Right in front of our car…

It took some quick action and fancy maneuvering not to hit her. Which succeeded, and as we drove on, we could see her only reaction was a mild look of surprise. Then she moved on with her day.

This situation was entirely of her own making; it’s not unreasonable to look both ways before crossing the street. We teach it to children when they can barely walk. The only reason she is not severely injured or dead is our quick reaction speed. She lives in an imaginary safety bubble where the world around her isn’t her concern. Others have to adapt to her behaviour to ensure her safety; she outsources her agency to her environment.

This is far from the only example. I’ve noticed plenty of reckless behaviour and have asked many people if they spotted the same rising trend of it. They confirmed. What do I mean?

• Dozens of teenagers on their bikes to school during rush hour: both hands on their phone as they fiddle with it, staring down for seconds on end, only occasionally glancing up. Seen this over and over these past few years.
• People chatting away while standing on the edge of the sidewalk with their heels hanging over thin air, their backs to traffic. As cars zoom by at high speeds. A gust of wind, a loss of balance, a car making a small steering mistake, and they get crushed. Seen this in plenty of places, including my own town.
• The whole swerving trend. Statistically, it will eventually end in catastrophe for the cyclist, the person/car he hits or both. Most of all, these idiots rely on others to not freak out and make the wrong move when they aggressively barrel right at them.
• As a fight breaks out behind you, just sit there and continue eating. Not get up and create distance. Not put the phone down. Instead act like nothing can happen to you and stay in the blast radius.

Two things:

First, yes, sample size, anecdotal, confirmation bias, etc. I only give them as examples of what I observe as a larger trend. More on statistics later.

Next, to a large degree, this is just people being people as they have been for millennia. More on that below too, but for now, also note this post fits in a larger whole of changes to Western countries and how this relates to self-defense.

What is happening?

I see a combination of two main issues:

Entitlement and incapacity.

• Entitlement is, to oversimplify, main character syndrome: people are the protagonist in the movie that is their life and the rest of the world are just extras. Extras don’t get a say and don’t count as the movie is not about them. Worse, other people are also the antagonists, the bad guys. You are not supposed to have empathy for them; in fact, you have to fight them. In short, it’s all about you and everybody else sucks. This mindset can quickly lead to violence when the protagonist doesn’t get to do whatever he wants.
• Incapacity is the inability to see the risk. People have lost touch with common sense when it comes to danger and violence. They don’t see how their actions put them at risk or actually provoke violence. Taking into account second- and third-order consequences is almost a superpower now. Again, this is not new, but I make the case that it is worse than in the past. For reference, I wrote about this a few times over the years:
  • The death of common sense regarding violence
  • Common sense and self-defense
  • Violence, death and common sense

It gets more complicated, but I don’t want this post to become too long.

Why though?

I suspect it is insulation from corrective feedback.

Modern life in most Western countries has for the longest time and in large part, insulated people from their mistakes. From their lack of forethought. From mistaken assumptions about violence, but also from other people. I see a combination of several root causes for this. This list is incomplete, but this is a start:

• Cellphones and social media. This combination of constant dopamine hits, TL;DR mentality, viral content, etc. This has reduced the attention spans of many, and they are unable or have difficulty focusing.
• The rise of influencers. Having many followers is now equated with knowledge and trustworthiness. Social media influencers who dumb down complex topics to soundbites are seen as experts. After a generation of this, a large part of the population thinks it is informed but, only truly has surface-level knowledge or is just wrong about many topics. They do have outspoken opinions and speak with unearned authority.
• Information overload. Before the internet, you had to watch the TV news or read the newspaper. Typically, it was mostly about local events. Today, anything that happens anywhere in the world can instantly get shared and go viral. News and social media are 24/7. Then there is email, texts, WhatsApp and the like, phone calls, podcasts, YouTube shows, etc. The flow of information (regardless of quality) is constant. The time to process it all is short and too often inadequate. So jumping to conclusions or not digging deeper into a topic is often the standard response.
• Historically low levels of violence. Compared to the previous milennia, the last 50 years were quite peaceful in Western countries. Compared to the peak of violent crime in the 1990’s, the last 30+ years have been calm. Violence obviously existed, but historically speaking it was mostly absent. Which led to generations growing up without what used to be commonly understood about how violence happens in society. Which led to normalizing behaviour that eventually triggers violence.
• Education policy. Postmodernism crept into education and inclusion became more important than actual learning. In my country, it was introduced over the last two decades as the M-decreet, which friend and enemy today (if begrudgingly) admit was a disaster: the bar was lowered for all students so those with difficulties could clear it. Result: students graduating with a significant lack in reasoning skills, let alone a suitcase filled with knowledge. The PISA scores showed the downfall without a doubt.
• Abundance breeds complacency. John D. Rockefeller was one of the richest men ever in the early 1900s. Even the best medical care he could buy was horrid compared to what the average citizens can get today. The standard of living and technology have never been this high. But too many people don’t understand what makes it all possible. They make many assumptions and don’t see the enormous, complex infrastructure needed to let a modern city of half a million people function, let alone bigger cities. They fail to see how it could very quickly end, despite living through COVID and experiencing a rather mild breakdown firsthand.
• Ideological and political polarization. In large part due to postmodernism and the reactions to it, Western societies are extremely polarized. Almost everything is political and ideological now. There is virtually no common ground anymore, no neutral territory where people can come together as a society. Which means only conflict is left.
• Impaired reasoning. As a result of the previous (and lots of other factors), many people can’t coherently reason their way out of a wet paper bag. Or they don’t know the basics of how everyday life functions. Like where milk comes from. Or how taxes work at a basic level. Or how much of their clothes are made out of oil. But they still have strong opinions on these, regardless of the consequences these might have:
  • If you advocate for overly strict limits on the number of livestock to save the planet, you will reduce the output of milk.
  • If you don’t even know how you have to pay taxes, how can you judge how much others should pay?
  • If you advocate for an immediate ban on drilling for oil, how will you replace everything made from oil?

Why should you care about all this?

Because for a variety of reasons, many Western countries are moving from a high-trust/abundance society towards a low-trust/scarcity one. Such societies have much more violence than we are used to now. People in bubbles are unprepared for such a change. They don’t have the knowledge or experience to recognize the danger that comes along with this shift. Their sense of what is normal is still calibrated to the old, safer world.

As change happens at different speeds in different places, it might take a while before the violence manifests. Until it does, it is easy to persist in behaviour that leads to violence, because there are still no consequences. Normalization of deviance teaches us that when things finally do go wrong, they can end in catastrophe.

My claim is that we are well on the way in this process of change and it manifests in a variety of ways:

Political and ideological violence is on the rise. Trust in government and institutions is low. According to the statistics, certain forms of violence are rising again, while others are apparently down. However, as we have seen in the cases of retail theft in California and the Rotherham rape gangs, there is a dark number of incidents that never get reported or incorporated into the statistics for political reasons. Because too many citizens no longer see a point to it or the institutions don’t want to admit the problem exists.

I believe in the coming years, statistics will catch up to what I see becoming every day reality: two groups coming into conflict with each other:

• The bubble people are increasingly at risk of violence they don’t see coming, especially the kind their own actions create. When it does happen, it is a rude awakening and risks radicalizing them, making them the ideal target audience of demagogues and populists.
• Those who were never in the bubble but grow tired of the previous group’s obliviousness and the general polarization. This makes them vulnerable to populists too, just from a different faction.

Which means the potential for violence of all kinds goes up.

Ideological and political, as polarization keeps ramping up.

Domestic abuse, bullying, social violence, as tensions in society increase.

Protests and riots are punished harshly by law enforcement as governments try to maintain or even regain control over the public space.

Any resource going to the above means fewer resources to fight actual criminals. So those can ply their trade more freely, thriving on chaos, furthering the path toward a low-trust society.

To be clear: I am not saying these two groups are the only ones and everybody has to fall in one or the other. I am saying this looming conflict is problematic if it manifests.

Conclusion

People have always been like this, human nature doesn’t change. But in the past, increased risk came with repercussions much faster. Today’s population density, technological advances, the instant globalization of everything through the internet, that is the difference I think matters. “Last straw” incidents that push things over the tipping point can spread much faster to more people than ever before. This makes it harder to treat it as somebody else’s problem, somewhere else, later, than in the past. That is an unprecedented, unstable situation: people can stick to bad habits and actions long enough for the changed environment to suddenly punish them all at once. Because recalibrating takes time, and there won’t be enough of that anymore.

It would be absolutely awesome if I were wrong, wouldn’t be the first time. But hope is not a plan.

If I’m right and you are in the bubble group, I suggest treating it as a skill and information issue instead of a moral or identity position. If you are in the other group, understand that seeing and treating the others as NPCs is not the solution either. For all, I suggest adjusting your mindset:

Keep this potentially emerging dynamic in mind and see if it tracks with your experience. Don’t expect others to do the work for you: put your phone down, look before you move through traffic, create distance first when a situation escalates. That’s a good start to keep yourself safe and there is plenty more you can do. And even if I am only half right about the above, this mindset still pays off in keeping you safe right now.

Most of all: history also suggests that given enough time, eventually, the chaos will more than likely subside and some new equilibrium will arrive. The goal is for you and your loved ones to make it to this other side safe and sound.

Sources:

For more background regarding the above, you can spend some time at the links below.

• The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States – Annual Review of Political Science: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051117-073034
• Political Polarization – Pew Research Center: https://www.pewresearch.org/topic/politics-policy/political-parties-polarization/political-polarization/
• Polarization, Democracy, and Political Violence in the United States – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2023/09/polarization-democracy-and-political-violence-in-the-united-states-what-the-research-says
• Normalization of deviance – Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
• When Doing Wrong Feels So Right: Normalization of Deviance – PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25742063/
• Drifting into failure: theorising the dynamics of disaster incubation – Dekker & Pruchnicki: https://safetydifferently.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/SDDriftPaper.pdf
• Book summary of “Drift into Failure” by Sidney Dekker: https://blog.falcony.io/en/book-summary-of-drift-into-failure-by-sidney-dekker
• Filter bubble – Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
• Filter bubble – overview, Internet Policy Review: https://policyreview.info/concepts/filter-bubble
• Risk compensation – Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation
• Evidence on risk compensation and safety behaviour – ScienceDirect: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165176598002043
• Risk Homeostasis Theory: An Overview – Wilde, 1998, ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/13619289_Risk_Homeostasis_Theory_An_Overview
• The Theory of Risk Homeostasis – Wilde, Risk Analysis, 1982: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1539-6924.1982.tb01389.x
• Belgium PISA reading scores, year-by-year data – TheGlobalEconomy.com: https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Belgium/pisa_reading_scores/
• Education GPS – Belgium student performance, PISA 2022 – OECD: https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?primaryCountry=BEL&treshold=10&topic=PI
• Niveau van leerlingen in Vlaanderen daalde nog nooit zo snel – VRT NWS, Dec 2023: https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2023/12/05/onderwijs-pisa-resultaten-wiskunde-lezen-wetenschappen/
• Waarom scoren Vlaamse tieners slechter in PISA-onderzoek? – VRT NWS, Dec 2019: https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2019/12/03/vlaamse-leerlingen-scoren-minder-in-pisa-onderzoek-is-te-veel-n/
• Waarom blijft het niveau van leerlingen in Vlaanderen maar dalen? – VRT NWS, Dec 2023: https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2023/12/05/pisa-resultaten-lager-niveau-experts-de-witte-duyck/
• The Average American Today Is Richer than John D. Rockefeller – FEE: https://fee.org/articles/average-americans-today-are-richer-than-john-rockefeller-ever-was/
• Richer than Rockefeller? – Econlib: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/richer_than_roc.html
• Public Trust in Government: 1958-2025 – Pew Research Center: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/12/04/public-trust-in-government-1958-2025/
• Americans’ Declining Trust in Each Other and Reasons Behind It – Pew Research Center: https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/05/08/americans-trust-in-one-another/
• 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Reveals Trust is In Peril As Society Slides from Grievance into Insularity – Edelman: https://www.edelman.com/news-awards/2026-edelman-trust-barometer-society-slides-into-insularity
• Bowling Alone – Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
• Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital – Journal of Democracy: https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/bowling-alone-americas-declining-social-capital/
• Key Political Violence and Resilience Trends From 2025 – Bridging Divides Initiative, Princeton: https://bridgingdivides.princeton.edu/key-political-violence-and-resilience-trends-2025
• Criminal Victimization, 2024 – Bureau of Justice Statistics: https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/criminal-victimization-2024
• When Crime Statistics Diverge – Council on Criminal Justice: https://counciloncj.org/when-crime-statistics-diverge/
• Ferguson effect – Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_effect
• Criminal Justice Data: Organized Retail Crime – Congressional Research Service: https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R48061.html
• RILA Researches the Underreporting of Retail Theft – Loss Prevention Media: https://losspreventionmedia.com/rila-researches-the-underreporting-of-retail-theft-2/
• Shoplifting Trends: What You Need to Know – Council on Criminal Justice: https://counciloncj.org/shoplifting-trends-what-you-need-to-know/
• Retail theft in US cities: Separating fact from fiction – Brookings: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/retail-theft-in-us-cities-separating-fact-from-fiction/
• Lies, damn lies, and shoplifting statistics – Judd Legum, Popular Information: https://popular.info/p/lies-damn-lies-and-shoplifting-statistics
• Rotherham child abuse: What was the Jay Report? – BBC: https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/articles/cy4ynzppk80o
• Grooming gangs scandal – Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooming_gangs_scandal
• Estimating the Incidence of Rape and Sexual Assault – National Academies Press: https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/18605/chapter/9
• Comparing National Data Sources: NCVS vs. NISVS – VALOR US: https://www.valor.us/2021/10/29/comparing-national-data-sources-ncvs-vs-nisvs/
• Homicide data: how sources differ and when to use which one – Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/homicide-data-sources-comparison
• Toward a Better Estimate of Domestic Violence in America – Council on Criminal Justice: https://counciloncj.org/toward-a-better-estimate-of-domestic-violence-in-america/
• Potential Sources of Error: Nonresponse, Specification, and Measurement – National Academies Press: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK202274/
• 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey Results – CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/yrbs/results/2023-yrbs-results.html
• Crime, violence concerns spike, but data shows country is becoming safer – KATV: https://katv.com/news/nation-world/crime-violence-concerns-spike-but-data-shows-country-is-becoming-safer

The post Living in the safety bubble appeared first on Wim Demeere's Blog.

The second part of our talk with Q&A from my Patrons is here.

Summary

Tèja VanWicklen describes her path through martial arts stunt work, choreography, filmmaking, and writing as the result of successive unplanned steps. She outlines her training in combative methods, knife and stick techniques, and conditioning. VanWicklen argues that traditional martial arts frequently lack explicit self-defense frameworks, particularly for women dealing with size differences and the need to protect children.

She presents the self-defense continuum from her book, which covers pre-incident recognition of predatory behavior, during-incident deterrence, disruption and disengagement, and post-incident debriefing, drawing on Eric Kondo’s 5Ds and Marc MacYoung’s Five Stages of Violent Crime. Key principles include one-beat responses, aggressive defense that strikes while protecting, entry into the reactionary gap, and emphasis on catastrophic damage over pain compliance.

Key takeaways

• Functional Range Conditioning develops control of internal muscles around joints first, which supports mobility, strength gains, faster recovery, and focused movement practice.
• Effective self-defense requires a full continuum of stages: recognition of predatory intent before an incident, active disruption and disengagement during it, and structured debriefing afterward.
• Responses work best as single-beat actions that combine defense with immediate counter-striking while closing the reactionary gap and delivering decisive force when required.
• Training for women must address real size and strength differentials as well as protective scenarios involving children, rather than assuming equal opponents or isolated technique application.
• Instructors can adapt existing systems using the timeline and templates in Reimagining Women’s Self-Defense as a reference to add structured predatory-intent recognition and response options.

Links mentioned

• Her book: Reimagining Women’s Self-Defense: Protective Offense
• My talks with Marc MacYoung
• Reimaginingwomensselfdefense.com
• Tèja VanWicklen.com
• Protectiveoffense.com

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The post WDP 170 – Reimagining Women’s Self-Defense – Tèja VanWicklen appeared first on Wim Demeere's Blog.

Let’s dig in.

What’s this blog actually about?

I started a martial arts and self-defense website in 1999 when the internet became mainstream. I wanted to try it out. I wrote articles, did book and video reviews, etc. Due to technical problems I eventually stopped. Fast forward to 2009 when blogging and WordPress became popular. I picked up where I left off and started this blog, imported some of my old articles, and never stopped. However, a lot has changed since those early days.

One insight is the different phases my blog went through:

The nature of a blog is that you don’t know where visitors first come in. This can be eminently confusing:

If you first read How to visit another martial arts school from 2009 and you found that useful, you might check out more recent posts, like How to live a long and healthy life: four fundamental tips. Talk about a big jump in topic…

Not having followed my work over the years (which is entirely reasonable) means you missed how I got from writing the one to the other. So this post aims to clarify the purpose of my blog.

Here goes.

Discuss violence, in all its forms and all its causes

Over the decades, my writing expanded in scope to see violence as more than just punching and kicking. For me, it now all ties together; every part links to the others. I’ll explain more below, but first an overview:

• The early blog posts were mostly technical, focused on martial arts and self-defense techniques and training methods:
  • 15 ways to become a better martial artist
  • How to conquer your fear of fighting
  • How to refill a Heavy Bag without having to empty it first
• Later, I moved out of the purely physical realm and wrote more about theory, physiology, psychology, etc. About the why things are a certain way regarding violence, as opposed to how to do them:
  • The realization that changed my self-defense training forever
  • Rites of passage and self-defense
  • Training to take a life
  • 8 Self-defense tips for men
• This in turn led to another expansion, to how violence works on a societal level:
  • Violence, death and common sense
  • Unintended consequences of the George Floyd protests and riots
  • Angry German citizens
• Eventually, we got to geopolitics and how they influence societies
  • WDP 155 – Toby Cowern
  • The Optimistic Episode
  • The age of Western humiliation
  • Surviving Societal Chaos: Resources for Making It to the Other Side

Each of these phases covers different layers of violence. Each layer influences all others: starting from you as an individual and then gradually expanding outward towards the entire world. For instance:

• Conflicts on a geopolitical scale can raise the odds of tension and polarization within societies, eventually leading to violence.
• Not understanding the psychological aspects of violence can lead to your physical techniques failing under stress.
• If you use physical techniques that are acceptable in a tribal society, but you live in a post-industrial one, society/government is likely to condemn and punish you for it.
• Etc.

Let’s call this the Interconnected Violence Framework.

This framework is my way of structuring the many different aspects of violence, along with the factors that influence them. It isn’t meant to predict with certainty when and where violence will happen. Instead, it points to connections and dynamics that increase the odds of violence coming into your life. It is the synthesis of decades of personal experience, research, writing, and much more. Despite that, it is also still a work in progress.

On this blog, you will find information covering all aspects of this framework and my continued efforts to refine it. The underlying idea is that, for effective self-defense, an understanding of all levels of the framework is needed.

I still write about techniques like I did twenty years ago. For instance, How to train with edged weapons primarily covers the technical aspects of training with knives. Or Podcast episode 143 – Ares: How to not go too far? which is more of a “how to” than anything else. I’ve also spent the last nine years releasing instructional videos on Patreon (more on Patreon below) So I didn’t abandon this topic; I just began covering a lot of other aspects of violence as well.

To get things out of my head.

Writing is an exercise in thinking. It forces you to formulate your thoughts and ideas, create structure, test them, see how far you can take them before they break, etc. I write about what’s on my mind and share that with you, the reader. But it is also a way of learning, as my teacher explained long ago: at one point, you have to teach to still make personal progress. Writing is my way of “teaching” in that I hope it adds value to your training. For that, I have to think, investigate, research, test, etc., before I get to a finished post. Writing moves me through that process and hopefully helps grow my own understanding.

This is particularly true when I get questions, mostly in the short- and long-form monthly Q&A video on my Patreon. My Patrons ask questions I wouldn’t think of, or make me revisit what I (think) I already know. Invariably, that leads to personal growth. I can then also let go of that question after spending a fair amount of time in my head thinking about it.

My interests run wide and deep.

Musashi has even more comparisons in his Book of Five Rings, well worth reading (affiliate link), but here’s the key one.

The Way of the warrior does not include other Ways, such as Confucianism, Buddhism, certain traditions, artistic accomplishments and dancing. But even though these are not part of the Way, if you know the Way broadly you will see it in everything. Men must polish their particular Way.

I’ve always had a wide and eclectic range of interests, ever since I was a child reading dictionaries and encyclopedias. This means I tend to see similarities and connections you might find strange at first: I have guests on the podcast, like a visual effects specialist or a fiction author. Or you can read a post about What I learned from Carl Sagan. I usually tie it all in with the martial arts or self-defense world. These connections and similarities are fascinating to me and I share them here.

Why so much content on Patreon?

In the top picture, you see phase 4 and the shift to Patreon. Here’s why:

In 2017, I started my Patreon on a whim and, to my surprise, it was a resounding success from the get-go. Their support allows me to keep the blog and podcast completely free by financing the hosting of this site and podcast. In return, they get multiple exclusive videos every month, standalone videos and courses, bonus podcast episodes. There are now almost 1400 posts, hundreds of videos and dozens of bonus episodes and the library grows every month.

This is the only way I’ve found to consistently create high-quality content on violence that doesn’t get censored by social media. So I put a lot of time and effort into giving exclusive, in-depth content to my Patrons. I’m extremely grateful for their support throughout the years. Without them, I couldn’t do all this, nor deliver the quality of work I want to.

Conclusion

This blog has changed over time. So have I. So has the world around me. The cliché of change being the only constant is true. Hopefully, the above gives you a clearer picture of what I do here and why.

A final insight I got is that my blog posts are much less frequent. That hurts the blog and creates a vicious circle as it is usually the first introduction people have to my Patreon. So I aim to rectify that as well, along with a bunch more things I won’t go into right now.

Stay tuned.

The post What This Blog Is Actually About appeared first on Wim Demeere's Blog.

But preferably, before you do: read on.

I have done, and still do, a lot of solo training; you can find some of it here. For the most part, because I have a weird schedule and can’t make it to all the classes I’d like to attend. So I train when my schedule allows, which often means I don’t have a training partner, hence solo training. For that training, but also when I work with clients, I have used the Impetus timer app for over ten years. It is relatively flexible, allows for some programming and is stable. But it is also limited.

I’m also a bit of a nerd and did some programming over 40 years ago. Back then, it was in BASIC on an Apple IIe, and I also learned a bit of Pascal. Heck, I even programmed on a Philips Videopac. I wasn’t very good at it though and, to the chagrin of my father, gave up on it when martial arts and self-defense became my primary focus. But I always enjoyed technology and computers and have worked a lot with them. Fast-forward many decades and enter Grok AI and vibe coding. I decided to try and make an app for my own training and about a month later, you can see the result now: Shadow Boxing Randomizer App

So what is it?

A free, practical shadowboxing training tool built by a martial artist, for martial artists. No fluff. Just shadow boxing.

• An app that speaks out loud single techniques or combinations for Boxing, Kickboxing, Muay Thai and MMA.
• It’s completely free to use, but donations are appreciated.
• Small size, 125Kb, works even on a slow internet connection.
• The techniques and combinations are random, with minor logic to avoid certain repetitions.
• It works on computers but I mostly focused on phones.
• It uses the text to speech feature of your web browser, so no need to download lots of files.
• You can customize a lot: Number of rounds, duration, pause time, fixed or varial tempo of calls

What I suggest for best results:

• Start with single techniques or short combinations (2-3 techniques) and set about 5-10 seconds in fixed call tempo. That allows you to adjust to reacting to audio cues and do the technique or combo once or twice before the next one comes along.
• Do a single technique or 2-part combination, and set fixed call tempo to 30 seconds. Do the calls stationary, then add footwork, then add footwork for the technique/combo plus footwork to move away from the imaginary opponent. By the time you do all that, the next call will be there.
• Most of all, experiment with the different sliders and options. Make it work for you.
• Consider using earbuds and conneect them to your phone. Use whatever you have, or I can recommend these (affiliate link) as their fit is good for the explosive momvements you’ll do. Earbuds help a lot in reaction time, especially if you don’t train in a quiet envirnonment or don’t have acces to good speakers.
• It’s not just shadowboxing; I’ve used the app for my heavy bag training as well. Worked great, especially with earbuds. If you teach a class, you can put it on a speaker system and walk around correcting students instead of having to do so while you call out techniques.

Again, this is free, no charge. It’s one of those things I would have liked to have years ago, so I want others to enjoy it right away.

What’s next?

• It depends. If there is enough interest, I have some ideas to create an advanced version with custom modes (offense, defense, footwork, etc.), more advanced techniques for each of the combat sports, different levels of complexity, letting the user select or deselect certain techniques, and much more.
• I haven’t implemented any of these because it means a totally different programming architecture with multiple files and different programming tools. Aka, a lot more work. For now, I wanted something that works as a lightweight file and does the job but that limits the possibilities for more advanced functionality.
• So it all depends on the response I get from all of you. Speaking of: leave a comment here below if you find a bug or have suggestions for improvements or new features.

Most of all, go to the app here and start training. Enjoy!

P.S.: special thank you for my Patrons and the other beta-testers for their feedback.

The post Shadow Boxing Randomizer App appeared first on Wim Demeere's Blog.

Enjoy!

Summary

Randy King discusses his framework for civilian self-defense, focusing on the three critical phases of an encounter: the before, during, and after. The conversation highlights the industry’s tendency to overemphasize physical combat skills at the expense of crucial preventative measures, such as de-escalation, and post-conflict realities, such as managing injuries, legal ramifications, and potential retaliation.

Wim and Randy address the psychology of violence, examining how the internet changes predatory behaviors and how cultural trends affect young practitioners. They critique the romanticized “power fantasies” prevalent in martial arts culture, emphasizing instead the necessity of acknowledging fear, understanding the evolutionary reliance on community, and recognizing the baseline limitations of personal knowledge.

Key takeaways

• Self-defense extends far beyond physical fighting: Comprehensive safety strategies must place equal training value on pre-conflict boundary setting and de-escalation skills as they do on physical techniques.
• Immediate aftermath management is critical: Practitioners need a specific checklist immediately following an encounter, such as validating their own physical injuries while under the effects of adrenaline, moving to a secure location, and identifying immediate risks of retaliation.
• Community is a pillar of personal safety: Real-world safety relies heavily on a practitioner’s social network and environment, challenging the unrealistic martial arts trope of the solitary, all-capable survivor.
• The “curse of knowledge” impacts training: Instructors often forget the specific milestones, motivating factors, and basic validations required by entry-level students, which makes maintaining a beginner-centric perspective vital for effective coaching.

The links mentioned (affiliate link):

• The book: The Timeline of Self-Defense: Before, During, After
• Our previous talk
• Randy’s site
• Eight self-defense tips for men

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The post WDP 169 – Timeline of Self-Defense: Before, During, and After – Randy King appeared first on Wim Demeere's Blog.