Progressive Resistance Part 2
Progressive resistance is a functional training method for developing combat scenarios in which the sensory and motor movement overload is regularly increased to facilitate adaptation. Progressive resistance is essential for understanding how to operate successfully and adapt to your environment whilst in the heat of battle and be able to track and measure your improvement during training. Each goal that is set and achieved serves as a servo-mechanism for adaptation under the stress of a violent confrontation. The student needs to be constantly challenged in order to progress to the next pinnacle of their training model. We must learn to foster a “training to win” approach in favour of throwing your students straight into a Tsunami with no life belt.
Navy Seals training for overkill
Training Overkill
Endocrinologist Hans Selye popularised how stress can be induced to the body way back in the 1930s. After much research, Selye concluded that there are a similar series of responses to stress that are broken down into 3 categories: Alarm, Resistance and Exhaustion. This became known as the General Adaptation Syndrome or GAS.
Stress is how the body reacts to a stressor- this is the stimulus that evokes stress. An important point to mention is there is a continuum of stressors that progressively takes you from being slightly irritable all the way up to incapacitated.
Alarm is the first stage. When a threat is recognised, the body goes into a state of alarm. This is where the adrenaline dump is produced to bring out the fight, flight or freeze syndrome. What is often left out is that preparation in advance and the cultivation of situational awareness helps to negate just how “alarmed” the person put under stress will actually be when attacked or threatened.
Resistance is the second stage. If the person under stress is overwhelmed by a physical attack, it becomes necessary to attempt some means of coping with that stress. No matter how good one is at defence, the body simply cannot keep this up indefinitely against a committed attacker without going into complete exhaustion.
Exhaustion is the third stage. At this point, the body’s resources become depleted and therefore it is unable to maintain its’ normal physical functions. This stage is to be used as a ceiling for training purposes and to be progressively extended over a period of time. By being pushed further through training the body is progressively able to adapt to being put under so much stress and begins to be able to function more readily while under stress in general.
Exhaustion Training for Adaptation
Basics of Street Survival Training
Adaptation is the whole purpose of Street Survival Training against a progressively resisting opponent. The process of adaptation is to progressively add both sensory and motor movement stress indicators to each phase of the scenario. The stress should be sufficient enough to allow adaptation to occur, but not so severe that it causes a complete “arses and elbows” exhaustion breakdown which inevitably leads to unnecessary injuries.
Most importantly always keep an eye on your end goals; once you achieve a certain level of competence, begin to set new goals that enable you to adapt even further. Remember, practice improves skill and success not only through constant repetition alone, but through recognition of “survival successes” within the process of repetition. If improvement were gauged only through repetition, then most people would become experts at “getting things wrong” as it takes many more attempts to start “getting things right.” Therefore adaptation plays a big part in hardwiring successful attempts over failures. By all means, learn from your mistakes, but then forget about them. What you want to remember was that feeling of successfully surviving the encounter when you eventually get it right!
Dedicated to YOUR Survival
Joe
Progressive Resistance Part 1
So, by employing our formula of detecting a threat, delaying a threat, initiating the contact by inserting a pre-emptive strike between the beats of well timed verbal warning or simply by defending and counter attacking your opponent’s first strike while applying undue forward pressure, the fight, by itself – in a perfect world – could seem like a simple proposition. Unfortunately, there are many other factors that serve to influence our perfect formula when the chaos of combat abounds. With that in mind, the confrontation can easily transform and mutate, and as a result become a more complicated problem to potentially solve.
Resistance is the force that hinders all action making the simple seem impossible.
The very essence of combat viewed as a clash between opposing wills creates a certain amount of resistance. A significant point to remember is that the enemy will not be an inanimate object, but instead a real moving person that is fighting back with the potential conviction to cause you bodily harm. It is this ever changing dynamic interplay between his will and ours that makes the fight so difficult and convoluted. In the chaos of combat the resistance given to us by our opponent is truly an obstruction that we need to overcome.
Resistance may be physical or mental. Resistance may come from an external source, such as our opponent, but what about environmental considerations, such as adverse weather conditions or uneven terrain? Resistance could also be self induced, indicated by lack of preparedness, lack of efficient strategy and tactics, poor physical conditioning or inadequate interpersonal skills. Resistance is your opponent’s defence against your attack or possibly your defensive measures countering his.
While we should always seek to minimise any self-induced resistance, the greater goal should be to learn how to fight effectively against a fully resisting opponent. Many systems agree with this, but you cannot model your training around going from A-Z and skipping out on all the letters in-between. Only through using progressive resistance will enable you to understand the force necessary to vanquish a fully resistant opponent and develop a realistic appreciation for “what is” and “what is not” possible in a sudden violent encounter. While your training should always attempt to replicate the conditions of an authentic street fight, you must also realise that it will probably never fully duplicate the level of resistance of real-world violent confrontations.
Dedicated to YOUR Survival
Joe
The Fight: Early, Mid & Late Phase Defined
When two people are aggressively fighting each other, their main objective is to offensively and violently impose their Will onto each other. The first person to submit through voluntary action, injury and/or death usually ends up losing the battle. The tactical means to this combative end is generated through the organised application of the use of force.
Conventional thought and political correctness has spread like a pandemic virus advising us not to antagonise a would-be attacker by responding with any kind of aggressive behaviour and/or continued resistance when being threaten with violence and/or attacked. We are told that to escalate matters will only make things worse for us and often it is the “good guy” that potentially faces jail time for exercising his law abiding rights of fighting back when the chips are down.
However, the conventional thought process or political correctness, for that matter, holds little weight in the wake of a sudden violent attack when your survival clock is ticking. Although our awareness and avoidance measures are defensive in nature, our response continuum must include offensive options as well as defensive options. In other words, offence and defence are interdependent cogs of the same wheel. One without the other is an instantaneous recipe for failure.
Although I completely abhor violence, when faced with a violent threat and/or attack, you must adopt a survival mentality that gives you permission to respond offensively in defence of yourself and/or your loved ones. In other words, in the wake of immediate danger, you need to create enough resistance in order to reverse the roles where you are now able to impose “your Will” back onto your enemy. Experts often refer to this principle as the “Predator/Prey Reversal.”
Let’s break this down into three phases:
- Early Phase: Passive deception is a defensive posture used as a “camouflage delivery system” whereby you can launch a pre-emptive strike. The pre-emptive strike is an offensive tactic used to surprise the enemy when all other defensive options are exhausted.
- Mid Phase: The ability to successfully counter an attack means that you had enough time to read your opponent’s intentions. The initial movement (parry, shield or cover) is defensive and employed to create enough resistance against your enemy’s attack, so that you are able to launch a counter-attack, which is offensive. To remain completely defensive will only reinforce a victim’s mentality and ensure your untimely demise.
- Late Phase: When you are surprised and overwhelmed by a sudden attack along with being unaware of your immediate surroundings, this places you in a precarious position to say the least. This is potentially the “worst case scenario.” This is where our defensive ability must be at its strongest; to preserve and protect yourself through resisting your opponent’s Will being imposed onto you. Many systems do not cover these late phase options, but without them, the system is never complete.
Many citizens of good character have difficulty with the thought of being offensive towards another fellow human being. We have all been raised to embrace to the standards of fairness, goodness, equality and empathy towards others. Unfortunately there are many other people in our world today who do not hold those same values; to them life is cheap!
Another stark reality to take into consideration in these modern times is that we can no longer rely on the police anymore for protection. At best, these days law enforcement functions as a post-event reactionary organisation. In fact, it is no longer even an occupational obligation for them to protect us from danger. Our judicial system is also based on a post-event structure, often designed in favour of the criminal’s rights rather than our own.
With interpersonal conflict becoming a staple of modern society and violence rising every year with staggering statistics, more and more people are becoming interested in some form of self protection. Make sure you have chosen the right self defence system for YOU! Whatever system you choose in the end, make sure that you ask them to define the actual interpersonal conflict – the fight: early, mid and late phase – before you invest those hard earned pounds and dollars!
Dedicated to YOUR Survival
Joe
Combat Scenario Based Training
Force-on-Force Training, Role Play, Street Fight Replication Drills, Combat Simulation Training, Animal Day, Panic Attack or Combat Scenario Based Training. This training model goes by many different names, but the outcome of this type of training is all supposed to achieve the same thing:
To place a student into an unfamiliar and/or uncomfortable setting that simulates a real-life violent confrontation in order to test his ability to respond to that incident by using the skills that he has acquired while being placed under undue pressure.
Sounds easy, right? Often it is not, resulting in dangerous outcomes due to a lack of proper teaching and testing structures applied. Properly done, this type of training must be carefully structured; overseen by a coach where the student’s progress and training objectives can be tracked and measured, and most importantly designed so that the good guy ultimately wins and survives the encounter.
Unsupervised and/or disorganised scenario-based training is usually presented as a “let’s see what happens” approach. Because no one knows what the outcome is likely to be, there is no way to intelligently track and measure the student’s progress, let alone his training objectives and outcomes. Although, often when a scenario is completed the student exhibits a feeling of exhilaration, the individual steps and behaviours adopted to get him there are murky at best.
To establish a progression, it is necessary to delineate some different styles of learning to understand how we can implement this scenario-based training with a positive lasting effect that actually helps the student to survive when unexpectedly confronted by violence.
I like to take my students through five stages of learning:
- Theoretical
- Static
- Dynamic
- Low-Level Combat Scenarios
- High-Level Combat Scenarios
Theoretical
Theoretical learning has to do with developing a cognitive understanding of “doing the right things” and “doing things right.” It is here that the strategic groundwork is laid for the proper implementation of tactics used. It also outlines and defines who the student is (strong and weak points; use of limitations), what he must know (technical, tactical, conceptual and interpersonal) and what he must be able to do (real time application). Philosophy and system doctrine is covered here extensively.
Static
Static learning is used to build the proper skill and “motor-memory” required through the use of repetition of good form. This sort of training helps to isolate a particular skill set and determine the student’s ability to demonstrate a move where focus and concentration are employed along with a time limit to do so. Many attributes can be isolated within techniques practiced with this type of training.
Dynamic
Dynamic learning requires the use of skill through constant movement. This determines the student’s ability to perform tasks under gradual pressure.
Low-Level Combat Scenarios
This is where you would start to blend the use of dynamic training along with the mental, emotional and spiritual components. This is where you would add much of what you learned within the theoretical boundaries and mix them with the practical. This would employ simple verbal statements to evoke an emotional response; nothing too complicated.
High-Level Combat Scenarios
This type of scenario training is based on a script. It involves more than one role player and employs a storyline where a specific set of actions initiated should evoke a certain set of responses by the student. Properly structured, this training model will provide an environment where replicated dangerous or even possible deadly confrontations allow the student to understand the opportunities available to him to overcome the situation and survive at all costs!
Dedicated to YOUR Survival
Joe
Street Survival Secrets
Street Survival Secret #1: There Are Only Two Types of Fights
There are many who still spend disproportionate time training long-range kickboxing as a “test” to see what will work in a street fight. This “myth of the duel” is prevalent in many systems and has very little bearing on close quarter combatives or street survival. Am I saying that an UFC champion won’t fair well in a street fight? No, not at all, many champions and/or experts will do just fine; but the average person needs proportionate training that parallels what they will actually face on the street. There are only two types of fights:
1. The Interview:
This refers to the confrontation that begins with “the unsolicited encroachment” such as “Do you have the time?” or “Can you spare a cigarette?” Often violence can escalate rapidly in this context. You have to train subtle stances and responses that will either defuse the situation or set your opponent up for a pre-emptive strike, counter and escape.
2. The Ambush:
Always keep this in mind: some of the greatest militaries of the world have been defeated by an ambush! This doesn’t mean we are just going to agree with that and resign ourselves to defeat. We must train to respond to any ambush by:
- Reacting immediately, don’t wait.
- Fight back, fight back, and fight back some more!
- Never allow the attacker to move you to another location.
- Learn to fight past the stab, the broken nose and/or the gunshot wound.
Long gone are the days of “The Gentleman’s Square Off.” If someone challenges you to take the fight outside, the minute he stands up, sucker punch him! If you don’t, expect to be set up for an ambush by more than one person the minute you walk out that door.
Street Survival Secret #2: Action is Faster Than Reaction
Proximity negates skill! When you are confronted with an in-your-face violent threat, the distance that your opponent gives you will set him up for his own demise. Because he is “in-your-face”, striking first almost always insures success. However, you have to be legally, ethically and morally justified to attack anyone without first trying to verbally defuse the confrontation. The First Hit First Principle is a pre-emptive strike model built on visual, auditory and tactile Pre-Contact Force Cues. These are the indicators that you can use to predict violence and thwart the enemy’s intentions.
Street Survival Secret #3: Close the Gap While Standing, Open the Gap While Grounded
This is one of the most overlooked concepts in martial arts systems today. On the street you have got to close the gap while standing to minimise the power base of your opponent and/or get “inside” of the weapon attack to diminish your adversary’s opportunities. If you end up on the ground, you must immediately create space to facilitate a deluge of stomp kicks, knees and mule kicks that will enable you to get back on your feet and ensure a safe escape.
Street Survival Secret #4: Watch the Hands, It’s the Hands That Will Kill You!
Do not fixate visually on any one part of your opponent. Don’t get tricked into the “blood lust” starring into his eyes. Learn to develop a peripheral vision by paying attention to what we call “the window of combat.” This is an area on the body loosely bordered by his shoulders and hips. One of the key elements for survival here is paying attention (not fixating) on where your opponent’s hands are. Are they in his pockets? Are they behind his back concealing a weapon? Know where they are at all times, these are the tools that will most likely be responsible for causing you harm.
Dedicated to YOUR Survival
Joe
Keep It Simple, But Not Too Simple
The Chaos of Combat is filled with a myriad of complexities. Often along with the adrenal rush comes an altered perception of our motor movements. Repeatedly this concept is confused with the idea that when faced with danger, you will not be able to execute more than three tools efficiently. Actually, our motor or muscle movements are rather paradoxical. On the one hand we are all able learn difficult tasks such as eating, brushing our teeth, driving a car or simply walking. On the other hand we quickly adapt to perform these undertakings without any conscious cognitive effort. These actions quickly become automatic and reflexive. If we have to consciously think about how we walk for example, the instinctive process of walking becomes confusing to us and hinders our natural movement. We need to understand that all motor movement is a result of a stimulus to response action. We also need to understand that being exposed to a “synthetic combat experience” such as repetitive tool development, combat scenarios and “theatre in your mind” visualisations, we will eventually be able to respond to a violent assault and all the chaos that surrounds us, with the command and mastery of the close quarter tools that we have trained.
Many close quarter combat courses teach what is called the K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid) method. This approach seriously limits your arsenal and options when the spit hits the fan. They will claim that you are too stupid to learn more than three movements, when you are already performing thousands of movements over a period of hours in your average day. This concept is scientifically incorrect, lacks empirical evidence and they are insinuating that you are brain-dead by trying to install this erroneous “programme” into your muscle memory! The key to success and survival in combat is being able to re-call simple movements and then putting them together into an improvised flow. We train this in a “goal specific” manner by breaking down the complexities of the “chaos of combat” into separate or “simple” pieces. Then we begin to piecemeal these tools together to use as a “source material” of ideas that you can improvise with. Very quickly your ability to thrive, yield and flow within “the chaos of combat” will improve exponentially. Albert Einstein was one of the smartest people in the world. He said, “Keep it simple, but not too simple!” What can “appear” sometimes as a “complex combination of motor movements”, are just a collection of simple ideas put together. In close quarter combat this gives us the desired “shock & awe” effect on our opponent that we are looking for!
Dedicated to YOUR Survival
Joe
Choosing a Self Defence System
There are hundreds of different self defence systems out there available for you to train and study. However, through either a “politically correct” culture, which chooses to sweep the “reality of violence” within our society under the carpet and/or an “historical homage” to old-world martial arts systems, most self defence systems offer pretty much the same old thing: unrealistic moves, a lack of empirical evidence, over stylised dance-like art forms and basically systems that are too complicated, too cumbersome, too artsy or dangerously too simple and robotic. Street survival is about functioning within chaos! In combat, deciding on your “best option” self defence tactics basically boils down to being able to differentiate between what works and what doesn’t work in the big picture of an all-out violent street encounter. Through operational experience and a committed process of attrition, useless fighting concepts need to be filtered out and re-organised in order to function within this survival framework. What you will be left with is what we call “The Essence of Combat.” These are all the immutable, re-occurring combative principles that transcend all styles, systems or uniforms and that knows no one single home. To understand the “Essence of Combat” one first has to be able to thrive, yield and flow within what we call the “Chaos of Combat.”
All life-or-death altercations are a combination of un-choreographed confusion, violence and fear. The reality of a vicious, violent street assault must not only include the physical, but also the mental, emotional and spiritual (not religious) attributes, which are all intrinsic elements of street survival. Survival is not about winning a trophy or a belt while wondering how good you look. Survival is about getting home safely! Survival is overcoming fear in the face of danger! Survival is developing the mental toughness and resiliency to fight past the broken nose, the knife stab and/or gun shot! Survival is all about being aware of your legal rights as a human being; learning how to fight back and to provide a safe environment for yourself and your loved ones!
Dedicated to YOUR Survival
Joe
Strategy & Tactics: What’s the Difference?
I am often asked this question by students who aren’t exactly sure what the difference is between strategy and tactics.
At the entry level of any operation, strategy is the “master war plan”- it is the Generals’ in the war room planning the overview of the operation. Clausewitz said, “Strategy sets the point where, the place when and the force with which the battle is to be fought.” So, essentially, strategy is the planning process or doing the right things. If your overall strategy is to kick box at long range, then it really doesn’t matter how good your tactics are because long range kick boxing is not a strong strategy for street survival. A solid strategy for street survival would include:
- Awareness
- Intuition
- Tactical Intelligence
- Threat Analysis
- Creating a barrier (The Fence)
- Effective Communication (Verbal Judo)
- De-escalation
- Deceptive Delivery System
- Pre-emptive Strike
- Defend and Counter Attack
- Neutralise to Degree
Tactics are the things used at the point of physical contact. This is what defines the elements that you actually use accomplish your mission or doing things right. Again, if I am confronted with someone who is in my face and my response to his big haymaker attack is to side-step while parrying his strike, catch his wrist and attempt a wrist lock…well, I could have had a good strategy to start with, but the tactics were not acceptable for street survival.
In a previous post I have delineated that all fights are won in close quarter range. The power tools we are essentially looking at here to be the most effective at this range are:
- Elbows
- Knees
- Shoulder Butts
- Forearm Strikes
- Stomp Kicks
- Head Butts (limited usage)
We are not limited to these tools only, but these are the foundation power tools. At close quarter combat range, you need to be doing these things right, before adding a huge list of other tools to your arsenal. As Napoleon said, “God is on the side of the heaviest artillery.”
Dedicated to YOUR Survival
Joe
Ground Zero
Gong to the ground intentionally in a street fight is potential suicide. However, if everything else fails and you are taken to the ground unexpectedly, we must be able to adapt to this range and fight our way back to a standing position. I have a maxim that I like to use that goes like this:
“Close the gap while standing and open the gap while grounded.”
Although there are many systems who will claim that this concept is incorrect, here are just a few reasons why you would not want to take the fight to the ground:
- Grappling systems teach you to stay as tight as possible to your opponent. Whether you are in a committed top or bottom reference point, you are pinned to the ground!
- Once you go to the ground your chances of escape are extremely limited.
- The street is not a soft mat; it is hard, sometimes covered on glass, syringes and gravel. Going to the ground on the street could very well end in you getting a serious case of road rash.
- Rolling around wrestling on the street will give you a “wake-up call” when your assailant pulls out a knife and starts stabbing you repeatedly.
- Beware of the traditional martial arts break fall! Every time you slap your arm down forcefully on the pavement is potentially a serious injury for you.
- 40% of fights involve more than one person. You may just find that when going for that nice triangle choke set-up that you are having your head stomped on by a third party!
Dedicated to YOUR Survival
Joe
