Mma - With Violence, A Video Clip Is Worth A Thousand Words

I just instructed a self defense seminar in NYC and it was interesting to note certain folk's response to being systematically shown how to use the tool of violence for survival.

The instructors did a matter-of-fact job picking various vulnerable areas of the human body and showing how to injure those targets. We use a proprietary method that allows the student to learn how to injure the body in a specific manner to yield the desired result.

We then show them how to use that information to cause serial injury on the human body until the other guy is non-functional. This method literally produces results in mere days that used to take us many months to achieve.

Clients rapidly get good at targeting, then injuring, the defined areas of weakness in another human.Don't get me wrong. It is not necessarily a thing of beauty to watch. Participants are often ugly in their 'look' but their effectiveness is without question.

What is funny to me is clients that have survived real violence get this approach to self protection training right away. They realize the methods and principles are sound and they focus and develop intent during those initial early day one sessions.

The clients that either have no experience with violence or only have competative martial arts or combat sport backgrounds often spend these early sessions questioning why we are doing what we do.They wrestle with the idea of violence being so one-sided. It goes against everything they 'know' about 'real fights'.

Of course this knowledge they bring to the course is from watching the media (films, TV, Internet) or from participating in and watching combat sporting events. The main goal of media is entertainment. Producers want you to be involved in the plot and if there is an action sequence they want it to rivet you to your seat.

The main goal of combat sports is to win by bettering your opponent and scoring more points. Both can be very fun to watch.

Both of these mediums have restrictions that severely limit realistic use of the tool of violence. A good movie has the restriction of keeping you entertained so it needs to be just that... entertaining.

The competitors in a combat sports event are hampered by agreed upon rules. Therefore they rely on developed athletic skills (being bigger, faster, stronger) in order to better the other guy and win the competition.

Neither of these worlds accurately reflects the effective use of the tool of violence. Nor should they. It would defeat the purpose of the 2 mediums.

From an entertainment standpoint, real violence is hard to view, not because of the violence but because it is relatively boring since it's so one sided.In competition, using real violence would leave many competitors maimed, crippled, or killed. This would absolutely defeat the goal of the sporting event.

Where all this becomes a major problem is when someone attempts to use these mediums as a benchmark for 'fighting'. They expect to see lots of 'give and take' when training. They have a hard time realizing that real injuries are not something that you can shake off and 'keep fighting'.

At a recent demonstration I did for a business group at Harvard University I hammered this home by using some video clips of a martial artist showing a knife-fighting demo.

He made some claims about the knife and how a good cut will shut a man down and send him into shock. He then demonstrated his assertion on a hanging piece of meat. It all looked very impressive and I could tell the class was mesmerized.

Then I showed them grisly photos of prisoners in a fight who were cut numerous times, right down to the bone. These prisoners not only survived the attacks -- they killed their 'attackers'.This totally went against the knife-fighting expert's claims.

I then showed two other video clips, back to back, of prisoners 'shanking' (using an improvised stabbing tool) another prisoner until they killed the victim. Again this looked nothing like the nice back-and-forth technique the 'knife-fighter' showed in his impressive demo.

When I was finished there was dead silence. I had made my point and the rest of the time we had 100% complete focus.

I wasn't able to show this recent class the videos and it showed. Some people didn't 'get it' until the last day when we do 'Grabs, Punches, Holds and Chokes'.

That's when they see how much simpler it is to use violence rather than try a 'give and take' approach.
I'll make sure to always include the video upfront in future seminars. The old adage of a picture being worth a thousand words is very true!