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.

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.

One of the final mental tweaks we have to make to ensure our jiu-jitsu is completely prepared for realistic self-defense is to understand what we mean when we talk about “submissions”.

Quite simply, there is no such thing as a submission. Every single finishing move we do is exactly that – a FINISHING move. It may be a choke that renders the other person unconscious within 2-5 seconds, or it may be an arm attack that snaps the elbow or dislocates the shoulder, or a leg attack that destroys the knee and leaves the opponent writhing in immense agony. It may very well be a slam to the earth that acts as the strongest strike possible, or a throw that does as much damage as a joint attack. The underlying principle is that we are able to do so much injury to the opponent that he will end his violent actions against us.

So what then are we doing in training? Obviously, we cannot do these things to our training partners, or we will be out of partners within the first session. What we do, in order to practice finishing techniques over and over so that we instill the automaticity we need to pull them off when we are in the middle of a chaotic criminal assault, is to do the move right up to the point of no return and no further. That point is signaled to us by our partner by “tapping out” – i.e. he taps our body or the mat at least three times quickly and loudly. At that moment, we can release the hold and discontinue our further forward movement. And then, both of you can go right back to it and try again.

The tap is nothing more than an admission by our partner that he can do nothing else, and if the training continues, he will be severely injured or go unconscious. We are not doing a move to get a tap! We are trying to do something overwhelming to the other guy and he lets us know that he concedes he is helpless and we CHOOSE to stop. This is a simple concept that anyone who has done jiu-jitsu for even a short period in a legitimate academy knows. It is instilled in you quickly since you are responsible for both the safety of your partner as well as yourself.

So why do I write this and take extra note of it? This is not for the BJJ practitioner, but rather for the guy who is about to start. And truthfully, it is a gentle way to let the interwebz combat and self-defense experts know that they are being as ignorant as children when they try to push the pathetic trope that somehow, if you do “sport” jiu-jitsu, that when you do it for real, the bad guy will tap and you will unconsciously release your hold only to find yourself at the criminal’s continued attack because he fooled you. There has never been one documented instance of that every happening anywhere. The self-defense gurus love to talk about such-and-such situation where someone did it, but they never seem to be able to produce video, police documentation, or even names. There is also the Krav Mage types who love the fake video of the guy doing an armbar in a parking garage and while he is holding the arm, the other guy pulls a knife and starts stabbing. Their “proof” it happens is a fake video! The actual version is this video will be the screaming of the bottom guy as his elbow is destroyed a soon as the top guy’s back hits the floor – about 1 second. Not only will he not have time to get a knife out and start stabbing, he won’t have time to make a move towards it, and even if he had started to draw before the break, he will do nothing but thrash around in abject pain as his whole world now revolves around the shattered bone and tendons.

Quite simply, it won’t happen with someone authentically training under the eye of a knowledgeable BJJ instructor. Every single attack in jiu-jitsu is taught from the beginning as a finish, and not a “hold”. Even in competition, both participants before a match are reminded that they should not release a lock until the referee tells them to, regardless of the other person tapping. It is in the IBJJF (International Brazilian Jiu-jitsu Federation) rulebook that you specifically DO NOT release just because you feel a tap. It is for the referee to decide.

So for the person contemplating a step in to the wonderful world of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu – Just keep in mind that we don’t look for submissions; we look for finishes.

A lot of people in the jiu-jitsu community that want to push the self-defense aspect of our art like to quote the legendary Grandmaster, Carlson Gracie who once famously said “if you take a black belt, and punch him, he becomes a brown belt”. It is a good pithy phrase to get someone to consider that just because you can roll and spar does not automatically translate completely over to self-defense.

And it is true on a very, very superficial level. The problem is that people who like to quote this phrase forget to add the rest of what Carlson Gracie said. What he then said was that if had that same black belt spend a little time dealing with strikes, he stayed at a black belt level when he encountered them for real. That is a far, far cry from some damning admonition to not do competition jiu-jitsu. Carlson was a huge proponent of “sport” jiu-jitsu, and his team was considered the top one in the late 80’s and into the late 90’s. He loved it, and thought it was a vital component to being truly good at jiu-jitsu.

What he was trying to remind people was that you needed to have some specificity of training that you went through to make sure you could handle anything that came your way. If you never ever worked against the authentic energy of someone punching you, the sheer shock of it happening could derail your response. The first time you get a sense of what it feels like to get hit should not be when your life in on the line. The same goes for weapons. It is not a hard skill to build in the ability to actively monitor for someone trying to deploy a handgun or knife, unless the very concept has never crossed your consciousness until the moment when you are looking down the barrel of a pistol.

At some point, you need to work the concept in a physical manner until you build some familiarity with it. That does not mean you have to spend years only working grappling against weapons or strikes. The vast majority of our time can actually be spent in a healthy, fun, safe, and productive way by just doing our normal training that we generally do in the academy. Once you have got a real grasp on it (perhaps by doing a training course like Craig Douglas’ ECQC) just carve out a small percentage – say one hour for every 20-30 hours of “normal” training. This is enough to maintain proficiency and to keep the groove greased. This is especially true if you take into consideration all the little things I have already written about in this series. Maybe once a month, get together with a handful of training partners on a Sunday and do two or three hours of full on training with weapons, strikes, and even multiple opponents involved. The other two to three times a week can be left to your regular BJJ schedule.

Here is an example of working weapons concepts directly into a standard BJJ paradigm:

And just as I brought up in the article on the dangers of hyperfocusing, jiu-jitsu is not the only art that is guilty of not doing enough specific training. In actuality, the gun community is far worse because there is rarely any oppositional resistance of any kind. If we need to make sure our grappling has some direct experiential connection with weapons and strikes, shouldn’t our weapons work have some of the same with regards to the oppositional part?