HIT WITH ALL YOU’VE GOT!

Krav Maga uses body weight to generate power more than any other art or system I’ve seen. While other “arts” are spending hours upon hours learning to snap at the waist, bend knees and twist just right to generate power for their elbows (as an example) in Krav Maga we basically spend twenty minutes learning to burst off of our back foot like a sprinter leaving the blocks. They both use body weight to generate power into the elbow, it’s just that in Krav we’ve learned to do this in a fraction of the time it takes the “art”.

Can a one hundred pound woman hit as hard as a two hundred pound man? No, if they are both using all of their body weight. If he is just arm punching and she is sending her hip to twist and generate power she is hitting harder. While his twenty pound arm is behind his punch her entire one hundred pounds is behind hers.

In Krav we have two rules for throwing a combative. 1) Hit as hard as possible and 2) hit many, many times. If we can justify hitting someone we can justify winning the encounter with whatever it takes. Every combative that we throw in class (hence, in the real world if needed) is thrown at full force. If we are ever in a violent situation where our safety is threatened we will not dance, change levels, go in and out and attempt to “set up” our attacks. We will go forward and swing for the fences. The longer we allow the encounter to last the more likely the scum bag’s buddies will show up. We need to destroy and then vacate the area. This is why we don’t have a “jab” in Krav Maga. We have a “front hand punch” that we twist our hips with and try for knockout power. In sports they can jab because their life isn’t on the line and they are attempting to win by scoring points. This just doesn’t work on the streets.

How important is getting our body weight into a combative to generate maximum power? Krav Maga techniques are fairly worthless without it. If we get a scumbags hands off of our neck but don’t kick hard he/she just attacks us again. If we block a knife but don’t hit the scumbag hard he/she just stabs us again. If we redirect the handgun but don’t deliver a strong combative we are in a wrestling match. The strike is what makes the technique effective. This is why half of each krav maga class is spent on combatives.

Krav Maga was designed to get people from zero to being able to defend themselves faster than any other system. This is why transferring body weight into an attack is done as simply as possible. Most practitioners in martial arts aren’t very good after only three or four months but in Krav a student is testing into level two after three or four months…and are pretty darned good by then.

Below is an old Human Weapon episode explaining knock out power. BE SAFE!

If It’s Complicated…It Ain’t Self Defense!

If it’s complicated…..it ain’t self defense. Real violence is more sudden, more terrifying, closer and faster than any of us can train for. If whatever you do to fight back isn’t instinctual, if it isn’t something that comes right out of you, it will not keep you safe.

If it teaches you to fear no man & to charge into a knife, stick or other weapon……it ain’t self defense. Any good self defense system will tell you to RUN! We aren’t injury proof and we’d rather not have to defend ourselves. We’d rather not be there, run, talk our way out, pick up an object to whack the scumbag with and, only as a last resort, use actual self defense techniques. Self protection is using awareness and avoiding. Self defense means you weren’t paying attention and are already in a bad situation that you now have to fight your way out of.

If it involves fine motor skills….it ain’t self defense. With stress and the adrenaline dump blood pools to our core. This makes our limbs weak, heavy and numb. There is no way we are doing finger manipulations in the face of real violence.

If it is regimented…..it ain’t self defense. There are arts where a choke defense, for example, has steps A through F that are followed and practiced every time. When, in the real world, the attacker doesn’t do what we expect and the technique derails at step C we will be lost.

If it is totally ground based….it ain’t self defense. Being on the ground takes two things for granted. That there isn’t a weapon involved and that there is only one attacker. Theses are two things that we should never be thinking won’t happen.

If it is practiced with space….it ain’t self defense. All knife defenses, for example, work when the attacker announces himself from six feet away. Whatever you are learning has to work late, after you’ve been surprised and have already taken damage. Another angle on this is if I am taking big circular steps in my technique, stepping several feet to perform a throw, etc. I am taking for granted that I will never be attacked in a crowded area, never in an aisle of a bus, etc.

If it isn’t a workout, isn’t developing cardio…it ain’t self defense. We have black belts in other arts come to our gym quite often. They almost never can make it through a class and almost never come back. How can you teach people to be safe who can’t fight hard for more than a few seconds? We’d love our fights to be over in a few seconds but we can’t take that for granted. If the fight does drag out fatigue will get us hurt. We must be able to keep going until the danger is over.

If it relies on katas to develop skills for fighting off multi attackers…it ain’t self defense. We learn to fight multi attackers in Krav by having multi attackers pad up and smack us around! Sounds logical to us!

If it takes years to become proficient…..it ain’t self defense. If you knew that you would be attacked five years from now it wouldn’t matter what you studied. You’d be pretty good by then. Do you know when you’ll be attacked? It could a month from now, couldn’t it?

If it is sparring….in ain’t self defense. Despite what Hollywood leads us to believe real world violence is never like sparring. Sparring has rules, flow, set ups. Violence is a knife slashing at you non stop, three people standing over you stomping your head into the curb, someone grabbing you by the hair and throwing haymakers at your face. It is not feinting, changing levels, going in, backing out and throwing combinations. Sparring teaches some good skills, it just can’t be relied on to get us ready for real violence.

If you are studying something strictly for self defense make sure that it was developed strictly for self defense! BE SAFE!

Listen To Those Voices!

Did you ever get an uneasy feeling about someone after just a glimpse of them? There are reasons this happens, don’t ignore your brain, it’s pretty smart! Malcolm Gladwells’ book BLINK is about this very phenomenon. Our brain is like a super computer, it picks up on things that we don’t consciously see or realize. We often get bad feelings and don’t know why so we ignore them, sometimes to our peril. As an example Gladwell tells the story of a statue that was supposedly thousands of years old and worth millions of dollars. The tests all showed that it was really that old, was from the area of the world that was claimed, etc. Three different experts took one glimpse at it and said that it was a fake. When asked why they thought this they said that they didn’t know, they just had a gut feeling. These experts were ignored because the “scientific” research said that it was real and a museum bought it for millions. It ended up being fake. The expert’s brain knew something that they didn’t even know that they knew!

Another discovery that Gladwell talks about in his book is that of our brain seeing “thin slices”. He believes that things can actually happen so quickly that they can’t be picked up by our conscious can still be seen by our brain. An example that he uses is a video of a married couple talking about their relationship. It sounds like they are very positive and have a good relationship when the video is only listened to. When it is watched he and others who were studying with him had a feeling that the couple was in trouble. They ended up divorcing shortly afterwards. When Gladwell played the video in slow motion and looked at it frame by frame he saw negative body language….rolling eyes here, looks of disdain there. He was fascinated that these things that happened too fast to notice were actually picked up on by the brain.

One of my own students had a horrifying illustration of this. As he was opening up his shop he saw two guys pass by the window. He thought “if I had to describe those two to the police, what would I say”? He didn’t have any idea why he would have thought such a thing. Sure enough, a few minutes later they were in his shop and had a gun to his head.

Ladies, this is exactly what “women’s intuition” is. Listen to it every time. For example, a guy gets on an elevator with you when you are alone. Something doesn’t feel right but you know that if you get off before the door closes he’ll be offended. Who cares? He is a stranger who, even if he is offended, will have forgotten about it five minutes later. If you stay on and were right you will regret it for much longer than five minutes. Men know they make women uncomfortable. If a guy gets on an elevator and there is a woman there by herself he will automatically go as far to the opposite side of the elevator as possible. We may never have consciously thought about this but this is why if he gets closer the “women’s intuition” kicks in. Animals listen to their intuition every time. There are no rabbits thinking “he looks like a nice fox, it would offend him if I ran away”! There are no deer thinking “I am just being silly, it looks perfectly safe. I’ll just stay here for awhile.” We humans alone ignore our intuition.

There are reasons for uneasy feelings, for bad feelings about someone or for being “creeped out” by someone. Our brains are noticing everything and computing the data for us in split seconds. Listen to these gut feelings and stay out of trouble. BE SAFE!

BUT IT LOOKED GOOD IN THE GYM…

“No matter how enmeshed a commander is with his plans he must from time to time consider the enemy” Winston Churchill

In Krav Maga every technique in our curriculum has been put under stress, exhaustion and realistic attack scenarios. Techniques that look good in a gym may completely fall apart in the real world. Techniques will degrade under the stress of real world violence anyway and, unfortunately, many techniques that are embraced and believed in may well be worthless.

When we do our handgun disarms with a partner who is standing like a statue we can look pretty effective with the technique after a few reps. In our class we would then have the partner act like an actual attacker and wave the gun around, strike and push the defender while screaming and cussing all the while. With just this one change the defense suddenly doesn’t look so good, the defender suddenly doesn’t look as proficient. If we have only trained with a partner holding the handgun like a statue we will not react properly when, in a real world attack, the gunman is hitting us, the gun is never still, etc.

We have actually had techniques that we believed in that were part of our curriculum be taken out after seeing them fail under stress and realistic attacks. In our level 1 curriculum we now have a choke defense called “one hand pluck”. This is a useful technique under certain circumstances. This technique used to be called “choke with a head butt defense”. When done in class it looks like a great technique. You pluck the choke with one hand and send the other hand as a palm attack to the attacker’s face and then go into the clinch with knees and kicks. It looks effective with a training partner in the gym. We noticed time and time again during a drill where the defender closes their eyes and the partner grabs them for any choke defense (behind, side, front, front while rearing back for a head butt, chokes with pushes, headlock, etc.) that all defenses came out of the defender except the choke with a head butt defense. The student almost always just did the two hand pluck choke from the front defense and never saw the head butt coming. I used to bawl out the class that nobody noticed the head butt. Well, after studying stress, the adrenalin dump, etc. I learned to quit bawling out the class and realize that under a realistic, surprise attack this defense simply won’t be done. Therefore, it is a bad technique. Looked great one on one in the gym, never comes out of anyone when under stress. If this technique had never been put under stress, exhaustion and realistic attacks it would still be taught…and it would get people hurt.

The techniques I see in other systems that really scare me are the knife defenses. They look great on the videos. The instructor looks great taking that knife away. In Krav we have put those defenses under realistic attacks, stress and exhaustion and have found very, very few that would be even slightly effective. Take whatever defense you believe in and run it through this simple drill; Spar for at least a couple of rounds (or crossfit for awhile or anything else that will get your pulse rate way up), then have several people grab kick shields and jostle you around. Next have the knife attacker yell “knife” to let the pad holders know to get out of the way and then attack you with a sewing machine needle type of attack. Oh, by the way both the attacker’s arms and your arms are slathered with KY jelly (which represents the blood that is always present during a knife attack…and is one slippery substance). If your knife defense works after all of that it’s a good one. We’ve pretty much found that blocking as good as you can as you punch the attacker’s face or kick his groin and then bear hug the arm with the knife as you attack with all you got is about all that even comes close to working. Again, what may look great with your buddy attacking half assed in a gym just ain’t gonna hold up through all of that. “All of that” represents reality. Why learn something if it hasn’t been tested?

This, to me, is where most martial arts fail. I was a fourth degree black belt in one and don’t remember anything we did ever being put under stress, exhaustion or an attack that was anywhere close to realistic. If it hasn’t been tested it’s just a pretty gym technique…that will get people hurt when they need it the most. BE SAFE!

Mass Shooting & Terrorist Attacks

I have had a couple of people hit me up with “what would you do” questions about the mass shooting in Orlando a few weeks ago. This tragedy is being politicized by all sides to the point that it’s sickening. I’ll give ya my advice on how I’d take care of it…then I’ll give you more realistic advice that anyone can implement.

As far as schools go I like what Texas is doing…arm teachers. Taking guns away from everyone will have only the psychos and criminals having access to guns. They will still get them because they ignore the law. Schools are “no gun” zones…that law didn’t stop the scum bag. If a few teachers were highly trained and had access to guns in the schools these psychopathic idiots wouldn’t have free access to roam the halls and shoot for as long as they want. “But that isn’t the teacher’s job” is what I hear. Well, the principal and a few teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary rushed the scum bag empty handed. They weren’t going to let anyone harm their kids. They were killed in the process because a rifle beats empty hands every time. The point is, these heroes wanted to do something and they did do something. They just had the odds stacked against them.

Now advice for if you are ever in such a situation that is a bit more realistic. The best thing you can do is to have thought about it before hand and have a plan in your head. I have written about stress and mind setting in previous blogs. Under the stress of someone shooting at you it is impossible to come up with a plan. Your brain will go to “mid brain”, which is also called the “animal brain” under this stress. This is why you hear stories like that of Luby’s restaurant in Texas where people sat at their tables frozen as the gunman walked around shooting. Under that stress your brain is scanning to see if anything like this had ever happened before and how you got out of it. With no plan in place, no practice and no experience the brain will not come up with a plan but will continue to scan, freezing you in place.

I believe if everyone carried a weapon and trained (especially RBT) mass shootings would be a thing of the past. Read that again, I didn’t say if everyone carried. The training part is the most important. Training comes out of us and we don’t freeze in place when some fool starts shooting.

What plan should we have for these mass shootings for those who don’t or can’t carry a handgun? I have a very good friend who is a cop that tried to get into his local school system a few years ago with plans/drills for the high school students. The administration wouldn’t even sit through the video of Columbine that he had with him, yet alone talk to him about implementing the plans he had. Their heads were buried in the sand, they couldn’t possibly implement such a thing.

The plan is that in a crowded room when someone starts shooting everyone throws whatever they can get their hands on at the scum bag (books and laptops if you are at school, dishes and glasses if in a restaurant, etc.). As these objects are striking the shooter everyone then rushes him and dog piles on top of him. He may get a couple of people but these twenty and thirty person mass murders wouldn’t happen. Such a thing would take training, which is exactly what we do at our gyms. We actually sit people at tables with plastic plates and cups, have someone come in firing a blank gun and have at him.

These tragedies are horrible and, instead of knee jerk reactions and blaming everyone and everything except the psycho who pulled the trigger, we need education. If every school had active shooter drills where the above plan was practiced the students would be safer. Schools have fire drills several times throughout the school year but don’t practice for active shooters (correctly anyhow). There have been more school shootings than deadly fires in schools over the past fifteen years, by far. BE SAFE!

GET IN, STAY IN!

One of Imi Lichtenfied’s students tells a story about the time that there was a TV on with a Bruce Lee movie playing. The student asked Imi “what do you think of Bruce Lee”? Imi said “Well, the boy is very good, however, if he has time to duck he has time to go in and finish….but that would make for a short movie I suppose.” Krav Maga training has a technique that is very unique called “bursting.” We push off of a foot like a sprinter leaving the starting blocks to put our whole weight behind an attack or block and to get inside. We want to be inside because we never think that one punch, elbow, etc. will knock out the attacker (it indeed may but we can’t take that for granted) so we want to be close to clinch and attack and attack again until the bad guy is done.

A person in a sparring match can move, strike, move some more, circle, strike again, etc. This works because in a sparring match there are two evenly matched opponents competing with a set of rules. In the real world fighting like this only works if we are better, stronger, aren’t worried about a second attacker, have time, etc. In Krav Maga we realize we don’t have those luxuries so we want to burst in, hit the bad guy many times, finish him as quickly as we can and never give him the chance to strike at us more than once. In a choke, for instance, getting the bad guy’s hands off or our throat and then backing off, squaring up to fight and then throwing punches would only work if we are the better fighter. Instead we remove the attacker’s hands, simultaneously kick his groin, land forward, clinch the attacker and throw non stop knees & front kicks until he is done.

We show this concept from the very first intro lesson at our gym. We show a front kick, let the new student do a few, and then stop the student to teach Krav philosophy. We tell them that their kick was fine (it’s an easy technique) but not to kick and put their foot back where they started. If they kick and put their foot back they have to kick again to get back close to the attacker. We show them to kick and put their foot down forward because then the attacker is right there for a knee with the other leg or they can just clinch the attacker and deliver multiple combatives.

When there is a weapon involved this becomes even more important. If we can’t run or pick up something to smack the attacker with we want to go in. If it’s a handgun we direct it off of us and go in and beat him unconscious. In the case of a knife or stick the attacker expects us to back up. Backing up puts us in greater danger as we are going to the most dangerous part of the stick (the end) or into the arc of the blade. In the case of the stick going in keeps us from being hit by the part going the fastest but instead takes us into the hand or forearm of the person swinging the stick. There isn’t much damage the bad guy is going to do to us there. We aren’t just moving in to escape the danger but when we do get in we deliver a strike. This strike has a lot of power as our whole body was behind it. While inside, after this first strike, we clinch and throw knees, elbows, head butts, etc. until we are safe.

The point is that you can dance and prance if you are in a fair fight. If you are fighting for your life go forward, get in deep and beat on the bad guy until he’s done! BE SAFE!

Permission to Strike First!

This blog by guest blogger; Matt Kissel – 2nd degree USKMA black belt and Law Enforcement Officer

Permission to strike first!

Traditional martial arts often wait for the first punch. We don’t live in a traditional world. Your attacker is not raised with Honor, Discipline and Respect for others. He has chosen you as his victim and wants to prey on you.
The attack comes on fast and brutal. Sometimes without our ability to even see it. A full on ambush from your blindside and you enter the fight from the worst possible time. You’ve been hit, cut, knocked to the ground, swarmed… But not all attacks start this way. I want to discuss the ones that start a bit more slowly.

We have all heard of the X. The place the attacker has chosen. He is waiting for his prey to arrive at it. Your there and he approaches. The setup, The attacker may use a ruse to gain your attention or distract you from their real intent. “Do you have some change.. Know what time it is.. I lost a puppy. “. No matter how benign it may sound you have to trust your guy. Is this guy legit or setting me up?

The confrontation. His real intent comes out. He produces a knife or gun. Maybe he just grabs you or blocks your way. Now is the time to ask your self. “Can I get away?” If you can run! The attacker is looking for “easy prey”. Your running metamorphous you into the difficult prey or better yet ” an opponent”. If you can’t, should you do what he demands. He can have my money, there isn’t much there anyways. He can use my credit cards. The detectives will get pictures of him buying gift cards at the gas station. Someone will know him. He will get caught. It’s my immediate job to get home to my wife and family.

But what if I can’t get away? What if giving him what he wants won’t satisfy him? What of he wants something from you like rape? What if he wants to take you somewhere? You are going to be in a fight very soon.

I say start it. Be the one that hits first, knocks him to the ground, ambushes him. Come in strong, fast and brutal. In Swat we call it the trinity (speed, surprise and fierceness of action). It must have all three to be an effective counter attack. If you lose one of them you have to work very hard to get back in control of the situation.

Make witnesses that see and hear you with your stance, open hands palm out, yell “stay back” back off, call 911. “. Criminals never yell these things. We need witnesses from near and far. Someone that will point out my actions before the fight starts so the police will list me as the victim. Get to a safe spot, Be the first to report the attack.

We as instructors have to give permission to strike first. Those that trust us to teach them to protect themselves also trust us to tell them the truth. You can not block all the attacks. You can not always absorb the first punch. If you wait to be struck first you may be too late and not survive the attack. Tell your students it’s O K to strike first. Use roll play with attackers and let them explain their actions afterwards.

Bottom line; If you identify the setup and confrontation and decided you can’t get away without becoming physical. You have permission to strike first.

A story from my job as a police officer; We had a criminal attempt to rob a pizza delivery driver. The driver saw the knife and slapped the knife hand and delivered a right cross that knocked the robber out. Bet he didn’t see that coming. We never solved the robbery but we never had any more either.

In law enforcement we have a saying to each other ” be safe!” I say ” be dangerous!” Be the most dangerous prey he ever crossed.

PRESS FORWARD!

“Danger. If you meet it head on and without flinching you will remove the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never.” W. Churchill

One of the keys of Krav Maga training that I blog about often is that there are no magic techniques. Aggression and developing a switch so that our “flinch” reaction enables us to go from overwhelmed and surprised to going forward and destroying the attacker is what keeps us safe. The one thing that we can develope to make us safer than any system, art or technique is aggression and the mindset to go forward and go hard no matter what. I wrote about this a few weeks ago in the “slow it down” blog. We go hard in classes and work aggression and a “fight no matter what” mindset and worry about perfecting technique later.

I found a beautiful illustration of this in Chuck Holton’s book BULLET PROOF. The following is a couple of paragraphs from the book; “Capt. Brian Chontosh, found himself leading a patrol through the small town of Ad Diwaniyah, south of Baghdad. In what seemed like a single heartbeat, his unit was hit with a coordinated attack of mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and machine-gun fire. Chontosh knew immediately that it was a near ambush…and that he and his men were in the kill zone. Retreat was not an option. Dying was.

But Captain Chontosh wasn’t about to let that happen to his Marines. The love he felt for each of them instantly transformed into rage at those who would try to kill his men. He ordered the driver of his Humvee to plow directly into the enemy trench, and with a violence of actian that came from hard training, he leaped from the vehicle and attacked the attackers until his rifle ran out of ammo. He then pulled out his pistol and continued killiing the enemy until that, too, ran dry. He picked up an enemy weapon and continued fighting. Then another. Then another. When it was over, more than twenty enemy fighters were out of commission and his men were saved.”

When in doubt go forward and go hard! BE SAFE!

Hollywood BS!

Some of my blogs are informational…some are just me railing on something. This one is in the “railing” category! My wife hates watching movies with me. I am constantly pointing out the improbabilities, the impossibilities and the down right stupid stuff that movie makers want us to believe. They must think that we are stupid! Most people want to be blissfully ignorant and be entertained I guess but it drives me crazy. The stuff you see in movies that just don’t happen in the real world:

-In the movies guns are magic. Watch how many people in the movies who have a gun pointed at them just freeze. The gunman has the gun pointed at their head from a foot away and is looking somewhere else yet nobody ever thinks to grab the gun and beat the bad guy into the ground. Duh.

-The bad guy can hit a running target from fifty feet away. When someone asks me what my defense is if the gunman is ten or twenty feet away I tell them I’d use the Nike Defense. Friggin run! Even a trained shooter has a very hard time hitting a moving target.

-Ever see someone get shot in a movie and they go flying off their feet? It’s physics. If a projectile has the force to send someone flying it had to send the person who fired the projectile flying as well.
-Those little bitty silencers on handguns? No such thing. The silencers would have to be much larger and the gun use sub sonic rounds…usually a .22 round. There is no such thing as a silencer on a revolver. The gas (and noise) escapes around the cylinder.

-Hollywood must have magic bullets. People seem to drop every time a bullet hits them. In the real world people take full clips to their mid chest and still keep trying to slice or otherwise beat on the person with the handgun. I read of a criminal who took four .357 magnum rounds to the mid chest, another round that went arm pit to arm pit through the dude and several more in the arms and legs and was still fighting the police officers who shot him. If you have ever gone deer hunting you know that shooting that deer with a slug doesn’t drop him right there…and we’re talking about a huge slug! You have to track the darned thing for miles afterwards.

-One last observation on guns. How many movies have you seen where a car blows up because someone was shooting at it? Supposedly they hit the gas tank. This is an impossibility. Even with phosphorous tipped rounds shooting a stand alone gas tank (no other metal to penetrate) it is virtually impossible to blow that tank. Sheesh.

-Kids and small women can whoop on trained fighters. In the real world size and strength matters. A good big guy will beat a good small guy most of the time. I want to puke when a 60 pound kid kicks a 200 pound adult in a movie and the adult goes flying. This ain’t happening. As good as our female Kravists are, they know to hit vulnerable spots and to be looking to escape. All my female instructors would kick the crap out of those female movie starlets yet those starlets somehow can stand toe to toe with a large, trained fighter and kick his butt. Stupid!

-The hero takes knives away from dudes in a fight and never suffers a cut. Even when successful with knife defenses you rarely come away unscathed. The writers must have never heard the old adage “the winner of the knife fight is the one who dies tomorrow”. This is why we train knife defenses with KY jelly slathered on our arms. A lot of the joint locks and grabs just don’t work when there is a slippery substance involved. Guess what? Blood is pretty friggin slippery!

-The hero takes on 3 and 4 attackers all movie long and wins every time. BS! I don’t care how good you are you cannot see behind yourself. If even two guys get you between them you are in trouble. You can’t block 8 appendages with 4 consistently, especially if you can’t see them because they are coming from behind.

-Those witty one liners and smart aleck comments that the hero makes during and after fighting…wow. In the real world with an adrenaline dump, stress, etc. due to someone trying to kill me I’m going to be lucky if I even remember my name!

-Unbeatable heroes. I wish. No matter how bad you are there is always someone badder. Anything can happen. I was told of a special forces soldier who had seen combat in Afghanistan who was finally home. His first week at home he was in an altercation in a bar. He was punched once by a regular looking guy, fell back, hit his head and died. This was a tough dude, a real fighter and a hero…and he died that quickly.

-The hero takes a bunch of damage and bounces back to win…and in the next scene he doesn’t even have a limp! Bodies are fragile. To be taking a whipping and then catch a second wind isn’t going to happen. Broken bones, punches in the head and kicks in the groin aren’t something that you’ll be recovered from mid-fight. Those long choreographed fight scenes only work if the fighters don’t take damage. Real violence is fast, terrifying and devastating.

-In Lt. Col. Grossman’s book ON COMBAT he interviewed several WWII combat vets who stated “I won’t watch any WWII movies until they show them boys pissing their pants cuz that’s what happened to almost all of us.” Fear, adrenaline, exhaustion, etc. do some amazing things to our bodies. “You fight like you train is only true if you train clumsy, dumb, blind and deaf.” SGT Rory Miller

-Why doesn’t the bad guy ever kick the good guy in the groin? Watch an MMA fight. Those dudes are tough as nails but they drop in a hurry when they get kicked in the groin. The ref has to stop the fight and let them recover.
OK, I’m done railing. Go enjoy your movie. BE SAFE!

“I’m gonna kick your ass!”

“No intelligent man has ever lost a fight to someone who said ‘I’m gonna kick your ass’.” SGT Rory Miller

The threat of violence is a gift. The scumbag doing the threatening is giving us time to react. Sudden violence is a hit in the back of the head or a knife in the gut before we even knew that there was trouble around. The threat of violence is an idiot giving us the gift of time. With this gift we should either be moving or attacking.

If someone says “I’m gonna ______ (fill in the blank) to you”, why wouldn’t you believe it and act on it? Law enforcement and military units would love to have this kind of advance intelligence! When a threat tells you that they are going to punch, kill, beat, kick your ass or anything else believe it and act on it…do not wait to see if they were telling the truth! “Threats of violence” aren’t always verbal. Be on the watch for anything telling you that trouble is coming. Is he reaching behind his back (for a weapon in his belt), reaching for his pocket, taking off his jacket, walking straight at you with his eyes burning a hole through you, picking up a bottle, pool cue or similar? Act quickly and decisively, he gave you the clues that he meant you trouble. Also pay attention to his body language. Are his shoulders rising, neck veins bulging, teeth clenched, hands clenched and or is he shaking? Again, act on this threat of violence.

Think about the “monkey dance” bar fight scenario. It starts with one over testosteroned dude looking at another. Words are passed. They both puff up and chest bump for a bit. Then a punch is thrown and the fight is on. Ego pulled them right along the same path that has been travelled many, many times. The problem is that one is expecting the other to know the rules. Many have died thinking they were in a fight only to have the other believe that they were in combat. When we do this “monkey dance” we don’t know what the other is thinking, if he has weapons, if he has killed before.

I was told about a tragic incident in a club in Florida. For some reason this club decided, on the same night, to have country and western on one side and hip hop on the other. One of the good ol boys was stabbed and killed by one of the hip hoppers. It turns out that the good ol boy was known for bar fights. His fun was going to the club on weekends and getting into a scrap. He started a fight with a guy and believed that everyone knew the rules to a bar fight. It was just two guys having fun and beating on each other a bit. The hip hopper came from a different society. A fight to him was combat and somebody usually got killed….he was gonna make sure it wasn’t him. The man who died believed he was in a bar fight with the usual “monkey dance” rules and his opponent believed he was in a fight to the death. Only one of them could be right.

If these young men used the threat of violence tactically there would be more of them around. As soon as someone is looking at us funny, says something threatening, is heading for us, etc. we should be doing something besides going into a fight. We need to create distance, pick up something to defend ourselves with or attack the attacker before he gets a punch in. This is what keeps us safe. Standing there waiting for a fair fight against someone who we cannot possibly know wants a fair fight is stupid, and can get us killed. If you are in a fair fight, your tactics suck. When it comes to protecting yourself and your family be proactive, not reactive. BE SAFE!