One of my loves is trying to understand violence.....
What makes one person expode while some else remains calm?
I have tried to learn as much as I can over many years and like an onion there are many layers.
Some of my learning experience came from when I learned and taught self defence.
Now before I start I am not being critical about any system it's what I saw and experienced.
I did some traditional martial arts as a youth and many years later I stumbled upon Krav Maga. I was hooked, I absolutely loved it. I found a great instructor who had a brilliant group of students. I was a serving police officer at the time and this group had a number of police and prison officers. It ran at the training wing of a local prison and it was everything I wanted.
We trained hard and there was many a bruise and scrape given and received.
Now I went through the grades and eventually became an instructor. One of the hardest courses I have ever done.
I opened my own club and began to train. I had all sorts of people from all different backgrounds.
Now this is where I saw a difference, I found that I could not replicate the same intensity in training that I had when I joined years previously.
People expected a magic pill on their first night to become instant ninjas.
It doesn't happen.
This is where I saw a huge dip in the system.
The training was flawed. A choke was not a choke. A "Zombie" would walk in and place their hands onto a training partners throat area to simulate a choke. The student would then carry out a technique good or bad and would succeed. This is so wrong, it gives and breeds fall confidence.
The attack was fake for a start. Everything down to the lack of facial expression from the attacker. When was the last time you saw a friendly smiling attacker?
It got to me that these people where paying money to learn a system that in my opinion would let them down in a real situation so things changed. Alot of my focus was on intent, the physical choke need not go on but the aggression and facial Intent was there.
When I applied the realistic technique I found most freezed and floundered. Once they learned to deal with the initial realisation of what they saw then their brain would find the appropriate response.
At gradings I watched students from other clubs doing the same old and it ate into me.
It made me question lots of things but this was the start, I wanted to learn more as this is a massive subject. I began to read books and research online. Now I was learning more and more and trying to understand how the brain reacted under stress.
I read a brilliant book by Rory Miller and then got to go to a teaching course he was teaching on. Wow.
I became a police instructor and again It was fake training. The same thing kept coming up, people will get hurt. Do attackers on the street care?
Unfortunately there is only a 3000 character limit available but It would be interesting to hear your thoughts.
