For those of us who are all about being a multi-disciplinary thinking tactician and one who is truly prepared for whatever life throws at us, we need to deal with a great deal of information and material. One of the things I talk about a lot, both in writing, teaching, and being interviewed on podcasts is something that keeps coming up by people emailing or messaging me. It is one of the most important lessons I try to emphasize, but one that gets lost in the avalanche of things we concern ourselves with in this lifestyle. What I try to preach, again and again and again, is to JUST START.

Start what? Start training! Just start something. I don’t care what it is. I get a lot of questions about the best way to start, what area should be the focus, and how to find the right training. Here’s the thing. I T DOES NOT MATTER. What matters is that you are working on something.

Should you find a BJJ academy first? Should you take a defensive shooting class? What about medical? And then we worry about health and fitness. Wait, what about the pre-fight threat containment? And on and on ad infinitum. I have even contributed to it by writing different articles on my blog about specific pathways you can take when studying unarmed fighting methods.

It is easy to develop paralysis by analysis. We get so stressed about finding the perfect path. We hem and haw and waste time.

Stop the wasted time. Pick something you can do right now, and begin walking the path. It may be joining a jiu-jitsu school, or buying a kettlebell. It may be signing up for coursework with Craig Douglas or William April or an OC class with Chuck Haggard. Perhaps Tom Givens is doing one of his Intensive Pistol Skills courses (probably my single favorite class Tom teaches and the one I think is truly indispensible for the private citizen) within reasonable distance. Or you saw the Red Cross has their one day first aid/CPR/AED class coming up close to your house. I don’t care. And I don’t care which one you do first. Just do something.

The path only truly begins when you take the initial step. JUST START. NOW.

My most recent podcast appearance. It was a really enjoyable one because we talked some music (which I love almost as much as jiujitsu!), and some history, and sartorial splendor. Check it out:

http://evosec.libsyn.com/cecil-burch-immediate-action-combatives

Training in BJJ can be tough. It is a long slog to get to where you can functionalize your actions against a truly resisting training partner or opponent. It is not really about individual technique at all. Rather, it is about mechanics, leverage, positional control, posture, base, pressure, grips, angles, and how to adjust all that on the fly. And the problem with all that is the difference between success and failure may be very close together. When the margin is so close, it can lead to a lot of frustration. That frustration can then start a downward cycle that gets you thinking you flat out suck at jiu-jitsu and that you should just give up.

Here is the antidote to that. Everyone who does jiu-jitsu feels that way at any given time! There has not been a practitioner yet that succeeds on a constant basis and never doubts themselves. That is impossible. We all feel it. All jiu-jitsu training is made up of peaks, valleys, and plateaus.

The peaks are great of course. We pull off that new pass or sweep against a tough partner and everything clicks when we roll.

The valleys suck so hard. Feeling like nothing is working, maybe to the point even that the stuff that used to work is no longer a sure thing.

I hate the plateaus the most. You don’t have the feeling of getting worse, you just feel like you are not getting better. You can do all the things you have been doing, but you can’t make that next step to actual progress. To me, this is the most frustrating place. It makes training true drudgery at times.

Every one of us will go through all of these at different times. Sometimes they will be short periods, but often they last for weeks or even months. I remember one plateau in particular after I had been a black belt for a few years. I think that particular plateau lasted almost a year. Truly awful.

How do we break this cycle and make sure we stay in the peaks? As soon as someone discovers one, we can all try it. The simple fact is, we can’t stop this. We will be in one of these areas regardless. There is no escape.

I can hear the audience moaning that I am making them depressed. So I will make it better. There is a good way to deal with the issue. What is it? Keep training! Just show up. Some days are good, some days are not, and some days are so-so. Just enjoy the time put in and the experience of being on the mat pursuing something you love with other likeminded folks, and don’t stop. The only thing to stop is expecting a particular outcome each session. Just train, don’t quit, and move forward and you will get better. Maybe not at your preferred speed, but it will happen. Just keep on keeping on.

I am excited to announce I will be teaching in Oklahoma City February 15/16th, 2020. On Saturday, we will be working my Immediate Action Jiu-Jitsu (IAJJ) material to learn how to survive a scenario where you find yourself on the ground through no intent of your own, and what you need to do to take the fight back to the bag guy. And on Sunday, we will be doing Contact Pistol, which is all about dominating the entanglement and deploying a pistol. There is a live fire component to this course so you can get used to shooting from proper retention and through a compressed drawstroke. Then we will put that to the true pressure test in force-on-force scenarios. It will be a great weekend with the possibility of a few special guests as well. Don’t miss the shenanigans!

You can sign up for just one day, or you can do both days. They can be treated as stand alone courses.

To Register:

https://www.ptgtrainingllc.com/store…__lSNLEjqIP2qE

https://www.ptgtrainingllc.com/store…N3-UQsDvGD31Gk

Real World Application of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in a Weapon-Based-Environment

Contrary to popular belief, many empty hand fights and those involving weapons, end up on the ground. No amount of pontificating or self-proclaimed “expert“posturing will change this simple fact. If you ignore this reality, you may very well find yourself in a situation you cannot handle with disastrous consequences. This course is designed to give the layman a realistic and functional set of concepts, techniques, methodologies, training drills and experiences that will prepare them for a worst case “ground-fight” scenario. All techniques and concepts are high percentile applications which span a wide spectrum of confrontations. Training consists of presentation, drilling and Force-On-Force evolutions providing attendees with immediate feedback regarding the efficacy of the skills learned. The goal of this course is not to create a “ground fighter” or grappler. The objective is to provide attendees who have limited training time and resources with solid ground survival and escape fundamentals geared toward the increasingly violent weapon based environments they may live, work and/or travel within. And all techniques/concepts are from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and are combat proven over the past 80 years by thousands of practitioners, including the U.S. Army.

These methods are for everyone regardless of physical condition – young, old, male, female, athlete or not – You DO NOT have to be a professional fighter to perform at a functional level. This will be a class about physical training, but it is NOT boot camp. Participants may go at the pace that is comfortable for them, while trying to push the envelope of their own individual performance.
Requirements : Loose, comfortable but durable clothes, mouthpiece, cup, notebook, and an open mind

The course is divided into modules that address specific situations. Seminars/training can be customized to fit your needs by arranging for the appropriate modules to be covered. Among the topics covered by the modules include:
-Surviving/defending/escaping when you are on the ground underneath an attacker
-Surviving/defending/escaping when you are on the ground and your opponent is standing
-Functional methods of getting back to your feet
-Countering takedowns and remaining on your feet
-IFWA (in-fight weapon access)
-Denying your opponent’s weapon access – understanding technique, positional hierarchy AND timing
-Multiple opponents – realistically maximizing your chances
-Surviving inside the guard
-Proper usage of the guard to win/escape
-Defending against punches, elbow strikes, stomps, kicks, etc…
-Proper role of “dirty tactics”
-Essential training principles, methods, & drills
-How these concepts & techniques remain true with or without weapon involvement
-Learning to deal with the most common MMA attacks and holds
-Recognizing and defending against common submissions (guillotine, rear naked choke, triangle, arm bar, etc.)
-Structuring and balancing your training and integrating it into a busy real world lifestyle

Contact Pistol
Effective Handgun Use in the Clinch

Ideally, should we have to use our Defensive Handgun to protect ourselves or our loved ones, we will be able to use it at an extended range, in the way it is designed to be used. Unfortunately, ideal and the real world rarely meet up. Oftentimes, we will be in contact – or extremely close to being in contact – with our assailant, and we will need supporting hand-to-hand skills to allow us to use our pistol. The Contact Pistol course is designed to give the layman a realistic and functional set of concepts, techniques, methodologies, training drills and experiences that will prepare them for a worst case combined handgun and H2H scenario. All techniques and concepts are high percentile applications which span a wide spectrum of confrontations. Training consists of presentation, drilling and Force-On-Force evolutions providing attendees with immediate feedback regarding the efficacy of the skills learned. The goal of this course is not to create a professional boxer or MMA competitor. The objective is to provide attendees who have limited training time and resources with solid fundamentals geared toward the increasingly violent weapon based environments they may live, work and/or travel within.

• These methods are for everyone regardless of physical condition – young, old, male, female, athlete or not – You DO NOT have to be a professional fighter to perform at a functional level. This will be a class about physical training, but it is NOT boot camp. Participants may go at the pace that is comfortable for them, while trying to push the envelope of their own individual performance.
• Requirements: loose, comfortable but durable clothes, mouthpiece, cup, notebook, and an open mind. One duty/carry appropriate handgun, good belt and holster, one spare mag carrier, at least 3 spare magazines, and all needed eye and ear protection. Boxing or MMA gloves are strongly encouraged, but are not mandatory. An inert handgun trainer is also strongly suggested.
Among the topics covered by the modules include:
Why & How to use clinch skills in a WBE
Underlying Concepts and Mindset for use
Dealing with the Sucker Punch / Ambush
The Default Cover
Transitioning to and Regaining the Initiative
Fundamentals of the Clinch/Safely Entering
Controlling the Entanglement
Individual & Partner Drills
Gradual introduction and immersion into sparring
Fighting at Close Quarters; attached and unattached
Retention Shooting, pistol drawstroke optimized for both distance and compressed space conditions, shooting through an appropriate line of extension/compression based on proximity of threat
Disengaging from the clinch
Safely gaining distance for escape, weapons access, or orientation reset
Keeping the Fight standing, realistically defending the takedown
Performance Coaching and Troubleshooting
Insights and Suggestions for Solo Training
Tips and pointers on how to train the material with the limitations of a real world lifestyle

The “Hail Mary” pass in football is one of the most exciting moments in sports. When there is no time left on the clock, and your team is down by more than a field goal, and the Quarterback throws that ball up high, and your receiver comes down with it in the middle of a pack, that moment may be the epitome of why we watch sports.

This video is a perfect crystallization of the moment and why it is so exciting. I actually saw this live as a young kid. I grew up a Cowboys fan and I was watching this on TV, and when Pearson snagged it, you would think from my (and probably every other Cowboy fan in existence) reaction that the “Boys had already won the Super Bowl, rather than just got the chance to go to it”.

The problem is, that in the excitement of the success, and the water cooler talk that follows for weeks after, we forget one little thing – that the Hail Mary is a desperation move that fails far, far more often than it succeeds. We are so giddy from the excitement that we lose sight of that fact. Not one football team plans to use the Hail Mary play as part of their preferred game plan. It is instead a “nothing else left to do” moment.

So why do I bring that up on a website devoted to self-defense oriented issues? Because too much of the techniques and tactics in self-defense are the equivalent of the Hail Mary pass. We are going to do that cool technique that “worked” one time because it seems cool and makes us feel like John Wick, when in fact the move will fail 98% of the time. Years ago I got into a debate with fairly known instructor about the efficacy of the Superman punch. He was advocating for it as a legitimate and useful move for self-defense, and insisted that because it “worked” in MMA, that was enough proof it was good for self-defnse. So I went back and looked at the prior two years of UFC fights and I found that indeed, the superman punch worked – about 20% of the time! The rest of the time, it failed, either to do any damage or to even make contact. I used that info in the debate because it makes exactly zero sense to try to train a technique that only works two out of ten times when it is performed by a professional athlete at the peak of fighting condition, when none of us fit that description because it will work even more poorly for us lesser mortals. Yes, when it lands, it is spectacular, and makes us feel awesome. I am far more concerned about all the times it does not land, because that is where most of us will be most of the time.

Unfortunately, this type of thinking is too prevalent in the training community. I think, besides that it may make us feel cool when it works, that the biggest reason people like to focus on these moves is that they tend to be easier to work and train. It is much easier to plan on using an eye gouge or a hair grab or a throat punch that we only need to work for a little bit in order to be ready to fight than the alternative which is much more difficult to face up to; that this work is hard and requires a much blood, sweat, tears, and time, and that the entire way our ego is undergoing constant attack because we will realize we are not actually John Wick.

And it is not just techniques or physical action that can constitute these wishful tricks. Hardware tends to be a big go-to move for too many people. “I carry a back up gun in my pocket to deal with anyone who tries to grapple me” is an all too typical refrain, as is people looking for another trigger, or sights, or ammo to make up for a poor skill set. If our shooting is lacking, it becomes much easier to buy new gear than it is to shoot more repetitions on Dot Torture or other similar foundational drills.

The solution is that we need to focus on the things that we regular everyday folks are able to do. What are the most robust, reliable, and replicable concepts and techniques that will work in most contexts and most situations that can be trained in a reasonable amount of time.

Those are the things we can count on, not the flashy tricks.

I am seeing a lot of New Year resolutions posts all over the place and I think that is great. We should always be trying to make ourselves better. Here is a tip I have found that is incredibly helpful to making those resolutions become real.

Have your goal, but then write down the action plan to achieve the goal. The more steps you can take, and the more specific they are, the greater the likelihood that they become true. For example, losing weight is always a goal for so many people. But if your action plan consists of “eat better” or “cut out junk food”, I suggest that you may find implementing those things are close to impossible. The more nebulous the plan, the harder it will be to make work. On the other hand, if you have concrete plans, they become easier to follow. If you want to lose weight, an action plan that looks more like this – for the first month do this 1) one day a week do not eat starch foods, 2) eat dessert only Friday through Sunday, 3) add one serving of fresh fruit into diet once a week 4) eat one lunch a week with only a large salad – is very doable with little extra planning or need to do too much else (i.e. buy supplements or special foods, or make a special grocery trip, and throw out tons of food in your pantry).

If you are trying to get more fit, don’t try to do it all by next week. See what small but immediate step you can take today or tomorrow, and then sketch out the following steps. If you are trying to get better at an activity, don’t say “I will practice it x amount of time every day” if you have not been doing it at all. Start small, say one session a week, and then chart a very basic progression. Don’t jump in too fast or too far ahead. Make the steps the kind you can do now with little preparation.

I know some people who are reading this are thinking “but I want to do a lot right away and fix stuff”, and I understand. Here is the cool thing about the approach I have outlined. You start the small steps, and if you find yourself being able to do more, then do it! All it means is that your action plan gets done sooner than you anticipated. It is not a timeline or a plan you chain yourself to, but rather one that gets things going. We can always do more, but we first have to make sure we do something.

This is a fascinating video to watch because it shows the idea that “entangled gunfights for private citizens never happen” for the falsehood it is. Everything that is the typical internet wisdom is shown to be, at best, incomplete in its reality.

As you can see, the altercation is between two private citizens. Big Dude In Red starts throwing down with Smaller Dude In Gray and the clinch happens almost immediately. Gray Dude does an okay job of trying to get some control but has no sense of how important base and hips are, and consequently, is thrown around by Big Dude. Eventually they go to the ground (again, because Gray Dude has no concept of where his head goes to prevent it) and the going to the ground is exacerbated because Gray Dude decides it is a good time to go for the gun. He makes what Craig Douglas calls a bad timing decision. The reason he does is the same reason we see bad timing decisions over and over – people think the gun is a magic talisman and that it is a piece of cake to draw and deploy when the opponent is at bad breath distance. This is a perfect crystallization of why that fails most of the time. As soon as Gray Dude makes a play for his pistol, Red Dude has nothing impeding him or his control over the fight and what he wants to do. So he continues driving Gray Dude and lands on top and can easily see and feel Gray Dude going for his waistband and knows exactly what that means. Red Dude then, because he is on top and in complete control, takes the gun away. Not only that, since he is in control, he can then stand up on his own volition with Gray Dude having little say in the matter, and calmly checks the gun and makes sure it is loaded and starts firing. Gray Dude’s only chance at this point is to run and trust that the other guy is not a good shot.

There is a reason I harp on the concept that it does not matter who brings the gun to the fight, the man who has dominant positional control owns the weapon. Ignore this – as Gray Dude did here – at your peril.

Entangled gunfights happen. Do they happen every time? Of course not, but they do happen a great deal, and if you have no idea of what to do, you are not suddenly going to learn in the middle of the chaos. You are going to Gray Dude, hoping luck is on your side, or praying that the opponent takes mercy on you. I personally don’t think that is a good life plan.

Postulated hypothesis : “Advanced” techniques are those that require higher level of physical attributes or developed ability, are more complex and more involved (i.e. have more “moving parts”) and will  happen in real world application only in outlier type situations.

There are some clichés in the self-defense training community, whether you come from the firearms or the martial art side. “They all fall to hardball”, “two is one, one is none”, “I know grappling because it is hidden in my katas”, “slow is smooth, smooth is fast”, etc. Any of them may have had decent roots in an authentic truth at some point, but they tend to get warped by overuse. “There is no such thing as advanced techniques, only applications done better” is one of those that I think has some basis in truth, but loses any benefit without nuance.

Let’s look at Jiu-jitsu for example. The majority of moves (certainly the moves you should build your game on) consists pretty much of essential fundamentals. Cross Collar Choke, Straight Armbar, Kimura, Flower Sweep, et al are ones that can be done successfully and often whether you are a white belt or a black belt. However, there are moves that cannot truly be considered non-advanced. Worm Guard and its attacks is a perfect illustration of this. If you have no idea of how open guard moves work and their important points, then pulling off any worm guard attack is going to be pure luck, and it will absolutely not be consistent. Because without that underlying conceptual grasp of open guard, then the only way to execute any word guard attack is by regurgitation from what the teacher said, and there is no way to do that well or reliably against true opposition by your peer.  You will not know how to control the lapel, you will not understand how to apply pressure with your hands and feet to control the other person, and you will not understand how to adjust things on the fly. You must have a fundamental base first. Therefore, if you have to have that base first to do worm guard, then there is no way it can be considered anything but advanced.

Or if we look at Defensive Handgun, I have a hard time believing anyone would reasonably argue that doing weak hand only immediate action drills will be the equivalent of a giant cluster**ck  if the first time you pick up a handgun you are taught to do WHO malfunction clearing techniques. I think it is safe to say that to be proficient at that, you have to have some decent ingrained gunhandling skills, and you probably should be okay at doing the same work with your primary hand. Once you have built a bit of familiarity on that side, going to the weak hand will be a bit more manageable. So again, a skill set that ahs to have some requirements before they can be understood and performed, and again, pretty much a definite indicator of it being a more advanced skill.

We also have applications. To be good at moving through a structure with a gun in your hand and working against a bad guy, you better have the shooting and handling portion down pretty solid. You will be using almost all of your cognitive powers on the task at hand, and you will have little to spare for making sure you align the sights and press the trigger properly. Once again, fundamental skills with the gun to be sure, but done in a manner that makes it far more advanced and you need far higher developed mechanics.

Look at the following video. Go to the 8:18 mark to see some room movement with a gun in hand and note how much of the brain is occupied with seeing and thinking about the movement, and the gunhandling has to be pretty automated.

Or with jiu-jitsu, sometimes to pull off a successful attack, you need to do more than a single direct action, and have to build on a complex and ongoing series of moves.

Take these worm guard attacks. Not only are the shown set ups more complex than something fundamental like a Flower Sweep, even the set up before this moment is complex and requires a good amount of effort and work. You are not just going to be able to get to the beginning part of the video straight away at the beginning of a roll. You are going to have to carefully get into the position just to begin the worm guard attack, let alone all the actions for the attack itself.

Make no mistake that this is any kind of argument to do spend more time working “advanced skills”. Rather, I think the Pareto Principle should be followed to some extent. That is, the 80/20 rule. So the bulk of our training should be focused on the fundamentals and what gets us the most bang for the buck, but it is not a bad thing to spend at least a small portion of our time on the advanced stuff.

It might seem pedantic to talk about this in this manner, but I think it is important to be clear in how we view and talk about the principles that might help keep us alive.

I have a weird type of OCD.

It is not something that comes up all the time, only in occasional odd places. One of those is when an idea gets planted in my head that leads to a next idea, and then I have to pursue that line at all costs. Case in point was this past week where I found some old training journals and thumbed through them. I found where I started formally training Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, among other tidbits. And then a little voice in my head said “what if you could find your very first teaching certificate?” and the OCD race was on.

I did not find the exact cert, but I did find the journal entry for the first time I officially taught someone as an instructor. That was August 29, 1987 on the campus of Arizona State University. I had just been authorized to teach Jeet Kune Do by my teacher, Paul Vunak, and I had plastered ASU with flyers and within a couple of weeks I had some takers. I made a whopping $10 for the hour lesson!

32 years of teaching and that has almost been non-stop. There was about a two year period after my father passed away where I was working 70+ hours a week to keep the family business going and had zero time to teach so I took a sabbatical from doing so. Outside of that, I have been actively teaching some form of fighting, whether it involved empty hands, knives, stick, firearms, or an integration of all of that dating back to that August ’87 session.

When I started, I SUCKED. I was not a good teacher. I did not understand it, or how to get information across to different people. It took a good while of constant working at it to get to where I now feel I am pretty good (I still need to get better though). Fortunately, outside of charging for private lessons, a good deal of my early teaching was done for free in a training group I organized on campus that later transferred to a Chinese Kung Fu school in east Tempe, so I did not rip off too many people. If I had, I would feel like I should go back and teach them some stuff for free now as a make-good!

I tried to start figuring out how many students I have actually taught, and I can’t get a hard number. Between groups 30+ years ago, assisting some of my instructors like Vunak at large seminars (one seminar I was the lead assistant for had over 120 people that between the main instructor, myself, and the other assistant, we had to spar every single one of them for at least two minutes. That was a longggggg afternoon), doing my own seminars since 2005 and averaging 14-18 per year, multiple tactical conferences (my first appearance at the Rangemaster TacCon in two blocks I had 130 people alone), and teaching at my Professor’s BJJ academy running the Fundamentals class as well as being the main fill in when he is gone since 2010, the closest I can get to any kind of estimate is over 7,000 individual students. It may be more because I was a bit conservative figuring this out, but I don’t think I can get any closer to the definitive number. I certainly have the potential to have done more than that, and maybe have even broken the 10k barrier, but I cannot be sure.

The problem with not keeping better numbers is that I never intended to be an instructor! I was concerned with my own growth in performance and I only thought of that. The single reason I started teaching was that Vunak convinced me that teaching was a good way to get better at my own understanding and performance, so I started with that. Not because I wanted to be a teacher (mostly because I did not think I was good enough or had the time in to take that step) or intended to have any longevity in that, but so I could get better at fighting. So my training logs – especially well into the 2000’s – did not have a ton of entries on the details of my teaching as far as student numbers (most of those entries were about WHAT I taught). Even the first handful of seminars I taught under my own banner seemed to be more of a short time, one or two off type thing, and not something I would be sustaining 15 years later. I wish I was more farsighted and kept better track. But all I can do is estimate.

It is funny to look back now and see the personal growth. I have come to cherish my opportunity to teach. I started with selfish intentions but ended up loving being a coach. The chance to maybe make someone’s life better – even in a tiny, tiny way – is such a blessing that it can be at times breathtaking. I will never be known as the baddest fighter on the planet, but an individual thanking me for teaching them something positive in their life is eminently more satisfying.