection of sketches he had done of heads that had been freshly severed by the guillotine. The expressions on these faces were chilling. Some calm, some in pain, some frightened. Some, were aggressive, the straw from the wicker baskets into which they had fallen poking into their lips and nostrils and gums. My instructor told us that sometimes, the heads would continue to fight and try to eat their way out of the baskets after being decapitated. I couldn't believe this. This was pre-internet so I hit the library that night. The librarian was of little help because when I asked her what I was looking for, she started at me like I was insane. Eventually, I found records of decapitations by guillotine, where the heads continued to function for a brief period. Throughout history, people have recounted heads that were severed continuing to move and twitch, but much more than this, there were accounts of heads raised up to crowds that looked back with intent, with eyes that scanned and focused on the crowds. There were accounts of eyes fixating on individuals. There were accounts of mouths murmuring words. Some accounts implied periods of activity lasting 30 seconds after decapitation. An example of such an incident was written in 1905 in the French Archives of Criminal Anthropology (Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle). The supervising physician, Dr. Beaurieux, recounted the reactions of the convicted murderer Languille:

"...immediately after the decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds … I waited for several seconds. The spasmodic movements ceased.The face relaxed, the lids half closed on the eyeballs, leaving only the white of the conjunctiva visible, exactly as in the dying whom we have occasion to see every day in the exercise of our profession, or as in those just dead.It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: ‘Languille!’ I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions … Next Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves … After several seconds, the eyelids closed again, slowly and evenly, and the head took on the same appearance as it had had before I called out.It was at that point that I called out again and, once more, without any spasm, slowly, the eyelids lifted and undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids, but now less complete. I attempted the effect of a third call; there was no further movement and the eyes took on the glazed look which they have in the dead. I have just recounted to you with rigorous exactness what I was able to observe. The whole thing had lasted twenty-five to thirty seconds."

Modern research suggests that there is likely only a few seconds of consciousness, following the massive drop in blood pressure which would quickly draining the brain of function. The remainder is likely involuntary electrical activity. Either way, I find motivation in this gruesome phenomenon.

I was already teaching the martial arts back in the 1990's and I went to my school that night and relayed the story. Some people get dropped and killed by a single punch. Some people survive 60 stab wounds and fight on. You can never know how much you'll endure, but I know one thing. So long as I have a pump left in my heart, I will gnaw at my attacker like a severed head through a basket, I told them. To this day, this gruesome example somehow remains a comforting thought for me. It personifies the drive to survive. Recently, one of my students said, "but those heads are dead anyway, and all that gnawing doesn't end up making a difference". I replied, "it makes all the difference in the world. At the end of the day, you can choose to focus on gnawing through the basket, or you can choose to focus on the basket that is limiting you. Which road you choose will affect how you live your life and see your world every step of the way until then."

We can't train for everything. We can't control what happens to us,. We can however control how we perceive these threats and how we live our lives every step of the way.

And if you need a slightly more light-hearted take on this gruesome example of resolve, I leave you with this classic to clean your palette.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhRUe-gz690

Facts in the Fight: The Truth About Self Defense and Sexual Violence by Peter Jensen and Margie Serrato

2017-03-23T14:38:00.002-04:00

International Combat Systema Association (ICSA) and GOTAC leaders highlighted the issue of sexual violence against women in their video response to Justice Robin Camp’s remarks during a criminal trial [see news story here]. Camp’s troubling remarks, directed at the rape victim in the case, put the onus of responsibility on her based on misguided ideas that: 1) women, particularly if consuming alcohol, are inviting sexual contact or assault; 2) sex is sometimes painful, therefore forced sex is not necessarily a crime; and 3) victims can successfully fend off attackers if they really want to - in this case, by keeping one’s knees together or skewing one’s pelvis. Offering solidarity to those who have faced sexual violence, the video reviewed some fundamental principles and techniques for self-defense against sexual assault. To complement the video, this article introduces the wide range of information and research available on women’s self-defense against sexual violence. As a community who relies on rigor and evidence-based practice to inform training, ICSA instructors and students may find this article a useful gateway for improving existing training curriculums on sexual violence self-defense.

Before discussing the self-defense related findings in this article, it is important to emphasize a point addressed in the video response. Specifically, that it is not a victim’s responsibility to avoid sexual violence. Responsibility for sexual violence lies solely with the individual perpetrating the aforementioned crime. The findings and recommendations in this article are not designed as “tips” and “strategies” for women to avoid sexual assault - and inherently shift responsibility onto the woman who is attacked [1]. Instead, for those who train in women’s self-defense or are considering such training, there may be questions about what beliefs to hold about the efficacy of the training that they complete or choose to begin. The information in this article aims to address some of these questions and offer resources for continued explorations on questions about training in self-defense against sexual violence.

THREAT

The threat of sexual violence for women remains persistent in both Canada and the United States. A recent study examined the views of first-year university students in Canada and found that more than one in four women reported having a history of being sexually assaulted [2]. The research study - led by Dr Charlene Senn of University of Windsor - uncovered a number of other key findings:

More than half of the women reported experiencing one or more forms of victimization since the age of 14.
Over one-third were either raped or experienced attempted rape at least once, and 23.5% had been raped.
Sexual assault through the use of drugs, force, or threats had been experienced by half of the women.
Men used force in nearly half (48.3% and 44.3%) of all rapes and attempted rapes.

Similar rates of sexual violence against women exist in the United States [3]. Without question, a significant and persistent threat exists for women in Canada and the United States. With this evidence, one question raised by those in the self-defense community might be: what does research say about the role of self-defense in preventing, countering, and resisting sexual violence?

FIGHT

Studies on sexual violence resoundingly indicate that fighting back during a sexual assault is associated with a reduced likelihood of rape. However, it is important to note and explain to those considering training that, in the past, women were encouraged to not resist if faced with such a situation [4]. The concern was that if women resisted their attackers, the attackers would be angered and the victims would be in further peril; if they did not resist, their attackers would presumably be more gentle - which was also a misguided remark made by Judge Camp in the aforementioned trial. Such misinformed ideology is still inaccurately perpetuated in popular media and in outdated resources for women on avoiding rape. Dispelling this myth is an important task for self-defense instructors and practitioners to undertake. Three recent articles reviewed the considerable research and national reporting on the relationship between resistance to a sexual assault and rape avoidance [4, 5, 6]. Findings from these studies indicate that:

There is a 91% decrease in the odds of experiencing rape when a person defends themselves with a knife, gun, or other weapon. Further, there is an 85% decrease when individuals used other physical resistance tactics.
Physically resisting sexual violence is not associated with a greater risk of physical injury to a woman.
Non-Forceful Physical Resistance (e.g. blocking strikes, fleeing) lessens the likelihood of rape and is unrelated to physical injury.
Forceful Verbal Resistance (e.g. threatening the attacker, screaming, yelling at the attacker) is related to rape avoidance, but research has not found a relationship regarding the risk of physical injury to this defense response.
Non-Forceful Verbal Resistance (e.g. reasoning, pleading, begging with an attacker) is related to greater severity of sexual abuse and unrelated to physical injury.

These findings strongly support the overall merit in physically resisting - either forcefully or non-forcefully - during a sexual violence encounter. These findings are consistent with the contemporary understanding that sexual assault and rape are related to power, not only sex. Perpetrators of sex-related crimes are in actual or perceived positions of power [7]. Thus, challenging an attacker’s power through physical resistance is an effective response, while non-forceful verbal resistance is ineffective because it enhances the attacker’s sense of power. Fighting back against those who perpetrate sexual violence is an acceptable and basic solution for a complex and endemic threat - except that it is challenged by a disturbing finding. Specifically, that the vast majority of attackers in a sexual violence encounter against women are not strangers.

SOCIAL CONTEXT

A recent national survey in the United States found that 44.7% of perpetrators of sexual violence against women were acquaintances and 41.7% were either a spouse or partner [3]. The remaining groups of perpetrators included strangers (5.3%) and a person they had dated (3.6%). As instructors and students of self-defense, the implications of these findings may not be immediately apparent. The relevance of these findings come to light when posing the question: How much of your self-defense training has included application of physical resistance (i.e., self-defense skills) against an acquaintance or spouse/partner? Does your self-defense curriculum address the psychological demand to enact physical and/or verbal violence against someone normally trusted?

Humans are social beings. We are influenced - even under the threat of violence and harm - by deeply held societal norms. As discussed previously in this weblog, psychological inhibitions play a complex role in self-defense. Further, Western society socializes women into being gentle, non-violent, feminine, and fragile [4]. Self-defense training against sexual assault must consider these aspects of human culture. Modern, evidence-based women’s self-defense programs incorporate into training curriculums the social dynamics and psychological barriers related to the challenge of defending oneself against an acquaintance or partner/spouse.

For example, Dr Senn and her colleagues examined the effectiveness of a comprehensive women’s sexual assault resistance program implemented at three universities in Canada [8]. Women who completed the resistance training reported significantly lower incidence of rape and attempted rape than a control group of students who only received brochures on sexual assault (i.e., the university standard education practice). Given that the training program consisted of only 4 three-hour sessions, these study findings are promising. Self-defense instructors and students may consider leveraging practices from modern resistance programs, such as those used in Dr Senn’s research, in order to improve existing training curriculum.

CONCLUSION

Perhaps the most important message in this article is that women’s self-defense against sexual violence occurs within a societal context. Instructors and students of self-defense against sexual violence should be encouraged that physical resistance is related to a reduced likelihood of rape. Yet, review of training curriculums might be in order to ensure that societal and cultural factors are considered. Research - such as that conducted by Dr Senn - is a useful resource to inform and update training and address the broader context involved with women’s self-defense against sexual violence.

REFERENCES

[1] Bedera, N., & Nordmeyer, K. (2015). “Never Go Out Alone”: An Analysis of College Rape Prevention Tips. Sexuality & Culture, 19, 533-542.

[2] Senn, C. Y., Eliasziw, M., Barata, P. C., Thurston, W. E., Newby-Clark, I. R., Radtke, H. L., & Hobden, K. L. (2014). Sexual violence in the lives of first-year university women in Canada: no improvements in the 21st century. BMC Women's Health, 14, 1-8. Articlelink

[3] Black, M. C., Basile, K. C., Breiding, M. J., Smith, S. G., Walters, M. L., & Merrick, M. T. (2012). The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2010 Summary Report. Atlanta: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; 2011. Articlelink

[4] Gidycz, C. A., & Dardis, C. M. (2014). Feminist Self-Defense and Resistance Training for College Students A Critical Review and Recommendations for the Future. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 15, 322-333.

[5] Hollander, J. A. (2016). The importance of self-defense training for sexual violence prevention. Feminism & Psychology, 26, 207–226. Articlelink

[6] Brecklin, L. R. (2008). Evaluation outcomes of self-defense training for women: A review. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 13, 60-76.

[7] Groth, A. N., Burgess, W., Holmstrom, L. L. (1977). Rape: Power, anger, and sexuality. American Journal of Psychiatry, 134, 1239-43.

[8] Senn, C. Y., Eliasziw, M., Barata, P. C., Thurston, W. E., Newby-Clark, I. R., Radtke, H. L., & Hobden, K. L. (2015). Efficacy of a sexual assault resistance program for university women. New England Journal of Medicine, 372, 2326-2335. Articlelink

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

PeterJensen, is a Combat Systema instructor and holds a doctorate degree in sport psychology and motor behavior. A former director of the United States Military Academy Center for Enhanced Performance, he has also served as a United States Army Special Forces officer during multiple combat deployments in Southwest Asia. He is a Certified Consultant - Association for Applied Sport Psychology (CC-AASP) and has published several articles on military hand-to-hand combat.

Margie Serrato, is an experienced martial artist in a variety of disciplines and the assistant editor for Martial Arts of the World: An Encyclopedia of History and Innovation. She earned her doctorate degree in anthropology and her dissertation research included immersion and training with the United States Modern Army Combatives Program at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. She is currently a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow and working at TutorGen, an educational technology company.

Association, Disassociation and Associative Flexibility

2015-05-28T13:08:00.003-04:00

My sensei leaned into my ear. “Focus on the contraction” he whispered. “Can you feel it right in the middle of the muscle?” and he hammered my arm with an open palm to drive the point home. My arms were on fire. I had been holding the same stance for half an hour now. My mind was teetering on the verge of self-pity. “Now feel the center of that contraction and squeeze it even harder.” Somehow I went deeper, feeling the very core of the activation. This type of focus on physical cues is what is termed Association training. Flash forward a decade. I walk into my dojo, throw on some music to get me pumped and start working out on the heavy bag until my playlist is done. Workout out by distracting yourself from the strain is known as Disassociation.

Roughly 50% of individuals initiating an exercise program will quit in the first 6 months.[i] Is discomfort and exertion the main reason for this? Certainly anyone who runs a martial arts school knows that retention is a huge consideration in maintaining a healthy enrollment and keeping their school sustainable. Despite the proven advantages of physical activity, gyms everywhere must contend with this reality every day. The added value of self-defence training does little to temper these dropout rates for martial arts schools. The simple reality remains that most people quit within the first few months. As our society becomes increasingly sedentary, physical inactivity coupled with poor diet are responsible for a substantial amount of preventable deaths, making the importance of curbing this trend extend well past gym owners or fitness lovers, to our society as a whole.[ii]

Within the fitness domain, many have turned to the individual’s perception of exertion as a possible solution, namely. The belief is that by distracting a client from their discomfort (disassociation) fitness professionals are able to keep their clients more motivated than if they focused on the pain of their workout (association)? The basic theory runs like this: rather than focusing on the immediate responses created by the exertion (i.e. the particular burning in a muscle group as an indication of correct execution) focus is shifted onto environmental stimuli, like watching a TV monitor or focusing on the beat of music. Research has been confusing at best and both approaches have been shown to be effective in some cases, so I would like to highlight a few of the most interesting findings so that we maximize the latest research in this field.

A central factor is exercise intensity. If an exercise is perceived as over-whelming in intensity, it is not considered enjoyable and the practitioner is less likely to repeat it.[iii] This is critical to novices who are often returning to activity after long absences and even more important for novices who have never even acquired a fitness base and to whom the whole experience is daunting and foreign. So, when designing your own workout and programs for beginners, in most cases disassociation and focusing on distracting and positive stimuli appears to be a helpful tool.[iv] Rejeski argued that this is because perception is not a passive process but rather an active one that can be influenced by cognitive manipulation.[v] [vi] He proposed that exercise of low to moderate intensity and duration was less physically demanding and therefore permitted greater psychological involvement. As exercise becomes more physically stressful, physiological cues become more dominant and psychological factors get bypassed. This model also considers that individual tolerances can vary and that the point where psychological motives subside to physical ones can vary. Psychological intervention may therefore be able to extend the threshold where psychological factors remain influential. Tolerance is likely determined more by the actual exertion required than by any universal intensity standard. What is stressful and challenging for one may be manageable and familiar for another. Physiological parameters like ventilatory threshold and blood lactate accumulation as well as breath depth and frequency are likely better metrics of individual exertion and tolerance thresholds. Simply put, as body states become less comfortable and steady, the brain switches from the more meta-cognitive operations of the forebrain to the more primal, direct routes that bypass the cortex. [vii]

TIP 1: Have training times where you can keep things simpler for new comers when planning a class and give yourself the time to slowly learn new techniques and exercises until they become familiar.

A second key finding is that flexibility and adaptability is necessary when implementing any training method. This is something that I have long advocated in my own curriculum. Consider the role of breath retraining (which is largely a disassociation technique). In the Russian martial arts, there is heavy use of breath stretching to a consideration of 4-phases (inhale, fullness, exhale, emptiness), with equal or exaggerated importance being given to all 4 sections. This is often referred to as square breathing. Often, breath work is linked to rhythms, such as exercise repetitions (i.e. inhaling on your first rep, holding the lungs full on the second, exhaling on your third rep and staying empty on your fourth). This method (Pace Assisted Assocation / Disassociation) or PADA, was pioneered by W.E. Simes for use in running, with stride counts being linked to breath.[viii] This was found to be most effective in uphill running in order to maintain cognitive disassociation from the strain and to avoid allowing the body to slip into anaerobic supplementation. In many Systema approaches breath counts are strictly prescribed and enforced and students believe that exact formulas hold the key to specific achievement. I have seen students struggling to enforce breath patterns that they simply cannot manage and then conclude that they are somehow failing. What we have found to be far more effective in our approach, is to introduce some general arbitrary patterns for one of two phases of any exercise and then to encourage tweaking and adjusting the shape of that square. Students are encouraged to immediately identify the shape of their own square, which is often more rectangular (with two phases being longer than others) or even triangular (with one phase being minimized until it is almost not existent. Some approaches are simply not comfortable for certain individuals and the mere idea of them add more stress than they resolve. Practitioners must be permitted to explore methods as they see fit and to adapt them to their preferences and this research further supports the need for flexibility.

TIP 2: Stay flexible and allow yourself and students to adapt techniques and exercises to different capacities and preferences.

Emotional stress is also a factor. In one study, participants were divided into 3 groups: group 1 was told they would run for 20 minutes on a treadmill. Group 2 was told they would run for 10 minutes but were then told at the tenth minute that they would run for another 10. Group 3 was told to run without any time limit and made to run for 20 minutes. Group 2, had the largest and quickest decline in pleasure ratings and it occurred between minute 10-11 which reinforces the idea that familiarity and knowing what to expect contributes to greater levels of pleasure and that surprise and variability can cause discomfort.[ix] In designing our own training regimen or classes for others, some degree of regularity and structure is ideal. In classes, ritual or routine can serve this purpose as can dividing lessons into accelerated and fundamental classes. Similarly, announcing topics in advance can also be a good way to help students gauge what they can expect.

TIP 3: Maintain predictable elements when structuring your routine to have a base of familiarity and help control emotional stress.

Remember that some degree of surprise is also necessary. Surprise helps keep routines fresh and stimulating and helps bolster motivation. In fitness training, surprise helps shock the muscles into constant periods of adaptation and require more effort from the body. In combative terms, surprise is intrinsic to the end state that we are training for, whether it be sport or the street and must be present in our combative training to help us inoculate us to that stress.

Stress and discomfort is also integral to achieving higher levels of mastery. I have written extensively about the role of deliberate practice in achieving high level skill. Deliberate practice requires micro correction, stress and discomfort and focus on the task at hand. It is a highly associative technique that is required to break through to higher level of performance. What seems most likely is that some degree of attentional flexibility is essential.

· Students need to be allowed to oscillate between focusing on both internal and external cues, as the intensity of the exercise dictates. [x], [xi]

· Disassociation seems most beneficial at early stages of training and association seems unavoidable at higher levels of exertion as we have seen.

· Furthermore, association is necessary for achieving the specialization and concentration intrinsic to deliberate practice.

· Furthermore, in many studies, regardless of intensity, participants have refused to adhere to the strategy they were assigned pointing again to the importance of not only flexibility, but also the freedom and confidence to choose at will. [xii],[xiii],[xiv],[xv] It seems likely that association is unavoidable when exercises reach a sufficiently high intensity. [xvi], [xvii], [xviii], [xix],[xx]

One final consideration is the use of attentional focus strategies during post-exercise experiences.[xxi] Managing how an experience is registered in an individual’s memory may be critical in affecting their motivation to continue engaging in that exercise. If oscillating between association and disassociation seems likely to be the most effective strategy, post-exercise control of affectation can help further ensure that students leave with a positive perception of their experience. Verbal debriefings, visualization, relaxation drills, meditation and the familiarity of rituals or routines likely contribute in increasingly positive memories of the experience.

TIP 4: Try incorporating visualization or discussion after particularly intense association-based training intervals, to help students reframe their experience and bolster their motivation to engage in their training again.

These are just a few key findings from the field of association and disassociation training that radically improve the effectiveness of your training. This summer, during the 2015 ICSA Adaptability training camp, our sub-theme will be implementation of these strategies to help us optimize training programs for ourselves and our students. To find out more about the camp, click here.

Special thanks to Dr. Lt. Col. Peter Jensen for his continuing support and inspiration.

[i] Dishman RK, Buckworth J. Increasing physical activity: a quantitative synthesis. Med Sci Sports Exerc 1996; 28: 706-19

[ii] Mokdad A.H., Marks JS, Stroup DF, et al. Actual causes of death in the Unites States, 2000. JAMA 2005; 293: 293-4

[iii]Emmons R.A. Diener E. A goal-affect analysis of everyday situational choices. J Res Pers 1986; 20: 309-26

[iv] Rejeski WJ, Kenney EA. Fitness motivation: preventing participant dropout. Champaign (IL): Human Kinetics, 1988

[v] Rejeski WJ. The perception of exertion: a social psycho-physiological integration. J. Sport Psycholo 1981; 4: 305-20

[vi] Rejeski WJ. Perceived exertion: an active or passive process? J Sport Psychol 1984; 7: 371-8

[vii] Ekkekakis P, Acevedo EO. Affective responses to acute exercise toward a psycholbiological dose-response model. In: Acevedo EO, Ekkekakis P, editors, Psychobiological of physical activity. Champaign (IL): Human Kinetics

, 2006-91-109

[viii] Simes WE. A new look at association/disassociation in long distance runners. Running Psychol 1982; 4: 1-3

[ix] Brewer BW, Van Raalte JL, Linder DE, Attentional focus and endurance performance. Appl Res Coahing Athi Ann 1996

[x] Moran AP, Cognitive style constructs in sport: explanatory and attentional processes in athletes. Int J Educ Res 1998; 29: 277-86

[xi][xi] Moran AP, The psychology of concentragtinon in sport performers: a cognitive analysis, East Sussex (UK): Psychology Press, 1996

[xii] Sachs, ML. The mind of the runner: cognitive strategies used during running. In: Sachs MI, Buffone GW, editors, Running as therapy: an integrated approach. Lincoln (NE): University of Nebraska Press, 1984: 288-303

[xiii] Couture RT, Jerome W. Tihanyi J. Can associative and disassociative strategies affect the swimming performance of recreational swimmers. Sport Psych, 1999: 13: 334-43

[xiv] Brewer BW, Van Raalte JL, Linder DE, Attentional focus and endurance performance. Appi Res Coaching Athl Ann 1996; 11:1-14

[xv] Okwumabua TM, Meyrs AW, Schleser R, et al. Cognitive strategies and running perforamcne: an exploratory study. Cognit Ther Res 1983; 7: 363-70

[xvi] Tenenbaum G. Connolly CT. Attention allocation under varied workload and effort perception in rowers. Psych Sport Exerc 2008; 9: 704-17

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Psychic Energy, No Contact Work and Other Tangents of the Martially Misguided

2014-10-20T14:29:00.003-04:00

“A primordial, unquenchable thirst for the miraculous is hidden in the Russian man.”-Nokolai Berdyayev, philosopher

Would you like to be able to make a throng of students collapse like choking fish with the wave of your hand, to steer a grappler mid-shoot with combat jazz hands or grab an attacker’s weapon mid-flight and twist it until your opponent is twisted up like 2 ropes in a dryer? The reality is that a good amount of you must secretly long for this given the sheer volume of instructors pandering the power of psychic martial arts. This insanity is particularly ripe in the Russian martial arts which I love. Go on youtube and before long you will trip over an assortment of hokey clips of touchless self-defence and displays of psychic energy. Students are made to fall with the wave of a hand or left contorted in twitchy pretzels with little to no contact. If you are like most people, this is justifiably enough to turn you off the arts completely.

I constantly get students coming into my school asking me to show them how to use psychic energy. I always tell them that I think it’s all bunk. About half of them wink at me as if this is some type of test and join any way, presumably waiting to be worthy. In the meantime I teach them stuff that works and how to think critically. One spectator even said: “I hope you don’t mind but while you were teaching, I went into your aura. The thing that was most amazing was that although your aura was fuchsia, it tasted tangerine”. I get that all the time. The other half leave, presumably disappointed with my “lack” of skill.

The Russian traditions are hip-deep in mysticism. Records from the 10^th century, show that Slavic warrior traditions were tightly fused with their pagan beliefs. Faith healing, a belief in energy from the moon and sun, and dedications to Perun, the all-father god and patron saint of the martial arts were key components of their training. With the rise of Christendom, most of these practices were made illegal. Participation in the traditional arts could result in everything from excommunication to a loss of burial rights to public flogging. Despite this, many of these traditions survived.

Although spiritual traditions were publically repressed when the Soviets came to power in 1917, they still maintained a strong influence. Religious sectarians played a large role in the formation of Bolshevism and as authors Richita Bhattacharyya and Liz Goodwin noted, Communism shared many ideologies with Gnosticism. Despite the Gnostic rejection of state and church, they were deeply nationalistic and shared the Communists’ hostility to foreign invaders, particularly the West. Much more importantly, repression has a tendency to strengthen the attraction of faith. In the words of Sergei Leskov of the Moscow Times:

“History has shown us many times that a mass passion for mysticism is a sign of social crisis. In periods of social upheaval people need a psychological defense, crave consolation. People unconsciously seek out someone strong to comfort and protect them. The Soviet man [was] not used to relying on himself. During decades of Communist rule, people got used to looking to someone else to solve their problems, someone who could free them from the anxiety induced by complex and incomprehensible problems.”

The Soviet penchant for the paranormal is now widely known, including their intense research of remote viewing, telepathy and telekinesis during the cold war. Soviet martial research waded out alongside the rest of it into the paranormal. Old footage shows practitioners performing touchless defenses and no-contact fighting. How much this footage was intended as propaganda and how much it was actually believed by the Soviets is a matter of debate. In either case, the ensuing fall of Communism led to a massive resurgence in religion and a wholesale embrace of all manner of supernatural charlatans in modern Russia.

The more interesting question is how do otherwise normal individuals get lulled into this madness. Are they simply devout believers? The structure of the Russian arts would seem to discourage this type of delusion. While the Asian arts typically advocate strict structures, ranks, rituals and apprenticeship which would seem to promote cultish behavior, the Russian arts are at their root far more open, encouraging play and free expression. This freedom does not ensure a freedom of thinking unfortunately.

One particularly problematic aspect is what the Russian arts commonly term “slow” or “soft” work, a spontaneous and adaptive flow drill that depends on a high degree of consensus among partners. From a sport performance perspective, slow work allows students to identify their errors and make corrections during the movement, leading to repetition and reinforcement of better movements. It builds mobility and encourages exploration and is important for skill confidence since it allows the practitioner to feel success in their movement. The difficulty is that if slow work becomes too large of a focus, it risks encouraging a false perception of reality. Slow work is not a complete training method in itself. In the three-tiered formula for stress inoculation first outlined by Donald Meichenbaum at the University of Waterloo, it is simply the rehearsal phase. To be effective in preparing the student for stress, it first requires a strong education phase. Students must know what they are trying to achieve with their slow work in order for it to have direction. Too many camps hide behind the banner of “intuitive learning” and in so doing fail to provide the basic parameters to be effective. This is the first step towards faith-based training rather than objective analysis, measurement and error correction.

When performing slow work, it is imperative that all participants move at congruent speeds. Too often, defenders allow themselves to become over excited and to move at disproportionately quicker speeds. Take a quick survey of some of the top masters of any art employing slow training on the net. Watch the clip through entirely. We naturally tend to watch the expert working. Then re-watch the clip studying only the mock attackers. You’ll quickly notice that most clips are not "alive". Attackers are often like zombies, moving much slower than the defenders and generally leave their attacks hanging in the air far longer than they ever would in a real situation.

Adding fuel to this fire is the dogmatic emphasis on relaxation in many approaches. One leading Systema master openly expressed that anything that brings your pulse rate above 80 beats per minute is “poor systema”. Sports performance research refutes this fully and consistently indicates that we have a “zone of optimal performance”, where arousal gives much more than it takes, that exists in all elite performers between 115-145 bpm. By setting impossible degrees of relaxation as a goal, you only succeed in creating a constant sense of failure in the student that begins to erode skill confidence. It also creates the habit of over-thinking what should otherwise be automatic which keeps the student perpetually in the rehearsal phase. The end result is a practitioner that is self-doubting, second guessing and ripe for influence on par with hypnotic pre-conditioning.

As with hypnotic states, it is difficult to know exactly what is occurring. As mentalist Derren Brown has noted in his book "Tricks of the Mind", factors include:

o SHARED BENEFIT: First, the subject may simply be faking. In the case of martial demonstrations, there can be a vested interest in making the instructor appear to be extremely proficient. After all, the master’s proficiency justifies the student's allegiance to the teacher or the style and ultimately serves to strengthen the reputation of the company/business of the style itself.

o EMBARASSMENT: Second, the subject may consciously be faking his attacks and pulling his punches only because he is embarrassed by the entire experience. Social pressure is extremely powerful and I have often seen instructors chip away at students' self-image by saying:

§ "What I just did would have worked on you if you weren't so tense."

§ "I won't be able to show the work because your organs aren’t ready to take these types of hits."

§ "No one would attack like that in reality. You were able to do that only because you know what I am trying to do."

Even if we give the speakers of these comments the benefit of the doubt and assume these comments were well-intended and not just their ego vomiting, very little changes—the comments remain poisonous to the student’s self-image and skills confidence. Moreover, whether intentional or not, they foster the growth of a flock mentality and create followers not free-thinkers. This invariably leads to a shared delusion of competence in the absence of measurement or realistic testing.

o PERSONAL EXPLORATION: Third, the subject is consciously trying to help the process along in order to optimize his experience. A student might submit to the process in order to explore their own fear and tension. While superficially, these comments sound like valid justifications for cooperation, they ultimately detract from the objective at hand—namely, to learn valid, real-world self-defense skills.

o PLAYING THE PART: Fourth, the subject simply has an out-going, effusive personality and is happy to be a part of the show. As Brown notes, these people are most likely to genuinely feel something from the state, often inexplicable energies, etc. In martial demonstrations this can also include the mock attacker simply being ego-formed and confident in their own capacities. They consciously recognize that the demonstration is forced and ineffective but they have no need to rock the boat or express their beliefs. Many honest seekers in the martial realm, particularly those with a clear structure to their beliefs and real-world experience and success, would rather let sleeping dogs lie and move on.

The third and final component of the learning cycle in Meichenbaum’s stress inoculation model is to pressure test the technique. Pressure testing simply involves experimenting with the technique or principle at hand against a more resistant partner. The degree of pressure testing can vary widely. Naturally, it is impossible to ever fully replicate the realities of combat without actually fighting and since no sane human is willing to train in an environment where students are constantly being maimed or killed, the entire notion of "full contact" training is a misnomer. At best, we are seeking to find the balance between the degrees of resistance that we find necessary to cement and solidify our individual skills confidence with the degree of risk each of us is reasonably willing to endure for the sake of training. To borrow from Jared Diamond, we each have a unique calculus. As I have said elsewhere, there is no logic in replacing the possibility of one day getting attacked and hurt in the street, with the absolute certainty of getting maimed in the training hall every single night. The avoidance of injury and death is precisely why we are training in the first place. To paraphrase combatives expert Tony Blauer, we must decide what degree of lie we are willing to settle for. At best, pressure testing is an imperfect measure of combat proficiency, but at the very least it is a more accurate measure than noncontact environments. As Bruce Lee noted so succinctly:

"You can't learn to swim standing on the beach."

Some argue that psychic energy work is not about the master’s capacity but rather about discovering the student’s weaknesses. I’ve been involved in training where we evolved from diving and falling over physical objects, then reduced the threat incrementally to a partner’s gestures, “acting as if” the gesture was a threat and softly adapting to the feigned attack to study our capacity to fall and evade. I can see the value of this type of training in small doses. The difficulty I have is that same session was later marketed as an example of psychic energy work, including narration that said: “And now Kevin will use the force…”. I can assure you that no such force was used or felt during the training. In other cases, a strong series of face punches to the individual will soften them up to drop at the mere promise of a raised hand. How treating a partner like an abused puppy can be beneficial to them I do not know. The relevance to actual combat is low if any. Granted, if you break someone’s nose in a fight, you may influence them or other attackers in the group, but the effects are never reliable and do not require practicing.

In the end, there is very little value in any aspect of so called no touch work. If you want to learn effective fakes and baits, train boxing, kali or fencing, where there is a real pressure test to punish failed timing and control of distance. If you want to learn how to reduce the amount of strength required in a technique, add pressure and repetitions. Spar, wrestle, box, simulate, over and over again. Touchless work is a heavy stone that rocks the scale towards delusion and not a bright light assisting self-understanding. I realize that most people reading this are equipped to easily dismiss touchless work as the sham that it is. The greater danger is that we allow elements in our training to invite the quiet growth of belief in the absurd in our partners and students. Think of the ki master who challenged the mma fighter. It seems that he honestly thought that he would win that fight without contact. After the first punch to the face, look at his expression as he stared at his own blood. He was stunned. Let him be the mascot for the dangers of delusion in your training. The simple truth is that measurement and testing is the only way to grow your capacity. Otherwise you will only grow your delusion.

The Deliberate Practice Camp

2014-03-24T14:23:00.000-04:00

I was 12 years old the first time I can remember being annoyed by someone calling me “gifted”. I remember it vividly. A friend of my mom, wearing perfume that smelled like dollar store hand soap, was holding a panel of comic art I had drawn in hands clanking with over-sized rings. She said: “Wow, you were really born with a gift!” She meant well but that simple phrase triggered something hot inside of me. I was mad and I didn’t know why.

I grew up most of my life being a talented artist. My first memories were of drawing with my sister Linda who was the family’s art pioneer. She was passionately committed to drawing with me every chance she got. That kindled an early habit of drawing. By the time I got to school, I was already far ahead of the curve. I had pencils with different lead qualities, I knew how to smudge and blend and I was using formal techniques I wouldn’t be taught until high school. I drew for hours

A Frazetta sketch in its full glory

every day. In high school, I always had a sketchbook in tow, dog-eared with pages scrubbed by inky hatching. That’s why, when that lady called me gifted, I thought to myself, I hadn’t miraculously come head first from the womb with a paint brush in my teeth. I had earned my skill. Certainly I had been fortunate to have been exposed to art so young and I was supported in my pursuit of it, but what part of this skill was given to me? What about all the nights I spent tracing Frank Frazetta sketches and studying Boris Valejo’s reflected light and half tones. What about all of the frustration I felt when I ruined a perfect gesture with some clumsy inking or bad lettering. The amount of re-dos, the thousands of pages that were ripped angrily from sketch books as I struggled to overcome the daunting blank page that mocked my intent and the canvases that were painted over exceed inventory. Everything I had certainly seemed hard earned.

The language of giftedness haunted me throughout my education. Often, even people who shared my belief that skill was earned and not pre-ordained, were burdened by the language and habits of convention. It wasn’t until I was completing my undergraduate degree in education at McGill University that I encountered the research by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson. Working at Florida State University, Ericsson had refuted the idea that talent was innate. Excepting a few notable exceptions, like height for a basketball player or horse jockey, he insisted that talent was not genetically prescribed. Ericsson insisted that talent was earned over a life of deliberate, intentional, focused trying.

From that day onward, the idea took root beyond my sketchbook. I had already been a student of the martial arts for over a decade. In that domain, hard work was also necessary, but it was precisely the nature of instruction that varied so massively. In the visual arts, I worked arduously in my solo time, sometimes frantically, restarting, redoing and refining. Time was filled with the inspired mechanics of testing and exploration, the lessons of failure and the joy of minute successes taking form in accumulations of surprising discovery. When I studied art in school, teachers gave us a challenge and then left us to discover, using the habits and mechanics we had each honed in our solo work. In the martial arts however, things were different. My boyhood kung-fu movie education had left me fantasizing about tying rocks to my ankles, punching trees and balancing on narrow columns but the first dojo I attended was quite the opposite. There, everyone stood in neat rows performing 10 repetitions of every hit or block in symmetry, followed by a stand-alone drill, perhaps an escape from a hold or a three-point sparring drill—all neatly contained with no room for interpretation. It was cookie-cutter, uninspired, and it bored me for 6 years but there was nothing better available and so I learned what I could from it.

Enter the importance of Ericsson once again. Ericsson found that experts don’t merely practice more than the average practitioner. Experts tend to break skills down into their smallest components and then drill and refine each “chunk” individually. This is dependent on critique and

Ericsson

coaching. You must have feedback. In my young art career, I knew when something didn’t look right and even when I didn’t no one seemed shy to express their opinion with comments like—“that thumb doesn’t look right” or “what’s wrong with his eyes?” Yes, feedback was all around me. In the martial arts however, it was quite different. There, feedback could take on many forums, including pressure testing, competition, measurement or direct instruction from a coach. The problem was, this feedback was irregular and always poorly structured with no follow-up.

Ericsson stressed that feedback allows you to determine inherent problem areas or particular stumbling blocks and then to intentionally structure training to isolate and systematically improve those areas. Experts in his view are first and foremost experts at seeing and accepting their weaknesses. This is vital. The importance of accepting criticism cannot be overstated. If you do not deeply understand the importance of deliberately practicing something you will not be motivated to pursue it. Your why must be larger than your how. Knowing why you are training, what your end goal is and why you are drilling each shred of that performance is the only way to maintain the high levels of motivation for the long periods of time that are required to achieve expertise. Without feedback, efficient, optimized, hyper-accelerated learning is impossible. This was something I was doing intuitively in the fine arts but that was sorely absent from my early martial training. Repetition alone was never enough. Practice needed to be intentional, goal-oriented and measured as well as repetitious.

With my second martial arts teacher, Sensei Onada, I was introduced to a second key component of deliberate practice—albeit unknowingly at the time—namely the continuous incremental increase of difficulty in my training. Sensei never allowed me to coast contently by. He would rather ingeniously say, “If I let you think you are too good for too long, you will stop listening to me”—in that one sentence, he had encapsulated deliberate practice. Training needed to constantly challenge the body, to demand more focus and adaptation.

So what does it all mean? First and foremost is that if you are still using a lack of talent as an excuse for not achieving higher levels of skill, that’s just a cop out. Begin by getting rid of that excuse. Deliberate practice trumps natural ability. Notwithstanding the obvious advantages that size can provide in a combative encounter, your level of ultimate skill is not a birth rite. Second, skill mastery is a journey not a destination. The longer you persevere with deliberate practice, the greater you will become. It’s just a question of identifying the skill that you want, breaking it up into bite sized pieces and then drilling and refining it. In the end, it’s not what you’re born with or even where you are at now, but rather its what you are consistently and deliberately doing that will determine where you end up.

This summer, I will be dedicating the ICSA 2014 summer camp to the practice of deliberate practice. As an educator, I am constantly being asked how to improve a specific area, address a certain threat or rehabilitate a specific injury. My goal first and foremost is to make every student into a teacher, not only so they can share their passion with their loved ones but so that they can be their own first and best coach and optimize self-regulated learning. This year, we are keeping the camp smaller to give unmatched personal attention and I'll be keeping a report card on every student to help them identify target areas they can work on after the camp is done. I will specifically be working on:

-How to identify the base components of any given skill, to help practitioners learn to break mechanics down into their rudimentary parts

-How to implement various modalities of measurement and feedback that can be used in solo training in addition to providing each practitioner with clear, direct feedback for short and medium term training

-How to create a culture of critical analysis, repetition and deliberate practice and how to keep targeted repetition exciting, motivating and marketable in a school

-How to assess previous skill levels so task levels can be kept appropriate and easily understood using a 3-minute rule

-How to maximize concentration and dedication and increase attention spans

For more information on the camp, please visit http://www.combatsystema.com/Summer_Camp.html

Powdered Unicorn Horn and Navy S.E.A.L.s

2012-05-14T12:28:00.002-04:00

Imagine a Special Forces operative for a moment. These are individuals in small, elite units, who are sent into the worst possible situations in the world, against staggering odds, with the expectation to achieve incredible results. Not surprisingly, they are usually trained accordingly, given the lion's share of resources, cutting edge technology and resources and surgically precise tactics. To paraphrase Richard Marcinko, founder of S.E.A.L. Team 6, the secret to the special forces operator is that they divide and conquer, outnumbering their opponents one piece at a time when possible, using superior fire power, superior intelligence and ambushing their opponent to gain the added benefit of surprise. And all of this makes perfect sense for me given the job they have to do. With the one year anniversary of the elimination of Osama Bin Laden by the hand of S.E.A.L. Team 6 themselves having just passed, the results speak for themselves.

Now let's jump a world away, from military to civillian life and look at the humble prospect of women's self defense. At the risk of offending the politically sensitive with some realities of biology, women are generally smaller and enjoy less bodily strength than their male counterparts. They are often influenced by cultural norms and fashion to wear what could be deemed "visually appealing" but must be agreed is "tactically detrimental" attire. They are often conditioned by social norms to allow their boundaries to be crossed by social norms, to deny their intuition and to facilitate their general victimization, lest they be perceived as cold, bitchy or unfriendly. Given the biological differences and the unavoidable responsible women carry versus men in pregnancy, it is no surprise that sociological studies consistently show that men are more hungry for sex while women tend to set more limits in relationships. Yet despite this, the Peace Alliance states that 4.8 million women in the U.S. are victims of assault by their intimate partners. More than 60% of women killed by firearm were killed by their intimate partner. The American Bar Association claims that in the U.S., roughly 1 in 4 woman can be expect to be raped in their lifetime. Women are 3 times more likely to be stalked in their lifetime than men, are likely to know their stalkers and in the majority of cases, stalking leads to violence. Adding to all of this, women earned less than men in all 20 industries surveyed by the Census Bureau, even in fields where they far outnumber their male counterparts (female secretaries for example earn an average of 83.4% of what their male counterparts do). So it would seem that when you walk out your front door in the morning as a woman, you are already hopelessly outgunned by the world.

So what do we do with this half of our population that are facing "special forces" opposition? Do we provide them with the equivalent of special forces training? Do we empower them to defend themselves, support them socially and provide cutting edge training to this end. Unfortunately, in the sheer majority of cases, the answer is a resounding "no".

As a martial arts and defensive tactics instructor, I have encountered women's self-defense courses for decades. They generally take a small number of forms, involving some distilled body of simple tactics like knees and elbows, they sometimes pay lip service to the "psychology of self defense" and often end with a man dressed up in armor offering his genitals and eyes as a buffet for their newly trained arsenal. And, all of this is well intended for the most part and can be the start. Where I get squirrly is when instructors impart nuggets of glib fortune cookie wisdom to their female students, usually in the form of condensed mini courses that send them out the door feeling they have "done" their training, like a tour bus of seniors running through a museum with a checklist of 9 masterworks they must see in 30 minutes. To me, this is deluded, if not dishonest and tantamount to abuse of the teacher-student relationship.

So, I write this blog in the spirit of clearing the air a little. First off, to all of the women out there reading this, or the men reading this who will encourage a female they love to seek out training or attempt to train them themselves, recognize a very simple facts:

1-Violence is ugly. There is no pretty way around it. There are people out there who will stab your face and have sex with the wounds. There are people who will torture you with everything in your kitchen and then keep you alive to watch the expression on your face. There are predators who through faulty wiring and negative reinforcement have been preparing their whole lives to hunt people like you. Do you think a 3-hour mini-course is going to deter them. The need for training is real. Beneath all of those staggering statistics above are the unmeasurable, countless daily offenses, the ogling, disrespect, lewd glances and invasions of personal space, that every woman is prone to. Never diminish their feelings of victimization or deny their experience. This is your starting point. Accept the reality and focus on what you can do.

2-Size matters. When I hear martial artists spout that claim that it doesn't I know I am in the company of someone who has never been hit by a heavy weight with unkind intent or has never been pinned under a 350lb sambo player who squeezes your lungs until you wish you were back inside your mother's womb. Size matters. That's why pro fighters have weight classes. Size doesn't guarantee success but it sure as hell stacks the odds in your favor and beating size means doubling your motivation, staying smart and fighting feral. It is morally irresponsible to sell your students to tell your students otherwise. You might as well just give them a pouch of powdered unicorn horn and a jar of leprechaun piss and tell them that as long as they carry it with them, they'll be magically protected from violence. Students need to understand that physics govern combat mechanics not fantasy. Reinforce the reality of mass and velocity safely in the gym. Let them feel the difference and light the fire or urgency in them. Being smaller means needing to know how much more important it is to detect sooner, avoid more often and to engage more furiously if you have no other choice.

3-Education is a journey not a destination. Some styles are longer roads. Some are arguably so complex they may never reach their destination, but no system, no matter how hyper-accelerated and refined, can guarantee you readiness in a fixed amount of time like a calorie count on a McDonald's menu--just do this many hours and you'll be ready for a fight! Moreover, no system can be taught and then forgotten. It must be maintained. Your ability is like a bank account. The more you deposit, the more you have available for withdrawal. As unmarketable and unpopular as it may be to say this, training must be maintained. If nothing else, plant this seed of reality. Recognize that you only get out what you put in. No matter how busy your life is, start by pointing your vessel in the right direction by accepting this then reframe the way you look at your world. Every time you encounter a grim headline on the evening news or overhear a story of violence, rather than letting that poison slip quietly into your self-image and infect and weaken you with fear, ask yourself what could you have done in the same situation. If you have no idea, get the necessary training. If it motivates you to be more aware, you just decreased the odds of being victimized. Remember, that in nature, the lion attacks 1 or 4 types of gazelles: the young, the old, the injured and the distracted. There is not much we can do about beiong old or young but we can stay educated and hungry for knowledge and that alone has the powerful effect of making young people wise for their years and seniors young at heart. With this awareness and passion comes a reduced likelihood of distraction and with that same drive and vigor comes the greater likelihood of health. Reducing victimization begins with accepting that you alone carry the responsibility to thrive and prevail in every aspect of your life. How badly do you want to stay alive? How badly do you want to keep what you have? At the end of the day, it's up to you. It is impossible to behave in a manner that is inconsistent with your self-image. If you embrace strength and make the tough decisions, if you volunteer to face challenges and stay focused, you will get stronger and others will see this, including predators--and predators rarely choose strong victims. Embrace responsibility for thriving.

4-Cheat, don't compete. For those of you that know me, this is something of a mantra. By all means, training can incorporate elements of the competitive. Wrestling, boxing, sportive sparring and a host of drilling options are strong means of kindling fighting spirit in your students. At the end of the day however, it is important to bring that spotlight down to a laser and physically remind yourself what you are training for. It's not enough to box and wrestle and then to say, "of course in the street you wouldn't volunteer for the ground or use closed fists or x,y,z". Physically change the drill to more closely replicate the end reality and make students experience that refinement. Change the grappling drill from wrestling to "dirty wrestling". Change the boxing drill from boxing to "dirty boxing". As Laurence Gonzales said, we don't rise to the occassion, we fall to our training. Get yourself safely pressure testing the most effective tactics for you.

5-Be honest with yourself. Don't try to be your instructor. If a 200lb man is telling you to do something that just isn't work for your 100lb frame, demand adaptation, make it your own, or find another instructor. Trust your gut and always let common sense be your editor.

6-Visualize, visualize, visualize. Visualization muscles, like any other, starts off flabby and gets strong quickly with a little use. Once you get used to visualizing yourself prevailing in self-defense dynamics, you will start to feel more dynamic, empowered and confident walking both out of and into the gym. You will have a clearer understanding of what is working for you, what you need to work on and where you are going. It is a huge part of taking responsibility for your own success.

7-Train with predators. I am all for the comfort and security provided by a women's only environment and I offer one at my club in our women's self-defense club, but I also strongly encourage every student to freely come and go in our regular co-ed classes. Training along side men and with men is a huge part of self-defense training. As a woman, you are most likely to get attacked by a man. Training with them is a necessary pressure test. Not only will it allow you to understand the difference that size and strength makes, you will also heighten your intuition, strengthen your compassion, learn where to set limits, how to diffuse and dismiss things that shouldn't bother you and amplify and highlight things that should. I have seen too many so-called feminist women self-defense classes that talk about men like some story book monster and then theorize about how easy it will be to defend agtainst them. As Hart wrote, the difference between a military operation and a surgical one, is that in a military one, the patient is not tied down. Don't make this deadly assumption in your own training. The more you are exposed to the chest-thumping, ego-drenched world of the male martial monkey, the more you learn to identify and resolve the roots of your fear. Find an environment where sexism in the dojo is not tolerated and where men and women train respectfully but honestly with one another.

At the end of the day, I will still be left wondering what motivates a lot of martial instructors out there. I have seen too many who seemed bored, going through the motions, prescribing fantasty death wish tactics that will never work. I can't imagine the motivation is financial since there are far easier ways to make a buck. Maybe they are honestly working their own way to truth and are starting that far outside of reality. I don't know. Whatever the reason, don't be dragged down with them. You matter. Your loved ones matter. Your family matters. Demand the absolute best in your training. Demand the absolute best return on investment for your time. Get the results that you need and keep lookng until you find what you need.

Why We Strike?

2012-05-14T11:19:00.000-04:00

People constantly ask me about striking. There are so many different approaches to striking, so many different concepts, that the wealth of options are naturally over-whelming. Should I use a Muay Thai style kick or a Karate variation? Should I condition my strikes on bags or only work on partners? Is there value in strike conditioning like iron palm, or makiwara work?

The first step I believe, is to ask yourself "why are you striking?". If your honest answer is to break your opponent into a pulpy mess, than naturally, your motivation will dictate your method. Seeking power at all costs, swinging your fist like a sledge hammer and willfully volunteering to break your hand in exchange for a solid knockout may make sense to you. I don't say this coyly. There were long periods in my training where heavy strike conditioning were a part of my daily life. I invested massive amounts of time toughening my shins, palms, fists and forearms. To dismiss this as naive or misguided is arrogant. At the time, this type of training not only appeared to improve my functionality, it also gave me tremendous joy and piece of mind. It was fistic meditation, I loved it and it probably kept me out of a lot of trouble I might otherwise have been getting into. The arguments most strongly against it are naturally the long term effect. Since I am not there yet, I cannot attest to them other than to say all of my masters, older and wiser than me, began to feel their effects and changed their focus. This is not to say that some do not manage it more safely. I was certainly religious about self-care, using ointments and massage and other means to offset the risk of injuries and in the mid-term where I live now, I have yet to see any negative effects, so perhaps I stopped in time, perhaps my counter-measures worked, or perhaps the true effects wait to reveal themselves. Whatever the ultimate reality, I do not frown on these methods nor question the allegience of those that follow them.

I do however no longer advocate them. My calculus of violence has changed. The degree and nature of intentional pain and injury I am willing to subjugate my being to in exchange for emotional balance and clarity, a sense of wellness and combative competence has changed. I no longer feel the need for it. Age has perhaps robbed me of some degree of durability and made the risk of injury more relevant, so everything that I write here will be written from a perspective of self-preservation.

When I ask myself "why" I strike, I answer to end an encounter as efficiently as
possible. I believe that we all have more than enough power to seriously damage our own bodies. I always think back to an incident between Mike Tyson and Mitch Green. Green was intent on securing a rematch with Tyson and got into an argument with him in a clothing store. They exchanged words, then Green apparently swung first. Tyson hit first--a single punch that led to Green getting five stitches and Tyson breaking his hand. For me, breaking your hand in exchange for a few stitches is not an efficient use of your tools. Naturally, we would all likely break our hands if it could protect our family or loved ones. No one questions that. I am talking rather of the statistical probability--and swinging like Tyson at a human head is a recipe for injury. We all have more than enough power to destroy ourselves. For me, striking should be efficient. It should seek to discourage and stop but not necessarily all in one shot. It should be a component, a step in the journey. I am not a believer in training for the one-hit knockout. I am not an advocate of putting all of your power into every shot. Protecting your own body and keeping yourself safe and functional is the reason why I train. Gambling needlessly doesn't fit my criteria.

To this end, I would like to use a quote I have used many times before from Frederic Herzberg: you can't blow an uncertain trumpet. Striking effectiveness, competence, power and even speed, all begin with having confidence in your tool. A confident fist, for lack of a better term, is less likely to get injured. In the martial world, a typical debate revolves around the facets used to strike. Some styles advoacte using the facet created by the bottom three knuckles. Others advocate the facet created by the top two. If you are punching, you likely already recognize the facets of the first (bottom three or top two knuckles). Often, when asked what they punch with, Systema masters respond: "all of them". For years I heard people theorize with giddy whispers in the corners of training camps and events how certain masters had four knuckles that were all equally level and how his hand was so versatile. I believe this is rubbish. X-ray anyone. A normal human has facets from the base of the first phallange. Swelling or girth in the hand meat can conceal this somewhat but the structure inside remains unchanged. Therefore, everyone should have strong sensitivity to these facets. So often, I see people holding fist push-ups, wincing and oscillating from facet to facet or worse still, somehow trying to balance on the middle knuckle. Choose one. There is a huge history of debate on this--in fact my last article in Meibukan magazine goes into this at length. Whether you are a 3-knuckle puncher or a 2-knuckle puncher, you should know. Philosophy and research aside--recognize your current preference. When holding fist push ups, keep you thumb either pressed against the side of your index finger or comfortably wrapped around the first, possibly second finger. This is where the thumb is supposed to be. When we hold fist push ups and press the pad of our thumb into the floor to lessen the pain and strain, we reinforce weak wrist structure.

Some will argue, can't "punching with all of our knuckles" refer to be competent at both 2 and 3 knuckle punches. Absolutely. Many styles actively train the variation--for example, 3 knuckling on vertical punches and 2 knuckling on horizontal. This is fine if this is already ingrained but in my experience as a trainer, it is too cognitive in the beginning. I quote Matt Thornton here on the idea of training symmetrical. At a seminar at my school, a traditional martial artist asked--shouldn't we train both hands in the lead position equally. He responded that ideologically, this notion of training symmetry sounds beautiful, but in application, when we fight, we default to our best side. Sugar Ray Leonard could play with putting his right forward instead of his left, but he doesn't--he trains his left forward all the time and polishes it as strongly and as much as he can. When he fights a southpaw, he doesn't change his stance, he tweaks his strategy. In much the same way, I say choose your preferred fist facet and train it. Learn to make it work from every position. There is so much that you can do even with only one facet. Once you are absolutely comfortable, you may finding yourself switching to other facets or wish to explore other facets, but let that happen natural. Get as good as you can now and worry about the finesse later.

DEFINING PRESSURE TESTING

2012-02-02T11:31:00.000-05:00

One of the defining tenets of Combat Sytema, is its emphasis on pressure

testing. Admittedly, the term itself is something of a misnomer. It suffers, as do most labels, from some degree of misunderstanding. What defines pressure? How much is enough? How much is too little? What is truly being tested? If it's a test, how do you pass?

Another failure of labels, as William Barrett so aptly noted, was that they come to be used by some like magical incantations, as if the mere use of a word or term somehow conjures a distinction, a verifiability, a proof that something is immediately and inherently correct, but labels are approximations, and even something as well-intended as "pressure testing" is fully susceptible to these short-comings.

A good starting point for my thinking is the research of Donald Meichenbaum. In the 1970' Meichenbaum first coined and promoted the now prevalent phrase "stress inoculation" to denote a three-tiered cognitive behavioral therapy. In Meichenbaum's language, behavior modification begins with a "conceptualization" phase--what we term the education phase. In this, the subject identifies the nature of their stressor, giving particular attention to its known effects. Work begins by understanding what stresses the individual and how it stresses them. The subject learns what reactions and symptoms stress causes and how will this influence their thoughts, feelings and actions? In combative terms this could include understanding the "fight or flight" response, the anatomy of the brain, and the reality of stress responses. It could include statistical studies or research on the effects of stress on combat from leading autors like Bruce Siddle or David Grossman. The first component of this work combatively, is that the student learns what to expect. The description of stress alone begins to prepare the subject for the reality they may face and goes a long way to reducing post-traumatic stress disorder after the fact--if they are warned and familiarized with the reality regarding the erosion of motor skill, the heightening or dampening of certain perceptions and a host of other factors, they are less likely to feel alien and alone when they experience them firsthand. Moreover, with continued exposure, they are more likely to accept,expect and adapt their future training accordingly.

The second base is what Meichenbaum terms the "skills acquisition" phase or what we more commonly call the "rehearsal" stage. This is where the subject applies the model they have learned and where they put

their expectations into action. For combat application, this would include mechanical drilling that first isolate then integrate a given skill into a dynamic. For example, the various components of a round kick could be drilled, such as distance and starting position, the wave generation of power, the pivot of the support leg and the surface area of the impact zone. Isolations could be combined into greater complexity, such as moving with balance and correct footwork then freeze-framing at ideal kicking distance, then after many repetitions added the chambering of the leg and commencement of the pivot, then after further repetition culminating in the extension until the kick itself is fully performed as a kick. Similarly, then that skill unit can be integrated into basic combinations, or fused in with evasion and movement drills, to build upon the inherent complexity. In Combat Sytema parlance, the rehearsal phase should isolate and build the mechanical components of the tool, the attributes of delivery ( I.e. strength, speed, flexibility and mobility, effective breath work, focus,etc.). It should build the physical delivery mechanism required (namely the control of distance, timing and rhythm) and lastly the psychological delivery mechanism (the tactic/technique being placed in a context, in a living dynamic? Is it justified in accordance with the legalities of the force continuum, the probable capacities of the individual in the emotionally stressed state, and is it behaviorally justified within the context? Dropping into a "twisted monkey stance" is unlikely to be acceptable to a mugger who is holding you at gun point and asking you for your wallet. By comparison, compliantly raising your open hands in a show of submission, making eye contact and expressing the willingness to comply with their requests however would be far more expected and tolerated and likewise more effective in improving your tactical position, allowing to both improve your proximity to the gun, while initiating interaction and opening the window for verbal deescalation.

The third and final base is What Meichenbaum terms the "application" phase and what we would term pressure testing. The goal of this phase is to increase the level of the stressors in order to more deeply reinforce the subject's experience and coping skills. The more closely the stressors can emulate the actual stressors they will ultimately face, the more likely they are to be able to function under said stresses. The first key component is spelled out in this paragraph. Pressure testing is about exposing the subject to increased levels of stress. The second ingredient to effective pressure testing would be to ensure the pressure levels of the stressors are manageable. Too much pressure and the student will be completely over-whelmed and their feeling of inadequacy and inability will only be more fully entrenched. What then is the solution?

Should we do like so many elementary schools have done and move completely

away from the very idea of competition and the risk of failure? Should we abolish the very language of defeat, by elimating the ideas of winners and losers and instead have labels like "giraffes" and "gazelles"? When I used to teach elementary school in one such environment, a parent complained to me that the term gazelle was too submissive relative to the other group who was named the "lions"". Although every part of me wanted to scream, "that's because the other team ate your son's team", I towed the company line begrudgingly and promised to pass the criticism on to my principle. Anesthetizing our language and shielding our children from the reality of risk and loss in life was not an effective approach in the long term, and I saw first hand what a generation of children with deficient coping skills looked like. Why would sugar-coating the reality of combat be somehow better for the martial artist?

The fact is, we live in a predatory world. As students of defensive

tactics, we are aspiring to improve our survival capacity in that world. When, we make things too manageable, too neat and clean and sanitized and when we allow our attackers to take five plodding zombies steps with a stiffly outstretched knife hand while we busily buzz around them like an asterix of flailing limbs, we do not in any way prepare ourselves to survive--we only prepare ourselves to be knocked on our collective heads should reality decide to rear it's viciously resistance face and fatten our misplaced egos.

So while stress levels must be greater during the pressure testing phase

and while they still must be manageable, the third and most important criteria is that those pressure levels are constantly increasing at a level where they evoke struggle n the student. Life is struggle. Survival is struggle. To prepare us for both, training must evoke struggle to ever increasing degrees, so that as we adapt and grow more familiar,new are constantly being tested and growing. Daniel Coyle's fantastic book, The Talent Code is required reading for anyone who is serious about this. Coyle shows how the traditional notion that practice makes perfect and that repetition was the mother of skill is absolutely true, but with a twist. Repetition was believed to deepen the ruts in our understanding and to strengthen synaptic connections. More recent research however has shown that the strength of those connections depends don't solely rely on repetition, but rather on the insulative sheath that wraps the synapses--so called myelin, the insulation of our nerves. As Coyle noted, every thought, action or feeling, is a nervous pathway. Myelin wraps these nerve fibers, making signals faster, more efficient and more accurate. The more you fire a circuit, the more you wrap it in myelin, making it more efficient and powerful. And best of all, myelin wraps, it doesn't unwrap except from the effects of age and disease. Skill, as Coyle notes, is purely a matter of insulation. The old adage that 10,000 repetitions is required to master a movement is well intended but not quite the whole picture.

The first step is to break something up into pieces. This whole idea that intuitive free-play alone will breed mastery is not only misguided, it's highly improbable.. Mastery, Coyle shows, depends on dissecting movement down into the smallest units and understanding each of them. Next, each part must be performed correctly. Mastery is doing everything right, in the right order, every time. Coyle shows that the best coaches in the world, from tennis to football to singing, dissect learning in order to find failure and to fix it. In combative terms, the most infallible way to find failure, is to add pressure. Every chunk of learning is drilled and drilled again and again, but mindfully, intentionally growing and increasing the pressure, the resistance and the challenge. This leads to students that can "feel" their mistakes. The irony is that so many styles using a lack of technical understanding hide behind the banner of "inutition" claiming that their goal is to create a more adaptable student, but as Coyle's research shows, a student that is specifically drilled to find and fix mistakes against ever-increasing degrees of resistance actually learns to identify their errors and become more intuitively self-correcting. As many who have floundered in the overly-intuitive training modality know, too much freedom often does the complete opposite and provides only confusion and uncertainty.

This point merits repeating? Isolation of skill and struggle in drilling builds skill faster. This simple formula also carries the secret to correct pressure testing. In everything that you do, monitor the individual student to see if they are correctly performing the target movement or tactic. If they are not, stop them immediately and clarify the goal (education phase). Make sure they know what they are supposed to be doing and why. Then start them up again more slowly. One of the ideas a piano coach in Coyle's book mentions is that if someone walks by and can tell what tune you are playing, you are playing it too fast. I think this really sums up the goal of slow training. Break a movement down to such mindful slowness that the slowness itself becomes its own form of pressure. Give yourself no room to hide from your mistakes. Face them and actively change them in your slowness. The entire point of slow work is to permit active change during the moment rather than after the fact. When we go too quickly, we realize our mistakes after we have made them and then try to implement change in our next, equally fast repetition. When we go slowly, we make multiple micro-corrections as we go and reinforce more correct actions. This is the entire point of slow work. Once the student is performing the action correctly, it's time to step things up.

Start by adding increments of pressure. Add greater resistance but keep it static. For example, once a student is demonstrating a correct arm lock, have their partner fully lock their arm and resist their partner's attempts. Then add dynamism, adding movement to the resistance. Slowly build the speed. Once we are moving at relatively fast speeds with relatively strong degrees of contact, we essentially have arrived at some form of sparring. Depending on the nature of the work, protective gear may be in order. Rapid knife work should be done with rubber knives and possibly eye gear. Moutpieces should also be regular fare in more contact oriented drills. I am a massive supporter of BrainPad brand mouth gear as most of you know. They have massively changed my game. Gloves are a good option to protect the hand in more chaotic striking drills. Helmets, and body armor need not be employed but if it is should be used intelligently. Ed Flosi has a great article on the use of Spartan Gear here.

In the end, the degree of pressure is your choice. There is a calculus involved in any violent encounter--how much am I willing to risk in any given situation? Is each of my options worth the investment? Similarly there is a calculus involved in training. How much am I willing to risk relative to the degree of risk I feel in my everyday life? What are the probable risks of the training method I am using and what is the ultimate probability that such measures are justified or necessary in my regular life? Professionals like police, military or security officers have higher needs and might therefore be more willing to risk. Individuals living in more violent area would similarly have more need. In the end, the choice is yours. What matters is that we make no excuses or apologies. Choose what is right for you. Break it down into its base parts, drill the components, find the mistakes and fix them, then turn the heat up to a level that you can safely take so that your training begins to more closely match what you can expect to see in reality. As Ellen Winner said, fuel your rage to master.

For an excellent short interview with Donald Meichenbaum on stress innoculation, click here.

For a great interview with Daniel Coyle regarding The Talent Code, click here.

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

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.

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.