Tony Blauer Talks With Black Belt About the SPEAR (Part 2)
Tony Blauer Talks With Black Belt About the SPEAR (Part 2)By Robert W. Young |
In part one of this article, Tony Blauer described the foundation of the SPEAR. The system, which takes its name from Spontaneous Protection Enabling Accelerated Response, promises to empower practitioners of any martial art to use their body’s natural flinch response to stall an attack long enough to be able to use their style’s techniques. —Editor
You mentioned phase one of the sucker-punch drill; what other phases were involved? The drill evolved so my partner could do as many shots as he wanted. Phase two had two strikes, phase three had three, and so on. From this drill the SPEAR system was born. It teaches us to convert flinching into tactics. It also addresses the paradox of moving away from a threat rather than engaging it. Explain how the drill developed. The only way I could control my partner was by moving toward him and jamming him. If I tried to block, parry or evade, I got nailed during phase three and up. There’s no way to not get hit if you maintain a distance where you allow your opponent to reload—another missing link and paradox of standard training. Because of the unpredictability of the attack, my initial move was a flinch. Performance ego demanded that I try various moves from my theoretical/cognitive arsenal. They usually failed. So quickly I recognized that flinching speed, triggered by unconscious neuromuscular communication, was much faster than conscious neuromuscular communication. I then created drills that were attached to the primal, mid-brain responses. In time, I learned how to trigger my cognitive brain as I flinched. It allowed me to move toward the threat sooner. Again, the behavioral paradox is that when we are in danger, we want to move away; but the tactical directive is to move in.
The flinch is the foundation and spark of the SPEAR. Our close-quarters arsenal is based on this conversion process. It’s based on an instinctive single-mindedness for the survival system to protect the command center: the head. Consider this: A guy gets punched and goes down. He may be getting kicked in the stomach, but his hands will still be covering his head. He’s not moving his arms or covering the parts of his body that get hit. Whenever you are blitz-attacked and not sure what’s happening, your hands come up. Irrespective of your training, if a stimulus is introduced too quickly, you will flinch. What is the physiological purpose of flinching? It’s the physical response to an emotional startle where we intuit a physical threat. The flinch is designed to protect the body’s command center: the eyes, ears, throat and brain. When you realize you’re in danger, the flinch happens. For those on a path of self-discovery or looking for a realistic survival system, it’s imperative to appreciate and incorporate the flinch mechanism. It takes courage because you need to consider the conflict of contemporary training methods. In sparring you’re taught to step back. You’re actually moving into the trajectory of the attack because the attacker is always a step ahead of you in an ambush-type assault. The real fight is when you’re ambushed, not when you’re the sniper. Did you modify the flinch, or do you just go off whatever comes naturally? Through thousands of evaluations of how people move and from research that involved talking with people who were attacked, I was able to identify three [kinds of] flinches that are triggered by proximity sense and angle of attack. If somebody suddenly charges at you from a distance, the flinch is to widen your power base and thrust your hands out to push away the danger. If someone comes running at you with a machete or a baseball bat, you don’t run toward him. People think they’ll run away, but running is not an immediate primal response. Hesitation, freezing and denial are the common behavioral responses. Then the fight-or-flight syndrome might kick in, but in real life it’s more like the fight-flight-or-freeze syndrome because people often hesitate when they should jump out of the way.
What’s the second type of flinch? The second one is from striking range. Somebody comes at you from just outside arm’s reach—for example, while you’re having a verbal confrontation over a coveted parking spot, the guy lunges. Is it a shove, a choke or a hook punch? Who knows? Who can actually see it at that moment and distance? And here’s the point: Your reactive brain just screams “Look out!” and voilà, flinch No. 2. Your hands come up to protect your head, your weight gets transferred to your back leg, you close your eyes and you turn away from the danger. And the third type? The third is similar to version two, but the angle is more severe because the threat is much closer. In this flinch, you do what I call a shielding action in which you actually cover your head with an arm. It’s like holding a medieval shield against your forearm as you block and strike. From that shielding position, you kind of twist or “corkscrew” away from the attack. How does the flinch manifest itself in combat? Well, this brings us back to the contradiction of athletic performance-based trained versus adversity drills and trying to replicate the conditions that’ll be present in a real assault. Here’s a metaphor: Look at the patriotic war films that came out after World War I and II, then look at Saving Private Ryan. It’s fantasy versus fact. The SPEAR system is about proactively analyzing fact and creating the most realistic “fake” drills we can. So when real-life conflicts happen, your adaptation challenge is minimal. Here’s a graphic example that relates to the frustration of classical training and how a reactive response triggered by a real-life assault can short-circuit your whole theoretical arsenal. Often, a murdered police officer will have defensive wounds on the hands: bullet holes or knife slashes. The assumption is that the officer was trying to wrestle for the weapon. I disagree. Those wounds do not come from trying to grab the weapon. They come from flinching. When you grab, you grab toward the wrist or along the side of the weapon—not at the tip of the knife or gun. Those incidents most likely happen like this: The cop is chasing a suspect, who pulls out a gun and turns quickly. The cop flinches. He doesn’t parry the weapon like he was taught. His hands come up in front of his face.
Is the first step in learning the SPEAR simply accepting that we all flinch? Yes. By accepting the flinch, two things occur. First, you realize that it’s a survival mechanism that you will do whether you like it or not. Second, you realize that the fastest thing you can do is work off the flinch. Ask anybody who’s been in a real explosive fight what the first thing he threw was, and he’ll say: “I don’t know. It happened so fast. The next thing I knew I was drilling the guy in the head.” Has that happened to you? In the first big fight I can remember, a guy winged a punch at me while I was talking to him. My hands naturally came up to protect my head, and they deflected his punch. Because he threw it so hard, he was jammed against me in a spontaneous clinch, so I just grabbed his head and shoulder and did a hip throw. He fell because of how the flinch intercepted his haymaker—not because I stepped in, caught his arm and executed a judo throw. Did you use any formal martial arts techniques? Because I’d had a huge adrenaline dump, my next move was certainly not a fine motor skill like “the third metacarpal bone must be twisted this way.” He was on his butt trying to get up, but he was winded from the fall. I grabbed him by the hair and threw him into the furniture right beside us. Again, it was spontaneous gross motor tactics. How hard is it for the average martial artist to learn how to work off the flinch in a natural way? Not hard. The SPEAR is truly a genetically inspired system. This means the foundation isn’t something you have to learn. It is built on unique drills that coordinate the instincts and body mechanics that human beings are all born with. It is easy to get started with the SPEAR, and it’s actually easier for a layperson to learn than for an instructor to teach—as paradoxical as that may seem. But if you just scratch the surface, you will miss the best of it. And if you look at it once and never look back, you’ll only be exposed to the stuff I developed yesterday—which is good, but it’s constantly getting better. If I had developed my system in the 1960s and then stopped researching, the foundation would still have been sound. But the trends and issues of surviving today are different from those we had to be concerned with back then. Is it a matter of just listening to an audio tape or watching a videotape, or does a martial artist actually have to do some kind of drills? It’s a combination. You could just listen to the tapes and start incorporating the principles. They’re that natural. Remember that it’s easy to learn because it’s based on how the body actually moves, not on how some animal moves or on reconfiguring your body to acquire a new muscle memory. It’s based on spontaneity. There are also drills to develop it. One of the ones I created is called the “range rover”; it takes you out of the driver’s seat and puts your training partner in control of your arsenal. A chess master once said that the height of strategy is not doing your best move, but doing the worst move for your opponent. Yet people are always practicing their best move, and they try to use it all the time. They should be looking at where their opponent is open or where he doesn’t think he’s going to get hit because that’s tactically the best thing you could do to hurt him physically and psychologically. In a fight, do you flinch and then think about how you can strike, or do you actually modify your flinch into an attack? It should be both. It depends on what the bad guy’s doing and how much homework you’ve done. You could say to yourself, “I’m going to hit him from where I flinch.” Because flinching is so primal, it actually locks and loads your most dangerous close-quarters weapons: elbow strikes, eye rakes, head butts, eye gouges and so on. Exactly when in a fight do you initiate the SPEAR? The SPEAR is the conversion, so anything you do right from a flinch is a SPEAR. Many people misinterpret the SPEAR as the physical move I often demo in which contact is made with my forearms. But since the flinch is triggered by the aggression of the opponent, you may find yourself flinching away and side-kicking while leaning over a chair in a bar. If you throw the kick without worrying about repositioning to get in your stance, you have “SPEARed” your opponent because you struck from where you were and spontaneously protected yourself. And the startle/flinch combo enabled accelerated response. How does this strategy tie in with the skills martial artists already possess? If you’re a boxer and somebody sucker-punches you on the street, you will flinch. If you incorporate the SPEAR, you can engage the attacker and then disengage using the SPEAR system to set up your uppercut. If you’re a Thai boxer and you are jumped at an ATM, you won’t go into a neck hookup and a knee thrust; you will protect yourself first by flinching. The SPEAR nails the person as he’s moving in and creates space. Suddenly, you get a chance to throw that knee strike or shin kick. If you’re a taekwondo player, it’s the same. If I’m a foot away from you in a bar and I start something, you won’t be able to do a jump back kick or side kick. But you will flinch. And if you can hit me from the flinch using the SPEAR, that’s good for you. You can use your flinch, which at that range and in that context is faster than anything else, as an impetus to get tactical. How does the SPEAR work physically? The common SPEAR is to use the forearms. This is more natural because of our instinct to cover our head by raising our arms. Getting students to engage the attacker—to actually move toward the bad guy—is a challenge. So the tactical SPEAR demands that we engage the threat. Our movement is like an impaling, penetrating tool. It’s not a block; like a traditional spear, it moves in for the attack. The physical evolution of the SPEAR went like this: When I started to develop this penetrating movement, I realized that I could jam a head butt, a haymaker and so on. I started telling my students: “You’re the spear tip. Just go right through the attacker.” The SPEAR started as metaphor to get people to move toward danger because the paradox is that behaviorally we move away from danger, while tactically we need to move toward it. How do you position your arms when you implement the SPEAR? You hold your arms just outside 90 degrees so they form a triangle, which is one of the strongest geometric shapes. Your arms create a natural barrier between the attack and your most vulnerable areas: your head, temples, ears, carotid region, brachial region, etc. Once someone learns the mental part of the SPEAR and the simple positioning of the arms, can all his previously learned martial arts techniques be blended with it? Yes. The SPEAR doesn’t replace your system. Good information doesn’t displace good information. Good information only displaces [crap]. The SPEAR allows you to get at what’s good in your system. If you try to make your system work at what I call the “big bang moment” of a real street fight, you may find yourself wondering what went wrong. The tactical flinch will intercept whatever he’s doing and inflict some pain. The pain will cause doubt and hesitation on his part. That will give you a chance to engage him using the techniques from your style. When you use the SPEAR, are you trying to hurt the attacker or just stop him for a moment and negate his attack? If it is a real fight, you are trying to hurt the attacker. If you don’t, the fight continues. Just remember that there is a moral and ethical distinction between hurting and injuring, and instructors must educate students on the legal considerations regarding self-defense. But the best part of the SPEAR system is that it’s tactical and protective at the same time. If your attacker truly surprises you, you flinch, convert, make contact and defend. The serendipity of the SPEAR is that it often strikes at vulnerable points on the bad guy, and you weren’t even going after them. The most important aspect of all this is that the SPEAR really doesn’t interfere with your style. The SPEAR protects you in the moment of ambush—which is not addressed by most systems. The SPEAR allows you to get to your system and to hopefully escape safely. Think of it this way: The faster the attack, the faster the flinch, the sooner you can defend yourself. You can use your survival system to spontaneously protect yourself and use that natural flinch to accelerate your response. 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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