SURVIVABILITY

The Realities of
Interpersonal Violence
Vol. 1

BY COACH RODNEY KING

 SPECIAL THANK YOU
Thank you Tilda Vaughan, one of my awesome Trainers in Crazy Monkey for
taking the time out to clean up my writing for this special Survivability issue.
Appreciate your time on this. To find out more about her group in Cumbria,
UK, check out her website at: www.crazymonkeywomencumbria.co.uk

PHOTO CREDITS
Photo credits goes to Vernon Reed. Great action shots Brother!

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 Survivability
The Realities of Interpersonal Violence
Vol. 1

By Coach Rodney King

3
Copyright © 2017 by Rodney King

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced

or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of

the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or

scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2017

For information, contact:

rodney@coachrodneyking.com

Visit: www.coachrodneyking.org or www.crazymonkeydefense.com

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 Table of Contents

Introduction p.6

About The Author p.9

Articles:

• Violence Isn't A Solution To Most Problems — Except When Violence

Is The Only Solution To The Problem p.12

• Functionality In Martial Skill Has No Allegiance! p.15
• You Can’t ‘Escape’ Evolutionary Defense p.20
• Self-Preservation: Is There Real Self-Defense Training Out There? p.26
• Self-Preservation: The Truth Be Told p.32
• When It Comes To Self-Defense, Throw 90% Away! p.38
• What Do You Really Need To Know, In Order To Defend Yourself? p.44
• What Wins Street Fights? p.49
• The Cold, Hard Truth Of Training To Survive Physical Violence p.55
• Adapt Or Die: A Self-Preservation Training Paradigm Shift p.66
• The Approximation Principle In The Reality Of Self-Preservation p.72
• 3 Mindsets That Will Keep You Safe, When It Matters Most p.76
• 5 Street Fighting Lessons I learned The Hard Way P.78
• What Happens After The 1st Punch Is Thrown? P.83
• The Primacy Of Defense In Self-Preservation! P.88
• Failure To Fight: It’s Not The Physiology, It’s The Interpretation p.94

Find out More p.103

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 Introduction
Hey There!

Well, thanks for downloading this eBook. It's a collection of many of my

current self-preservation articles that you can find on my blog at

www.coachrodneyking.org

There's are so many articles now, that it can sometimes seem hard to keep

track of all of them, especially the most popular ones — so I came up with

this bright idea to compile 'most' of the important ones in one place for ease

of reading. The articles are in no particular order, although I have tried to

keep some structure in order for them to make more sense. The good news

of course, is that you can jump into any article you feel like reading first,

mostly without necessarily reading all the articles that precede it.

Feel free to share this eBook with people you care about — who knows, the

information in the following pages may end up saving their lives at some

point.

I Never Wanted To Write About Self-Preservation

For a long time I really, really, resisted writing about self-preservation on my

blog. I am the kind of guy who likes to have a person right in front of me, so I

can teach them how to protect themselves. Words alone just cannot do the

subject matter justice.

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More importantly though, it's draining dealing with all the supposed 'self-

defense experts' out there. Anytime I wrote something about self-

preservation (the term I prefer to use instead of self-defense), every wannabe

keyboard warrior would come out of the woodwork and chime in, as if they

really knew and understood the often complex nature of interpersonal

violence. To be frank, I am so sick and tired of the wannabe self-defense

gurus, who seemingly have a solution for every interpersonal violent

situation, yet, ironically, have actually never fought a day in their life.

This is the absolute, upside-down, nonsensical, paradoxical world of 'self-

defense instruction' — where these days, you can put yourself up as an

expert in that domain yet never have actually experienced real interpersonal

violence in your entire life (outside of some drills you do in the Dojo). Even

more sad though, people pitch up in droves to attend these so called

experts seminars too. As is often the case in these kinds of situations, it's the

heavily overweight weapons nuts, who wear camouflage fatigues who relish

these events. Their cholesterol will likely kill them anyway, long before that

criminal who is supposedly 'on every street corner'. 

So, that's my long winded way of saying: I was simply put off about writing

about self-preservation. It was actually both my students and my trainers that

twisted my arm to start blogging about it. So here it is, Vol. 1, some of the

more important articles I have written up until September 2017.

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I don't write this for some kind of ego boost, and certainly not to glorify

violence, because in fact I abhor violence, and have done ever since I was a

little kid. But the reality of my life forced me into a situation not of my

making, so like it or not, I grew up, sadly, becoming intimately acquainted

with interpersonal violence. As a young adult, fresh out of the military, with

no high school diploma, I was once again forced in to a situation I would

rather have avoided. With no job, I took the only one I could find, as a

bouncer outside some of Johannesburg's roughest nightclubs. So, for

several years of my life that's what I did, night in and night out. And,

eventually I became the head doorman, running a doorman/security group

off over 70 bouncers.

During that time I was in 100s of fights. Some against weapons, others using

weapons myself. There was nothing 'romantic' about that period of my life. It

was raw, unscripted, and I got to see the worst of human nature. What I write

about in the following pages then, doesn't come from second hand

knowledge, but rather first person and personal experience.

Rodney King 2017

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 About The Author
Every Man Is The Artisan Of His Own Fortune

Until my late 20s, I felt like I had been fighting my whole life. Brought up on

the south side of Johannesburg, in South African government housing

(similar to “the projects” in the USA), I learned early on that what really

mattered was not how smart you were, but whether you were tough enough.

Growing up, I often felt trapped in a really bad nightmare — and I wanted to

wake up.

But as they say, tough times build strong character. I was determined to

survive the school bullies, and the mean streets of my neighborhood. Even

though I survived the violence outside of my home, my home wasn't safe

either. Things turned rough in my teens. My abusive, alcoholic mother kicked

me out of the house at 17 and, as a result, I never finished high school.

I found myself sleeping on a park bench, in the very same park I played in as

a kid. With less than $20 in my pocket, I decided then and there, to change

the trajectory of my life. As Appius noted, “every man is the artisan of his

own fortune”. I worked hard to turn things around; I realized in the darkest

moments of my despair that success comes down to what you do on the

inside, no matter what’s happening to you on the outside.

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The truth is, the only narrative that really mattered was my own. All stories

can have any kind of ending you choose. I decided not only what my story

would ultimately become, but how it would end. Your life is YOUR story. You

can choose both the plot, and the ending. You can also change it at anytime

you like. Don’t live someone else's story, live your own. Be brave, you owe it

to yourself!

Martial Arts Literally Saved My Life

Martial Arts taught me to be resilient, to embrace my fears, to develop laser-

like focus, and to never give up. Having developed those qualities (I had to!),

I went back to school, put myself through college, and I am now currently

completing my Ph.D.

Over the years, I have taught special-force military operators and law

enforcement officers how to develop an unstoppable physical game, and

importantly the mind needed for succeed and to survive when all else fails

on the battlefield, or on the mean city streets. I have taught thousands of

students how to both survive in life and death interpersonal violent

encounters, as well as how to take on the Martial Arts of Everyday Life more

skillfully.

Violence Survivor, Fighter, Martial Artist

You see, I did wake up from my nightmare whilst growing up. What I learned

on the mat as a martial artist, helped me not only take on those tough, mean

streets of Johannesburg, but it also empowered me to take on life, full

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throttle, and to succeed. I started martial arts first as a way to survive, and

then as a method to achieve personal mastery. If I hadn't started training in

karate and boxing, I wouldn't be coaching business leaders, entrepreneurs,

and success-minded people the very same inner game tools I had

developed to become a success in my own life. This site is dedicated to my

life’s work on the mat, on the street and to taking on the Martial Arts of

Everyday Life more skillfully!

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 0.1. Violence Isn't A Solution To Most
Problems - Except When Violence Is The
Only Solution To The Problem

Most people are uneasy when talking about violence, especially if they have

never had to engage in it. In fact, often, those who suggest violence is never

the answer have grown up in places in the world where front doors can be

left open. Yet, in many places in the world, violence of various kinds is an

everyday reality.

I grew up in violence. I learned early on that you can try to avoid it, but once

you were targeted, it was just a matter of time before you had to deal with it.

Like it or not, no amount of talking would make it go away. Forced into a

corner, one had to fight back simply to survive. I realized that there is a

segment of the population in this world that use the currency of violence to

achieve success. Rather than going out and legitimately finding a job for

instance, even if it meant flipping burgers, it was quicker to get what they

wanted by stealing. Many of these types of people were also able to be

perceived to be tougher than they really were, because joining a gang gave

them firepower. If you were on the other side of the divide, so to speak, you

always knew in the back of your mind, that even if you beat this one guy, the

others would come for you in the end.

I agree, no one should grow up this way, living in constant fear. But getting

out of it unscathed is a fallacy too. Sadly, when violence is the currency, the

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fist becomes the ATM, and knowing how to make that tactical withdrawal, or

to make them pay with interest are often the only options you have.

I was bullied severely right up until I was 15. Only when I had had enough,

and it looked like I was going to be stuck where I lived for a while, I decided

to fight back. Once I did, people backed off, not completely of course, but

enough to give me a breather. This is in no way a justification for violence,

but the truth is, as I realized growing up, there are people out there who’s

language is violence, and the only counter language they understand isn't of

the verbal kind, rather it is the fist. What learning to fight however has taught

me, is to choose my fights. The difference between myself, my students, and

those punks from my neighborhood is that we don’t have to fight. We only

have to fight, when no other options are available. As a warrior, you always

try to find a peaceful option first, because ego shouldn't enter in to it.

I think you not only live a lie, but you also do yourself and those you love a

disservice, by not being honest that there are bad people in this world, and

that no amount of appealing to their rationale will hold them off from

harming you if they so choose. This is why self-preservation skills now, just as

at the dawn of mankind, aren't a luxury, but a necessity. Sadly, as most of us

now spend most of our days in an office cubicle, we have lost touch with our

primal nature. In other words, knowing how to protect yourself, at least to

some degree, has been forgotten.

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But here again is the harsh reality. That guy, the one who won't listen to

reason, he has likely been immersing himself in violence. What you fear, he

sees as excitement. The only choice you have is to train in a martial

experience that will afford you the skills to defeat these kinds of people,

when no other choice is available. Learning this skill, won't be easy. It will

take resilience, you will have to build toughness, and you're going to get

bruised (both physically, and more likely your ego).

You are going to be surprised too. You will go in thinking that you need and

want to learn only how to fight, but then you will realize that the fear of not

knowing how to fight, will gradually be replaced with a confidence of choice.

As the saying goes, “Only a warrior chooses pacifism; others are condemned

to it.” This is what I have found in my own journey: Because of my training, I

can walk away from an ego fight, but when it is no longer about ego, and

instead about survival, I can bring down the wrath of Thor on my side,

destroying the enemy without a second thought. Once the fight is over, I can

walk away as if the day has just begun, because truly embodying those

warrior skills has allowed me to fight for purpose, not pride.

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 0.2. Functionality In Martial Skill Has No
Allegiance!

As simple as this is going to sound, if you are training in some form of martial

arts, and if what you are training/learning as a fighting approach doesn't look

similar to what you do when you are working against an uncooperative,

resisting opponent — you may want to reconsider the validity of what you

are spending your time training.

While this may be a simple definition of functionality, it is often lost in the

world of stylized martial art systems. At their heart, all martial art systems

claim that what they teach will inevitability be able to be deployed during

interpersonal aggression situations. No one would train in any of these styles

or systems if they didn't believe, at least to some degree, that what they are

learning could be applied in the ultimate arena of self preservation. Besides

all the purported benefits of training in martial arts, at its heart, its one goal

is to fulfill the real evolutionary need to find the best way to keep on living.

Yet, even with this noted, there is a very real disconnect between true

functionality, and the ‘perception’ of what may be functional. What is often

sold as 'self-defense', or life saving skills then, often only looks good on

paper (or structured demonstrations).

The Disconnect Between Training And Performance

Point in case. The other day, I watched what was supposedly live sparring of

a specific style. This style has gained a lot of coverage in movies and is

15
noted as an effective self-defense system. When these seasoned

practitioners (not beginners) sparred, it looked liked really bad boxing or

really bad kickboxing. Virtually nothing resembled what you typically saw

them do in training (or for that matter in the movies). Sadly this isn't an

isolated example, it is far more common than one would expect. It is also not

purely found in the domain of many stylized martial art systems either, but

equally, often also in the domain of proclaimed ‘reality’ based martial arts.

You would think that this would be evident to the practitioner of said style or

system. You would think that it would be especially self evident that when

they go from ‘drilling’ and ‘learning’ etc, to a performance environment —

that not much of what they do, looks anything like what they trained — and

as such something must be wrong. Sadly, so many people, obviously

including those who teach, cannot see this disconnect because often

‘performance’ is absent. Instead, proclaimed performance is neatly skirted

and drenched in terminology from threat management, combatives etc. But

all the fancy, cool, tactical self-defense sounding terms, cannot, and will

never, replace testing what is learned, and the exposure of the truth that

unfolds against uncooperative, resisting, live opponents.

The bottom line is this: Cool sounding names mean little in the end, because

ultimately the fight will tell you if anything you have to say on the subject

really matters. Personally, I would never trust anyone’s methodology unless

they can take what they teach, and show me, and others, how they

themselves can apply those skills against someone who truly fights them

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back. While I get that there are restrictions to what really can be

accomplished in real functional martial performance inside a Dojo, it is truly

one of the only real accessible, repeatable options available.

Further to this, it is not uncommon for reality based systems to invoke the

old, tired, and misinformed argument that 'sport' isn't the same as 'street'.

What this argument is really saying isn't what it purports to, but rather reads

as, “we don’t want to spar”. Sparring against a resisting, uncooperative

opponent will quickly show the disconnect between what is taught, and what

actually transfers to a live fight. There’s no way to hide this. Doing stuff in a

pre-planned scenario, or in a demonstration, where someone feeds the right,

and consistent, energy, is all about hiding from the truth. And while, of

course, I conceded that sparring against an uncooperative, resisting

opponent in the Dojo isn't fully real either, it does however offer an

approximation of a fight out on the street. In the end, it remains the only real

viable way to repeatedly test technique (and one's resolve) against an active,

uncompromising opponent — short of going out on the street and doing the

same. In other words, sparring isn't the perfect solution, but it's one of the

better options available to use as a testing ground for martial skill.

It's Not Just About Sparring, But What You Can Make Work
Now, just because you spar, doesn't mean it’s right either. Many people spar

with what often seems to be a blatant disregard for their safety. Often,

inherent attributes of power, speed, strength etc, are used to both

supersede technique, as well as safety. While there are of course naturally

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athletic people out there, who can circumvent good sound strategy, tactics

and technique by imposing their natural attributes onto others and win, most

people will never come close to this. This is really sad in a way, as often, we

look at fighters, especially in the competitive world of combat sports, as role

models for what we should be doing – often neglecting and avoiding the

reality, that they may simply be athletically gifted, naturally tough, and that

that approach won’t fit most people.

So in this sense, outside of testing one's skill in live sparring environments,

maybe, just maybe, the true functionality of what is being taught and

displayed shouldn't be measured by those few enigmas of Herculean

standing. Rather, maybe it should be measured by those who have no

natural physical gifts, or Marsian godlike instincts. In other words, would

what I teach my 15-year old, to give him enough of a leg up to be able to

survive a physical assault and live to tell the tale?

You see, while functionality in martial skill has no allegiance, it either works or

it doesn't, the key point really for any true teacher of interpersonal survival

skills, should be about availing a method that will allow the many to survive

an interpersonal assault – not just the few that where hardwired to dispense

violence in the first place. This is no easy task. I spend most of my days trying

to figure this out. When I step on the mat, my goal is always to offer an

approach that even the least inclined among us to fight could apply if needs

be. In other words, does what I teach them cross over to functionality? Will

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they be able to pull it off against a resisting, uncooperative opponent? If not,

then the method has to change.

Of course the passage of time helps too. If you have a method that works,

with enough training even those who never thought they could, will. This

should always be kept in mind too. But, if what you teach others, even after

years of practice, has no resemblance to what was taught when it crosses

over to a live sparring event, there’s a serious problem that needs to be

addressed.

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 0.3. You Can't Escape Evolutionary Defense

There is a reason that wrestling and boxing are likely the two oldest forms of

martial arts on this planet. Simply, they tend to work with evolution not

against it. Unless you encounter an alien with four arms, and four legs, along

with a completely different physiology, all humans respond to interpersonal

violence in very much the same way.

Yet nowhere does the human species try to ‘escape’ evolution more so than

in the world of reality based self-defense, and traditional forms of martial

arts. Martial arts in general has been a hodge podge of pseudoscience,

mysticism and delusion. I think the reasons are varied, but often it arises out

of being insular in the stuff you teach: In other words, you train in your own

environment, with your own people, within the parameters of your own style

— so you can set up the experience to look good and where you can always

win. Secondly, the vast majority of people teaching martial arts, have never

actually fought, either in combat sports, in hard all out sparring, or out on

the streets. If you don’t have those two domains as your litmus test of the

truth, you can pretty much convince yourself (and others of the same) about

almost anything — yes, that a fight will go down exactly as it is shown in a

Jason Bourne movie, for example.

While Mixed Martial Arts is not ‘street fighting’ (as so many RBSD pundits

like to point out) there is a very good reason you see the disciplines

presented in MMA as they are. Boxing and wrestling or two of the main
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staples, not because that’s what you use in MMA, but rather, that’s what will

come out when someone needs to actually fight. Of course, some changes

need be made, and taken into consideration when applying those

movement patterns to self-preservation, but if one looks beyond this, it is

painfully obvious that the human body responds to interpersonal danger in

much the same way it would in a cage, as it would on the unforgiving city

streets of Johannesburg.

The reason people want to fight this evolutionary fact has very little to do

with truth in combat, but rather fear of losing face. You see, if you have to

actually perform, in other words get on the mat, or wherever you train, and

test for real what you do against a resisting, uncooperative opponent, much

of what you have told yourself, and much of what you have told others will

now have to be proven. That is a mighty scary proposition for most in the

world of martial arts.

There is a reason, that 99% of what is touted in the martial arts world doesn't

show up in MMA (or other 'real' combat sports), because it simply doesn't

work. I still don’t get why anyone feels it necessary to continue to both

delude themselves, and to lie to those they teach. Unless, unless, unless of

course, it has nothing to do with truth in combat, but rather a big, massive,

unapologetic ego trip, where having people look up to you as the fountain

of 'all' self-defense mastery is a big, massive injection to your fragile low self-

esteem. Let's get real here for a second too, just because you add a word in

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like Reality, Combatives etc, in to what you do, doesn't automatically make

what you do 'real' either.

Our Evolutionary Imperative

Evolution has designed you and me to survive. If it did a really bad job at it, I

wouldn't be writing this, and you wouldn't be reading it — because both of

us would be extinct. Evolution didn't design you, or me, to win in

interpersonal violence with mystical chi energy, where without even touching

a person you can stop them in their tracks. Evolution didn't allow us to

survive by simulating your bad ass moves against an opponent who doesn't

fight back. Evolution didn't design the human species to fight like a praying

mantis. What evolution did give us, are the tools to punch people really hard

in the face.

As crude as this sounds, there is nothing beautiful or artistic about having to

defend yourself, and there never will be. No one who is sane, willingly puts

themselves in harm's way, but when life throws one of those curve balls that

forces a person to go hands on against another human being, evolution will

step in to help.

It may seem like I am making the case that evolutionary defense is all we

need — no training required. This is not what I am saying. What I am saying

is that we have all evolved to survive. When faced with a threat, your flight

and fight response kicks in, and you can instantly feel biology change in your

body. But here is the thing, evolution doesn't really discriminate, and mostly

22
doesn't care if you, or I, survive. What it does care about is giving all of us

the necessary survival instincts that will see enough of our species through to

procreate.

Here is an example: It is not uncommon in interpersonal violence, when

overwhelmed or caught off guard, for a person to turn their back to the

threat. Turning one's back, not only saves the operating system (i.e. your

head) but it’s a precursor to running. Just a little over 10,000 years ago, a

hunter-gatherer faced with the threat of a Lion, would turn tail, run, and hope

there was a tree nearby to climb. That instinctive reaction could, and can be

a life saver. All you need is 1 out of 10 people faced with that situation to

make it to the tree safely, and the human lineage can continue. That’s what I

meant by evolution doesn't discriminate. Nine people running from a Lion

may not make it, but one will. So turning your back and running from a

threat, may only work 1 out of 10 times, but it works enough to continue the

species.

The problem of course is if you are part of that nine that got eaten up. This is

where martial training comes in. If you can effectively learn how to defend

yourself from threats, you can then turn the tide on evolution, and instead

use it to your advantage and work with it, in a way that allows you to win. I

would argue this was likely why martial systems evolved in the first place.

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 Evolutionary Defense
If you take an evolutionary approach (not a cultural, or style influenced one)

to your self-preservation training, then you can be honest about how you will

likely react, and what would be the best response. Here’s an example:

Someone throws a barrage of punches at your head: Do you a) Go into a

praying mantis posture to survive the onslaught? Or do you b) Pick up your

hands to protect your head (more like a cover response)?

Well, unless you trained in praying mantis, pretty much everyone on planet

Earth would pick up their hands and attempt to protect their head (the

operating system). We all know that if you hit someone hard enough in the

head, and switch it off, you win. What does that tell you? Protecting your

head in a fight, and knowing how to, is imperative. It shouldn't be an

afterthought: It should take priority.

When I created both the Hunchback fighting platform, and Crazy Monkey

Defense this was my thinking process. Through my years working the doors,

it didn't take long to figure out that 99% of the time, when people got into

fights, they tried to hit each other in the head first (remember it’s the

operating system, switch it off, and you win). I can quite easily surmise (and I

have YouTube to back me up) that I could go to far flung regions of this

planet, and I would find a similar thing unfold when people get into fights.

So, I set myself the task to try and eliminate much of this threat as possible.

Essentially, I took the evolutionary response of picking up one's hands to

24
protect your head when someone is striking at it, and made it into a robust

defensive system that could ride that incoming storm. What happens now?

Instead of then going to stage two of that evolutionary response, and

turning one's back (since you now likely find yourself stuck in a room/area

with no tree to run too) you are able to use that evolutionary defensive

response to your benefit, by being able now to face fire with fire so to speak

(riding the storm of incoming attacks). You didn't override evolution, you

worked with evolution to your advantage.

25
 0.4. Self-Preservation: Is There Real Self-

Defense Training Out There?

Is there real self-defense training out there? I guess this really depends on

how you define ‘self-defense’.

If one looks at YouTube there is a lot of information out there being passed

off as self-defense training. But if you look closely, often (not always) what

you see is more about winning a ‘street fight’ than about self-preservation. In

other words, there is little or not talk about options other than, “if this guy

gets in your face, or throws a punch then do this, and do it multiple times”.

Basically, it always seems that the solution is fighting back, and winning that

fight physically.

There is always a risk in generalizing (and pissing people off), but, at least as

a see it, the people often learning real fight skills, are the very people who

actually want to get into fights, or at the very least have no issue

accommodating someone who wants too. The proverbial 'yob' often seems

to be the overwhelming feature in many of these YouTube videos. A couple

of years ago I experienced this first hand. I had two individuals join my

trainers program, it came to light that their only interest was learning how to

fight. They didn't want to hear about any other alternatives. What they talked

about, and wanted to know from me in respect to what they viewed as self-

26
defense, seemed borderline psychopathic. I am always concerned in the

end, about the difference between knowing and teaching what to do when

dealing with interpersonal aggression (and surviving it), versus the same

knowledge being used to become a predator oneself. In the end, I am glad

these two individuals left my program.

The reality is, learning how to street fight and self-defense are different

aspects of the fight game (and they likely never go together). The first is

when someone shoves you in a bar because you bumped into him and

spilled the drinks he was carrying, all over him. You shove him back, followed

by getting into a verbal assault match with him. Things escalate fast, and the

guy you are arguing with now throws a punch at you, and you respond in

kind — because now you have no option. That's a 'street fight'.

Self-defense (or self-preservation as I prefer to term it) on the other hand in

the same situation, would find you apologizing first to the person for

bumping into him (even if it was his fault for not looking where he was

going) — followed by possibly offering to buy him another round of drinks —

or even better still exiting the scene before anything real went down

(especially if he seemed overly aggressive).

Self-preservation, is when you completely avoid that bar you know all the

‘yobs’ hang out at, and rather invite your friends over to your house for

drinks. When it comes to self-preservation, no one wants to have this

conversation, or have this proposed to them as a viable strategy. The

27
consensus, it seems, on YouTube among the Reality Based Self-Defense

experts is that any aggression towards you, should always be met with an

instant physical retaliation — saying sorry, deescalating the situation or

simply walking way, never seems to be a viable strategy.

I get it better than anyone. I grew up in government housing on the South

Side of Johannesburg. Gangs were rife. Posturing and violence were my

daily, staple diet. In that neighborhood, you could only run for so long

before you had no choice but to step up and fight back  — or face being

victimized for the rest of your life. The best self-preservation thing I ever did

back then, was work my ass off, achieve my dreams, and, at the first

opportunity I had, move out of there.

Most of what I had to endure in that neighborhood growing up, was less self-

defense, but more street fighting. Some days I had routes to get home safely

(self-defense) but mostly I had to posture, and slap that kid in the face before

he did it to me at the corner shop, to get respect (street fighting). One was

about survival, the other was about perception (how the tough guys saw me)

and of course defending my ego.

Learning how to street fight was a necessity for me, but that's only because

all of my other options were exhausted. To survive a street fight, one has to

be well versed in the very same physical and psychological tactics of the

assailant. As such, there is a very fine line between calling what one does as

self-defense versus calling it street fighting. In other words, what I know

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today, from that time growing up in violence and working the door for

several years, could quite easily be used to victimize others if I chose too.

Coming back to those two individuals I noted earlier, who made a brief

appearance in my Trainers program, the mere fact that all they ever wanted

to know what was the best, most ruthless way to dispense with a potential

threat, is a clue towards seeing the kind of people they really are — and why

no sane person should be training with them — not if the intention is to learn

self-preservation (if it's street fighting then, maybe).

Learning ‘street-defense’ then, is a combination of both a self-preservation

mindset (i.e. avoiding violence at all costs), and the ability to street fight (i.e.

use all physical means, even if it's really nasty) — if one has absolutely no

other choice. Even then, if someone goes hands on with me, and I have to

fight back, I do so only to neutralize the threat as quickly as possible. But at

the same time, I need to have enough sense and restraint in me, that once

the person is down, and is no longer a threat, that it is then time for me to

leave the scene, and seek a place of safety. This is self-preservation kicking

in.

When someone on YouTube shows a similar example, but then proceeds to

show students how to kick the guys head into the sidewalk (even when in the

drill the fight was won several moves earlier), this now crosses over from self-

defense to assault. This now, at least to me, is no longer self- preservation,

but street fighting. The reality is, you, the original victim, can now become

the person charged, and imprisoned for attempted murder. When the

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assailant who attacked you first, doesn't wake up from that coma you put

him in — because you crushed his skull into the pavement — the burden is

on you to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this level of force was really

necessary. My bet is you are going to find it really difficult convincing a judge

it was. No one wants to speak about this either on those Reality Based Self-

Defense YouTube channels, because it's not showing the cool speed based,

choreographed, fight scenes they so love to put out there. In other words,

it's much cooler to show how to kick someone's knee-cap off, than to

suggest, maybe that that is simply not the best idea to begin with.

The irony about all of this — and what you will hear me repeat often in this

eBook — is that most people peddling self-defense training don’t actually

need it. Often, they also don’t want to teach real self defense — which is at

its heart: Zero ego, survivalist in nature, and combined with 'avoidance at all

cost' strategies.

Back to my two psychos mentioned earlier, who joined one of my Trainers

programs. Both of these individuals lived in areas that require little fear of

walking down the street. However, the people who come to them for training

were clearly the troublemaking kind. After being immersed in violence my

whole life, I only had to step on the mat, in a seminar that they hosted me

for, to spot those 'yobs' everywhere. I think for these instructors it allows

them to live out some kind of sick twisted fantasy of feeling, and being

perceived as powerful (the camouflage pants help too). And, why is it always

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so prevalent in those ex-Soviet Eastern Bloc countries? Something to ponder

for sure. The truth is, hanging around other 'Tough Guys' can make a person

feel more powerful (I know, I have been there, done that, and got the t-shirt

so to speak).

In the end, there is a lot of great information out there in the public domain

about 'self-defense', but one clearly has to ask, is this about becoming a

street fighter first, or about preserving the self? Is what is being taught really

about avoiding the very thing you don’t want to be a part of, or teaching you

how to become that very thing you say you want no part of?

This is one of the biggest reasons that for so long I kept the self-

preservation knowledge I had to myself, only ever teaching it to people I

knew personally, and trusted. For years people asked me to put out online

material on self-preservation, and I declined. Taking those two psychos again

as examples, they shouldn't be teaching anyone self-preservation skills, and

the fact that I recently started seeing them teaching knife fighting scares the

crap out of me. These are also the same individuals who would be inclined

to purchase my self-preservation material, only to harvest the best street

fighting stuff they saw, and discard the rest ( I know, because even after

leaving, they still buy all of my material). It really is, a double edged sword.

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 0.5. Self-Preservation: The Truth Be Told

After working the door outside some of Johannesburg’s roughest nightclubs

for several years, some perennial truths about defending oneself against an

assailant stand out. Below, I outline some important considerations to take

into account when thinking about learning to defend oneself. Some of these

may seem painfully obvious, but if they were properly acknowledged 99% of

all self- defense schools would need to close their doors for business.

Know The Reality: Real fights don’t look the way they do in Hollywood, in

fact most demonstrations in self-defense (on places like YouTube) don’t

resemble what a real fight would look like at all. As obvious as this sounds,

most reality based instructors are counting on a person's perception of how

fights are won via the Hollywood image; and secondly, they are counting on

the fact that most people entering into a reality based self-defense school,

don’t typically get into fights to begin with. In other words, if you don’t have

multiple real life experiences with interpersonal aggression, someone could

likely make you believe anything they want you too. This allows self-

proclaimed 'experts' to position certain self-defense approaches as valid,

even though real fights look nothing like what is taught.

Drills And Demos, Only Half The Truth: I am the first one to admit, that in

order to convey to the ‘general public’ what kind of approach they should

take against a potential threat, one needs to show a visual example. This

may be via a demo video, or taught on the mat via drills. But, the truth is, in
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the end, real fights are untidy, almost never go to plan (as you would like) —

and regardless of how much you have trained  — your reactions to that

violent encounter will always be at best, an approximation of what you

practiced in training.

Most Fights Are Won Before They Happen: Awareness of your

surroundings, and making sound choices on where you find yourself at any

given time — are key to survival success. In many instances, there is often an

opportunity to exit oneself from a potential threat, or not to be in a known

trouble area in the first place. Often though this doesn't happen because of

ego. Not loosing face in a potential violent encounter is strongest among

men (but woman can be prone to it too). If the situation you find yourself in,

is truly about self-preservation, then losing face has nothing to do with it. A

person should always seek to exit a potential threat — be that before, during

or after an altercation.

Fights Are Fights: Most real street fights, especially those with empty hands

resemble at best a boxing match, and at worst something akin to mixed

martial arts. I think the whole sport vs. street debate is absolute nonsense.

Anyone with ten minutes to spare could go look on YouTube, and watch a

dozen recorded street fight situations, and they would will see exactly what I

just mentioned.

To be able to actually protect yourself against an opponent, requires then,

that you learn how to fight. One of the best places to practice this is in

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sparring, against uncooperative opponent. Contrary to the misinformation,

spread by reality based self-defense instructors, most fights on the street

resemble bad versions of boxing, kickboxing, MMA and/or wrestling. The

bottom line, train that way, learn those arts, because that’s likely how fights

will look and go down. Of course, there are some considerations and

adaptations that need to be made between those delivery combat sport

based vehicles to self-preservation (I teach this myself in Crazy Monkey

Defense) — but the gap between sport vs. street is not as 'huge' as self-

defense instructors like to claim.

You Can Only Defend Yourself With Self-Defense Training [Not!]: Absolute

nonsense! Every day, every second, someone, somewhere in the world is

defending themselves right now and surviving — and they have never taken

a day of martial arts training in their life. You have, as everyone else has, an

evolutionary imperative to survive. While you may be stuck inside a cubicle

all day, and no longer hunt on the grassy plains of the Savannah – your

survival imperative still remains. It may be hidden, but it is there.

Of course, if you are training in martial arts you do give yourself an

advantage over someone who has never trained (well, sometimes, but with

all the garbage being taught, you often better just relying on your natural

survival instincts). The trick is to take an honest look at what real fights look

like, and then ask, if what you are training resembles that? If not, then you

are overriding what is natural to your survival system, and replacing it with

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something completely unnatural. The outcome? Expect to lose a violent

confrontation, even if you supposedly know how to defend yourself.

Weapons Change The Odds: Once a weapon is brought to an altercation,

such as a blade — the favor turns towards the person who possesses that

weapon. If you are not armed, then your number one priority is to seek an

exit, while remaining aware, and safe. While I teach my students (and

trainers) how to defend against a weapon, I also make them realize that there

is a high probability that they will get hurt (possibly seriously). Most people

don’t want to hear this, but this is the reality of the street.

However just because someone gets stabbed for example, doesn't mean it’s

the end. Your desire to survive must always outweigh the will of the person

trying to hurt you. If faced with a weapon, try and find an equalizer, or place

a barrier between yourself and the weapon wielding assailant — especially if

escape is not immediately possible. Only when all options are exhausted

should you attempt to take on a weapon wielding assailant. Of course, I

realize this is largely due to situation, and there may be times where going

hands on with a weapon wielding assailant is required from the onset.

Context, Context And Context: The three C’s are crucial. Okay, it’s actually

one word repeated, but you get my point. Let me give you an example, in

most self-defense demonstrations, one person attacks, and the other

counters. Typically the attacking side attacks once, allowing the defender to

do as s/he pleases thereafter. The truth is, no fight looks like that. Training in

35
that context, as a method of preparation for the actual event, will be lead to

a rude awakening to anyone believing that is how it works, or will go down.

The funny thing about fights between two people (or more) is that the

attacker will actually fight back, fight back hard, and will continue to fight

until he is unable to (or doesn't want to anymore). Unless you are able to

stop and neutralize the threat on the first blow (which almost never happens)

you will find yourself in a fight for your life.

Killer Moves: Most self-defense programs teach eye gouging, face ripping

and kicks to the groin as the ultimate moves to stop an attacker. I am not

saying these are not valid, but to bet your life on these is a mistake. The

human body is amazingly resilient to violence. The amount of punishment a

person can take, and yet still keep on coming back for more in fights is

amazing (I have seen this first hand, 100s of times working the door). This

applies not only to yourself, but the person attacking you (I have

experienced this too). If you look at most fights on the street, self defense or

otherwise, almost never do you see any of these ‘killer moves’: And if you

do, they almost never stop the fight immediately. (I have used them, and

found this out the hard way.)

A couple of things stand out here. For one, fights are chaotic, fights are

almost never stationary, and distance in fights changes rapidly. What does

this mean? Even if you want to kick someone in the groin, you still will need

to be able to apply it in the midst of overcoming your own fear, and lose of

36
motor control. You will still need to apply it against an opponent who is

trying to hurt you, and hurt you with multiple strikes from a variety of angles.

You will still need to apply it in the changing circumstances of the fight, as

the opponent moves at varied speeds, and varied distances (or suddenly all

his buddies decide to jump in on the action).

My position is this, if you are not sparring with people every week, which is

the very place you are able to learn to deal with distance management,

timing, precision, chaos, unpredictability, and of course a resisting opponent

but you have only ever trained out of pre-rehearsed, often stationary training

encounters (like the one punch attacker mentioned earlier — what makes

you think you can land anything (groin kick included) when someone on the

street does the same?

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 0.6. When It Comes To Self-Defense, Throw
90% Away!

How many street fights have you been in? How many times have you had to

defend yourself? How many street fights have you witnessed personally? In

fact, if you are training with someone claiming to teach you self-defense,

how many fights have they been in? (And no, that schoolyard scuffle from 20-

years ago doesn't count.)

Most people won’t have much in the way of concrete experiences as it

relates to these questions. The truth is, if you keep your head down and

mind your own business, the chance of interpersonal violence jumping out at

you is slim at best. This lack of knowing, however, allows our heads to be

filled with what Hollywood says fights will look like, or simply means that we

take the word of self defense experts.

Ironically, there are in fact, tons of examples of real world fights only a click

away. Like it or not, YouTube offers up a myriad of examples of real world, in

the flesh, fights. While we can discuss the psychological composition of

people who think it’s entertaining to put these fights up on YouTube, the fact

remains that they are there, and readily available for anyone to watch. In

other words, stop listening to these so called self-defense experts, go watch

how real fights go down, and, if based on that, you can see what you do

never preparing you for a real fight, go find another school.

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The paradox is, that on that very same video platform that one can watch

real fights, there are self defense instructional videos in the side playlist, that

have zero resemblance to the actual fights that are right there for anyone to

watch. I am certain there is a sense that those street fights on YouTube are

examples of ‘untrained’ people — and if they were trained, it would look

more like what those self-defense experts claim it to be.

Cookie Cutter Wins The Day

As human beings, we will take cookie cutter explanations before we will take

a chaotic answer. We tend to focus in on clearly defined sequences of events

to deal with a particular situation, rather than having to bathe in the

unfamiliar, unpredictable nature of chaos. As such, when it comes to learning

how to defend ourselves we are our very own worst enemy. By our very

nature, we invariably gravitate to answers and expressions of self-defense

that are packaged neatly, have clear cut step-by-step answers, with 'tacticool'

names. However without even knowing, we are setting ourselves up to be

devoured by the reality of violence.

Throw 90% Away

The truth is, as is glaringly obvious just watching real fights on YouTube, that

90% of everything taught in all styles of martial arts — regardless of how

many people follow those styles, or say it will work — needs to be thrown

out. Said another way, if you have trained to defend yourself, and then find

yourself in the immediacy of a fight, less than 10% of what you have ever

learned will work. When that 10% does come out, it will never imbue those

39
clean lines, with precision, power, timing and perfect distancing as it did in

training.

So when I am asked why I spend so much of my time teaching my students

street boxing, and why Crazy Monkey doesn't have this or that? My answer is

always the same, “Of course we do, but we work first on probabilities, not on

possibilities.” The truth is, you can go watch 100 street fights on YouTube in

a row, and if you are astute, you will come out with the very same answers I

have. While on occasion other techniques come out (as they say there is

always an exception to the rule) in reality the rule is what matters most.

Watch those fights and what you will see, for almost all of them, is a crude

form of boxing as primacy (and if it goes to the ground, a crude form of jiu-

jitsu). There’s always one person trying to break in and get past the other

person's attack. Most are unsuccessful at ‘breaking in’, and when they do get

it right, it happens because they got overwhelmed by the other person’s

aggressive intent. It's also very clear that if someone doesn't have any kind

of defense, that this is likely going to be their downfall, and will often cause

them to lose. There’s a lot of clinch in real fights too, which happens by

accident in the throes of two people punching each other, causing them to

land up on top of each other in that clinch

With this in mind, most fights follow a similar projection:

• Boxing as primary.

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• Clinch to hit out of. You still see a lot of punching going on here. At times
there are occasional elbows, knees and head butts — but never as much

as the self-defense experts claim there will be. Hitting a moving,

aggressive, uncooperative opponent, while dealing with your own fear,

hormonal changes, adrenaline etc. isn't as easy as it may seem.

Sometimes there's a kick in a fight, but it often isn't pretty and it's low.

When you do see kicks, it's because someone is trying to stomp another

person on the ground.

• Most people lose a fight because they have no active defense, and they
get hurt or knocked out as consequence of this.

• Often in fights, people centralize their focus so much on the immediate

threat, that they forget (or simply don't know) that there may be other

threats nearby. In the end, they get clocked from behind by a sucker

punch, which kicks off even more chaos, that they are then unable to deal

with.

• Almost never does someone lose a fight because they got kicked in the
groin, eye pocked, or face palmed to the bridge of the nose. In fact, you

almost never see these strikes, simply because, just like our primate

cousins we default to closing our hands when fighting another of our kind.

Many will disagree with me, but I believe we are hardwired to close our

fists in fights, because instinctively we want to protect our fingers. Which

makes sense, when we think about it, because back in our hunter gatherer

days, those were part of the tools of survival. No fingers, no pulling the

arrow on a bow. All those fights on YouTube pretty much bear this out.

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• Of course there is always an exception to the rule, but it always makes far
more sense to train for the rule first.

It Ain’t About Looking Good, It’s About What Works

When I created Crazy Monkey Defense (and I still continue to do so) I built it

off of my own personal experience on the street. Initially, as I engaged in

interpersonal violence, I thought I was doing something wrong, or I hadn't

trained enough. Nothing I was taught on the Dojo floor worked very well. If it

did come out, it resembled very little of the way in which it had been trained.

As time went on, I began chucking almost everything I had ever learned

away. When I was done, I didn't have much left in my toolbox.

I began redeveloping my tools, this time, not based on what self-proclaimed

experts said would work, but rather on real world experiences, my

experiences. In the several years I bounced, and as the head doorman, I

engaged in no less than 300 street fights. I am not proud of it, and it is

nothing to brag about, but it not only changed my martial game, it also

changed how I would look at training for self-preservation forever.

People ask me, “Why doesn't CMD have this or that?” or “Why do we focus

so much on boxing?” These are questions asked by people who know zero

about fighting on the street. When I look at the Crazy Monkey curriculum, I

feel confident, satisfied, and know that I am giving my students the best

possible fighting chance in a real fight. I know I would likely sell more videos

and more courses if I went down the rabbit hole of choreographed self-

42
defense sequences that make my audience go 'Wow'. But 'Wow' doesn't win

fights.

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 0.7.What Do You Really Need To Know, In
Order To Defend Yourself?

There are a lot of things you could train, but when it comes down to it, what

do you really need to have in your self-protection arsenal? To answer these

questions, first you have to decide what you want your martial arts game to

be about? Is it sport focused, more self-preservation oriented, or simply for

fun?

I would suggest, that for most people training in martial arts, an important

motivation (even if it’s not their primary one) is to know that should

something happen out on the ‘streets’ that they will be able to successfully

defend themselves, or defend those they love.

Taking this into account, three things stand out:

• Tools - What kind of techniques do you need to know?

• Environmental Awareness - Being aware of your surroundings, both when
a threat is present, and even when it’s not.

• Inner Game - Probably the most neglected, but most important aspect
that must be understood and developed in order to survive a street

encounter.

That’s a simple outline, but of course, it's more nuanced than that. If

suddenly you find yourself being attacked on a flight of stairs, something like

44
a roundhouse kick to the head may not be the best choice of tool. The truth

is, almost any technique can be applied depending on context. But just

because that may be true, doesn't mean one should spend time on every

single technique one can find. The key isn't to train a technique for ‘a

specific context’ but rather to train a technique that has a high chance of

being applied in ‘most contexts.’ In other words, how adaptable is that tool?

The best, and most honest approach, is simply to observe what techniques

are most commonly applied in resistance training, like sparring, and then

going one step further by simplifying them. In other words, boxing and

clinch techniques are common in stand up sparring in MMA. But there is a

big difference between what a professional athlete can apply, versus

someone just starting out. I am personally always looking for what a person

just starting out can apply and pull off — as this, at least in my view, will

always be closer to what the reality of a self-preservation fight would look

like.

Applying Tools That Are Universally Contextual

Here’s an example: It doesn't take long to teach someone a jab and a cross.

A hook isn't that hard to teach either. Uppercuts, on the other hand, are

slightly more difficult to teach someone, and a shovel hook even harder.

When I say 'teach' here, I mean transferring that in such a way that the

person applying those techniques — actually looks like they know what they

are doing — and importantly can pull it off in sparring. If we look at kicks, a

front kick is pretty easy to teach, an inverted kick to the knee a little more

45
difficult, but trying to get someone to throw a roundhouse kick to someone's

head with accuracy and knock out power, is pretty difficult. Of course, every

one of those difficult techniques to teach as mentioned above, are all

techniques that if used in the right context, could end a fight. But ‘could’ is

the important word here.

'Could' is never as good as ‘likely.’ It is far more likely in a street encounter

that I can throw a jab and make it land, than I could a jumping back kick.

Even an inverted kick to the knee (a technique I love training) has to always

be tempered within an environmental context. Standing on gravel? Probably

not such a great idea to execute that kick. This is why your tools (i.e.

techniques) always have to be considered within the context of environment.

What techniques you chose to use then, will largely be dictated by the

environment you find yourself in. But if you can find tools that are applicable

to many and most contexts and environments, then you have a winner.

This is why, when I choose what to train these days, I first use sparring as my

bench mark. I know from sparring, that a jab, for instance, is much easier to

land against a resisting opponent than a shovel hook. This doesn't mean a

shovel hook is a waste of time to train, but the reality of the fight should

always dictate what is most effective to use. If it’s hard to land a shovel hook

in a controlled environment like sparring, how much harder might that be in

the chaotic realm of a real fight on the street?

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In the same vein, a low roundhouse kick to an opponent's thigh will always

be easier to land, than one to his head. Again, this doesn't make a high kick

ineffective, but the reality of the fight dictates, that in order to make that

technique work, you not only need the flexibility, but equally precision, along

with great timing. All factors you would need less of if kicking the thigh. If

you then transfer this over to the mayhem of a real fight on the street, which

is chaotic and hinged to environmental factors (you are not in a Dojo on a

padded floor all warmed up) — you want to be concerned with applying

tools, techniques, that don’t require absolute accuracy, timing, etc. In other

words, the higher the attributes required to execute a technique against a

resisting, uncooperative opponent, the more likelihood something can (and

will) go wrong.

It’s Not About More, It’s About Less

As I see it, too many people spend way too much time collecting one

technique after another, as if all techniques are made equally. All techniques

are equal until applied within a certain context. Let's say, for example, I

become obsessed with high kicks. This is all I train. I then come home one

evening, walk into my home, the lights are off and suddenly someone grabs

me. We tussle, and we fall over my sofa. Where is there a time in that

exchange to kick someone in the head?

Let's say I am out walking in the city. Someone attacks me, and I am able to

make space. The environment is clear, there are no obstacles, and we are

standing on a flat surface and I happen to have lose pants on. I could kick

47
that person in the head for sure. But in both the scenarios outlined above, I

could have applied elbows too. Crucially, there is less chance of messing up

with an elbow, than a kick to the head.

So what’s my point then? There are techniques that ‘almost’ always apply to

any situation you may find yourself in. In Crazy Monkey Defense, I have

painstakingly worked on discovering these perennial fight winners. This is

why in Crazy Monkey, defense comes first, followed by boxing, then elbows

and knees, followed by everything else. This doesn't mean that we don’t

train other techniques, but if you only have two hours a week to tend to your

self-preservation needs, what do you want to spend your time training?

Knowing the difference between what ‘could work’ versus that which will

‘likely work’ can mean the difference between life and death in the end. If

you are serious about your training, then you need to become equally

serious about what, and how, you train!

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 0.8. What Wins Fights?

How many real fights have you been in? If you are teaching self-defense,

how many times in your lifetime, have you actually had to defend yourself for

real? How many times when this happened did you honestly think to

yourself, “I may die tonight?”

I get incredibly incensed by the matter of fact way that so many self-

proclaimed self-defense experts are quick to shoot other people’s work

down in their own industry, or very quick to offer up an opinion (especially

these idiots who post on FaceBook about YouTube videos of other idiots

teaching garbage) when they themselves have no room to talk. Ironically if

these self-defense critics were truthful, they have never actually been in any

kind of real fight/s of note in their life. Some of these critics I know

personally, they were the kind of guys who tried to avoid sparring, and if they

did spar (or were pressured in to doing it), they were the first to wine about

people going to hard on them. Yet, now they are 'Combatives' or 'Reality

Based' Self-Defense experts?

The martial arts world is a strange one. The world of self-defense is filled with

grey areas, a twilight zone filled with fantasy, mystique, and chest thumping

'Street Fighting Preachers'. These Street Fighting Preachers, — many of

whom live in the safe zones of middle to upper class neighborhoods of the

world (especially middle/upper class American suburbia) — spread their

gospel of street defense to a largely uneducated public, not forged in the

49
fires of violence: To those who have been spoon fed a steady diet of

Hollywood choreographed fight scenes, masquerading as reality (sadly this is

what the ‘safe’ public buy, because they don’t know any better).

This hit home with me a few years ago, when I was invited to teach a seminar

in one of the previous Eastern Bloc group of countries (these countries are

often dominated by the world of Reality Based Self Defense). After flying for

almost 18  hours, a three hour conversation ensued with my host. He argued

the whole way to our destination, why killer instinct was imperative to

winning a street fight, and he continued the conversation, asking my opinion

on a range of topics, from ripping people’s faces off, eye gouging and

kicking people in the nuts as the ultimate street strategy to win a fight.

Needless to say, listening to this guy, I was convinced that he clearly must

live in the worst part of his country, where violence is on every street corner,

and that he must be in fear of his life daily (his students of course must be

too).

Well, it turns out that none of this was true. He lived in what by all accounts

could be considered a sleepy village, nestled among beautiful mountain,

and fresh water streams. He was well educated, with a degree which

afforded him a great job (yup, he didn't teach full time like many of these

self-proclaimed street defense experts, and he never served in the military or

law enforcement either). The fact that he was able to fly me out, and pay my

private training rate, suggested he wasn't struggling for cash either. I wish I

could say this was an isolated case, but it sadly isn't. With the exception of

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military operators and law enforcement officers I have trained, almost

exclusively, everyone who has brought me out to teach themselves and their

students specifically ‘how to survive the streets’, if they were smart and aware

would likely never have to use what I taught them in the first place. None of

these people lived in war zones either.

You will be hard pressed to find a Reality Based Self-Defense school in a real,

violent, underprivileged neighborhood of the world. You will be hard

pressed to find many Reality Based Self-Defense instructors who forged their

skills on the streets, because just like their students, they too come from the

middle to upper class neighborhoods of the world. Plus let's be honest here,

underprivileged neighborhoods don’t have money for self-defense

lessons — self-defense for them is learned on the streets out of necessity, or

if you're lucky at the local boxing gym at the YMCA. All of these wannabe

Street Fighting Preachers are suffering from what I call the Scarecrow Effect.

Just like birds who think the Scarecrow in the field of corn is the real deal —

a human, so they fear him — these Preachers think that by telling other

people they are a self-defense expert, it is the same as actually being one.

Real Fights Are Not Neatly Packaged

When I was in the military, no one REALLY listened to ranked soldiers who

went to Junior Leadership School, but were conscripted at the same time,

just like we were. Rather, when a Sergeant Major, who as a full time soldier

had seen real action, and survived real war during the Border Wars in South

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Africa spoke — we all listened. Why? Because he had credibility, he had

been there, survived and returned to teach others. As far as I was concerned,

anyone else who didn't have this real world experience, was simply a theory

junky. And as we all know when it comes to theory, and fighting — all theory

goes out the window, when the first bullets or punches start to fly.

In the army, as soldiers, this seemed simply obvious to all of us (but it didn't

prevent those JLs from acting like they knew what it was like to go to war.

Sound familiar?) Yet, in the world of martial arts, people seem to accept

advice from self-proclaimed experts who have never actually gone to ‘war on

the streets’ so to speak, and they do so often without question. If they did,

they would know firsthand that complexity — which is mostly passed off as

real self-defense training — kills in real fights. They would know that, while

one can execute a counter measure to an attack, the attacker/s will definitely

fight back. No one who attacks you, unless you can pull off that one in a

million stop shot, is going to just let you blitz them with your awesome

Bourne Identity moves, and sit there and take it. People, especially attackers

will fight back, and will fight back with everything they have. Fighting for

real, where there are no rules, is unpredictable, chaotic, untidy, and

potentially life ending. 

What Really Works In a Fight

Take it from me, if you really want to be able to survive a real fight encounter,

where you potentially could lose your life, you want to keep everything high

percentage. This means, you have to look at everything you have been

taught, or think you know, speak to those who do know, and you will be told
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to drop 99% of it as bullshit. Simple, straight forward, offense and defense,

win fights. Awareness, before techniques, win fights. Knowing when to

disengage, and get your ass out of the danger zone, wins fights. Avoiding

places all together, if at all possible, that are known to be violent, win fights.

If all else fails, and you have zero option but to go hands on with someone,

take it from me, you going to be relying on core fight elements. Good, old

fashioned boxing, knees, elbows, low line kicks, clinch — and enough

ground skills, so that if you do end up there, you know how to get back to

your feet — is all you really need, or want to know. In the countless ‘street’

situations I was in, especially working the door for several years in

Johannesburg, I can tell you with full confidence that I won 90% of those

fights with solid Crazy Monkey hand defense, a diving board jab, a diving

board cross, a tight hook, horizontal elbow, front knee, side knee, a front

midsection kick, and an inverted kick to an attackers knee (obviously not

always individually, although that sometimes happened, but simply

combinations of the above). That’s it! It rarely got more fancy than that.

When I look at most of what is passed off as self-defense, I am left

wondering who are these people fighting? 99% of what they teach, you

don’t need, and I promise you, you will never use. The other 10% of my

fights, that I never mentioned earlier, could be considered as made up of

using pushing, pulling, a neck-tie, and fighting out of the clinch, with maybe

1% of that some fancy shit, just because that day I was feeling cocky.

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People need to stop sipping the Reality Based “it was taught to the military”

Kool-Aid too. I was the Defensive Tactics Trainer (or what we called Unarmed

Combat Instructor) for my unit, during my military service. I had most guys

for less than 40-hours total of training if I was lucky (and I would never see

them again). There sure as hell wasn't enough time to teach anyone to a

‘black belt’ level. Most other basic Army Combatives courses taught around

the world fall in line with this amount of basic hands on time, some even less

— and it’s really up to the individual soldier to take it further (which most

don’t). Let's just face facts, in the army, for the most part you shoot people,

you don’t punch them. The fact that you can now get a 'black belt' in some

military style unarmed combatives system is a joke.

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 0.9. The Cold, Hard Truth Of Training To

Survive Physical Violence

One of the most fatal flaws of martial art instruction, is that often, it is built

off a system of predefined responses, that would need prior knowledge or

prediction to accomplish. This may not be immediately obvious, but, if you

look closer, you will see how this acknowledgement of prediction is codified

in to practice.

It’s not uncommon to hear an instructor suggest that today's lesson is

dealing with someone who attacks you like X, with the instructor then going

on to demonstrate what should be the appropriate response. All in

attendance, then regurgitate, or in other words copy the instructors moves,

while the ‘attacker’ feeds the attack as demonstrated too. When you have

people who have never thrown a punch in their life enter your school, this

method is okay as an introduction, but sadly, in most places you go to train

for ‘self-defense’, this is the only approach you will ever be exposed to.

This standard approach to teaching ‘self-defense’ makes several, even

though often unconscious, assumptions. Firstly, to some degree that you will:

• Be attacked in the real world self-preservation incidents that will likely be

one of the attacks you learned to defend against in the Dojo.

• Be able to immediately identify the kind of attack as it takes place in the

moment of all out interpersonal aggression.

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• That you then, in the heat of that moment dripping with fear and dealing
with a ton of hormonal changes, will be able to recall verbatim what you

were taught for that specific attack.

• And that you will then, because you have trained and remembered the
response to that exact attack, will then be able to apply said defensive

techniques with success.

But the truth is, it is far more likely that you won’t know when someone will

attack you. You won’t know exactly how he will attack you and with what.

And that the attack, even if it has some resemblance to what you trained,

may still be marginally different enough, to not fully, and inclusively resemble

the exact attack you trained against in the Dojo. Even in instances when you

do have some forewarning of an impending violent attack — you still will

likely not know exactly when and with what the person will be attacking you

with.

Sounds all doom and gloom right? This doesn't make training for self-

preservation hopeless, but it does highlight the truth. If you start from the

reality of things, understanding the worst case scenario, then the method

you utilize to train for that worst case scenario will take on a very different

form, both in training and execution.

First things first!

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 Why All The Prediction?
I do think it is necessary to consider why, for so long and still today

(especially in the arena of reality based self defense), so much time is spent

on cookie-cutter responses to a myriad of self-preservation problems (i.e.

someone grabs you like this, you do that, someone throws a punch like this

you do that, and so on). I don’t think people teach like this because it

resembles reality, but rather because it is widely accepted, it's easy to do,

you don’t have to really prove what you teach works; and as I will get in to in

a moment students actually want it this way (be that unconsciously of

course).

Most people are unconscious of the fact that their brains are 'do not get

killed devices'. There's no difference to your brain now, than the one our

hunter gatherer ancestors had. Simply it hasn't changed. As such, the brain

seeks out coherence, structure, and order. No wonder then, when someone

offers a process that seems coherent, structured, and orderly, attached to a

promise of survival, the brain goes “bingo, that must be the answer.”

When it comes to something like fighting, which is so complex when

observed, and is often hard to make head or tails out of all the variables — I

am not surprised, that many of the older forms of martial arts used an

approach of trying to reverse engineer the complex nature of the fights they

witnessed, or were involved in. They hoped that by reducing it to smaller

more manageable chunks — that understanding would become clearer.

Observe the chaos of a fight, try to reduce it to manageable chunks, then

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put it into a codified step-by-step approach (i.e. attacker ‘A’ attack like this,

then defender ‘B’ do this) and eureka, when faced with the real fight again,

you will be able to take what you learned and reapply it into reality. This idea

is a really simple, but fatally flawed one. And the reason should be painfully

obvious, but clearly it’s not, as so many people teach a step-by-step

approach to every attack even to this day.

The irony is, while the human brain may love coherence, structure, and order

— fights, and survival by their very nature are more often than not,

disorganized, unstructured, and lack any order. This of course is hard to sell

to the human brain.

Can you imagine this as a marketing strategy?

“Come train with me to learn how to defend yourself when your life is on the

line, but when I teach you, please expect a disorganized teaching approach,

with zero structure and lacking any order.”

No one would pitch for class. The word would be, you have no clue what the

fuck you are doing. This is the paradox of real self-preservation training.

People want to learn how to survive a life and death situation, but they don’t

want it to be messy. They want it to be easy. But it’s going to be messy, and

only barely resemble what they have trained, and tons of things will pop up

in the midst of a self-preservation situation that they never, or never could

have, ever trained for.

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 Training For Self-Protection, Training To Survive
So what’s the answer?

Anyone who claims they have that down in my opinion is lying. I actually

think it's super difficult to teach someone how to deal with the chaotic,

unpredictable nature of real interpersonal violence. It’s not just the reality of

the vastness of possibilities of attacks and what they may be or consist off

(which no one in a lifetime could cover every eventuality of) — but it is

compounded further by a person's temperament (who are they, what life

have they led, their personal history etc.), and notwithstanding the

biological, psychological changes that will take place in the heat of self-

preservation. Something that is very difficult to simulate on the mat in

training. In other words, you can train all you like, but until that day that you

are in a fight for your survival, you won’t know how you will respond. That's a

very scary proposition for most people. People want certainties.

With that said, even though I have said that it is super difficult to teach

someone how to genuinely protect themselves, I am not saying it’s

impossible. But no matter what you have been told, real self-protection isn't

as neatly packaged as so many self-defense ‘experts’ claim it is.

Here are some preliminary thoughts on how I approach the problem outlined

above. It’s not the entire extent of what I coach, it is simply not possible to

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cover all of that here. Think of these rather as some starting points, a couple

of examples, sign posts or even questions to ponder:

Defensive Paradigm: I believe generally, that it is far more important that

you are able to survive the initial onslaught than immediately being able to

fight back. I am not saying don’t fight back, because to win you have pretty

much no choice. But, considering that in many instances you won’t know

when someone will attack you, you are left useless in the fight, if you end up

taking punches to the face for example, while trying to execute an offensive

counter measure. Especially if those punches/strikes/whatever end up

incapacitating you. It is the first two seconds of a fight that will often, but not

always, decide the outcome.

I need to make it clear here too, that when I say defensive action to survive

the onslaught, I am talking about a micro-second or two, not sustained

continues defense for minutes. Also, the way I teach defense is active, not

passive, designed to enable the user to mount an offense when needed. This

could be physical defense, as in covering CM1, or CM2 defense etc. or to

make space first to have a clearer picture of the threat (i.e. using the Bear

Position, Star Defense) or pushing the threat away to orient oneself to the

threat first (i.e. using the 3PC, T-Bar).

I know this doesn't sound as cool as Navy Seal going hands on immediately,

and with a flurry of strikes you then incapacitate the attacker instantly — but

you need to take in to account your Response-Cycle to physical assault. If

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you know there is potential danger ahead, you can begin to prime yourself,

which makes attacking back from your end quicker. But when you are caught

off guard and unaware (which is far more likely), your brain will attempt to

orient itself to what is happening. By the time you realize you are being

attacked, it may already be too late to respond with immediate effective

offensive action, especially if your attacker just clocked you with a shot to the

head that disorientated you.

Scenario-Drills For Movement Fight Fluency: It may have sound, earlier in

the article, that I am against teaching a simulated attack scenario to

students. For example, if someone grabs you, you deal with it like this, kind

of methods. I am not against this per-say, but I actually don’t teach scenario

drills so much as to teach someone how to deal with a specific attack, but

rather to develop what I call Movement Fight Fluency.

In this sense, it is not so much the scenario that is important, but rather the

capacity of the scenario to force you to work on movement responses that

you may never have considered. For example, the way you deal with

someone running up to you and punching you while sitting, will be different

to the way you deal with, and move against, the same striking action when

you are standing up. How you respond to an attack when you see it, will be

different to when you don’t. The more diversity in the drills that I can create,

that continue to challenge the movement efficacy of my student —forcing

him or her to be adaptable, often with a student coming up with movement

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responses I never even taught them — the more options of movement that

student will have when faced with a real threat.

With that said, I have already pointed out that it would be virtually

impossible to cover every conceivable way another human being could hurt

you, and what your response to it should be — but what I can cover, and

what I can make you good at is giving you the ability to be adaptable in fight

movement. Here the key word is adaptability. You shouldn't be asking how

many techniques you know or can remember — but rather, how adaptable

are your martial movement responses to varying situations, especially in

situations you may never had considered. As a side note, ever see that prank

video where a guy goes around in the hood challenging tough guys to fight,

and when they decide to, he pulls his pants down only to show off his

amazing pink thong? What happened there? Most of these tough guys were

caught completely off guard, and most simply backed up and ran away. The

bottom line, the more creative you can be in training for self-preservation —

eliciting martial movement responses that may not even had been trained in

class, or offering up variations of what was trained — the more chance, I

believe, you stand of surviving a real out in the world fight for survival.

For example: When I teach combinations, I am not teaching combinations

because that is the exact combination that will land on an opponent. How

would I know that anyway? Who is to say what kind of mistakes my opponent

may make? Maybe I train only combinations that are directed towards the

head, then I face an opponent who never leaves any opening around his

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head (but his body is open…and I haven’t trained that, so now what)? The

reason to train combinations then, at least how I see it, is to make students

as diverse as possible, with as many types of angles included in them that I

can dream up. This way, when faced with an opponent, there isn't an angle

of striking they haven’t trained for, so when openings do appear, they are

then able to hit into them without even thinking about it.

Semi-Unrehearsed Simulated Fights: I love this training approach. We

chose some parameters to make it manageable, but then the goal is to see

what comes out. For example, I may ask two people to walk towards each

other, and one person is instructed to bump into the other person. The

person who bumps into the other person is then instructed to sometimes just

to walk on like nothing happened, at other times the person is instructed to

turn back and argue, and sometimes to actually start attacking back right

after arguing a bit, or even not at all (and they can attack with anything they

like, a punch, a kick, a weapon if we are using those). This way, not only do I

get to see the Response-Cycle, and how the defender defends him/herself,

but equally it gives us an opportunity to unpack what happened. A good

thing to do here is to film it, so we are able to debrief it later.

I also like to ensure, in this type of training, that at times, when the defender

fights back s/he is given the opportunity to ‘win,' and at other times the

attacker continues to fight back, even though the defender had deployed an

initial defensive response. This makes it more realistic, as far too many times,

people are taught counter measures that always see them winning. We all

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know however, deep down, that no one in a real fight is just going to stand

there and let us do our awesome series of techniques. They are going to

fight back, and things can get messy quickly (and they will). These types of

Semi-Unrehearsed Simulated Fight drills aren't all out fights, but it allow a

level of unpredictability, requiring adaptability that is essential to learning

how to defend oneself.

The Sad, Sad Truth

I have more ways of preparing my students for self-preservation, but as

noted earlier, these are just two ideas that consider taking what is often

predictive training, to a level that closer resembles reality.

It's imperative, if we are really honest with ourselves as self-preservation

instructors, that we allow our students to get as close to the reality of what a

fight will be like. Of course it needs to be done sensibly, systematically, and

with care. At least until, they are adaptable and skilled enough that you can

really be super creative, unrehearsed, and get them to fully immerse

themselves into what will be the chaotic nature of the fight.

But I will go out on a limb here and say this: Most instructors will avoid

teaching this way, because much of what they would love to teach, they will

now need to discard. In chaos, much of what is peddled as self-defense skill

won't work, and that will be immediately evident once both instructor and

student step into a more real training environment. With all the cool stuff

chucked out the window, there will be no more opportunity for instructors to

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be standing around in camouflage pants, looking awesome against pre-

defined drills where they always seem to win. Everything they teach might

only be approximations when applied — that’s not really good for someone's

‘Bad Ass Motherfucker' rating. Instructors will also have to deal with the

discomfort of not actually being able to make everything they teach work.

Students won’t like it either. It won’t sell as great. The average Joe on the

street says he wants to learn how to defend himself, but that’s what he says.

When shown the reality of what fights are like, what will be needed to win,

and the way one will have to train in order to make that into a reality — well

let's just say, fantasy is easier to digest than reality. It’s just far too much work

for most people. I have had people who joined my Trainers program who

didn't want to do this work, and didn't like the reality of what it would take to

learn how to not only learn to fight themselves, but in-turn teach others.

Ridiculous I know!

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 10. Adapt or Die: A Self-Preservation

Training Paradigm Shift

Training martial skills so that you can effectively deploy those skills when it

matters most in self-preservation — are thoughts that occupy most students

and instructors minds. This is natural, as no one wants to find themselves in

the midst of interpersonal aggression, only then to find that those martial

skills you so diligently practiced, night after night, week in and week out, end

up failing you.

As a coach of self-preservation, I am well aware of my responsibility to my

students who not only put their trust in me but equally their lives are in my

hands, as they accept that what I am teaching them will enable them to

protect themselves. Unlike my life growing up, most of my students haven’t

been in serious interpersonal violent encounters. Outside of Hollywood, and

the dreaded news, they have no context or even experience to know for

sure, that what I am teaching them is right to begin with. One can quite

easily see how this relationship can be abused. In fact, you see it all the time

in this self-defense industry.

I feel, that if more ‘self-defense’ instructors understood the serious nature of

their roles in their students lives — and understood that what they teach

tonight, may unfortunately, have to be used possibly to save their students

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life the very next day —they would think more carefully about what and how

they teach. Sadly, what is often taught is an accumulation of techniques,

chasing belts, and a bloated curriculum (much of which is established to

make more money).

Now, nowhere am I saying that teaching techniques is not important. I have

to start somewhere with a new student, that come in with little or no

understanding of the ‘fight’ game - I have to first lay down a formative

structure. This formative structure will take the form of core techniques, that I

believe are the essential fighting tools that every human should possess.

But this is likely where I diverge from my contemporaries. I am not interested

in teaching a buffet of techniques, codified in some kind of artificial hierarchy

of basic techniques, rising to the most advanced. If there is such a thing as

an ‘advanced’ technique, then it is rather a person's ability to take what they

have learned, and find the most appropriate and efficient way to adapt those

techniques for a wide range of contexts.

Creating The Generative Self-Preservation Experience

“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who

can best manage change.” ― Leon C. Megginson

If I could argue for anything that is of utmost importance in self-preservation,

the one thing that should take precedence over all else, is training that

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enhances a person's ability to adapt. When you take the martial toolkit you

have, and apply it under conditions that requires you to be adaptable, it

invariably generates change in your results or experiences. This also invokes

a freedom to be ready to absorb a wide range of possible, conflicting ideas.

For example, you could assume X technique would be the suitable counter

measure to Y attack, only then to find that under certain conditions when Z is

thrown into the mix, that Y conflicts with X. There is no way of knowing this in

a sterile training environment, where, rather than experimentation, what is

being taught is prediction. No matter how someone wants to define it, when

you tell student 'A' to execute a specific attack, and then student 'B' needs

to defend with a specific sequence, that’s prediction — simply because the

person who is defending, just like the attacker, knows what parameters they

are working within.

When you instead offer a training environment that is generative, where the

capacity of answering a specific self-preservation problem comes from the

student itself — by its very nature, this experience becomes self-altering, and

works to fulfill its own created future — rather than simply adapting to the

given outcome it was handed. Confused?

Let me give you an example: Imagine I set up a self-preservation situation

that a student may possibly encounter out in the real world. Let's say

someone bumps into you, and then gets confrontational. You have all the

techniques we have trained, but those were in isolation, now you have to

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make a choice as how best to deploy them. In this scenario, what you choose

to do is up to you, not what I think you should.

We can then take this further: A person bumps into you, it gets

confrontational, but now the aggressor, has three options:

1. He flips you the bird and walks off.

2. He immediately starts shoving you.

3. After bumping into you, he immediately begins attacking you.

What the aggressor chooses, and in which order, is totally up to him.

Invariably, this now requires you, as the defender, to decide on the

appropriate counter measure. In other words, you have to be adaptable. The

key to this being successful, is that in the beginning you slow everything

down. And you lower the contact too. Slowing it down, gives you a little

room to process your response. But even then, if you are either not well

versed in this kind of situation, you're still trying to get the techniques down,

or you just execute whatever emerges from your body — you may still likely

mess up, and choose a less effective response. This is what I meant by a

generative experience making you ready to absorb a wide range of possible

conflicting ideas. What may have worked neatly in a pre-defined scenario in

training, may not work out as you like this time around. And that’s actually

okay. A generative change is not a one-time event, but an ongoing

engagement. It also forces a change in how you both view, and respond to,

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the experience you are having. In other words, this experience becomes self-

altering, and works to fulfill its own created future.

Sometimes, to spice things up a bit, I apply a quick fire approach in training.

I write down ten common interpersonal aggressive situations or behaviors,

put them on cue cards, mix them up, and then call them out randomly (after

the ten have been covered, I shuffle the cue cards again, and start all over). I

also like to change the parameters of the attack.

For example: The aggressor moves in close and grabs you by your clothing,

pressing up against your chest with both hands. The defender then chooses

what they feel is the appropriate response. Then immediately afterwards, I

call for the aggressor to rugby-tackle the defender, and so on. The student

has no choice but to think on their feet, and adapt. Each response will likely

be different to the last. I could also take one situation, where an aggressor

moves in close and grabs you with both hands, but this time the aggressor

can change where he grabs you each time he moves in. Again, the defender,

has to adapt his response accordingly. I can take this even further by calling

out an action the aggressor should take, but this time, after the defender has

deployed his initial counter response, the aggressor continues to mount an

attack of his choosing. I can go even one step further, and call the ‘attackers’

into one corner, tell them what I want them to attack with, while the

defenders are none the wiser. Not knowing what you will be attacked with,

makes it even more real, including your response.

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All of this though, is first done at quarter speed. While doing things at full

speed with intent is essential, what is far more important is a person’s ability

to adapt to the ever changing circumstances, and their ability to deploy an

effective counter measure to control the situation. This kind of approach sees

each of the self-preservation situations that I set up for my students as

discrete encounters, each to be won, lost, or drawn. If you look at how reality

based self-defense is often taught, the ‘victim’ always wins. The truth as we

know it, isn’t like that. People lose fights, yes, even those who know how to

fight.

In training, losing or drawing, even in a scenario as described earlier, isn't a

bad thing. It invokes the courage in a person to be a creative system, whose

goal is to enhance, and foster, further creation. The truth is, you only really

learn by your mistakes. If the scenarios are set up in such a way, that the

aggressor is always the one that loses, it creates a false sense of reality. This

type of training ensures that there is no opportunity for creative problem

solving, and crucially the ability to adapt (which, in and of itself, is a form

creative expression). As Pearl Zhu, author of Digital Master has noted “An

adaptive mind has better learning capability.”

And as Christopher Alexander, influential architect and design theorist,

notes: “But in practice master plans fail — because they create totalitarian

order, not organic order. They are too rigid; they cannot easily adapt to the

natural and unpredictable changes that inevitably arise in the life of a

community.” So is it the same in learning how to effectively defend yourself.

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 11. The Approximation Principle In The
Reality Of Self-Preservation

There is a difference between perfection in training, and the approximation

of application in reality. I talk a lot about this, both with my students and

trainers. In training, it may be tempting to always try an achieve a perfect

result, with the execution of perfect technique. But the truth is, out on the

street, in real interpersonal violence, where you are dealing both with your

own internal opponent, and external factors; seeking perfection is an illusion.

Let me explain…

The world of self-preservation beyond the mat, or the studio, is one of chaos

— it’s unpredictable. The very nature of unpredictability makes perfect

responses virtually impossible. Perfection of technique, which really is

another way of saying don’t mess up, is only made possible by knowing

beforehand what to expect. Take that knowing part away, which is pretty

much what you will face in real fights, and one is left in a quagmire of

potentialities. As the saying goes, “The best-laid plans of mice and men

often go awry.” In other words, all the training in the world to defend a

punch, won’t prepare you for an attacker who decides to pick up a brick

instead.

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 It Doesn't Need To Look Pretty, It Just Has To Work
In the end when I talk about self-preservation, it doesn't have to look good,

or pretty — it simply has to work. This means, conceding to the fact, that

what comes out in the street, will likely only be an approximation of what you

trained in the gym. Even if you trained as best you can for all possible

eventualities, there’s a strong likelihood that what you end up facing in a real

fight may be something you simply never trained for (or even thought of

training for). As such, it makes far more sense to ensure that your overall

approach to learning how to defend yourself is reduced to simplicity.

Here, I am not suggesting simplistic. As Edward de Bono notes, “Simplicity

before understanding is simplistic; simplicity after understanding is simple.”

Therefore, you need to be honest about what you are actually able to pull off

in training against an uncooperative, resisting opponent, versus what is

possible when things are more choreographed. Sadly, much of what is

peddled out there as self-defense, is done in a way that makes the defender

look good. The common recurring scenario where one person attacks, and

then the defender lets loose with a multitude of physical responses — while

all along the attacker simply stands idly by and doesn't fight back, is the

hallmark of unreality (yet passed off as real).

Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS)

As Edward de Bono points out, once you fully understand something  — in

this case, the reality of interpersonal violence as being unpredictable, and

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chaotic — you begin to realize through training for real self-preservation, that

it is simplicity that wins fights. As obvious as this sounds, this is not how most

of the world of self-defense instruction is presented. Sadly it is often

presented as complex, requiring precise energy from the attacker, with a pre-

understanding of each parties roles.

The truth is though, that even the role of an attacker on the street is never

fixed. In other words, he is not always attacking you, and he may even

change his mind. For example, he may go from being aggressive in one

moment, to talking rationally in the next, he may throw a punch, but then

decide to walk away.

Making your approach to self-preservation simple, then allows you to adapt

in the moment, to the ever changing terrain of the interpersonal violent

battlefield. Because you keep things simple, you are able to get away with

applying techniques that approximate what you trained and still win.

People need to understand that on the street, it’s all about what works, not

what it looks like. In other words, it doesn't really matter what your technique

looks like when you have no choice but to fight back to survive — what does

matter is can you make it land, and can you make it hurt? In the end, not

much else really matters!

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 Train How You Wish It Never Ends Up
Finding out what works, doesn't happen by training the way you would like it

to be, but rather, by training how you wish it never ends up. Making mistakes

in training, trying something out to only find it fails, or finding yourself in a

bad spot, are never a bad thing. If, heaven forbid, you find yourself in a

situation where you have no choice but to defend yourself, and you are able

to neutralize the threat immediately, that’s fantastic, but as you already know

instinctively this is hardly ever going to happen. It is far more likely that you

will throw a punch and miss. It is far more likely in trying to get out the way

of a blow barreling towards your head, you trip over a bench and find

yourself spread eagle on the floor. If all you have ever trained was for when

things go right, for perfection, you have pretty much lessened your chance

of self-preservation victory by 90%.

I remember as a child my Mother giving me medicine. It tasted like crap. She

responded, “If it doesn't taste good, it’s probably good for you.” When you

drop all the pretenses, and the Hollywood notion of fighting, and get down

and work the simplest, most functional approach you can — you begin to

realize, successes in a real fight won't taste good. It will be messy and untidy.

The more you can simulate the mess in training, the untidiness — the more

chance you will have of surviving a real interpersonal violent encounter. As I

have noted throughout this eBook, what you finally execute, doesn't have to

be perfect, it simply has to work. And just like crappy tasting medicine it is

good for your self-preservation success.

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 12.Three Mindsets That Will Keep You Safe,

When It Matters Most

Much of what gets peddled and passed off as ‘self-defense’ training on

YouTube, has nothing to do with the defense of the self at all. While the

possibility of going hands on with someone who is being an aggressor is

ever present, this should never be one's first action.

This starts with making a distinction in one's own mind if the threat one is

encountering is ego based or really self-preservation?

Bumping into someone in a bar, for example, who spills the drinks you are

carrying, who you then argue with, that then leads to an altercation — is not

necessarily ‘self-defense’.

Let me explain why….

Let’s re-run the same example. But this time, you realize that the person who

just bumped into you didn't see you, and he apologizes — which you

politely accept. This was an accident.

Let’s re-run that example again. Someone bumps you, and spills the drinks

you are carrying. Even though the person apologizes you flip out, and begin

to use all kinds of profanity. The guy, who was just about to apologize gets

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really upset, an argument ensues, and before you know it – you are both

rolling around on the bar floor trying to punch each other in the face. This

was an ego fight.

Lets re-run the example for a second last time. Same scenario, drinks are

spilt, you don’t get upset, and you don’t use any profanity, but the other

person does. You get upset, the situation escalates, and before you know it –

you are both rolling around on the bar floor trying to punch each other in the

face. This was an ego fight.

And here we are, one last time. Same scenario as before, drinks are spilt, you

don’t get upset, and you don’t use any profanity, but the other person does.

You keep your cool, and use verbal jiu-jitsu to de-escalate the situation. In

other words, you both don’t end up rolling around on the bar floor trying to

punch each other in the face. This was self preservation.

In each of the examples above context was key. Knowing what constitutes an

ego fight versus a self-preservation incident – is imperative when we are

talking about survival. A man’s ego doesn't like this approach, and even

some reading this won’t like it either. You see, most fights have little or

nothing to do with self-preservation, but as noted in the examples above,

they are often more than not ego defensive in nature. In other words, the “I

am not going to back down for any man”, kind of attitude. That’s fine, but

then don’t call it self-defense, or teach it as such, because it isn't.

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 A Decentralized Focus Mindset
Back to our final example from above. You are using verbal jiu-jitsu in an

attempt to calm the other person down. But let's be real, this other person is

being aggressive. While it hasn't gotten there yet, the possibility of going

hands on with an aggressor is ever present. While you want to keep focus on

the main threat, you need to be decentralized to a degree, with your focus.

In other words don’t place ALL your focus on the immediate threat in front of

you.

You want to immediately begin scanning the room for other potential

threats. Signs like, you just saw the people he was sitting with get up as they

saw him begin to argue with you. What kind of potential weapons are lying

around, either that can be used against you, or if you need to use one?

What is vital here to understand, is that while you may be unsure of the

intentions of the person arguing with you, being sucker punched or

blindsided is one of the biggest threats to your safety. While you can handle

a threat that you have eyes on, many altercations have been lost, when

someone focuses so much on the immediate threat, and fails to take note of

their surroundings.

As sad as it is, the person you are dealing with may have bumped into you

on purpose, to get a rise out of you. While you are dealing with the

immediate threat, and if you are not aware, his friends may have encircled

you, waiting for an ideal opportunity to attack you. The predatory nature

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predicts that those who use it will look for vulnerabilities, and one of those is

a lack of awareness to one's surroundings. Animals that hunt in packs use this

same strategy. They attack from one side, while the others come from the

rear where the wounded animal cannot see. The cycle is repeated until the

pack has taken down their prey.

My advice to all my students when coaching them on dealing with

interpersonal violence is to ‘assume’ the worst, but don’t show it. Use verbal

jiu-jitsu to talk things down, be confident, but don’t be aggressive. Use

correct strategy, like scanning the room, and not being centrally focused on

one threat. If it turns out to be nothing, then simply stand down. But always

assume the worst.

Distance Management Mindset

So, here you are, in a situation you don’t want to be in. You're scanning the

room. Your focus is not centralized solely on one threat, and you are using

your verbal jiu-jitsu. The next strategy you want to employ is distance

management, or what I call a proximity alert. In other words, wherever

possible keep all threats at an arms distance from you. Don’t let the threat

encroach on you, and break your personal space barrier. Here is the reality of

interpersonal violence (without some kind of projectile weapon), a person

has to get close enough to you, to put their hands (or feet on you) in order

to hurt you. Preventing that, ensures that you are ‘safer’. Of course this isn't

always possible, but you at least want to try achieve it, if the situation allows.

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An aggressor will use various ploys to get close to you. Sometimes they are

overly aggressive, they posture up, push out their chest, or try to push you –

or maybe it is more subtle things, like pretending not to be overly aggressive

by offering up their side while they move towards you. In either case the

objective is the same, they want to get close enough to strike. Animals in the

wild do this too. A Lioness in tall grass, slowly creeps towards a Zeal of

Zebra. When close enough she darts out and charges.

Keeping potential threat/s at arms distance from you, along with a

decentralized focus, are important tactics in a self-preservation situation.

An Evacuation Plan Mindset

While all of this is going on, you need to know where the exit is. If suddenly

things kick off, and you have to protect yourself, you want to only do so long

enough to be able to get out of the situation you find yourself in. Yes, I know,

this doesn't sound all Hollywood, but remember is this ego defense or really

self-preservation?

As a doorman for several years, I can’t tell you how many times I saw people

get in to altercations where an opportunity presented itself for the loser to

evacuate, but he still decided to stick around. And at worst, he come back

and tried to continue the fight (there’s that ego again).

If the situation you find yourself in, is really a threat to your safety, then

leaving the scene as soon as you can, is what it means to truly defend

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yourself. I know I want to go home and see my children. One ego driven

fight could end all of that for me, or worse still I may end up paralyzed for

the rest of my life, relegated to watch my grandchildren from a wheelchair.

My concern with so much of the stuff consumed daily on YouTube, under

the banner of ‘self-defense’, is that people who really need to defend

themselves may begin to think that the only way to deal with an aggressive

situation is with aggression. As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer,

everything begins to look like a nail.

Of course there are times where there is zero choice but to go hands on with

another human being to protect yourself (and/or those you love). I live in

Johannesburg, one of the most violent cities in the world, so I know that

better than anyone else. But because of that, I also know the reality. Almost

never will you be attacked one-on-one. Everyone uses firearms or some form

of weapon like a blade here, and they are not afraid to use them either.

About 2-years ago both myself, my wife, and our two boys were in a store

that got held up. The robbers where all armed. To not cause to much panic

they didn't openly pull their firearms. We could however, see what was going

down. I took my own advice in this article. I decentralized my focus from the

guy at the cash register, who handed over a bag for the cashier to fill up, and

I scanned the environment. In a second, I placed where my kids and wife

were in the store, and where they were in relation to the robbers. I quickly,

and quietly got everyone together. As we walked to the door, the guy who

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was blocking the entrance stepped towards me to block us from leaving. I

immediately placed myself between him and my family, smiled and said “hey

bud, how are you?”, all while going into the Bear position, and keeping him

at arms distance. My family walked behind me and exited the store – and,

still keeping my eyes on the robber (and his friends), I then did the same and

we walked away.

No ego. No foul, or aggressive language. Just smart tactics. And here I am

writing this today. Things could quite easily have ended up differently

(especially if I took the advice from these reality based self-defense nuts on

YouTube).

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 13. Five Street Fighting Lessons I learned
The Hard Way

It was a quite Saturday night at Foxies, a pub in the heart of the Northern

suburbs of Johannesburg. I was on the call box, speaking to a friend on the

phone. Suddenly, a group of men and woman entered the lower end bar

inside the pub. I could see them from the corner of my eye, rowdy, loud, and

screaming profanities at other patrons. Some patrons got up and left, others

tried not to make any eye contact with them. My eyes fixed on one individual

of the group. Staring back at me, he first hurled some profanities my way,

then threw a beer bottle at me. I dodged it, put the phone down, and

walked up to the group.

“It's time for all of you to leave.”

“Who the fuck are you?”, a person from the group screamed.

“I am the security here, and I am telling you, it's time to leave.”

By that time the word had gone out to the other doorman spread

throughout the pub, and within a minute, they were all there. We were facing

off with the group of troublemakers, and they, realizing we were serious, got

up, and we all exited the main doors.

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Once we were in the courtyard, it was clear that this group, (who I now knew

were a biker gang) weren't going to go quietly. The head guy stepped

forward, pointed at me and said, “Me and you, asshole, if I win, we stay, if I

lose we go.”

The first thought that popped into my head, “Has this guy been watching

way to many movies?”

Outnumbered, I realized that this was likely the only way we were going to

clear this lot out of the pub. So I said, “Let's do it.” I took my bomber jacket

off, and standing in the courtyard we sized each other up. He stepped

forward hard, throwing a lead jab to my face. I ducked, came up, and placed

a 1-2 combination straight on his chin. He buckled, and then he dived

straight in for my legs. I tried in vain to uppercut him while he came in, but I

missed. And there we were, on the ground. Back then, I knew pretty much

nothing about jiu-jitsu. So I used the only weapons I did know — defending

myself, in what only barely represented a guard position — I grabbed the

back of his head and began to elbow him in the face.

I was winning, and he and everyone else knew it too. I then felt two massive

shock waves enter my head. As I struggle to gain focus, I realized a woman

and another man from the group were now kicking me in the head. As it

turned out later, the doorman I thought would have my back, didn't. One

guy in particular, the guy who always wore camouflage pants (one of the

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reasons I hate those things), and who always told everyone his fight war

stories, had fled the scene.

I got up immediately, and went on a surgical rampage. Scanning the

environment, I hit anything and everything that moved. I didn't do it like a

crazy man, but rather like a sniper. Riding the storm of incoming attackers

(Crazy Monkey Defense, I love you), I put my head down, went into a

hunchback stance, and proceeded to execute diving board jabs and crosses

with absolute precision.

What were some of the lessons that night?

Here are five of the big things to take away:

1. Environment in a fight can change, and can change quickly: You have to

be adaptable to survive. This means, the ability to instantly recognize when a

strategy isn't working, and change it. For me, the ground, where I was

initially winning, had now become the worst possible place to be. The goal,

get up quickly, protect myself, and initiate counter measures. I can’t tell you

how many times I have seen people lose fights, in and out of the ring, by

using a strategy that clearly isn't working, but then still trying to force it to

anyway. You need to know when to give up, and change direction.

2. Tell Yourself To Survive: As I was being kicked on the floor, I remember

distinctly telling myself, “I am not fucking going out like this, get up, get up,

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get up.” Self-talk can be helpful in a fight, especially when you're losing

physically. Giving yourself a 'Braveheart' speech in a shit storm, can galvanize

your resolve.

3. It's Tank Time: What saved me more than anything that night once, I was

able to stand up, was a combination of strong defense, locking down into a

hunchback stance, and keeping safe. I made sure I didn't swing for the

rafters. The four drivers, that I still teach to this day, were paramount,

especially when you are out-gunned, out-numbered, and trying your best to

survive (Drivers = Active Defense, Tight Economical Structure, Balance, and

Adaptive Conditioning, in other words remember to breath).

4. Sniper Striking: When you are losing in a fight, there is a tendency to

want to fight out of desperation. The result is, you lose focus, get consumed

by your sympathetic nervous system (the fight/flight/freeze response), and

end up losing technical form. All it takes is a rogue punch to catch you in this

mayhem and the fight is over. When you're dealing with more than one

opponent, that risk is even greater, you simply cannot be everywhere at

once. Moving out of my tank position, I focused on riding the incoming

storm primarily with my defense, I then focused on my breath, and picked

opponents off strategically as I saw them. I did pretty much nothing else but

dive board jab and cross that night. I have always been a fan of punching

that is both offensive and defensive at the same time — the Dive Board —

really saved my ass that night.

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5. You Only Have Your Own Back: Like it or not, when it comes to

interpersonal violence, you may end up alone. Anyone who is a big mouth

about fighting, flag it, flag them. I have learned after several years fighting

outside the doors of nightclubs, that the biggest talkers, on both sides of the

divide, bouncers, and patrons alike, are exactly that — all talk. When the shit

goes down, they are often the first people to run for the hills. Trust only

yourself in a fight.

Louise, who is now my wife, saw it all go down. She saw lots of situations like

this. I am surprised she still married me. After that fight, I had a broken nose

and two cracked ribs, but I was able to walk away. A combination of fight

experience, and an amazing self-preservation delivery system, the Crazy

Monkey Defense System saved my ass that night. It wasn't pretty, but it got

the job done. Everything I used that night wasn't fancy, no Reality Based

Self-Defense hyperbole, just good old fashioned fundamentals. In all the

years and times that I fought, that's what saved me time and time again.

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 14. What Happens After The 1st Punch Is
Thrown?

In a general sense, you can categorize interpersonal violence into three

broad areas of concern:

1. Seen-Threats (can be Potential or Active),

2. Unseen-Unknown-Threats (are Active),

3. And Unseen-Known-Threat (has the potential to become Active).

Seen-Threats are when you have some idea that a potential threat exists to

you, in a particular environment that you find yourself in (e.g. someone just

hurled an insult at you, or someone actively engages you by using violence).

In Seen-Threats that have the potential to become violent, you may have the

opportunity to observe pre-fight/violent cues, which can aid you in your

ability to prime yourself for the potential impending danger. Seen-Threats

can turn into Active-Threats that you have no choice but to engage in: But

they can also be a Potential-Threat, that may or may not become active (i.e.

the person hurling insults at you, and threatening, changes his mind and

walks away).

Then there are Unseen-Unknown threats. These are threats that occur

without you having any previous indication that there is a Potential-Threat to

your safety (e.g. an ambush or surprise attack). These will take the form of an

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Active-Threat, that you will have to engage with. In other words, you had no

idea it was going to happen, but now that it has, you have to deal with it.

Unknown-Known threats, are threats that you are not sure may happen to

you, but either through crime trends, or previous history, you are aware that

they may happen. For example, in South Africa car hijacking is huge. While I

have never been hijacked (Unknown-Threat), the risk is still high, it happens

often (Known-Threat) and as such, I need to take precautions in order to not

become a victim. While I don’t know if these threats will materialize, I can

apply counter measures to reduce their chances of happening. As a side

note, I learned this early on in the military. As part of the VIP Protection Wing

we were told often, just because you are body-guarding a Principle doesn't

mean they won’t get assassinated, but your presence makes it less likely.

Prediction May Be Fleeting, But Control Is Still Possible

While it may be difficult to predict with any real certainty how an attack will

unfold, you do have some measure of control over how you respond once

the attack has been initiated. While, for example, you may find yourself

being caught off guard by someone attacking you, once the attack is on, you

are at least now aware that you are in danger. (Of course there may be varied

degrees to this awareness i.e. are you still fully conscious?)

While in this example you may not have had any opportunity to prime

yourself for a potential threat to your safety (outside of training in self-

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preservation skills), once the fight is on, what you do next, and how you

respond, to what I call the In-Contact Response Cycle Phase of survival, will

define the outcome.

One can think of an actual fight as having three possible outcomes:

Scenario 1: You are able to eliminate the threat before a fight even kicks off

proper (e.g. you can remove yourself from the environment before physical

violence occurs, you use verbal jiu-jitsu to talk the threat down, or if it has

gone to blows, you could knock the assailant out before it ends up in an all

out fist fight).

Scenario 2: Your assailant eliminates you before an all out fight happens

(e.g. you get knocked out or killed. Obviously this is not what you want). 

Scenario 3: Things don’t go to plan for either of you, and you both find

yourself in the fight, but you can just as easily loose).

It is scenario 3 from above, that this article is focused on.

In-Contact Response Cycle

Let me set up a scenario: You are walking down the street. Suddenly, out of

nowhere, and without provocation a man begins to attack you with a barrage

of punches (Unknown-Unseen Threat). Your initial response may be to flinch,

and if you don’t immediately knock him out, or if you are not immediately

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knocked out yourself — you will then find this guy all over you trying to

seriously injure you. Said another way, you were caught off guard, you were

attacked, but now you find yourself in an extended fight for your life.

I think this above scenario is far closer to the reality of fights, than what is

often portrayed by ‘self-defense experts’. How they often present it, is that

you are suddenly attacked, you respond with a move, you are then

immediately able to take control of the situation, deploy aggressive counter

measures, and see your assailant laying in the dust (i.e. Scenario 1 from

earlier). I think this kind of scenario, which I would argue makes up almost

the totality of self-defense training, rarely ever happens this way.

So while things like pre-contact violent cues, pre-emptive striking, the flinch

response to a conversion etc, are all important aspects of self-preservation,

and are necessary to be understood, to be examined, and to be trained – I

would argue, that what is often over looked is the In-Contact Response

Cycle. And you guessed it, just like the rest of the concepts mentioned

through this eBook, you have to train for this too. You are not going to just

magically know what to do.

I am going to reiterate for effect, and focus: You are walking down the street,

someone attacks you by surprise, and like it or not (if you're not already

knocked out) you will find yourself in the midst of the fight (i.e. in the In-

Contact Response Cycle). What you do from that moment forward will

decide, victory or defeat. I am going to say this too, it will be very rare, that

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you are able to eliminate a threat immediately (even if you knew the threat

was about to attack you). You will likely find yourself in the fight so to speak,

trying to both survive, and while trying to neutralize the threat at the same

time.

So unless you were immediately knocked out, or incapacitated in some way,

in the first second of the fight, when the fight is on, what you do next, and

next, and next will decide if you get out of this (or not). Just because you

didn't get knocked out initially, doesn't mean it won’t happen a couple of

second into the fight. Sadly, very little focus is ever given to this part of the

fight in self-preservation training. Everyone deals with the pre-contact and

conversion of the initial attack, which is all fine and well, but fights are far

more likely to continue for extended periods of time.

I am flabbergasted that almost no one thinks about this part of survival. It’s

also really hard to teach (maybe that’s why?), because while we can all

pretend how we will defend an initial attack in a scenario we set up, once the

fight goes down, it will get chaotic quickly — and now any kind of long

range prediction flies out of the window. Sadly, nowhere is this more evident

than in the world of self-defense, where people tend to work from certainties

(i.e. if the opponent does this, I do that). The truth is, the Fog of the Fight is

always ever present.

“War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action

in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A

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sensitive and discriminating judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to

scent out the truth.” — Carl von Clausewitz

Here's The Reality

Even if you survive the initial onslaught, as you attack back, you still need to

continue to survive that onslaught. So, one can deduce that surviving

interpersonal aggression is a process of surviving the onslaught, attacking

back, surviving the counter measure applied by the assailant, you attacking

back, possibly surviving a further counter measures by the assailant, and so

on, until, hopefully, you are the person who stands victorious (and this is

what I mean by being in the In-Contact Response Cycle). If you are unable to

ride this storm, or you end up making a serious tactical error in the process

of responding In-Contact, you will lose the fight.

If your self-preservation system then, doesn't teach you how to ride these

ARCS (Active Response/Constant Survival) between surviving and attacking,

you are dead in the water. It doesn't matter if you survived the initial attack, if

you are unable to survive the continuation of the fight itself. Of course I am

biased, but I coach all of this in Crazy Monkey Defense, and this is why I have

so much confidence in the program. The truth is, as I tell my students, there

are people who say they study violence – I lived it. The former still remains

theoretical, the later is real world experience.

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 15.The Primacy Of Defense In Self-
Preservation!

From the dawn of man, we have had to learn how to defend ourselves, and

those we love. If it wasn't from predators roaming on the Savannah, it was

likely surviving rival bands of hunter gatherers. You see, when one looks at it

from this perspective, fighting to survive in one shape or form, along with

procreation — have been our main two preoccupations for most of our time

on this planet. We could argue, that through all the glorious achievements of

mankind, survival always came first. Without it, life ends. Our inner warrior

nature, and by default self-defense then, is as old as man itself. The need to

protect one self, and others, is an evolutionary prime directive that secured

the continued existence of our species on this planet. Throughout the

existence of man, it has served us very well.

At the heart of this survival sits our fight and flight response. In my

experience, the flight response supersedes our desire to fight. Fighting, has

the potential for collateral damage. But while to fight may mean victory over

an aggressive opponent, it may also mean that you get injured yourself.

10,000 years ago going to the emergency room wasn't an option, so one

could quite easily have died from the injuries sustained (in spite of one's

victory). What has this got to do with self-preservation today? While the

world has dramatically changed from our time on the Savannah, (at least for

us living a Western lifestyle) the fact remains that we are still hardwired in the

very same way our ancestors were. The same fears, the same fight and flight

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response remains. In the end, what our ancestors had to overcome, both

internally and externally has remained pretty much the same, even if the

weapons and environment have continued to change.

Run To Fight Another Day

One of the constants, is that when it comes to survival, fleeing is always a

human beings preferred choice. For almost every person one encounters,

unless they are trained otherwise, moving away from violence is their first

instinct. From an evolutionary perspective this makes sense. Take a 100,000

humans, program them to run when faced with predators, instead of fight,

and whilst you may lose a percentage of those people, enough would have

run away and survived to continue procreation. This isn't helpful of course, if

it's you and you want to live. Our need to live, to survive, is one of the

reasons martial arts is even an industry, and a service that people will pay for.

They would prefer not to be one of the people dispensed by evolution to be

devoured, so that the human species can continue to live.

If my thesis is correct, and experience suggests it to be, at the heart of

actually surviving a violent encounter, where running is simply not an option,

one then requires a system of training that will teach a person to deal with

standing his ground and doing what must be done (even though all they

want to do is turn and run). The way this is often dealt with in most ‘self-

defense’ approaches is to fight back. The focus on striking, kicking, biting

etc. takes center stage. Little or no time is spent on actual defense, and

when it is, it’s cursory at best. I think this approach not only sets the grounds

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for survival failure, it does nothing to re-map ones evolutionary imperative to

run instead of fight. For example, even in sparring (often considered sport by

reality based proponents) when someone is put under immense pressure,

and is unable to respond with their own offense, taking up a cover position,

or at worse turning ones back is common place. If you do that in a quote

unquote 'sport environment', imagine when your life is actually on the line?

Psychological Armor Through Defense

In my approach, when coaching new clients, I position defense, rather than

attack, as primary. It is not an afterthought, it takes center stage. Working

through progressive stress inoculation drills, I train my clients to be able to

‘ride the storm’ of incoming attacks. In my experience this does two

important things:

• When you can deal with incoming strikes, without being seriously

injured yourself, you are then far more likely to respond with a counter

offence.
• When you are able to ride the storm of incoming strikes, it builds your

psychological armor.

Coming back to my earlier thesis, we are designed by evolution to move

away from violence preferably, often only resorting to violence ourselves

when no other choice is available. The desire to move or run from violence is

unconsciously encoded in our primitive brain, which recognizes that,

statistically, fleeing often presents a higher degree of survival, than staying

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and hoping one can deal with the violence one encounters. Obviously this

isn't good if you are a soldier, in law enforcement, or find yourself in a place/

situation in which running simply is not an option. What will enable you to

override that evolutionary desire to remove oneself from harm, is a new

psychological map imprinted on the brain, that says you can indeed handle

it. This is what I mean by psychological armor.

Though progressive drills, I can get anyone to handle even the hardest

strikes thrown at them. Their ability to handle these strikes are twofold: One

is having good defensive technique, and the second is how the use of that

technique creates an embodied confidence in the ability to deal with what is

been thrown at a person. In other words, psychologically you know you can

handle it, and in a real fight, that matters.

There is an underlying misconception in the world of ‘self-defense’ and

nowhere is this more evident than on YouTube. So many of the people

demonstrating how to defend yourself, do so completely out of reality (which

is odd, because the word ‘reality’ often precedes the use of self-defense). It

is not uncommon to see an attacker, attack once. It is not uncommon for the

defender to defend that single attack, and then return a barrage of counter

striking, while the attacker, simply folds under the pressure. When on rare

occasion reality is thrown into the mix, and things look more chaotic (often

with head protectors on), it’s two guys clashing like wild boars, smashing

each other in the face, without the slightest concern about personal defense.

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There are several glaring problems with all of the above. Firstly, never

assume the person attacking you doesn't know how to fight. And secondly,

no one who attacks you, will do it once, and no one will stop hitting you

once you hit them back. People fight back, their survival is on the line too.

Never assume you can simply get the better of an attacker, even if you do

something like a pre-emptive strike. I have often seen people come back

from a fight they seemed to be losing, only to turn the table and win. Making

a drill real is great, but just going off at each other isn't real either. What if

you face someone in self-defense who can, not only take a punch, but hits

like a Gorilla? (Yes, that guy who can actually fight.) You can strike all you like,

but once that person’s strikes land on you (and they will) you will quickly shift

from being in attack mode, to “oh shit” and begin looking for the nearest

exit. What happens if there isn't one?

Defense Is Primary
It is far more prudent in my view, to first teach people defense. Not just any

kind of defense, but defense that will hold up under fire. While the defense I

teach called 'Crazy Monkey' Defense is focused almost primary on head,

neck and mid-body defense — the fact is, 99% of people on the street are

head hunters (the only time people would strike your knees first, is with a

baseball bat because you owe them money lol). Jokes aside though, most

people know that the head is the operating system, and the easiest way for

them to win is to switch it off. Going for the head by an attacker in almost all

fights, is primary. So, it makes sense to protect that first. Of course, you

should have a robust defensive process for all parts of the body too. The

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reality is, once you successfully defend an aggressive attack, you are far more

likely to be willing to engage the threat because you survived it. Even, if for

some reason, you felt compelled to strike first, if things turn back on you,

your ability to defend what is coming at you next, will bolster your

confidence to continue the fight. This way you beat evolution at its own

game!

16. Failure To Fight: It’s Not The Physiology,

It’s the Interpretation

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I had won 10 street fights in a row, yet once again when faced with another

opponent, I felt the surge of fear pulsate through my body — but I fought

anyway. I had sparred this same guy a dozen times and won, but once again

the fear engulfed me — I sparred anyway and knocked him out.

You see, I think this whole notion of fearlessness reported by martial art

experts, and/or people who say you can kill fear, is a lie. You don’t ever

escape fear. Fear is there to prime you for what your body considers a threat.

It’s natural, organic, and takes place with, or without, your consent. Anyone

who says they don’t fear interpersonal violence of any kind, even the kind

that is consented too, is either talking crap or they are a psychopath (in fact a

study has shown that Psychopaths feel fear but do not recognize danger).

There’s something interesting about this finding though. Even though I have

felt what most would define as intense fear in interpersonal violent

encounters, I still did what was needed. In other words, I got in there and

fought. Unlike a psychopath, I recognized that there was danger, but I put

those thoughts aside and stepped up anyway.

And that’s the clue!

It isn't that the physiological changes that occur when presented with danger

are the problem, but rather how those physiological changes are interpreted

in the mind. An emotion arises only when one categorizes it as such, based

on one’s sensations and feelings. Emotions differ from feelings or sensations,

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because they involve a cognitive factor of interpretation. First, we feel an

embodied sensation, then we interpret it (for example, adding some

judgment about the feeling). This judgment isn't always loud and in your

mind's eye, sometimes it’s subtle, almost unconscious. Yet, regardless of the

tone, it is that inner voice that will decide if you step up, or run away.

An Example From Life

Let me give you an example from life to illustrate this point. Two people may

be asked to address a group of people at work. Both may feel the sensation

of butterflies in their stomach, clammy hands, and dry mouth prior to the

event. All of these physiological changes are associated with higher levels of

stress. In this sense, each of these people experience the same sensations.

However, one speaker might interpret the feeling in the stomach as a sign

that he is afraid, while the other speaker might interpret the feeling of

aroused energy in the stomach as an indication that she is excited to be

speaking to this group (resulting in excitement). Sensations then are the

language of the body that reveal the flow of energy through it.

As just noted, one person may interpret these feelings and sensations as

excitement (thus, labeling those sensations and feelings in positive affective

terms), while the other person labels those exact same sensations and

feelings as fear. The sensations and feelings remain the same for both, but

how they interpret them differs.

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 What Does This Mean Pre-Fight?
From a martial deployment perspective then, the objective would be to

teach a person how to cognitively re-frame feelings and sensations that they

may normally label as fear — in to more productive-enhancing terms (such

as, a necessary primer to engage in a fight) — which would likely be more

conducive to expressing a more effective fight performance.

In my experience, this can be achieved through somatic specific training,

where a person faced with a fearful experience, is firstly allowed to

acknowledge the physiological changes that are present, but is then taught

how to relate to those feelings and sensations differently, by a simple internal

act of interpretative re-framing. In this case, the somatic perspective to

learning to manage fear, endeavors to change the meaning that emerges in

that person’s sensory-motor experience, when faced with what he or she

would normally consider a fearful event.

When you no longer interpret physiological changes that previously you had

always classified as fear — and now rather as a primer for action, a necessary

change required in the embodied system to engage in a fight — you no

longer view those changes as negative. I know it sounds overly simplistic, but

in the end, your physiology will change when faced with what it perceives as

danger. There’s nothing you can consciously do to change that, except how

you decide to interpret those physiological changes.

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All emotions are helpful, and are there for a reason. I don’t believe there is

such a thing as an unhelpful or negative emotion. That’s the kind of bullshit

that has been sold to us by modern society. In other words, when it comes to

winning a fight, what you tell yourself about how you are feeling before the

first punch is thrown, matters. In the end, it’s not the physiology that’s the

problem, but rather what you tell yourself about the meaning of that

physiology that can cause the problems.

TO READ RODNEY’S BLOG GO TO:

www.coachrodneyking.org

TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT CRAZY MONKEY DEFENSE:

www.crazymonkeydefense.com

LISTEN TO RODNEY’S PODCAST AT:

www.combatintelligentathlete.com

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