I, along with my peers like Craig Douglas, Paul Sharp, Chris Fry and a few others, have been talking about the need to be able to integrate empty hand fighting methods, especially grappling, alongside firearms use for self-defense for decades. Over that time, a number of people have tried to argue that the entangled weapons fight does not happen, especially for civilians. They will try to get the idea across that somehow criminals never touch or come close to their victims, and all criminal assaults happen at distance.

Fortunately, with the prevalence of the internet and the information age and the ubiquity of video, we know how wrong that argument is. I have literally hundreds of videos showing that the entangled weapons fight, even for private citizens, happens fairly frequently. Here is a recent example. I like this video for a couple of reason. Number one, it happened this month, and number two, it happened in my city. As a matter of fact, it happened about a block away from the former location of my jiu-jitsu instructor’s academy., where I spent a lot of time, right round the same time of day this assault occurred.

Take note of a few things.

1. Everyone likes to pretend that they “never let someone get too close to them”. In today’s society, there is not a chance of that being true. How do you get off a public bus and not let someone get too close? Are you going to yell “BACK OFF!” to someone behind you? You know what happens after that? The police come by and interview you and possibly arrest you for either disturbing the peace, or some version of assault. You simply don’t have the right to personal space that trumps public interaction. You will be within double arm’s distance of other people – including strangers – more often than not. Pretending otherwise is delusional.
2. Take a look at how many other people were around. There were two within touching distance when the attack started. You can even see they looked and saw what was going on and they kept walking. You cannot count on outside help, nor can you assume that the bad guys won’t attack just because there is a crowd.
3. Note how the very first thing the initial attacker did was grab onto the victim. That is a classic clinch position, and in fact one in which jiujitsu players spend a lot of time dealing with. And if you think about it, starting that way makes perfect sense. He had a contact weapon – the knife – and so he had to be in contact for it to have the intimidation value. Even if he had a pistol, how effective is it to stand at 10 yards away to mug someone? “Hey you, put your wallet and phone down on the ground and move away” does not work particularly well, because if it did, bad guys would be doing that all the time. Instead they move in because that is the best way to succeed. They must exert enough control over the victim to get what they need, and physical control is easier and quicker. That attachment between attacker and victim happens time and again, more often than not.
4. Note how easily and quickly the fight goes to the ground. Also note how obvious it was that NEITHER side tried to go to the ground. This was not a grappling trained attacker fighting a grappling trained defender, but the consequence of fighting for your life when you don’t know how to NOT go to the ground. The typical advice to “not go the ground” is useless and moronic when you don’t put the time into learning how to stay on your feet. We all trip and fall just walking around normally at some point. Why does no one just say “never trip and fall”? Because it is obviously a stupid thing to say. Well, “don’t go to the ground in the street” is just as idiotic.
5. Observe how hard it was for the defender to get back to his feet. Again, the typical keyboard warrior advice to “just get up” is shown to be vapid. If you don’t know, it is only dumb luck that can help, or the incompetence of the attackers. They also had gotten what they wanted and were less interested in continuing, which was a blessing for the good guy. Otherwise, it may have been far worse.  Also  observe that as he runs away, if the attacker had a gun, there is a good chance the good guy would have been shot multiple times as he fled. Just running away may not be the best answer.

To sum up, the entangled fight in real life happens again and again, whether weapons are involved or not. You can try to ignore that at your peril.

John Johnston – the host of Ballistic Radio – and I recently had a terrific conversation about some rarely talked about topics in the training community. We covered how to give critique when you are an instructor, how to not insult training partners and treat them with dignity, and how once you start to see success when you are working to make yourself safer and more capable, the journey itself becomes the path. I thought this was a good use of 45 minutes.

It has become far more popular for a lot of instructors to teach shooting at contact or entangled distances. I am seeing it crop up again and again with new courses popping up all the time.

I am all for this, with the caveat that the instructor has actually put the work in. Rather than just show something that they have given little thought or effort to in order to appear that they are “cutting edge”, or that they have spent zero time exploring in force-on-force scenarios against role players that have the freedom to act as bad guys truly act, as long as the instructor has done the work, I will support them 100%.

Unfortunately, that effort into doing the work is generally overlooked, and replaced with the “well, I have been teaching shooting for 40 years” or “I have been LE for 40 years” or “I was a SOF face shooter in Dirkadirkastan” and they teach incredibly sub-optimal techniques. This area demands as much thought and effort and study as trying to get a sub second draw, or shooting B8s at 25 yards, and anything less is doing the students a complete disservice, and arguably is unethical.

And just having certain components at a high level – i.e. the instructor is an excellent shooter, or is a BJJ black belt – does not meant they will get it. Shooting in an entanglement is its own thing, and requires that the instructor has put time into it, nit just the individual pieces. A couple of years ago, there was a video from two top black belts, both with direct ties to the founders of the art, showing how to shoot at contact. It was atrocious, mostly because while they both are undoubtedly better at BJJ than I am, they have never been shooters. They live in an area where they cannot carry as a private citizen, and have never been in LE or the military, so they have no clue about shooting, which means they have no clue about shooing in an entanglement.

Here is a video showing some explanation of a couple of crucial things to deal with in retention shooting. If an instructor ignores these, than I submit he has not done the work.

One of the insidious problems facing those of us in the self-defense community is that far too many people have an extremely narrow view of what we face when dealing with violent criminal assault. Too many people seem to think that said assault will look a certain predictable way, and base their training plans on that assumption.

If you think I am exaggerating, then let me repeat some clichés that get tossed around in the training community to prove it.

“The gunfight will be 3 rounds at 3 yards and last no longer than 3 seconds”. This is a popular one. People love to repeat this one, and use it to justify their own level of competence. The problem is that these numbers are an average at best, and what seems to be lost is that an average is just a line that is even between all the results (pedantically speaking, that is actually a median, but everyone tends to think of average this way regardless). Which means that there is an equal number of instances where the numbers are greater than 3 – longer distance, more rounds, and longer time, as well as an equal number of scenarios where they are less – i.e. closer than 3 yards, less than 3 rounds and shorter time than 3 seconds. And that there are very, very few instances that actually take place at that mid-line result, which means if you are training to that standard, it will almost never arise!

Another one in particular that annoys me badly is this: “All fights start on your feet”. This was created and has taken on a life because of the pushback to the demonstrated real world success of grappling. It serves to make those who cannot grapple and are not willing to put their ego aside to get some training in it feel better and smug about not grappling.  It sounds reasonable at first. Except for the salient fact that no, in all actuality, not all fights start on your feet. Many, many of them begin elsewhere. We can easily search for documented incidents, including videos where violent situations begin in a car or a bus, or a restaurant booth, or a barstool, an airplane seat, or even when the victim is lying down. To make the huge assumption that all attacks will only begin when we are standing upright is to set us up for failure at the moment when we cannot afford to fail.

Take a look at this bus driver. Note where the fight started.

And not to let grapplers off the hook – they don’t get a free pass. They can be susceptible to this as well. The one that is particularly egregious is the “well, I know that move (something inverted or a guard pull or something along those lines) is fine for competition and training but it is not a street move”. Again, this is a false assumption that the attack will be starting on our feet in a wide open parking lot by someone who looks like a bad guy that we see coming from 50 yards away. There are those, sure, but far more are the ones that don’t fit there. Just as I talked about above where you are an Uber driver and your passenger decides to assault you for your Iphone that is prominently displayed on the dashboard, or the bus driver attacked while in the driver’s seat. Guess what? Inverted moves where you are in a 360 degree environment and can put your feet on seats and dashboards and car roofs make those moves incredibly effective and useful. Or the insipid advice to never pull guard. What if the attack happens on a icy or rain slicked surface? Ever tried to maintain footing there? You know where you will probably end up anyway? You guessed it. The ground. Where you would have been in a far stronger and more aggressive position if you and pulled guard (and no, this is not me telling everyone to pull guard in a streetfight every time. It is a contextual reason why it may very well be a really smart tactic, not a universal one).

To sum up, don’t assume how your fight is going to look. Take a realistic view of how fights may plausibly look, and prepare accordingly. Don’t settle for platitudes that accomplish nothing.

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.