All posts by Cecil Burch

everyone can be more than they are

I have recently taught a couple of seminars and I noticed an interesting thing.

I am fortunate in that I almost always have female students in my courses. The majority of the time, it is more than one woman. The largest number in a single class was five. Keep in my mind that I cap my courses at a max of fourteen, to ensure safety and that everyone gets sufficient attention so that I know that are learning and growing, so three to five is a significant amount.

Two classes ago I had one woman attend, and the most recent I had three. None of them had any time in doing any real kind of empty hand combatives training, and certainly none had any grappling experience.

One thing they all had in common (and I find this to be true across the board for almost any female willing to do the kind of training I teach) is that they had an amazing work ethic, and listened intently during the instructional moments. There was no screwing around, no thinking that they already knew what was going on and had an attitude of just “let’s get on with it”, and a concentrated focus on getting better.

One other thing they had in common was a tendency to put their efforts and performance down. “I just can’t get this” was an often repeated phrase, right after I just watched them perform perfectly and usually against heavy resistance and pressure from their usually larger training partners. All of them would keep insisting that they just were not any good, when the truth was that I needed to spend much more time correcting the male students who actually were getting it wrong rather than any of the women.

I thought about this as I was flying home afterwards. My conclusion as to why this kept happening was not a particular happy one. I think why this is endemic is because on the whole, those of us who formally and regularly teach self-defense, whether it be firearms or H2H have caused it. We have either directly or indirectly, through specific action or lack of appropriate action, have made women in general feel that they are inferior to men’s performances when it comes to combat. And that sucks.

The fact is that everyone, male or female, will have unique aspects to their performance, and the only judge of whether it is good or bad is if they are better than they were from the day before. That is it. Nothing else matters. It does not matter if they get to be the best person in the class, or the best person that has ever stepped in a self-defense course – the only metric that matters is if they as individuals are better than they were before they came to the class. Anything else is just fantasy camp. Implying that after two days of training anyone will suddenly become John Wick regardless of their starting point is ethically bankrupt. The focus should be on start training, and be better incrementally better each day.

So we as instructors need to emphasize that, and make sure that each student is focused on getting better and becoming more capable. And as an exclamation to that, I will say this to anyone reading this who contemplates taking any training course anywhere. If you are in the class, and you feel the instructor is just denigrating you and your performance and not giving you reasonable, workable input into how to correct any deficiencies, than leave, immediately and with as much speed as you can muster. It is not any teacher’s job to criticize any student. It is our job to make them better. Sometimes we need to speak about negatives or failures, but never, ever should those negatives or failures be tied to an individual’s worth as a person. If an instructor has such a hard time getting someone better, than they have zero business being an instructor. It is irrelevant if the student is male, female, young, old, physically fit, or physically broken in some way; a truly diligent instructor will get them better than they were.

Being a teacher is hard. If you are not willing to undertake the calling knowing that, and you think it is about your own ego stroking, or about getting rich, or famous, then you are not, and never will be a teacher. Find something else to get rich and famous at, because helping other people become more than they are is not in the cards for you.

PERSEVERE

When people look at me now, they tend to see essentially a finished product (not that I am done working on myself mind you – just that there is a level of performance I have achieved) especially when it comes to Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. What they don’t see is the blood, sweat, tears, energy, time, and money I put in to get here.Whenever I talk about people trying to start training in any kind of H2H fighting methodology, there is immediate pushback along the lines of “that’s easy for you because you do this for a living and have natural gifts and don’t have to deal with physical limitations that make it hard for me”. I chuckle, usually out loud, because that is so patently ridiculous that it can only be met with laughter.

First of all, I DO NOT do this for a living. Teaching and training is an avocation, not a vocation. I have a Monday through Friday, 8:30AM to 5:30PM job, and have done this since the day I left college some 35 years ago. I have also been happily married or in a relationship with my wife for more than 31 of those years, and have two children that I have raised for the last 30. I don’t have copious free time, nor have I ever had such. I have had to find the time to train, and have had to give up other things to do so. I watch little TV (most of the shows that get the office water cooler talk I have never seen like the Sopranos, Breaking Bad, True Detective, etc), and stopped doing similar minor amusements. I do things with my family, I read, or I teach and train. To do something important means to sacrifice things that stand in the way. And TV, ANY TV, is something that won’t be missed.

And the most laughable aspect of someone insisting this is easy for me is the fact that not one part of my martial journey has been easy. I have no physical gifts at all. I was the kid picked last for dodgeball in PE in school. There has not been a day in my life that I have not suffered from severe asthma. In fact, I have been hospitalized for major attacks multiple times, and have come very close to death twice, once as a toddler and another time only about 6 years ago.In short, nothing has come easy to me. When I started with my BJJ instructor around ’93 or ’94, if you had polled everyone training there, including him, and asked of everyone there who was the least likely to end up a black belt, I would have received all the votes. And yet, 26 years later, not only am I a black belt, but a third degree one, and one that was given by someone who is well known in the jujitsu community to be one of the stingiest of all with promotions. And to top that off, I help run his academy, teach the Fundamental classes, am responsible for making blue belts there, and fill in for him when he is travelling. I also have done okay in competition including being an American National and Pan-Am champion, as well as medaling in major tournaments all over the world, including Brazil and Europe.

So why and how did I get here? As the great Stoic philosophers say, it is good that it does not come easy. Seneca said that “Success comes to the lowly and to the poorly talented, but the special characteristic of a great person is to triumph over the disasters and panics of human life”. In short, you may get lucky, or have some genetic gift and can succeed, but the true victory is the success when the word conspires to stop you. I had everything stacked against me in my jiu-jitsu path, and yet I overcame them. And in doing so, not only do I have the satisfaction of that success; I also can take pride in that I earned it every step of the way.

And here is something I truly believe in my heart of hearts. That triumph, gained through adversity, sticks with you forever. I have it with me, and I can always know that I can succeed, even if it means lots of hard work and time. Most of the best jiujistsu players I have met are the ones who have stuck with it, and that marks them permanently, and enables them to always get better and to keep working, and to not get discouraged or to give up when things get a bit rocky. Persevere, and you will succeed. I know it is hard to see when you are on the road, especially in the early stages. That is why so many people quit BJJ those first two years. The challenge to even understand the art, let alone master it, seems so daunting and vast that it will not be achieved. But believe me, it can be. If I can do it, so can you. Every single one of you reading this, I guarantee it.

Ankle carry – an aproach based on context

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For quite literally decades, those of us in the Shivworks Collective have been publicly – both online in numerous areas, as well as vocally in video or podcast interviews – trying to get across the idea that contextual application trumps all doctrine. The idea that best practices are universal is only true in a global principle sense. In actual specifics, much changes.

For example, the best practices of a four man fire team in a room clearing scenario, where everyone has trained extensively together for long periods, have top flight equipment like body armor, night vision, etc, are all using long guns, and most likely have immediate medical back up just outside the building in case something goes wrong, is only superficially similar to the lone private citizen concealed carrier who is woken up at 3am by the sound of glass breaking from the direction of his daughter’s room. Those two fairly disparate contexts require a good deal of different methods and skills and techniques to handle the different applications. For too many people, that is a hard concept to absorb.

Since 9/11 and the start of the Global War on Terror, there has been an explosion in the training community and a  great deal of new students, many new instructors, new venues to train and a breathtaking amount of new gear has come along since. The art and science of fighting has rapidly progressed to an incredible level and at a freakishly fast pace. We are far beyond where we were at the start of the 21st century. However, one of the negatives is that a great deal of newcomers to training often have little to no idea of what has come before , and frequently show derision to the “old stuff”.

One area this manifests itself so obviously is in the approved way(s) to carry a pistol. It is accepted wisdom that you carry (especially concealed) on the belt and no other place. Whether that is behind the hip, at 3:00, or appendix, anything else but on the belt (and almost always IWB) is not given any credence in the general community. Very, very grudgingly, some will vaguely accept pocket carry in very limited and extenuating circumstances. And that is it.

If you try to talk about some other method, you are immediately and loudly proclaimed either stupid, a “Fudd”, a “poor”, or some other derogatory and dismissive insult. Few can even contemplate an informed and reasoned choice that selects another means. Probably the greatest insult a person can do to someone in the tacti-cool gun world is to suggest that ankle carry is a viable method of carry. It is as if you accused them of being a communist.

The problem with this caveman level of inquiry and its rejection of anything that the group does not sanction is that is completely ignores context. Not everyone can regularly carry on the belt. In fact, I would submit that far more people, on a daily basis can’t carry on a belt than otherwise can. That is a point utterly overlooked by those who make their living carrying, or teaching how to, or writing about, or being a salesperson for the firearms world. And disappointingly, there are a lot of people who don’t fit into those categories who take everything that that the former folks say as gospel, and parrot the same lines as well. It seems to go over the heads of people who should be applying critical thinking skills the simple fact that the context that the majority of concealed carriers face is not necessarily the context that the “experts” face.

Personally, I am a huge proponent of ankle carry IN MY PARTICUAR CONTEXT. What is that context you may reasonably ask? It is that Monday through Friday, 8am – 5:30pm my life tends to place me about 95% of the time in one of three places. The first is sitting at my desk either on the phone or on my PC. The second spot is sitting in my car driving to or from a client or vendor or on some other business related travel. And the third is sitting either across the desk from a client in their office, or at a conference table there. Do you see the common dominator?  I am in a seated position in some way, for a good chunk of the day. On top of that, because of professional reasons and requirements that are non-negotiable, I have set of dress standards that I absolutely must adhere to, at the risk of inviting more scrutiny by dressing inappropriately, and suffering catastrophic financial disaster if caught.

I put it to you that in that context, the absolute fastest and most efficient draw that anyone could do is from the ankle. Watch this video to see it in detail. Keep in mind that the beauty of almost any seated position is that I can stage my gun side foot at the best angle and at the best distance and no one is the wiser. And even better, in the car or at my desk, I can even pull the pant leg up so that there is zero interference in accessing and deploying the pistol. Take a quick look here:

This is just a short sample of the efficacy of ankle carry seated. It is demonstrably faster and more efficient than any belt carry because all I have to do is move my hand. That’s it. There is no need to shift anything before the access is enabled. This is one of the reasons I have made it a major part of my EDC.

I plan to follow this article up with a couple of others going deeper into far more detail about the hows and whys and gear and set up, etc, but this will serve as the amuse bouche before the main course.

Pheonix PD banning chokeholds

Before we get into this rant I am about to lay one you, I want everyone to understand that what I am about to say is in no way a slight on the LEOs and the defensive tactics instructors for the Phoenix PD. They were given a shit sandwich and told to turn it into Prime Rib and they were given about two days to do it. They did the best they could. This rant is on the sheer willful ignorance of the public, the mainstream media, and the police administration that is more concerned with public relations and appearances than on actual results.

So the Phoenix PD had banned the use of “choke holds” for officers during arrests. Now, I am writing a longer article to show how stupid this is, and the fact that as a recognized subject matter expert in this area, I am telling you that the choke hold is the single safest and most functional unarmed technique to use to stop an aggressive attacker and to do it with no harm to that attacker. PERIOD. I can – and will – back that up with documented and verifiable fact later this week, but today I am going to address the technique the Phoenix PD unveiled to replace the choke.

You can look at it here starting at the 13:39 mark:

https://www.facebook.com/ABC15/videos/269743547568833/

I am not going to address this issue from the point of view of arresting someone or the specific context of that. I am not, nor have I ever been a police officer, so I cannot in good conscience talk about that contextual application. What I can talk about is the efficacy of the demonstrated position, and it’s strength and weaknesses. The position the DT instructor shows is a very typical jiujitsu hold called a seatbelt. It is designed for one thing – to hold a person in place long enough to transition to a finishing hold. Used in the correct manner, on the ground with the opponent seated on his butt or belly, it is a decent control. Unfortunately, in the way it is being used to replace the choke hold, it will prove to be utterly useless.

Moreover – and here is the problem – IT WILL LEAD TO MORE INJURIES TO THE ARRESTEE AND IT WILL LEAD TO MORE SHOOTINGS BY THE OFFICER!

Why do I say that it if I just said above that it is a good control? Multiple reasons, but the most important one is this. It works in the ideal manner because you are on the ground – I.e. not standing – and can get your legs over theirs and place them above their hips and just inside their thighs. That way, you have a great method of controlling their movement. Standing upright as demonstrated in the video, you have very little control, and you only have that for a moment of two. The problems are 1) you have ZERO control of his lower body. The strongest part of a person that is the seat of the most explosive generated force a person can perform, and you do nothing to deal with it and, 2) you leave the other guy with one underhook. For those who don’t know anything about grappling, the underhook is any time I can get an arm between the other person’s arm and torso, and it is the king of grappling moves, especially if there is the presence of weapons. Take a look at the demonstrated technique in the video, and imagine weapons on the officer’s waistline. Note who one of the “bad guy” arms has complete freedom to move and is CLOSER to the officer’s weapons on that side than the officer does. Now what is going to happen when that officer realizes the other guy is going for his gun, or taser, or etc.? Is that not a guaranteed way to ramp up the violence and the end result? You better believe it.

For those who are going to argue that somehow the bad guy will be unable to move and won’t be able to get to the LEOs gun, let me assure not only can he, but that he will. I have been doing that exact move for quite literally decades, and I can flat out promise you that I cannot control someone in that position for more than a moment. If I cannot reliably do it, with 31 years of active training and practice, a police officer with minimal time in during his academy days, and little follow up after, will have no chance to do so. And now let’s add to the situation and make it worse. What if the person being detained is substantially bigger or stronger than the cop? What if he is much younger? How about if he is in a state of excited delirium from alcohol or drugs? Any of those would make it tougher for me to make that position work properly, let alone the LEO with only minimal training using it.  And I am even more concerned because the instructor was not even doing the two most important things to try to control form this position. Both use leverage and he was using all muscle. If he does not understand the details, how will the officers who need to learn it?

I will state this publicly now, and people can hold me to this. Banning the choke hold and replacing it with this will substantially increase the injury and death rate to both parties in the future. 100% guarantee.

bjj and baseball

What in the world does Brazilain Jiu-jitsu black belts have to do with baseball? Well, I will tell you.

People often remark about how self-effacing I am about my performance as a fighter. They say”but Cecil, you are a 3rd degree black belt in Brazilian Jiujitsu under a true legend of the art. You have to be uber successful when sparring!” Sure, I have some success, but I also have some crushing failures, and it is those failures that 1) keep me training, and 2) keep me humble.

When you do a fighting methodology that requires you to regularly get matched up against a resisting opponent with opposing will, malevolent intent, and freedom of action, some days you are going to lose. It is a fact of life. And even within what some people view as the highest level of fighting – i.e. black belt in Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, there is a hierarchy and sub-levels.

Fortunately belts still mean something in BJJ. Even with its popularity and a bit of watering down, the belts still are meaningful because you cannot hide from performance the way you can in almost all other martial arts or self-defense systems (“I can’t really spar because our art is too deadly” – yeah, sure it is fat man). You have to show you can go, cold and on demand.

Even still, I tell folks that there is a hierarchy with black belts, and the easiest way to understand it is like this. Think of jujitsu black belts as pro baseball players. They are all better than 98% of the population of the world in their ability to play the game, but they are not equal.

There are the minor leagues – A, AA, and AAA, then there are major leaguers, and then of the major leaguers, there are the All Stars. All are pros, but different.

Same as BJJ black belts. The equivalent of the single A and double A ball players are the black belts who are older, who have physical issues (whether from age or other causes), or who have not trained for years and years. For example, we had a student at my academy that got his black belt at 71. Jim was also a smaller and frailer person anyway. Can he roll at the same level as a 35 year old black belt? No way, but it does not take away from his knowledge and the time he has put in, and the fact that against his peer; he can roll at a high level. He is very much a legitimate black belt, but on a slightly separate plane.

Then you have the triple A belts. Guys who are not at the elite level, but can roll against the elite and at least make them work. Maybe, on a really, really great day, they may even catch the elite guy in something (probably not but we can dream!).

The major leaguers are obviously the black belts that are competing all the time, or the guys who are known throughout the community as tough guys to roll against. These are the current main high level players.

And the All Stars? Well, those are the legends and the truly greats and the current dominant competitors. The Roger Gracie’s, the Marcleo Garcias, the Gary Tonon’s , the Megaton Dias’ and the like are the ones that even people only slightly knowledgeable about BJJ tend to know. These are the ones, like a Babe Ruth or a Willie Mays, stand the test of time and leave a lasting mark on the art.

So where do I fit it? Well, I like to compare myself to Crash Davis, Kevin Costner’s character in the movie Bull Durham. He is an aging AAA player who almost made it in the big leagues but didn’t, and now he plays out his career in the minors. Bur while there, he is pretty decent and respected, and more importantly, he is a mentor to the up and coming young players who are destined to be far better than Crash ever was. He teaches them how to be better and more successful and even if he wishes he could have been more, he is fairly content to help the ones who come after. So the comparison for me is that I will contribute much more as a teacher, but when I roll with the major leaguers, I at least make them sweat a tiny bit before they thump me!

I hope this helps people to make sense of the levels of black belt. It is a great achievement (outside of being an okay husband and a better than mediocre Dad, it is my proudest one), and should be respected, but not all of us are walking death machines.

shotgun gear follow up

A follow up to my post yesterday about testing your gear in firearms training classes.

One piece of kit I was seriously looking at was the MatchSaverz shell holder. I had mounted one after taking Tom Givens Shotgun Instructor class last summer. One of the things that quickly becomes apparent when putting a lot of rounds through a shotgun is that keeping it fed can be a difficult task. There are not a ton of great answers (besides the reliable “do more work”) to this issue, so you have to take what you can get.

I had seen the MatchSaverZ device and it was certainly intriguing. A single shell holder that could be mounted right in front of the chamber for potentially a lighting fast single round reload is an awesome idea. The problems are twofold – 1) the holder itself is plastic and small, giving the impression it is not particularly rugged, which is compounded by issue 2) that the attachment of the holder to gun is not great. It is one screw going the shell holder channel into the forearm of the gun, which is then backed up with a velcro attachment. This is made worse by using the factory forend of the 1301. There are a lot of dips and curls in it, and finding a spot where I could drill through and drive the screw without compromising the action, and keeping it close enough to the chamber to be handy severely limited my options. I tried a number of different spots and used extra adhesive to give it some added support, but it still felt flimsy.

Understand me, this is understandable in it’s construction. I am not saying the company did a poor job of making or designing the item. There are just inherent limits to what can be done at a price point that works. Now, running this in dry fire and the little bit of range work I have done in the past year, I did not have any problems with the holder. It stayed on well, and did it’s job well. It is a perfect thing for the emergency load. But as I mentioned previously, going through an extended class and putting a lot of rounds through a gun under time constraints can reveal weaknesses, so I was interested in seeing if the MatchSaverZ could handle it. I was not optimistic.

Well, I was wrong. The seemingly flimsy thing held up. Frankly, I was a bit astonished. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it never did. Now, a longer class may give a different result, but I think that it has been shown that for MY OWN PROJECTED NEED, the MatchSaverZ most likely will work in the home defense role. I have doubts that it would hold up in the field in a military context, or as a patrol gun (getting banged up from being taken in and out of a locked carrier), but for a citizen in the home, I think it is durable enough. At least for this user.

Shotgun class

Taking firearms training classes is a good idea. Not only do you learn and improve your performance and build the skill set that you may need to save you in a life threatening emergency (cue reference to our current times) , you also get to test your gear under circumstances that may be tough. Will you be engaging in a firefight with a criminal assaulter that requires you to fire 1,500 rounds of ammo? I would hope not. Of course, again in reference to current events, that is a tad more feasible than it might have been last week, but still, even now it would be an incredible outlier/black swan event. However, putting your equipment through that level of demand can truly pressure test your gear, and most importantly HOW YOU INTERFACE WITH SAID GEAR. And if we are honest with ourselves, this should be an ongoing effort. New gear comes out, new methods are found for using extant gear, and we need to constantly check what we are doing and what we are carrying.

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to do just that by taking a class with one of my favorite instructors, Chris Fry. Yes, he is a very close friend so I am a bit biased, but I truly think he is one of the best around, and has an uncanny way of communicating especially to private citizens. Not really a surprise when you consider that over twenty years of running his company MDTS Training, he averaged over 1,000 students a year. That is a lot of time to perfect your craft and learn the best ways to get information across to people.

The course I took was a half day Fundamental Shotgun class, and in 5 hours we covered a lot of concepts and ideas, and we still managed to put our shotguns through live fire of over 150 rounds 9mostly birdshot, though the last portion was firing buck in a difficult evaluation drill, and testing the patterning of our guns with our loads. What was really helpful was that it gave me plenty of opportunity to hone in on some gear choices.

To sum up, poor gear really sucks, and well thought out and well made gear helps performance. It does not make you better, but it allows you to reach your potential much more effectively than poorer equipment does.

A few takeaways :

I personally have zero use for a sling on a shotgun – this is not a blanket statement for anyone else, but totally personal. As primarily a home defense tool for me, I saw little need for a sling except as a administration aid during classes. So I do have my main shotty (a Beretta 1301) set up with a QD single point. I used it only a bit in the Rangemaster Shotgun course I took from Tom Givens last June, but had more time to use it here, and I hated it. It got in the way of handling, reloading, and did nothing to help shooting, so about halfway through I removed it and have no desire to ever go back to one.

A red dot on a 1301 is as good as cheating as anything I have seen with firearms. The 1301 is already a light and fast handling gun, and manipulations are almost effortless, but adding a RD makes the actually firing part like it is on automatic. When we shot some temp drills (to allow you to find the best pace to functionally use the gun while still allowing for mental processing and correct recoil control), Chris allowed me to use his RD set up 1301 for part of it. My own was pretty nice, but adding that sighting system made it jump light years beyond. I am definitely going that route ASAP.

Wilderness Tactical makes awesome and bomb proof stuff. Their Shell belt, twin loader, and dump pouch were fantastic, and even after being tossed onto gravel, loaded/unloaded/reloaded constantly, they both look brand new. I have been a fan and customer of theirs since the mid-80’s, and this past Saturday only solidified that more.

Make sure you buy good shell cards if you use that ammo carry method. I have one from Vang Comp and Brown Coat Tactical that are super durable and even after heavy use, never lost a shell. I also have some crappy low priced ones (shown in the pic) that dropped rounds like a sieve. The price difference between the good stuff and the bad in tiny; the functionality gap between them is huge.

So take the opportunities in training courses to put the gear you may count on to help you protect your life or your loved ones to the test as often as you can.