- 16 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Hard training can be tricky because a lot of people are uncomfortable at first with the intensity. Don’t take it personally when the violence gets cranked up. It’s not intentional, but it is reciprocal.
I’m going to bang on my partner as hard as I expect him to bang on me. We’re going to push each other as hard as each of us is willing and able. If you get stuck with a partner who isn’t as motivated to wick it up, keep switching partners until you find a kindred spirit.
Over the years, I’ve established the following ground rules to maintain order and keep things from getting out of hand. They hold people individually accountable for their own and each other’s safety, ensuring that self-defense training is intense but relatively injury-free.
No One Gets to Watch
If you show up, you’re training. This rule reduces the performance pressure felt by students as they learn and attempt new techniques. No one likes to do anything they’re not good at, looking and feeling a little foolish until their skills improve.
If everyone’s sharing the challenges, getting sweaty and banged up, no one feels self-conscious.
By the way, instructors are not excused from training. No preening or prancing prima donnas allowed. After demonstrating a technique, instructors should crank out some reps alongside their students, then prowl the mat. It maintains credibility and provides another opportunity for students to watch, learn and then execute techniques. Everyone is subjected to each other’s scrutiny. Everyone sweats. Everyone bruises. Everyone bleeds.
Save the Cheap Shots for the Street
If you’ve been training awhile, you’ve no doubt run into the guy who loves to let one rip and then immediately apologize: “Oops! I’m sorry, man. You OK?”
But then it happens again and again.
Don’t let anyone get away with that in your training group. Sure, everybody slips up once in a while; it’s inevitable. But this guy? This guy you promptly knock on his ass when it’s your turn. Give it back to him as hard as he gave it to you but without the apology. He’ll get the hint.
When everyone understands that gratuitous smackdowns aren’t tolerated and that excessive force is reciprocal, unpleasant situations just don’t seem to develop.
Stick to the Drill
Do the drill as demonstrated and directed. If you’re the role-playing attacker working with a partner who’s fending off high-line strikes, then throw high-line strikes. But let’s say you close on your partner and throw a low-line shin kick to set up your high-line strike — you should pay for that.
We have a saying: “If someone gets out of line, redline.” It means that if you go offline by doing something in a drill that you weren’t directed to do, your partner gets to go offline, too. When everyone’s training hard, there’s a real potential for injury. Don’t increase that potential unnecessarily. Save your creativity for freestyle sessions when it’s appropriate.
Always Protect Yourself
Sometimes training gets pretty crazy, especially during duress drills. It’s everyone’s personal responsibility to protect themselves. The result could be tragic if a student’s depth perception is off by just a few inches when executing a stomp to the ankle, an ax hand to the throat or an elbow strike to the base of the skull.
Role-playing attackers and victims are responsible for protecting themselves at all times. Training with that assumption ensures an additional element of safety.
The most dangerous partners are newbies because they don’t understand how serious training injuries can be. They get amped up because they’re doing something new and extreme. They’re usually a little (or a lot) intimidated at first.
They haven’t developed enough skill to balance their speed of execution with power regulation. They can’t judge distance well enough to trust that they won’t get it wrong, and they don’t know which techniques are safe to throw hard and land on a training partner.
Finally, they don’t know when to pull power from a technique or which techniques should be practiced at full power near the target but not on it.
Hell, new students can even be dangerous when striking pads. Without the skill or control to fire off full-power elbow strikes and keep them on the pad, they’re bound to skip one off and smack their training partner in the face eventually.
We have a saying in firearms training: “Go slow to go fast.” That means you have to fully understand and be competent in executing all the fundamentals of tactical shooting before you can push your personal limits of speed and accuracy.
Similarly, if you’re patient in combatives training, you’ll develop your skills more quickly. You’ll ultimately become far more effective and dangerous if you just remember to walk before you try running. By following the ground rules listed here, you’ll give your skills a chance to catch up to your enthusiasm.
This is excerpted from Combatives for Street Survival: Hard-Core Countermeasures for High-Risk Situations, by Kelly McCann.
