Training for Sudden Violence: 72 Practice Drills

INTRODUCTION

I teach about violence. I worked in corrections for the better part of two decades, and as I left the life I discovered that my niche wasn’t so much teaching cops, as I had expected, or even teaching civilian self-defense. The material seemed to resonate most with experienced martial artists who were coming to discover how little they really knew about violence.

The first book, Meditations on Violence (YMAA, 2008), was as much therapy and catharsis as information. It was a mental dump of what I knew about Bad Stuff™.

The second, Facing Violence (YMAA, 2011), is less visceral and far less personal. But it is, in my opinion, far more useful. How to read a room, how to identify and classify violent people and situations, the nuances of explaining a split-second decision in logical, legal terms.

This one will be different. Maija Soderholm, author of The Liar, the Cheat, and the Thief and one of the sneakiest swordswomen I know, suggested a book of drills and exercises. Things that are suited to my goal (surviving violence) and to my way of teaching, which is getting the student to see and evaluate clearly enough that each student becomes a self-teacher.

Teaching, especially in martial arts, is often hierarchical. There is a clear sense of who is above and who is below. Information flows down, always under control of the instructor. Sometimes it comes with a ritual of dominance and submission: some students bow to a master.

I believe that you cannot be taught simultaneously to bow and to stand your ground. That the habit of obedience is a short step away from the habit of submission. That if you do what your instructor says when you know in your heart it is wrong, you will also obey a rapist. Trust me, a violent predator is far scarier than your instructor. Maybe not on an intellectual level (My instructor kicks ass! He is the best fighter I have ever seen). But on a gut level (This man is going to hurt me and hurt me and he is never going to stop and he is enjoying every second).

It’s not that criminals are somehow magically better fighters than people who train and stay in shape. It is that criminals will go to a place inside themselves that your instructor will not, a place that too many people cannot even imagine.

So what follows are drills and exercises that I think are important for observation, for integrating mind/body, and for efficient motion.

Some involve motion, because anything that escalates to a physical fight is a matter of motion. Many involve mind-set, because most of the catastrophic failures I have seen in a fight have been mental, not physical. Almost all, at some level, are about accurately seeing the world.

I believe there are three aspects you must master to successfully defend yourself: awareness, initiative, and permission.

Awareness is as broad and deep or as narrow and focused as you can handle it. From seeing in an instant the position and momentum of an attacker and each part of the attacker to seeing the dynamics of a room or a street, awareness goes as far as you have the discipline and curiosity to take it. It must be an informed awareness, however. Seeing everything is not the same as understanding everything. You may notice three young men suddenly going silent and separating, but if you do not recognize what that means, the information is useless.

Initiative is the ability to act decisively and ruthlessly. Simply to act. Simply to move. Make a decision. Execute.

People hesitate. They make a decision and they question it. They decide to move and then they prepare to move and set to move. All of these hesitations are visible and take time. They make you an easier victim.

Permission is the ability to do what you have decided to do. You have an entire lifetime of social conditioning telling you what conflict is and how to deal with it. When the type of violence you are facing is different from the social conflict you have been prepared for, the social responses will not work. Not only do violent criminals know this, they count on it. You must give yourself permission to break the rules, and to do that, you must know what the rules are.

There are also four elements in any conflict: you, the threat or threats (bad guys), the environment, and luck.

Most martial arts are centered on you: teaching you to move, to punch, kick, pin, and throw. Further, much of the training focuses on the physical self and at best pays lip service to the ethical, spiritual, emotional, and intellectual aspects. You have a brain and a spirit that must be explored and trained. All three (mind, body, spirit) are potential points of failure. You must emphasize the strengths and know the weaknesses.

There is also a bad guy (or many) in a fight, and you must understand him. If he is a predator, he is there neither to test you nor to help you develop skills. He is there to take something from you and do it as safely and efficiently as possible. To let you know anything in advance or to feed you the type of attacks you have trained against would be stupid. Do not count on the threat being stupid. You should know, as much as possible, how threats think and feel and plan as well as how all humans move and how they break.

Fights happen in places. Often, training is set up to minimize the variables of environment so specific skills can be trained and tested. It is fine as long as you understand the depth of the limitation. You will fight in a world of infinite hazards and opportunities. The one who is better at seeing and exploiting these has a huge edge in the real world.

Last is luck. Professionals work to take luck out of any planned operations and dojo are kept clean and uncluttered to try to minimize chaos. Chaos is the natural environment of a fight. Stuff happens. What you don’t see, like slippery surfaces or a table behind you, can have a profound effect on the outcome. Managing chaos, the use and mitigation of luck, is a skill as well—a skill centered on awareness of possibility or hazard and ruthless exploitation (e.g., initiative) of those elements.

Fighting is inherently conservative and this shows in martial arts. Fighting is dangerous. People get hurt and killed. For everything that might work, there are a hundred things that seem like a good idea that can lead to a messy death. We have kata and tradition not because people are stuck in tradition, but because when people consistently survived, it was considered imperative to remember how and model it.

A lot has been lost in translation and by transmission over time, but most of the systems that survived have the bones. But that may not be enough. They also were built around specific individuals in specific times and places.

There isn’t a section on training kata in this book, largely because I am not convinced kata is good training for assault survival. I think kata was the premier way to preserve and transmit physical information in a society where literacy was rare and video unheard of.

How you will fight must be built around you. Your physicality (both in build and in how you naturally move) as well as your temperament. A certain amount of aggression is required, but if you really cannot injure another person, training to injure is wasted time. If you can’t handle messy liquid spills, knife training probably isn’t for you.

I don’t like the term fighting, but I wind up using it a lot. Our obsession with social conflict and the fact that most of our experience centers in social conflict have stunted our language. So I use fight as a generic term, and that is very, very wrong. It puts images in your head that do not belong there.

Most conflict is social and establishes membership, establishes dominance, or enforces rules. There is no difference between a fraternity hazing and a gang jumping in. All over the world, young men follow the same steps leading up to a fistfight. The dynamics behind a spanking and an execution are the same.

It all has rules; it all has rituals. There is a lead-up. One or both of the people usually must be angry or make themselves angry—very few people can fight cold.

This is what we are used to. This is the default belief about violence. This is the place where fighting, with its implications of a contest with a winner and a loser, is valid.

These assumptions drive most of our training. From the lethal duels of bygone eras to sparring today, this is what we expect and this is what we train for.

And almost every last incident of this kind of physical fight is 100 percent preventable. You can walk away from it all. All of your training works here and none of it is necessary.

Assaults are rare, but they are the most serious person-to-person attacks. A human predator wants something from you: your money and jewelry or just a few minutes of pleasure hurting you. He will get it with minimal risk to himself. Minimum effort expended.

We do not work ourselves up or get angry to slaughter a steer. An experienced criminal will not do so with you. We do not take risks or even consider somehow making it fair when we butcher a chicken. A predator will not play fair with you.

To make it safe and efficient for himself, the predator will make the attack close range, hard, fast, and a surprise for you.

It will be nothing like sparring. Nothing like even the most extreme no-holds-barred match.

This will be an assault, and the things you need to train for, the things I teach, are those little skills that buy you some precious warning or a microsecond. The things that might give you a few percentage points of an edge.

If you already train martial arts, nothing here (nothing in anything I teach) is intended to replace your training. Hopefully, you will find drills in here that put your training into real-world context. Exercises that will bring your mind to the pitch that hard training has brought your body. Things that will make skills a little easier to access under stress and ways to practice making the motions you have trained natural for you.

This is a book of drills and exercises. As such, it depends on certain shared concepts. You won’t get the underlying concepts here. If you don’t understand self-defense law or you have no idea of how bad guys attack, or the psychological and legal implications that follow a violent event are mysteries … well, you and I probably aren’t talking about the same thing when we say self-defense.

I also think it’s kind of rude to spend a bunch of pages in a book just recapping a previous book. So here’s the deal. Most of the stuff in here will be useful no matter how you study (and believe me, how you train is far more relevant than what you train). If you don’t understand the relevance of something, you might want to take a look at a previous book. If the thing you don’t get appears to be emotional or internal, probably Meditations on Violence. If the glitch is more concrete (self-defense law or different classifications of bad guys, for instance), there is probably more material in Facing Violence.

I suppose, for most people, martial arts and self-defense, training for violence, is something of a hobby. They do it for fun, a couple of times a week and, to my eyes, with no sense of urgency. For the last couple of years, I’ve been teaching mostly civilians, for the decade before that, I was teaching corrections and enforcement officers.

Every class I taught I would look at the officers and know, without a doubt, at least a third of that class would need what I taught before the year was out, and at least one would bet his or her life on it. If I bullshitted them, if I lied to them, if I made them comfortable instead of effective, the price would be paid in blood and I would be one of the ones going to do the hospital visits or, gods forfend, the funerals.

It’s a huge responsibility. I had these men and women for as little as eight hours a year. Not all were in great shape: some old, some small, many had old injuries. They had to be able to prevail against younger, stronger people, people who sometimes got the first move at close range and had no compunction about spilling blood.

That responsibility forces you to rethink everything you do. You don’t have time for egos. The drills aren’t about identity. You know what I mean: the constant internet bickering about which style is right or whether boxing punches or karate punches are proper.

Going home to your family is your identity. There is no time to waste. And you can’t hand wave past the bad stuff. With only those eight hours we had people handle situations that experienced martial artists put in a That’s a no-win situation. We don’t train for that category.

We didn’t have that option. If we took that attitude … hospital visits. Funerals. I hate funerals.

The pressure to make something effective, the responsibility for other people’s lives, the limited time, the high stakes forced us to apply the same idea of ruthless efficiency to teaching that your martial arts should apply to combat. And it worked.

So here’s my philosophy for teaching self-defense:

I have no interest in teaching you to do what I do. You aren’t me. We have different bodies and different minds. Imitate an instructor and the best you can ever hope for is to become a flawed clone of someone else.

But work on you, and you can become better than your teacher. Not the same, better. The key is to become the most efficient you that you can be. If you ever need these skills, I won’t be there. Neither will your sensei or your mommy. Whatever saves your life must come from inside … so start working on your insides.

The physical skills of self-defense are easy. It is not that hard to kill or cripple a human being. Knowing when such force is appropriate and necessary, recognizing danger, and summoning the will to cross that line—those are rarely taught and absolutely critical.

The baseline of self-defense has almost no relationship to the baseline for martial arts, however. Two examples:

Let’s start with one very simple thing—power generation.

A traditional martial artist is taught how to hit hard. Different systems have different methods of power generation, but two of the most common involve a solid connection with the ground and good structure.

The solid connection with the ground allows you to put the power of your legs into a punch. Good structure keeps that power from being lost or bled off into space by excessive motion. You can add more to it, whipping action with the hips and rotational power transmitted through the spine … doesn’t matter. If you’ve been training for any length of time, you should have been taught how to hit hard.

Here’s where it gets ugly. You get surprised.

Not me! I have good situational awareness! Get over that. Assuming (1) there is an experienced bad guy in the picture, and (2) you aren’t creating a situation yourself—you will be surprised. If the bad guy can’t get surprise, he’ll go hit someone else.

Got that? If you aren’t surprised, you don’t get to use your skills.

You are surprised. It’s not like the timing in sparring, with the closing distance and maintaining defense and some feints for you to read and interpret. Nope. The bad guy got close, got you distracted for a second, and hit you. Not the one-half-power-hit-and-judge-for-effect that most inexperienced people do. Nope, it’s a flurry attack, so many things coming at your face and body so fast that your mind freezes. Crunching noises and pain coming from your face, your belly collapses with a blow, and you can’t breathe and you’re shoved, bent over into a wall with more hits coming in.

Power generation. How do you hit hard bent over, pushed into a wall, on a threat who is too close? When your connection with the ground is iffy, your structure is completely destroyed, and the blows coming at your head are making you flinch?

This is the natural environment of a sudden assault, and if you don’t have an answer for this situation, you don’t have an answer at all.

That’s just one example, but everything else in self-defense—the timing, distance, speed, strategy, targeting—is vastly different from the assumptions of sparring.

In case you don’t get it yet, one more example:

At the 2011 Montreal seminar I asked, Who is your nightmare opponent? Take a few minutes and think about that.

One of the answers: He’d be about 50 percent more than I weigh, much stronger, with more skill and experience.

Yeah, that would suck, huh? Then add that he gets the first move at the time and place of his choosing. And he may be counting on a previous relationship with you to keep you from acting.

Guys, our worst nightmare is where the average woman starts her day. As guys, we’ve been roughhousing, pushing, and hitting one another since childhood and, largely, we’ve been encouraged. Sometimes overtly, but often subtly, girls have been punished when they wanted to play like that. So the average man reaches adulthood (even with no formal training) better trained and far more conditioned and experienced with violence than almost any woman.

And men are stronger. We rarely get into contests of direct strength with women without holding back a lot, but when we do, the difference is stark. On top of it all, most women have only learned social strategies to deal with conflict … and social strategies not only fail but backfire when attempted on a predator.

Women are an easy example, but this is the baseline of self-defense. If the predator can’t stack advantages to this level, he just picks someone else.

What you can do within your own weight class is irrelevant to self-defense skills. This is the baseline. This is what I train for.

EVALUATING DRILLS

I’m not a big fan of most drills. There is a fine line, but conditioned reflexes are crucial in a fight, and habits will get you killed.

Conditioned reflexes are things you do without thinking. They are essentially trained flinch responses. If something suddenly comes at your eyes you will do something: block, move your head, or, at the very