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.

This is a tough video to watch, not so much for the actual outcome since the deputy came out alright, but for what could have been a far worse and more violent ending. However, it is an incredibly important video to view, because it so succinctly illustrates a point I have been screeching about for over fifteen years.

It does not matter who brings the gun to the fight. The person who controls the entanglement owns the gun. Period. It does not matter how fast or accurate you are, what kind of holster you run, or how awesome the gunsmithing that has been done to the pistol. None of that matters if you cannot win an entangled fight.

Watch how the deputy has zero control over what is going on. The criminal dictates every single thing that happens, including where it moves to, and when or if it goes to the ground. Then take careful note of when the deputy brings the pistol into the altercation, and how immediately the attacker snatches it away. The attacker had complete control and it was literally like taking candy from a baby. The deputy was utterly helpless. The only thing that saved her life was either luck that the gun malfunctioned , and that the attacker after he got the gun turned down his intensity and drive and seemed to slow down his movements and did not aggressively pursue her. The deputy had nothing else on her side because all she could do at that moment was run.

Think about this video the next time you hear someone say something along the lines of “if you try to wrestle me, I will just shoot you” or that the way to beat the jiu-jitsu practitioner or other grappler is to just get a weapon out. Would it have mattered what weapon was introduced there? Would a knife, a sap, or OC spray matter at all in that moment? The answer is simple. No, the outcome would have been the same. What gun-centric people fail to realize is that getting a weapon out is a fairly obvious thing in general, and if the other person is so dominating the fight that your only solution is to go to the tool, then they will see it with plenty of time to take advantage and assume the control of it. You may get it out and be able to use it. After all, the Hail Mary pass in football does work. Well, at least once in blue moon. Not exactly the kind of odds I prefer to stake my life on.