There is a trick some instructors do in the self-defense/tactical community to make their training bio seem more impressive or give them more gravitas in an argument. For want of a better descriptor, that trick can be referred to as “padding the resume”.

The typical way it is applied is this: the instructor, to boost their standing in getting across their point in a debate will say something along the lines of “I have been training / practicing xyz for 20 years”. The other person in the debate, without that level of training, often will then acquiesce to the point. The problem is the instructor has NOT been training in the subject matter in the way he implies.

It comes up quite a bit when firearms trainers discuss unarmed aspects of fighting. Talking about entangled fighting for instance, this kind of trainer will let everyone know he has been doing Brazilian Jiu-jitsu for 20 years so when he says something, it seems proper. However, the truth is not quite as he portrays. What actually has occurred is that the instructor took a weekend BJJ seminar 20 years ago, has watched MMA since then, maybe actually joined a BJJ academy for 3 or 4 months 8 years ago, and just watched a video clip of Craig Douglas showing an aspect of entangled fighting in a weapons based environment.

I submit to you that while the time of 20 years when all that occurred did pass, that is not “training for 20 years” as any reasonable person will view it. What that is, instead, is about half a year of actual training spaced out over 20 years.  When the person on the other side of the debate actually has been consistently and regularly doing BJJ (or MMA, or Sambo, of Muay Thai, or whatever H2H methodology), the argument level is not equal in any way shape or form.

Just as someone who “started hunting when he was 5, did some skeet shooting as a teenager, and then took a CCW class when he was 40” has not been actively training shooting for 35 years the way someone who is on the range and pulling the trigger almost daily is doing it.

Caveat Emptor. Make sure the instructor gives his full bio with details, not just what he wants you to know.

A truly good and in-depth interview talking about using a knife to defend yourself in the real world, and all the issues surrounding it. One of my favorite podcast appearances yet.

Any time we are training in a physical activity where there is oppositional force such as in any of the combat sports, we run into the problem of measurement, specifically in a regular measuring of our performance and whether we are getting better or not.

If we are lifting weights, doing cardio or yoga, or shooting on a range, performance tracking is easy. With strength training, all we have to determine is are we lifting more weight, or more often? With cardio, are we going longer and/or faster? With yoga, are we stretching more, or hitting poses more solidly for longer periods of time. Shooting may be the easiest to track. Are we more accurate/faster than we were the last time we shot? All easily measured and even more easily understood.

But when working against the variable and almost endless possibilities that occur going against someone else, all that measurement becomes more like guesswork and a lot of “well, maybe”. Nothing is more frustrating that working really hard at getting better at a particular move, being able to do it perfectly well in isolation, but never pulling it off when there is resistance. We wonder if it is the move, or us. Actually, there is something more frustrating – when sometimes a move works, but other times, against the same opponent, it does not, and we can’t figure out why! That can border on heartbreaking.

The solution? I don’t know that there is one! Comforting, right? What we can do though is re-orient how we view progress, especially in the macro sense.

One of the things that it is easy to forget is that the person we are training against is working too, and may very well be working as hard and as much as you. We have to remember that while we are getting better, so are they and that can skew our relative view of our performance. Take my personal case as an example. I have 4 regular black belt training partners that are truly my peers. We are all within 10 years of each other in age, close in weight, and have been doing BJJ for close to the same amount of time, and we all train around the same number of hours in a week. When any of us roll against each other, the chance that one of us is going to dominate the other is remote. Occasionally, one of us might pull off someone cool, and be able to fully control the round, or even get the other person to tap. More often, like 98% of the time, the rolls are pretty even. If we were scoring them like a tournament, the typically result is either a close victory 3-2, 5-3, or pretty much a tie 0-0 where one or the other may have gotten an advantage (i.e. “almost a point”). If I focus on how I do with them, I could easily get discouraged. No matter how much I train, unless they stop training totally, I am not going to leap past them.

Instead, the person to focus our measurement against is the newer person, the less experienced guy. Can we get a move on him that we have not gotten before at all? If the answer is yes, more often than not, it means you are getting better. Especially if we are focused on self-defense, then the more accurate gauge anyway is against a person how knows little if any about BJJ, so the newer trainee is more precise in letting us know whether we are better or not.

Another way to look is against someone much superior to us. If that guy for example typically taps us five times in a six minute round, but then we consistently only get tapped two times, then we are better. Is that as much of an ego boost as being able to do something offensive back to them? Well, no, but it is realistic.

To sum up, don’t view your performance on a day to day measure, but rather over a longer period of time, say a month, and focus on what you did against people who you can do stuff against.

“Fine tuning the discus will take several years. You have to really develop a base for it, and then, after about 10 YEARS OF THROWING, you get to the point where you’re REALLY SOLID IN THE TECHNIQUE that you have and you just need to have your little tweaking here and there. ” Stephanie Brown Trafton 2008 Olympic Gold Medalist in the discus

So much deep truth here. This is how you get good. Work the fundamentals over and over for years and years, and then you start to understand them. And ONLY THEN can you change them for you, and only then do you begin to understand it well enough to coach. Contemplate what she says – she undoubtedly as an Olympic athlete trained everyday on her chosen specialty and she still said it took her 10 years to just get technically solid. Not even great. Just the tip of the iceberg. Compare to those who take a weekend certification class in something that they have never done and think they can teach, or that they can comment on social media and even argue with a true subject matter expert.

And I know a ton of people will not get this even after I added the emphasis in the quote.

As someone who strongly advocates BJJ as a backbone art for a good base in self-defense, I am often asked what the benefits are. The obvious one is being able to fight well on the ground. However, BJJ goes far beyond that. One thing is does better than almost any other single activity is getting you mentally and emotionally prepared for the fight.

One of the biggest issues that can occur when you find yourself assaulted is that by definition, things are not going your way. Perhaps we let our situational awareness lapse, perhaps we did not realize that the person we were in range of was a violent criminal actor (VCA) because he was using a ruse, perhaps we happened to be injured or ill at the time of attack, or a myriad of reasons put us in a bad place. Regardless of how we got to that place, said place is going to be uncomfortable – physically, mentally, and emotionally. And, unfortunately, the typical gun-centric range training most of us engage in doesn’t do anything at all to prepare us for that level of pressure. It is just not possible to do so when there is not a living, breathing, resisting opponent who is determined to win and that we must lose.

One solution to this is what is called Force-on-Force training. Typically it uses marking cartridges such as Simunitions or UTM to have a pain penalty that is still safe. The gold standard for this type of training is Craig Douglas’ ECQC course (www.shivworks.com). This is terrifically useful and much needed, but there is a large drawback – it is hard to conduct such training more than once in awhile. Not only is it expensive to have guns that can use these cartridge’s, but the ammo is as well, and you also have to have good protective equipment like good helmets. It also can’t be conducted in too many places outside of a shooting range (while these rounds are not lethal, they do pack a punch and can damage surrounding structures and bystanders quite easily). And on top of all of that, it is incredibly demanding physically. A couple of hours of this kind of training will leave most people exhausted.  Even for top athletes it would be tough to do more than on occasion.

However, the parts that are so valuable – the dealing with a resisting opponent and the physical, mental, and emotional pressures that are needed – can be more easily done in a BJJ academy. In every single moment you are on the mats there, you are going to be dealing with this type of situation. In a very short period of time, getting squashed underneath someone who outweighs you by 80 pounds becomes just another day.  It does not exactly become ho hum, nor does it become comfortable. But it does help you lose the sense of dread and helplessness, and that feeling is something that stays with you no matter what, and that you will be able to draw on when you are being attacked for real. And the best part is that because the pressure can be adjusted in training,  you can work like this hours at a time, day after day and be no worse for the wear.

I have said multiple times that BJJ gives the multi-disciplinary thinking tactician more bang for the buck than any other modality out there. Period. And getting comfortable with being uncomfortable is one of the, if not the single most useful.

I am asked all the time on advice in finding a coach that can mentor someone in their journey to mastery. I did this video to go through some of my thoughts on the issue.

A lot of people have questions regarding the best strength and conditioning work for the specific purpose of being prepared to defend yourself.  If that includes you, do yourself a favor and watch this. It is one of the most useful podcast interviews you will ever see.