A truly good and in-depth interview talking about using a knife to defend yourself in the real world, and all the issues surrounding it. One of my favorite podcast appearances yet.

 

 

 

 

Any time we are training in a physical activity where there is oppositional force such as in any of the combat sports, we run into the problem of measurement, specifically in a regular measuring of our performance and whether we are getting better or not.

If we are lifting weights, doing cardio or yoga, or shooting on a range, performance tracking is easy. With strength training, all we have to determine is are we lifting more weight, or more often? With cardio, are we going longer and/or faster? With yoga, are we stretching more, or hitting poses more solidly for longer periods of time. Shooting may be the easiest to track. Are we more accurate/faster than we were the last time we shot? All easily measured and even more easily understood.

But when working against the variable and almost endless possibilities that occur going against someone else, all that measurement becomes more like guesswork and a lot of “well, maybe”. Nothing is more frustrating that working really hard at getting better at a particular move, being able to do it perfectly well in isolation, but never pulling it off when there is resistance. We wonder if it is the move, or us. Actually, there is something more frustrating – when sometimes a move works, but other times, against the same opponent, it does not, and we can’t figure out why! That can border on heartbreaking.

The solution? I don’t know that there is one! Comforting, right? What we can do though is re-orient how we view progress, especially in the macro sense.

One of the things that it is easy to forget is that the person we are training against is working too, and may very well be working as hard and as much as you. We have to remember that while we are getting better, so are they and that can skew our relative view of our performance. Take my personal case as an example. I have 4 regular black belt training partners that are truly my peers. We are all within 10 years of each other in age, close in weight, and have been doing BJJ for close to the same amount of time, and we all train around the same number of hours in a week. When any of us roll against each other, the chance that one of us is going to dominate the other is remote. Occasionally, one of us might pull off someone cool, and be able to fully control the round, or even get the other person to tap. More often, like 98% of the time, the rolls are pretty even. If we were scoring them like a tournament, the typically result is either a close victory 3-2, 5-3, or pretty much a tie 0-0 where one or the other may have gotten an advantage (i.e. “almost a point”). If I focus on how I do with them, I could easily get discouraged. No matter how much I train, unless they stop training totally, I am not going to leap past them.

Instead, the person to focus our measurement against is the newer person, the less experienced guy. Can we get a move on him that we have not gotten before at all? If the answer is yes, more often than not, it means you are getting better. Especially if we are focused on self-defense, then the more accurate gauge anyway is against a person how knows little if any about BJJ, so the newer trainee is more precise in letting us know whether we are better or not.

Another way to look is against someone much superior to us. If that guy for example typically taps us five times in a six minute round, but then we consistently only get tapped two times, then we are better. Is that as much of an ego boost as being able to do something offensive back to them? Well, no, but it is realistic.

To sum up, don’t view your performance on a day to day measure, but rather over a longer period of time, say a month, and focus on what you did against people who you can do stuff against.

“Fine tuning the discus will take several years. You have to really develop a base for it, and then, after about 10 YEARS OF THROWING, you get to the point where you’re REALLY SOLID IN THE TECHNIQUE that you have and you just need to have your little tweaking here and there. ” Stephanie Brown Trafton 2008 Olympic Gold Medalist in the discus

So much deep truth here. This is how you get good. Work the fundamentals over and over for years and years, and then you start to understand them. And ONLY THEN can you change them for you, and only then do you begin to understand it well enough to coach. Contemplate what she says – she undoubtedly as an Olympic athlete trained everyday on her chosen specialty and she still said it took her 10 years to just get technically solid. Not even great. Just the tip of the iceberg. Compare to those who take a weekend certification class in something that they have never done and think they can teach, or that they can comment on social media and even argue with a true subject matter expert.

And I know a ton of people will not get this even after I added the emphasis in the quote.

 

 

 

As someone who strongly advocates BJJ as a backbone art for a good base in self-defense, I am often asked what the benefits are. The obvious one is being able to fight well on the ground. However, BJJ goes far beyond that. One thing is does better than almost any other single activity is getting you mentally and emotionally prepared for the fight.

One of the biggest issues that can occur when you find yourself assaulted is that by definition, things are not going your way. Perhaps we let our situational awareness lapse, perhaps we did not realize that the person we were in range of was a violent criminal actor (VCA) because he was using a ruse, perhaps we happened to be injured or ill at the time of attack, or a myriad of reasons put us in a bad place. Regardless of how we got to that place, said place is going to be uncomfortable – physically, mentally, and emotionally. And, unfortunately, the typical gun-centric range training most of us engage in doesn’t do anything at all to prepare us for that level of pressure. It is just not possible to do so when there is not a living, breathing, resisting opponent who is determined to win and that we must lose.

One solution to this is what is called Force-on-Force training. Typically it uses marking cartridges such as Simunitions or UTM to have a pain penalty that is still safe. The gold standard for this type of training is Craig Douglas’ ECQC course (www.shivworks.com). This is terrifically useful and much needed, but there is a large drawback – it is hard to conduct such training more than once in awhile. Not only is it expensive to have guns that can use these cartridge’s, but the ammo is as well, and you also have to have good protective equipment like good helmets. It also can’t be conducted in too many places outside of a shooting range (while these rounds are not lethal, they do pack a punch and can damage surrounding structures and bystanders quite easily). And on top of all of that, it is incredibly demanding physically. A couple of hours of this kind of training will leave most people exhausted.  Even for top athletes it would be tough to do more than on occasion.

 

However, the parts that are so valuable – the dealing with a resisting opponent and the physical, mental, and emotional pressures that are needed – can be more easily done in a BJJ academy. In every single moment you are on the mats there, you are going to be dealing with this type of situation. In a very short period of time, getting squashed underneath someone who outweighs you by 80 pounds becomes just another day.  It does not exactly become ho hum, nor does it become comfortable. But it does help you lose the sense of dread and helplessness, and that feeling is something that stays with you no matter what, and that you will be able to draw on when you are being attacked for real. And the best part is that because the pressure can be adjusted in training,  you can work like this hours at a time, day after day and be no worse for the wear.

I have said multiple times that BJJ gives the multi-disciplinary thinking tactician more bang for the buck than any other modality out there. Period. And getting comfortable with being uncomfortable is one of the, if not the single most useful.

I am asked all the time on advice in finding a coach that can mentor someone in their journey to mastery. I did this video to go through some of my thoughts on the issue.

 

A lot of people have questions regarding the best strength and conditioning work for the specific purpose of being prepared to defend yourself.  If that includes you, do yourself a favor and watch this. It is one of the most useful podcast interviews you will ever see.

 

 

I wrote the following a couple of years ago, but unfortunately the need to revisit the concept is stronger than ever. Recently listening to people with zero knowledge in the use of an edged weapon for self-defense saying what people should carry, or a stand up “combatives” specialist try to show how to handle an entanglement just makes me ill. So I bring this one back up.

 

One of the great advances in the study of fighting in the self-defense/tactical firearms realm over the past 15 years or so has been the acceptance of the concept that fighting is not one dimensional. Just because you can shoot a pistol or rifle really well in no way means you are prepared to fight to protect your life. On the contrary, now we understand that the study of such activity requires, in addition to firearms skill, the ability to have a functional pre-fight threat containment strategy (including de-selection, de-escalation, knowing how violent criminal actors think and act, verbal judo, etc), strength and conditioning, empty hand fighting ability (both standing and on the ground), blade and impact weapon, less lethal tools such as OC spray, traumatic medical care, and most importantly, how they all work together. In short, rather than a single dimension, we have to be integrated, multi-disciplinary tactical thinkers.

That is an awesome and welcome shift in our collective conceptual outlook, because it makes us better prepared to actually survive worst case scenarios and prevail. However, one drawback to this is the tendency on some instructors’ part to suddenly advertise that they are able to teach everything across the board – that they are, in effect, one shop stops for knowledge.

The simple fact is that this is nearly impossible. The sheer denseness and chaotic-ness of the totality of combat precludes almost any single person from being an expert in every field. There may be some who are great in a few areas, and have experience in some or even all of the others, but to do so with enough depth and breadth that they can teach material? Sorry, it just does not work. Instead of staying in their individual lane(s), they seem to feel that if they don’t project the aura that they know everything about everything, people will stop listening to them. So they then start teaching and offering coursework in areas they are clueless in, or start offering commentary on the viability of others who are actually knowledgeable in another area.

 

Take the example that everyone in the tactical firearms community is probably familiar with – a person who has served in the military in the past 15 years and has involved in real world violence over and over again during the current Global War on Terror. Perhaps they have even served with one of the Tier One Specops units like Delta or the Navy SEALS. Without a doubt, this person knows how to run a rifle, understands fighting mindset, knows team CQB room fighting and open field warfare. Maybe they even were the medic for their unit so they have a solid background in trauma care. Perhaps his unit was one that did some specialized work and used pistols in combat. This person leaves the military and starts teaching to make a living. Now, in those areas discussed above, this person is without a doubt a Subject Matter Expert (SME) and can pass on incredibly valuable lessons. Does that mean he also knows the ins and outs of the realities of concealed carry? What if he spent his entire career in a uniformed capacity? Can he understand what it is like to have to operate daily (not on one and done occasions) in a Non-Permissive Environment (NPE)? What if he starts teaching courses and writing articles on strength and conditioning? What training has he had in that? Just because he himself is in good shape and works out a lot does not mean he has knowledge that everyone else can benefit from. What about knife work? Contrary to what the movies like to portray, the list of combat soldiers that used a bladed weapon on an attacker are far and few between. And don’t even begin to think that there is much instruction or training involving knife work being officially taught to any big time military unit.

A case in point in how to conduct yourself is Kyle Lamb, formerly of Delta. Kyle is a terrific shooter, and decorated and experienced combat vet. His lectures on mindset are phenomenal. His understanding of shooting tactics and running rifles or pistols are at the highest level. Do you know what he never teaches? H2H. Even though he had some Army Combatives training, he knows he is not at a level where he would be comfortable teaching others. And that has not affected how great a fighter or instructor he is. An instructor does not have to be a jack of all trades.

Another glaring example of the exact opposite way to conduct yourself is in the specific world of hand-to-hand combat. Since the Gracie family burst on the scene publicly in the late 80’s and forced everyone to concede that ground fighting is not only a possibility, it may very well be a definite in a fighting scenario. At first, the martial arts world tried to show ways that they could defeat the grappler and never go to the ground (I still have a number of old martial art magazines filled with articles that are laughable in their ignorance on how much of a nightmare an experienced, trained grappler can be), but with years and years of not just Mixed Martial Art (MMA) events like the UFC, but real world video footage that show lots of fights go to the ground, the realization has set in that you better know how to handle it if you do find yourself on the ground. Unfortunately, this has given rise to a number of instructors who try to shroud themselves in the mantle of “expertness” when they have spent little if any time studying grappling. So this person who offers excellent instruction when the fight is upright tries to teach groundwork and makes fools out of themselves. And more importantly, passes on info and techniques that could very well get a good guy killed.

If you cannot point to any serious time in training grappling with specific and exact instructor or gym, and only throw around vague hints that you did this and that, but with no proof, don’t put out videos showing your answers to the ground when all you do is look ridiculous with techniques that are demonstrably idiotic.

To sum up, just stay in your lane. If you are truly an expert in that lane, no one will care if you are not an expert in all of them. That won’t diminish you in any way shape or form. What will diminish you is teaching or talking about stuff you have no clue about. So just don’t.