https://evosec.libsyn.com/ep-116-cecil-burch-iv-new-jiujitsu-academy-and-npe-counter-robbery-course

I’m a believer that words mean things. To communicate with others we have to be precise with our language. To do otherwise leaves room for misinterpretation, argument, and misunderstanding. While some people might accuse me of being pedantic, I prefer to have clarity in what I say.

 A while ago a lot of people got really upset when I pointed out that the term “stress inoculation”as used in the training community is incorrect. Many of the offended people went after me, including friends who I had never done anything negative to, but they wrote some pretty crappy things.. Nobody could argue my exact point; they just preferred to attack me and my audacity in trying to provide clarity. 

Well I’m going to do it again. Today’s term is discipline. and I’m going to quote the Great Inigo Montoya when he said “I don’t think that term means what you think it means”.

 In the self-preservation training community we love to waive the flag that we have discipline. We point out all the training we may do and say “see I’m disciplined”. The problem is that every example tends to be us doing what we like to do. and that is not discipline at all.

 If you are a shooting instructor or even just an enthusiast, bragging about how you dry fire 5 days a week and spend two hours a week at the range firing 500 rounds has zero to do with discipline. If you are heavily into fitness, and you like to talk about how you are lifting heavy 5 days a week or are getting in multiple hard cardio workouts per week, you are not telling me you are disciplined. If you love jujitsu and perhaps even own an academy (Incoming fire!)telling others that you are disciplined because you are on the mat five to six days a week has exactly zero to do with discipline. 

Here is the dictionary definition (or at least one of them) of discipline: To train or develop By instruction and exercise self-control. Doing what we enjoy has no elements of requiring self-control. That will only come into play when we’re doing something we don’t enjoy. It takes no self control to eat a giant bowl of Braum’s Butter Pecan Ice Cream. It takes enormous self-control to NOT do so. 

 For example, I despise pure cardio work. I simply hate it. It’s boring, repetitive or it’s incredibly draining on my energy. So for me to hit my three to four cardio workouts a week requires a great deal of self-control and effort and willpower to do it. it’s far easier to make an excuse to miss the workout or to say I’ll get cardio just from being on the mat. Those are excuses and rationalizations which means I’m not enjoying what I’m doing.

 If you are an incredibly enthusiastic shooter, but are morbidly obese you don’t need discipline to shoot. You need discipline to eat like an adult. Is that fun? No. it is much more fun to eat Twinkies and fresh out of the oven chocolate chip cookies and butter pecan ice cream from Braum, but that’s not healthy, it’s not good for you and so we have to refrain from going overboard. Not to say we can’t enjoy it at times but we have to exercise discipline to make sure we’re not taking in more calories than we’re burning. We are literally 10,000 times more likely to die from metabolic dysfunction issues (heart attack, stroke, diabetes, cancer), and a good deal of that can be prevented simply by eating with a bit of discipline. 

 So please don’t try to virtue signal that you are disciplined by showing how hard and how often you do your favorite hobby. Show discipline by putting blood, sweat, tears, time and money into doing something you don’t like but you know is necessary, important and needed to actually practice self-preservation.

I am releasing a series of videos on my foundational approach to grappling in a weapons based environment (to use Craig Douglas’ excellent terminology). They look nice and professional no thanks to me, but to my friend Seth who does a great job of making me look smarter than I am.

This is the second one and it is all about building a survival ability when we find ourself on the ground through no intent of our own.

An AAR of one of my courses, Confined Space Combatives, by an antendee.

I was happy that he picked up on the key element of all my courses – that we are starting at a worst case scenario point, as opposed to most seminars/classes where it it all about best case scenario and everything is going your way. I prefer to know in my heart of hearts that I can handle the worst potential situations, because anyhting less drastic becomes a piece of cake.

IAJJ Confined Spaces Combatives After Action Report (2021)

I tend to be overly passionate about trying to help people become more – more safer, more capable, and more dangerous. I realize it sounds a bit too self-righteous, but I cannot think of a better description than I feel it is a calling to teach functional fighting concepts and do it in a way that anyone can benefit from them. Not only does every single person deserve the right and the capability to defend themselves purely for their own intrinsic worth, but also because it makes society as a whole better. When all the good guys can defend themselves from the bad guys, the bad guys lose their power.

I know it can be done. I am living proof. I have no special abilities. In fact, I have a long list of things that hold me back, and they are things that I have lived with all my life. I was born with severe asthma for one. I have been hospitalized for it numerous times, and at least three of those I was close to death. I have a thyroid that from all medical tests say has never worked my entire life. And on and on. We all have excuses, but we also can ignore those excuses and plunge on. It can be done if you do the work.

One thing that continually comes up though is this idea that you “have to get in shape for X”. I hear these things all the time – “I will take a few months to get in shape for BJJ” – Why? Nothing will get you in BJJ shape like actually doing BJJ! Or this one – “I need to spend a couple months working my shooting before taking a pistol class” – again, why? You know how you get better at shooting? Taking a training class! Here is a classic – “I need to get prepped for ECQC” – no; you need to go through ECQC so you can know what you need to do to prep for a fight.

Generally there are two reasons for these excuses.

One, the person genuinely thinks he needs to have some kind of preparation before doing one of these things. This person is afraid of not being able to do something during the training, or looking bad, or not doing well. Guess what? All those things will happen regardless! And who cares? Its training! There is not one legitimate instructor who expects a student to do everything perfectly after being told once. That is not how this works at all. Show up in whatever condition/capability you are currently at, and work to get better. It is a simple process.

The other reason for excuses like these is because the speaker is trying to get himself mentally ready to go and make the commitment. It is easy to put it off – “I need to lose 25 pounds so I am going to start eating right next month” – that is the path to failure. The commitment happens on a daily basis. It is not a thing in and of itself. Each day you say to yourself “I am going to do this” and the next day you have to repeat it. Your mind does not acclimate and make it easier. There is no magic line in the sand where it just happens. YOU have to make it happen, every day.

So what do we do? JUST START. TODAY. I don’t care what, or how much, but start right now. Don’t know how to start? Cool. Here are some suggestions.

1) Find a video on how to do basic BJJ movements (I have a number on my my YouTube channel). Learn how to do a hip escape or a hip lift and do it for one minute. Tomorrow, do it for one minute. And the next day. When you feel up to it, add time or moves.

2) Watch a video on how to do a burpee. Then do it for a minute. And every day repeat. No equipment, no gym membership, no travel.

3) Spend a couple dollars on the e-book version of Annette Evans Dry Fire Primer book. Then dry fire tonight for one minute (are you starting to see the jist?).

There are tons more you can do. The point being to just start right now, and do what you can, with what you have, for as long a time as you can, and don’t quit.

I was recently listening to a podcast with a couple of gun writers and they were talking about snub revolvers. They were hammering on a particular point that gets a lot of play in the gun community and that for the most part I don’t have any issue with. However there is some Nuance there and said nuance rarely gets addressed, so I’m going to take a couple moments and bring that to the forefront.

 The point they were making is that a snub is an expert’s gun, and looking at their simplified view they are correct. The problems typically brought up to support that argument is that the sights are suboptimal, the guns are difficult to grip well, the triggers tend to be awful, and punishing recoil makes them unpleasant to shoot. All of these tend to be true IF we are only looking at a select and specific type of snub. Without a doubt for the last 20 to 30 years the most prolific, most used and most encountered snub is one of the Smith & Wesson j-frame 38 specials airweights, usually typified by the 642, 638, for Model 36. Stock out of the box and coming directly from the factory, all the above criticisms are manifestly expressed in these guns. 

And while these guns for a long time were the most ubiquitous, they by no means today are necessarily so. Moreover, all of the above criticisms have already been addressed or can easily be addressed by the end user if they expand their view of snubs.

 A few months ago I wrote an article talking about how easy it is to find a perfect aftermarket grip that can be installed in minutes by anyone. This is one of the easiest fixes to a snub, and some of the newer ones come from the factory with better grips anyway. While it can be a pain to try to shoot a typical out of the box grip, it is dead simple to make monumentally better. 

As well, many of the newer snubbies have either better sights as is (for example the Kimber K6) or have sights that are pinned and are as easily replaced as grips. On my personal Ruger LCR I replaced the front sight with the green fiber optic and it took me less than 5 minutes and only one punch  and immediately the sight picture was exponentially better and more functional.

 Most factory triggers are not great on any gun (not just snubs) produced today. While there are exceptions these tend to be just that: exceptions. But on many of the snub revolvers produced today the triggers are substantially better. Again, the Kimber k6 is a standout example of this, and while my LCR had a reasonably okay trigger out of the box, with a bit of dry fire and live fire it has smoothed out to the point where most people who shoot it ask me what gunsmith I sent it to and are shocked when I tell them that’s the factory trigger. 

 As far as recoil, there’s not much that can be done to a small airweight in 38 Special. It is just not pleasant. My preferred carry load in that situation are 148 grain wadcutters at standard velocity,  but even they are not fun to shoot. They are merely tolerable. The great news is however that we are not stuck with only 38 Special as the only caliber available. We can drop down to smaller calibers and with modern loads such as Federal Punch or Buffalo Bore combined with well placed shots we lose very little and functional power, but what we gain more than offsets that little loss. 

One hugely important thing we gain is that they become enjoyable to shoot, and the dirty secret of practice is that a gun that is enjoyable to shoot is a gun that we go out of our way to shoot and practice with again and again. And that extra and focused work leads to mastery in performance, so even if the caliber we’re shooting is a third less effective than a 38 special or 9 mm, we are far more likely to put the bullets exactly where they’re supposed to go. Which equates to a substantially greater chance of the rounds doing what we need them to do when we need them to do it. 

 For those with physical issues such as extreme arthritis or hand injuries, we also gain the ability to shoot the gun effectively in a way which we can never do with the larger caliber guns. Again, shooting something that we enjoy and does not bring pain or extended discomfort means we will spend far more time shooting and practicing. 

 Another important game is greater capacity. The Smith & Wesson J frame in 38 Special is a five shot. My Ruger LCR in 32 holds six rounds, and many 22 caliber snubs hold as many as eight rounds. A substantial Improvement in capacity in the same size package means I have more options and versatility in my carry plan. 

There are a few people besides myself that have been playing with this concept the past few years. Darryl Bolke of Hardwired Tactical, Chuck Haggard of Agile Training, and Rhett Neumyer of Demonstrated Concepts have all been working on this paradigm and we all have similar conclusions, including the realization that with these smaller caliber snubs, even novices can become good and functional defensive shooters fairly quickly, and enjoy the experience. If you select the right snub in the right caliber, they are no longer “expert’s guns”.