If you were just learning to drive, and you wanted advice, would you turn to someone who has never driven a car before? Would you ask their opinion of driving in rush hour traffic, or on a high speed freeway if they have spent their entire life living in a small rural area where everyone walked or rode horses to get around? The answer is of course not. If they have never been in that position, what could they say that would help? Anything they say would be based on speculation, or a vague hope that things would work a certain way.

It is a goofy question, but it is pertinent, because this is all too often how we ask advice or seek knowledge when it comes to self-defense matters. If someone has never used, handled, or carried a gun – for example, if they lived in a country like Australia or Japan where gun ownership is tightly controlled, and a thing like concealed carry for a private citizen is completely unheard of, and they have never been in the military or law enforcement, what could they possibly say about firearms use? It certainly could not be based on logic or familiarity. At best, it would be a “best guess”. That is not the most intelligent way to base a technique or strategy to survive a violent criminal assault.

Similarly, a great deal of self-defense “experts” will pontificate about how to deal with grappling attacks, but they themselves have little to zero actual grappling experience! How can they believe that they have a reasonable approach if they have never done it, and if they have never truly pressure tested it? The answer is they shouldn’t believe, and moreover, they should not talk about it. If they were honorable, they would direct people to look at those who have real experience in grappling to seek answers in how to deal with such a scenario.

In the following video, I try to show how in just one single instance – in this case a rear naked choke – how the typical non-grappler advice in how to counter this technique is based on massive logical flaws. Hopefully, it will help guide people to see with better eyes and deeper critical thinking the next time they run across a non-grappler talk about “counter grappling”.