“From my place at the front of the room I have complete responsibility to speak clearly and with fearless honesty. I accept full responsibility for communicating with my students and for seeing to it that the message does get through. But that 100% responsibility on my shoulders does not lighten the student’s responsibility at all.The … [Read more…]
I am often asked that question. Can someone who hasn’t spent years fighting teach you anything about self-defense? Well aside from the first glaring error that fighting is not self-defense, the answer is “It depends.” It depends on something very specific. Below is my answer to someone who asked this very question.**********The answer lies in the information, not necessarily … [Read more…]
Take a look at many self-defense related intenet discussions and you will see the same thing. Heated threads filled with back and forth arguing about what works, what doesn’t work, what is “real”, what is fantasy. Most suggestions of “what to do” seem to only generate multiple counter-responses of why “that won’t work”, “that is a … [Read more…]
There are no experts here. To recap the last post and the comments on the last post- A “High level conversations” isn’t a matter of knowledge or experience, not in this field. Knowledge and experience never hurt of course. Not ‘never.’ If the experience is overblown or misremembered or poorly extrapolated it can go bad. … [Read more…]
Time and Distance is really it’s own thing and critical to everything. Not just self-defense, but every last damn thing. One internet warrior years ago said, quite pretentiously, “When one can control space and time, one is unbeatable.” Or words to that effect. Well, duh. Distance is not the same as space. Understanding distance is … [Read more…]
Terrain is, literally, a big topic and I know I can just touch on it in a blog post. Some things that need to be in there: Cover Concealment Vision, including reflections and shadows Movement control Resource access Escape routes Unconventional applications And all under the headings of how to read the terrain, how to … [Read more…]
The list won’t be exhaustive, and I wish all of the things on here were simple and had simple solutions. Most martial arts training isn’t effective for SD purposes. Some of it is on the teaching end, and some of that is on the learning end, and some is in the culture. That last sentence … [Read more…]