Sitting around this week thinking about Southern Knights and re-reading essays started me thinking. John has written about how we need to train with intent, and that we should "train like you have a fight in a month". That sounds good to me. But how do i do it? How should I train if I was going to fight for real?
A friend of mine (yes, I know it is hard to imagine <img src="/forum/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" /> ) who will forever after be refered to as SouthNarc because he is an undercover narcotics agent, and is from the south, trains for real. And, he puts together programs to train other agents. He also puts together photo illustrated technique sequences for self defense people to learn. A darned fine man in my opinion. And he allowed me to post this article about "training with intent" from his website here. This is how the people that are doing it for real every day train. I hope you don't mind me posting it here.
http://www.shivworks.com/commitment.asp
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On Commitment to Training
After 15 years of combined martial arts experience, I can honestly say that I am truly a newcomer to combatives. It was not until I could make this honest appraisal of my skills and my person that I began to understand what it takes to prepare myself for a potential life or death situation – an event that could compromise my own physical integrity, or the integrity of my loved ones. So what I am saying is that I am no authority and have nothing to teach you here. What I hope to convey is my understanding of what I have not yet learned – what I do not yet know.
Ask anybody who says they train in combatives whether they feel prepared to defend their lives and you will typically receive a resounding “yes.” They may qualify it with things like “I can do well enough,” or “I think I can handle myself pretty well,” but invariably, people like to believe they know how to protect themselves…and maybe they are right. Personally, I could never be so confident. I have no idea what’s out there or whom I will come up against. The best trained individual can be compromised, even by those who have never trained a day in their lives. In a recent discussion about this very issue with SouthNarc, a person whom I owe greatly for his pragmatic and no-nonsense insight into the nature of fighting, I asked “why the hell do we train? What’s the point when fighting really comes down to aggression?” His response went to the heart of the matter. He said, “When you have two guys of equal size, equal commitment, and equal aggression, what separates them? It’s the guy with that little bit of a scientific edge that will win the fight every time.”
Of course, he and I were already assuming that all other things were held constant. In this event, yes, the “science,” or the techniques and mechanics of fighting could decide the outcome. But far too often what we see is that people only train the mechanics and technical aspects of fighting. The pendulum has swung too far in one direction for this crowd. I suppose what is implicit in this kind of training is the fantasy-driven wish that one can take the aggression out of a fight. Concepts like “one punch kill” and “passive redirection” come to mind….Implicit in these concepts is the notion that the fight can be ended quickly and easily, without harm or damage done to the martial artist himself. Really, a great deal of fear is associated with this kind of thinking. This fear may come in the form of the fear of being hit, hitting somebody else, etc. But in reality, life or death confrontations aren’t pretty and they do require deliberate aggression to survive.
So, the “rigid technician” orientation/attitude can result in serious bodily harm or even death if no realization is made that aggression and the mental aspects of the fight are just as important, if not more important, to consider. Others go too far in this direction, however. Some conclude that training for a confrontation will never approximate the reality and dynamic nature of a fight, so why bother? The pendulum only begins to swing to center when we realize that both the physical and mental are intricately woven together; that one must take a more holistic approach to combatives and self-defense. I guess we could simply say that one’s beliefs about what it takes to survive will often dictate how they train to survive; if these beliefs are distortions of the truth, than their approach will be “off” as well.
So what’s the answer? It’s pretty simple in theory, anyway: Impact. Impact will set you free….It’s really just that simple. I am not referring to tappy-taps or slow-motion dramatizations, I’m instead referring to the real thing. There are no substitutes for realistic training. For those who are rigidly oriented technicians, it forces them to find out how their techniques change or fall apart under the stress of impact. For those who are rigidly oriented away from training, well, they get closer to the reality of the fight. In other words, there are no excuses and everybody gets tested in their own way. I’m not suggesting that you stab your partner or that you throw bare knuckle punches at each others’ heads, but it’s not a bad idea to train with a close approximation of what you’re likely to encounter on the street. Head gear is a wonderful thing, by the way. It cannot take severe impact, like full-on elbows, but it can absorb a great deal. During a recent videotaping, I wore a motorcycle helmet and received somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 hours of pretty hard elbows to the noggin. Of course, I think I almost got a concussion by the end of it, but the experience was invaluable to my training on a number of levels. There’s also nothing like training with solid metal trainers (dulled and rounded training blades) on occasion. You have to be a bit careful as trainers can still break a rib or gouge an eye, but the impact associated with this kind of training can help tremendously.
So many people have enormous trepidation about participating in training that involves heavy impact. I know I did at first, but I now see how it serves as essential preparation for real life confrontations. The advantages are too numerous to mention, but some include:
1. Enhancing the automaticity of motor responses and cognitive appraisal processes “in-fight.” In other words, the more we train realistically, the greater the likelihood that what we are training will transfer to real-life confrontations, and we will be able to do so with little deliberate thought.
2. Increasing the realism, or ecological validity, of training. We just get that much closer to approximating the real-deal.
3. Augmenting awareness of our responses to impact as well as assisting in the habituation and resilience to impact (critical to surviving a fight). We have no idea how we are to react to the vicissitudes of a violent encounter until we can experience them directly and are forced to continue. Often, people are greeted by a rude awakening the first time they engage in simunitions training, for example. Those who are involved in this training can tell you many stories about people who have plain “frozen” in their tracks the first time they are hit…you cannot freeze like this in a fight without handing over your life as well.
4. Increasing pain threshold. What more can I say? We just need to get the experience of “banging around” to even begin to withstand what is in store for us during a real life or death situation.
5. Decreasing the fear of impact, which can significantly improve our development and advancement in training. ‘Nuf said….
Hopefully this article gets you thinking about how you train, and more importantly, what your orientation/attitude is toward fighting. The thing that becomes the greatest challenge is developing enough commitment to do whatever it takes, regardless of what that entails. We aspire to be dominant on the streets, so we must do the same when training. Good, hard impact training can serve as an instrumental tool to this endeavor. What is interesting is that, so long as training partners have enough trust in one another and are working toward the same ends, impact can become something that many people begin to look forward to. Many, like myself, begin to equate training experiences such as these with the attainment of “martial enlightenment.” In other words, the flash bulb goes off, and people’s skills progress in leaps and bounds…we learn what works, as opposed to theorizing about what might work in a confrontation. As it is often stated, but rarely followed, “Direct Experience (or in this case, a close approximation of it) is the greatest of all teachers.”
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