Tony Blauer Talks With Black Belt About the SPEAR (Part 1)
Tony Blauer Talks With Black Belt About the SPEAR (Part 1)By Robert W. Young |
Back in 1982, a decade before the Ultimate Fighting Championship and years before other reality-based-combat simulations, Tony Blauer created the “panic attack,” a training drill that accounted for the way a real-life adrenaline dump affects a martial artist’s breathing, focus and complex motor skills. He discovered what everyone else found out once the UFC burst onto the scene: Theory and practice are not the same. The result of your latest research is called the SPEAR. What does that mean? SPEAR is actually an acronym for Spontaneous Protection Enabling Accelerated Response. Understanding the theory behind the acronym is the first step in understanding how and why many self-defense systems are predisposed to fail in a real, sudden, violent assault. Why do you think most self-defense systems will fail? Most of what martial artists practice is not real. The moment there is consent, there is awareness—which means there is preparation. These psychological components completely change your mind-set. In a real situation, there are so many emotional and psychological factors that the sensory overload can negate all those years of training. The remedy is to address the problem of how real fights occur and what is behaviorally realistic. In other words, you must proactively analyze how you are likely to move and think in a real assault and train around that model.
My system focuses on “adversity drills.” We are always working on recovery principles. Most people focus on the offensive, not the protective. In other words, most people tend to fixate on what they will do to the opponent, not what their opponent will try to do to them. This slight perspective shift is the difference between a proactive training session that increases perception speed and decreases reaction time. And that’s a fundamental difference. Our focus is on a simple three-tiered premise that seems to elude most self-defense curricula: One, real fights are not fun. Two, real fights are technically messy. Three, real fights are those confrontations in which emotionally we wish we were somewhere else. How does the SPEAR fit in? The SPEAR is genetically inspired and intuitively engineered. Our true survival system in concert with our intellect, experience and instincts can combine to enhance safety if we don’t botch it by learning contradictory muscle-memory sequences or wiring presumptuous decision-making programs. Behaviorally speaking, we all move away from danger, but tactically the only way to stop a close-quarters physical threat is by moving toward the threat. Real fights happen inside the space of a phone booth. And the SPEAR addresses this? Yes, the SPEAR is the only behaviorally based self-defense system that analyzes and uses the survival flinch spawned through a survival/startle mechanism in the brain. In a true ambush moment, your brain experiences a delay between stimulus and response. In reality, it’s not a response; it’s a reaction. This is the paradox of martial arts training. When we agree to fight, we can mentally adjust and respond. But when the attack is a true surprise, we are more likely to react rather than respond. How does the SPEAR use the body’s natural reactions? Over the past 20 years, I’ve analyzed the most common responses to surprises and designed cognitive drills around them. Methodical practice of these tactics turns your natural flinch into a trigger to engage your close-quarters arsenal. In other words, it helps you convert a genetically supported reactive response to a real threat into a protective action. You learn to move from a reactive state to make a responsive statement. I have not invented a new style; I have created a realistic and effective bridge so you get to the style you are trained in. If you lose it in that initial contact moment, it may be too late to recover. For years you have been on a quest to learn exactly what happens in a real fight, and now that path has led to the SPEAR. How did it begin? In 1986 and 1987 I developed the sucker-punch drill. I wore only a mouth guard for protection, and my training partner wore 16-ounce gloves. I was not allowed to strike; I could only evade and avoid. The drill always started with dialog at close quarters, and I had to maintain that close proximity while trying to verbally defuse it.
Yes. It’s important to understand the evolution and progression. There were a few groups out there trying to push the envelope. They were sparring hard and doing multiple-assailant drills. Some were wearing gear, but there was always something missing: real-time evolving dialogue and reciprocal risk. In other words, once the fight started, both the role-player and the defender had equal opportunity. How is that different from the sucker-punch drill and the SPEAR? If you spar hard or against several opponents, it’s still sparring and there’s still the [aspect of] consent and awareness. If you are doing scenarios and only one person attacks, there is no real risk. The adrenaline dump is created by performance anxiety, not a potential threat or the fear of failure. Many people, especially some of the newer groups doing simulations, do not completely grasp this. And those two components are the missing ingredients in a real dynamic simulation where a true “emotional blueprint” is created. If there is no dialogue and no unpredictable risk for both parties, the simulation is partial. You can’t jump in a swimming pool and wrestle with a rubber shark and then believe you’re ready to handle “jaws.” And that insight is why the panic attack is uniquely different from many simulation systems. Our effort to develop attack-specific responses within scenario-specific simulations is why the sucker-punch drill was developed. I wanted to create a close-quarters isolation drill to address the sudden attack. Why is scenario-specific training so important? Because scenario-specific training is the only process that can mature and develop the body/mind connection. And it develops the pre-contact stage, the missing link in all training. Sparring, no matter how you do it, is still just sparring. It is not scenario-specific, and there’s a huge difference between attack-specific training and scenario-specific training. Attack-specific is when you work on how to get out of a choke or how to get out of a multiple-assailant situation. Scenario-specific is about the situation and how you got there. It induces a different adrenaline state; and most importantly, it creates the mental blueprint that can heighten your awareness in a real-life confrontation. How are surprise attacks related to the SPEAR? Everybody forgets that in a real attack, you are somewhere doing something else, not waiting for someone to signal the start of the fight. Predators look for victims they can surprise. In real life, you don’t know when or where someone’s going to hit you. After creating the panic-attack system, I wanted to be able to refine special moments in a conflict. We had verbal-assault drills and pain-management drills, and I wanted a sucker-punch drill since that big right hand was common and fairly predictable. Embracing all I had learned in the role-playing panic attacks, the sucker-punch drill was pretty obvious. Phase one would start with a hostile verbal exchange that was escalating. The conversation was crucial to the success of the adrenaline dump and the element of surprise. I refer to this principle as adversity training—creating drills where the probability of failure was greater than the probability of success. Too many martial artists spend most of their time worrying about looking good rather than recovering from a Murphy moment. Anyhow, we’d be in a heated verbal exchange and even though I knew one punch was coming, I didn’t know when or where. It could be a punch to my groin, a shot to my bladder, an uppercut or an overhand. I found that once the adrenal system kicked in, the first thing to go was breath control and lucid verbal skills. Hyperventilation compromises blood flow to the brain. That’s a problem if you want to think clearly. That is the magic of a truly behaviorally based approach. The sucker-punch drill messed with all the notions of control and focus. I had to proactively design verbal defusing and distraction segues for real assaults: What can I say if I am being mugged? What can I say if am at an ATM or in my car? Years later I was explaining the process to a researcher in Texas who develops nutritional supplements, and he called it a genetically inspired self-defense system. He said I was wiring into the tactics that the human survival system wants to do, whereas other martial arts are based on learning and muscle memory. How did that evolve into the SPEAR? With the sucker-punch drill, I was trying to use a physical tactic when I had no knowledge of where my opponent’s attack would originate. Because the sequential relationship of the martial arts has no basis in reality, I got hit. That’s because most tactics are based on your anticipation of a specific physical attack. The drill totally changed all that. Here’s the most important aspect for instructors: I could’ve changed the drill because I was failing, but I didn’t. I wanted to understand why I my training didn’t support this.
A couple times I completely escaped the moment of impact by flinching. As I flinched, my shoulder would come up, and my hands would protect my face. Or I’d duck. I realized that flinch speed, which is born of your survival system picking up the danger, is faster than cognitive speed. The body is genetically wired to survive. We slow it down by saying, “My style says I should do this,” because that thinking process requires us to identify the attack and then diagnose it before treating it. Why don’t more people realize that? Because most martial arts training is done through imitation. And most of it is codified. The paradox is that we’re taught to maintain or create distance and then engage the other person in calculated movements. We teach people to spar to prepare for a real street fight and that’s wrong. You should be able to turn into the creature from Alien: get in the guy’s face, knock him on his butt, give him a rebirthing experience so he’s flashing back to being in his mother’s womb and forgetting that he’s a serial killer or a violent mugger. Maybe that’s a little dramatic, but the potential must be there. The only way to reverse the predator/prey relationship is to make the predator pray. About the interviewer: Robert W. Young is the executive editor of Black Belt. For more information about Tony Blauer and the SPEAR, visit www.tonyblauer.com 
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