THE ANATOMY OF A SELF DEFENSE SEMINAR

Our two-day base seminars are the distillation of more than 20 years of experience, research and the training of thousands of people to use violence as a survival tool. In approaching a format for a weekend seminar we had to answer two questions:

1. Knowing what we know, how would we use violence today, right now?
2. How would we train a loved one or family member if we knew they had to use it to save their life in just two days time?

Both questions cut right to the heart of it: there are a lot of training methodologies that are little better than hoop-jumping, hazing or time-marking that are perpetuated for no other reason than tradition or simply because we had to do it that way to learn it.

Just because we had to carry water through the 39 chambers in order to learn how to gouge an eye doesn’t mean you have to.

The answer to the first one is that I’d ignore the hand-holding through all the stuff people worry about—backing up, blocking, getting hurt—and get straight to it and do it like the guy everyone’s afraid of.

Focus on making the other guy want to back up, make him try to block, make him worry about getting hurt. Focus solely on injury and taking full advantage of the injured man. Only stop when I’m done.

The second question is the big breakthrough, though. It means letting go of conditioning, coordination work, ancillary training that only pays off down the line and giving away the “secrets” first and foremost. Be accurate, smash important things, stay right on top of him until he’s nonfunctional.

DEFINE THE GOAL

We start with a presentation of pictures and videos of real violence and injury to make sure we’re all on the same page when it comes to using those terms. There’s a lot of confusion between “fighting” and “violence,” between “boo-boos” and “injury.”

It’s not the five rounds of the MMA bout where the two competitors fight hard, giving each other countless contusions and lacerations—it’s the fight-ending broken knee (an accident) in round six that I need everyone to see when we talk about crippling people.

Once everyone knows what debilitating injury looks like, and how it happens, we can get to work making it happen.

TARGET ASSEMBLY

This is the process of identifying anatomical structures with important jobs to do and learning how to smash them so they don’t work so well anymore. Targets covered in a typical seminar include: 

• Eye
• Inner ear
• Throat
• Neck (side & back)
• Clavicle (collar bone)
• Solar Plexus
• False & floating ribs
• Liver
• Spleen
• Kidney
• Groin (pubic bone, pelvic diaphragm, testicles)
• Knee
• Ankle

We cover what each target does, the results of injury, how to locate it on the human body in different orientations, and how to smash it from where you are.

STITCHING IT ALL TOGETHER

The next step is to show you how to make your own decisions, from getting the initial injury to each injury after that, and how to achieve and recognize, nonfunctional status.

We refer to this as “free practice”—it’s like serial target practice on the human body where you go from target to target, smashing them to cause injury and picking the next target based on how the injured man moves and where you happen to find yourself.

We then take a closer look at using your mass to smash things the way you would if you had to take apart a piece of furniture. Most problems in effective violence have to do with position, and being too far away.

There’s no such thing as “too close” in violence—he’s always standing where you want to be.

KNIFE, STICK & GUN

These tools of violence have taken on mythological and magical properties in many people’s minds.

We dispel the myths and show you exactly what these tools do and don’t do, what they’re good for and what they’re terrible at.

And then we seamlessly fold them into your regular free practice.

ANTI-SOCIAL AGGRESSION VS. A-SOCIAL VIOLENCE

When is it okay to use this information? How can you tell the difference between an avoidable “ass-kicking” and a life-or-death murder attempt?

We draw the line for you, show you both sides, and give you guidelines for navigating both.

MULTIMAN WORK

What if there’s more than one guy? (Hint: there’s always more than one guy.)

We show you how to use multiple people to your advantage and how not to end up as the monkey in the middle.

GRABS, HOLDS & CHOKES

“Injuring people while they hold onto you.” We show you how to do all the things that aren’t allowed in competition (because they make competition fly out the window).

If you’re not big, strong and skilled you’re going to have to cheat.

INJURY, INJURY, INJURY

The constant throughout the course is how injury changes everything in your favor. The first person to get a real, debilitating injury—and knows what to do with it—is usually the winner.

We show you how to go straight for it, how to recognize whether or not you’ve been successful, and then how to finish it. Once you’ve got that skill down, we look at solving all the associated problems in violence (weapons, multi-man, grappling).

Each training module builds on the previous work, and by the end of the course, you’ve practiced putting almost a thousand people down. That’s far more practical work than the worst people out there will get in a lifetime of crime.

And I’m not happy until the entire class looks like a slow-motion prison riot.

FINAL THOUGHTS

So that is our baseline approach to the subject of life or death violence in our base 2 day seminar. Peter Drucker defined effectiveness as doing the right things and efficiency as doing the right things the right way. For first time clients, we focus on effectiveness first, then if people want to come back to train more, we can focus on efficiency.

In simpler terms:

I want you to know simple “rock to the back of the head” principles and methods then once I know you know how to survive then I can make you look good by improving your coordination and timing.

But with the timeline of two days, it’s all about effective and achievable skills… Because that is what saves your life.