The truth is, as human beings we are going to fail more often than we succeed.

Now, that failure may be a relatively minor thing – you don’t put a shopping cart back, you leave the dishes in the sink an extra day, you fail at your diet on one particular day, you don’t do your scheduled exercise program. Or it may be a more moderate one – you are short with a loved one, you cut someone off in traffic, you go out in public without a mask. Or it may even be a big one – you mentally, emotionally, or physically hurt someone even unintentionally. Whatever the case may be, we are all going to fail at it at some point. It is the nature of humanity. We want to be the best, but life has an insidious method of getting in the way.

Now, saying this is not a get out of jail free card, as if we can just move on and go “oh well, stuff happens”. Not at all. We need to pay attention to these mistakes, learn from them, and use them as an object lesson to try to prevent a re-occurrence. This is the way that we truly get better.

However, it does mean that we should not beat ourselves up anymore than is helpful to that goal of getting better. Endlessly flagellating ourselves accomplishes nothing and just diminishes our soul. I was talking to a friend recently who in my opinion was beating himself up when there was no need. He was truly and honestly trying to be better, and was too focused on the occasional lapse. I was trying to encourage him, when I realized I was doing the exact same thing at the same exact time. I had a family tragedy happen in the past few weeks, and I was torturing myself with the things and actions I felt in hindsight I did wrong in the days prior to this tragedy, and all I was doing was hurting myself to no end.

My wife has been telling me quite frequently the past five weeks that I need to be kind to myself and as often is true, she is right. We all need to exercise kindness in today’s world – kindness and empathy certainly to others, but to ourselves as well. Don’t stop trying to be better, but don’t dwell on the failures. Use them as a platform to launch yourself to be more. I know I am going to try that advice myself.

One of the nice things about having spent decades spreading the message about best practices for fighting in the real world is that it has taken root with so many people. I know there are tons of folks doing jiujitsu who would not have otherwise if myself, or my buddies in the Shivworks Collective had been silent for the past 20 years. Likewise, we have helped people to realize the efficacy of AIWB carry for pistols, the use of OC spray, force-on-force training to truly pressure test techniques and practices, boxing/muay thai for a striking delivery system, and how useful a small fixed blade carried on the belt forward of the hips can be in an entanglement.

One of the drawbacks to that success though is that sometimes, when the information gets carried through second or third hand sources, that some of the details and nuance can get lost. One area where this is really noticeable is in knife carry and use. It can often be easy for smaller but important details to get lost. So the following video is a short guideline in why the knife is best carried in the manner we tend to advocate. It is somewhat related to why the sheath I designed for the Craig Douglas ClinchPick works the way it does, so be warned that there is a tiny bit of a sales pitch, though that is a minor part of the video. But I did want to point out that proviso.

For quite literally years and years I have been telling people that one of the single best skills we can have if we are truly interested in real world self-preservation is the ability to breakfall. It is not sexy or tacti-cool, but it is far more likely to be used and more likely to save you from harm than a firearm or H2H fighting skills. The simple fact is that everyone falls – whether that is because of slipping/tripping over something on the ground, or getting our feet tied up through bad, hasty, unthinking movement. We all have done this at some time, and some of us have done it a lot. Hopefully, the most negative thing we get afterwards is embarrassment or some broken skin, but all too often the consequences are much worse. For anyone who is unsure about that, look up how many times a senior citizen who falls and breaks their hip then passes away as a result.

At the beginning of my Immediate Action Jujitsu coursework, I tell people the seminar is NOT about teaching you to voluntarily go to the ground to fight. Instead, it is about when you do not intend to go to the ground but find yourself there regardless. When I ask students if that is possible and how it would be, they universally answer “after falling”, because anyone that is honest will admit everyone of us has fallen at some time in our lives. I point out that even if you do not want to go to the ground, if you have not trained specifically to stay on your feet, finding yourself under sudden surprising violent assault is not the time when your brain is going to be able to do so easily. Take this video as a case in point, as it is a perfect illustration of what I try to get across.

Does anyone think that the LEO wanted to go to the ground? Of course not. It is obvious that was unintended and totally accidental. And because it was accidental, and he was not prepared or trained for it, the single reason he did not suffer worse consequences was that the bad guy had the same reaction. If the bad guy had not fallen over the officer and had a bit more presence of mind, there is a pretty good chance the officer would have suffered major injuries from the bad guy’s knife, and perhaps even have died. The good guy was also extremely lucky that he did not suffer injuries from the fall itself such as hitting his head. Again, nothing good would have followed that.

The good guy in the above video was lucky, but I don’t really think counting on luck to save your life is the best plan. That is no different than making poor financial decisions over and over again in the hope that you will hit the lottery at some point. You need to prepare and practice for it the same exact way you practice drawing from concealment with your carry pistol.

If you are honestly interested in self-preservation, than you need to spend a solid amount of time on the things that are most likely to kill you. Having decent health ( regular physical checkups, including dental since there is a direct link between poor dental hygiene and heart attacks), not being excessively fat, eating like an adult, being a good driver, knowing CPR and how to work an AED machine and recognize the signs of a stroke, and knowing how to survive a sudden fall. None of these are sexy or can be easily accomplished by buying gear, but they mean far more to your actual well-being.

In the next article, I will talk about how we go about learning and developing the ability to breakfall.

https://sports.yahoo.com/anthony-smith-ufc-light-heavyweight-nebraska-home-invasion-040914890.html

There has been a great deal of talk about this break in and attack on a professional MMA fighter. A number of people have chimed in with what they think were important points, but after reading a great deal of the posts and comments, I think three of the most key takeaways from this incident are being overlooked.

First, we have to remember that in the circles that are most likely to be paying attention to this incident that we are the outliers. Because understanding criminal violence and being prepared for it is important to perhaps the majority of folks in this community, we tend to talk in a bubble. That bubble is one in which not that many of the general public spends any time in, and gives little thought to. We may spend a lot of time thinking and even training for these things, including spending money, and blood, sweat, and effort while doing so, and trying to get ourselves mentally, emotionally, and physically prepared if we should find ourselves in the middle of this kind of situation.  The simple fact is most people don’t. Based on the story and the actual words said by the good guy here, I doubt seriously if he spent more than a minute on thinking about self-defense, and even then, it was probably in the same superficial way that the typical gun owner does. You know, the guy who goes to the gun store and buys whatever the employee says is the tactically cool gun, buys a couple of boxes of ammo, shoots some of it, and maybe goes and takes a CCW class, and that’s it. No other thought or effort to understand all the chaotic variables that may arise in a given criminal encounter. I doubt the MMA athlete here ever thought about coming into contact with someone who truly wanted to hurt him, and had some skills – whether trained or artificially chemically induced or both – and what the consequences of that would be. Every reasonably respected trainer in the firearms or self-defense training world (whether it is a Tom Givens, MAs Ayoob, Craig Douglas or a Gracie family member) has told people over and over that trying to survive a sudden violent encounter when you have never prepared for it is not the best time to start. Too many awful things may happen and trying to deal with it in the moment may cause mental overload and lockup. This event is a perfect illustration of not understanding the contextual considerations that differ from his normal and understood routine world view. Listen to his shock at how the bad guy just kept fighting. Anyone of us who think seriously about real world self preservation issues has read about any of a thousand different criminal attacks – the Jared Reston one, or Platt and Mattix’s actions in Miami , et al – would have been applying their skills in a different way, with a slightly different emphasis. This has exactly ZERO to do with “street vs sport”, and entirely down to the personal worldview of the individual. Being a combat sports athlete who spends a lot of time working his sport application under those rules had the exact same effect on this person as being a professional race car driver spending all his time on a race track has on the driver being on the day to day roads driving on the freeway or in rush hour traffic. Anyone who thinks that the reason this fight was not easier had anything to do with “sport” is just being infantile.

Second, there is a reason that a lot of us don’t really emphasize teaching much striking anymore, especially to people new to unarmed fighting. I myself spent the beginning 25 years of my martial art training and study as a striker first and foremost and most of my early seminar work was focused on teaching how to hit often, precisely, and as hard as humanly possible. I did not come into this as the “jiujitsu guy”. I became that over time when I realized the efficacy of grappling for self-defense. What I came to understand was that it was one thing to have someone who was dedicated to training a striking skill set, and was willing to put in the time and effort, but it was another thing entirely to do that with someone who was brand new to unarmed fighting, and may have physical issues (smaller, permanent injuries, lack of time to train, etc.) Striking is incredibly inconsistent and unreliable. Anyone who has spent much time training it can give example after example of hitting someone with a perfect shot and they shrug it off. Can it work? Sure, but it also fails far more often. Even with a professional fighter who spends hours every single day training, they cannot be sure that the hits will have the effect they want them to have. This is a perfect example. A trained and elite professional fighter hit a smaller non-professional time after time, and it almost completely failed. It took a lot before the struggle ended. Imagine if a 140 pound woman, whose entire training of striking had been in a weekend seminar, found herself in that situation. The ending would have been far worse.  I strongly feel it is crucial to have a working, functional knowledge of striking, because there will absolutely be times when it will be the best answer, but even then, it is completely unreliable in its effects, and you better be prepared for that eventuality. In other words, be ready for failure, and have plan B.

Third, just having a weapon, even a gun, in this situation would have meant little. The smart people in this community all make fun of the person who treats a gun as a talisman or a rabbit’s foot, and that just having it without the software behind it is foolish.  However, there were a number of comments about this situation, and sometimes made by people who I thought knew better, where some people seem to suggest that it IS a talisman and that just being there would have produced a different outcome. A number of comments were along the lines of “well, this is why you need firearms”, as if just having one available would have altered anything about this encounter. Those who have said that, I ask you to take note that a weapon WAS involved at one point – a knife – and it served no purpose, because the mindset behind was not there. He did not know what to do with it, and did not have the mindset to use the weapon in the best manner. Any hardware or gear, regardless of how super tactical it is, is meaningless without an understanding of why it should be used, and then how it should be employed. And further, I would argue that if the good guy did have the right mindset to use a weapon appropriately and correctly, it might not have mattered because then he would have used his own existing fighting skill set, which is tremendous, to end the violence much sooner regardless. This is not to dismiss the gun at all. Anyone who knows me will tell you how adamant I am that a gun is a key component of a self-defense plan, but let’s not get into the view that the presence of one would have solved this any better without extra things being present as well.

What won the fight was dominant positional control – i.e. grappling. There are different end strategies that can flow from there, but position before the finish was paramount. Striking eventually prevailed, but it only succeeded because the good guy was able to control the bad guy long enough for the hits to add up. Without that grappling component, this fight might have turned out different.

And, as a couple of people have pointed out, make no mistake that the good guy DID win. The bad guy went to the hospital, and the good guy (and all his family) walked away without any injuries and avoided any medical problem. Further, he will face no legal repercussions, either criminally, or even in a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the criminal’s surviving family. Anyone who has had to deal with these things, even successfully, will tell you that they are devastating emotionally and financially. If you can win against a criminal, and never have to experience these consequences, it is certainly a fantastic win. While we may want the encounter to have ended more quickly, or more decisively, or we can critique to learn of any mistakes, do not for a moment misunderstand this for what it is – a complete and utterly successful self-defense situation where the good guy has no lasting damage, and the bad guy does. That, my friends, is a happiest of endings.

I get a lot of messages and emails asking advice on how to choose a gi for jiujitsu. In this short video, I try to give a few tips based on 30 years of figuring this out and making a ton of mistakes. Watch this and hopefully you will avoid the wasted time, effort, and money that I did.

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”.

I did a new podcast with the Spotterup folks. This was a particularly fun interview. John, the host, is fully immersed himself in working the same ideas, so it was great to throw ideas back and forth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PucylFSpwv0&feature=emb_logo

Here is a video tutorial on using fundamental jiujitsu concepts and moves in a self-defense context when the criminal attacker is on top and raining down strikes. How do we apply our skills, and what are the most essential things to do?

I also talk about why in training we should not always rely on having “handles” and making our training harder than reality.

There are a lot of people that read my posts that are fairly new to jiu-jitsu. They are in the early days of trying to figure this complex art out, and I can tell you from experience that doing so is a tough road. BJJ is very deep and chaotic, and truly only time served is what allows you to really grasp the essence.

The problem is, with the Covid19 situation, a number of academies are closing for a time and even for those who may remain open, and it may not be easy for people to get to them. At least two good friends of mine are subject to a lockdown by their employer should they do something like go to a large gathering of people, so training in a group is out of the cards for the next couple of weeks.

I thought I would take a moment to give some tips on getting through such a situation while still helping people start to understand jiu-jitsu.

The thing that truly separates BJJ from almost all other martial arts and self-defense oriented activities is that it is NOT dependent on techniques. Every other fighting system is all about the technique that will be so devastating and unstoppable. The typical and classic self-defense training paradigm is “he does this, you do that”. That is great if the plan all goes your way. Unfortunately in the real world almost nothing goes your way, ever. And if your fighting template is geared for the “I will pre-emptively hit him with a palm strike and then I will use my cycling hammerfists of death to finish him”, when that fails (which it will more often than not), and you are not prepared, that will be a bad day.

In jiu-jistu, because we know that our best intentions are generally countered by a resisting opponent who wants to win and has the freedom to do that in whatever manner he sees fit, there is never a set game plan. That is where most noobs have the hardest time. It is difficult to work a new move when you may not even get the chance to start it all due to the actions of our opponent. So then they get frustrated and think they are not getting better.

The way to get over this is to realize that jiu-jitsu is focused on the underlying framework, principles, physical body movements, and concepts that drive the art and the application. All techniques are, are a temporary way to physically express those principles in the moment, all based on the context and what exactly your opponent is doing – his pressure, his position, his base, his posture, what his limbs are doing, etc. – not on a pre-planned attack. The difference between a white belt and a black belt is not really in the number of techniques, or even how well the black belt physically does the technique, but rather in understanding what technique is appropriate in the moment, and is also just as ready to alter that based on he changes his opponent makes.

That is the reason why the majority of BJJ training has to be with a partner. So much of what you are going to do is based on those varied and unscripted actions by another that you cannot replicate that solo. Even a grappling dummy does not fill that gap in any meaningful way. So what are we left with?

Well, as I wrote above, one of the foundations of jiu-jitsu is the actual body movements. Not prescribed movements in the sense of “do this technique” but rather the actions your body has to do to accomplish techniques. Think for example of playing the guitar. You can play an almost infinite amount of songs with specific actions, but all the actions are going to be powered by your arm, hand, and finger movements at the core. Playing a line from “Stairway to Heaven” is done in essentially the same manner as a line from a jazz song. Similarly, in jiu-jitsu, a fundamental movement like a technical stand up can be just a stand up, or it can be a sweep, or it can be an escape from a bottom position, but the movement is the same. All the opponent provides is the context in which that movement needs to be applied.

So you can focus on the foundational physical actions, and most of them can be done solo. If you myelinate the neural pathways and make a given movement subconscious and automatic, when you need it, your brain is only processing the need and when to do it, and not wasting cognitive power on how to execute it. In this way, solo practice, especially as a lower belt, can be incredibly productive and helps build the foundation for when you do get to go against a partner. This is how we can get through the next few weeks without much diminishment of our jiu-jitsu.

I have done a number of videos illustrating some of these essential motions.

Also, a terrific resource, if you are lucky enough to have it available, is Andre Galvao’s book Drill to Win. Unfortunately, it has been out of print for a while now and is harder to come by. But if you do have access to it, he even gives you a partial training template to use the drills in it.

https://www.amazon.com/Drill-Win-Months-Brazillian-Jiu-Jitsu/dp/B0085S02K2

There are other video resources. Here is one I particularly think it s a good one:

If you do a search for “solo BJJ drills”, you will find a great deal of free info out there. In fact, just last night, I saw where John Danaher, one of the most innovative instructors around, filmed a video over the weekend and will be offering it for free very soon. So keep an eye out for that.

Also, feel free to ask me for other tips or advice. I am happy to help.