12
« on: April 29, 2010, 01:24:53 PM »
*******
Training Sports Based Martial Arts As Reality Based Self Defense
Among the great debates of the modern martial arts era is what if any the mixed martial arts events have had on reality based martial arts training. There are legions of people who left traditional martial arts to flock to sports based martial arts. The art most well known due to the early success of the UFC's was Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or as it is more commonly known, BJJ. There has been an explosion of BJJ in the United States, there was a time that the number of Black Belts could be counted on one hand, and most of them were related. The past decade though has seen the popularity and accessibility of BJJ grow in leaps and bounds. From BJJ training grew schools and clubs more directly involved with Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) training. As opposed to BJJ, MMA is more concerned with the complete combat game not just the grappling portion of it. MMA generally consists of a few core training methods borrowed from other martial arts, and sports such as wrestling, sambo, judo, muay Thai, and boxing. All of these sports are considered performance based, which essentially means, excellence in the sport is the highest achievement.
Just as the popularity of this type of training grew, so did another training concept, that of Reality Based Martial Arts (RBSD). RBSD is at best training that takes in the whole of defense. Dealing with street psychology, de-escalation, weapons awareness (including firearms), and tactical considerations. It is heavily influenced by WWII combatives and straightforward and simple training methods and techniques.
The major philosophical distinction between these two training methods, sport training and RBSD training is the reason to train. RBSD training is specifically for the intent to defend oneself, sport training has defense as an ancillary benefit.
Both RBSD and sport based training when trained in the manner they are generally taught have large holes in their training methods which peculiarly tend to be addressed by the other. For example RBSD training tends to lack realistic contact and resistance training, sport training has this is spades but lacks weapon awareness, which RBSD training offers.
The purpose of this article is not to examine point by point the shortcomings of each method of training but to instead offer training strategies to help bridge the gap between these two seemingly polar opposite worlds.
I am a sports based trainer who teaches reality based self defense. On both sides of the fence there are people who will gasp at the very notion that these two things can coexist. As a matter of opinion I believe that they coexist very well, only helping my students to train better, smarter and prepare them to defend themselves.
We first have to dismiss the idea that sports based training has nothing to do with RBSD, in fact it has a lot to do with it. The combatives of the early part of this century were for the most part influenced by sports, Judo in particular. Judo is a sport though that with a little thought and effort becomes a formidable combative tool. Conflict takes place on many stages, the emotional, psychological, and physical. The physical stage is the one we are most familiar with and for the most part concerned with. We need to effectively deal with this stage to be able to defend ourselves. Being emotionally and psychologically equipped for battle but lacking the tools and abilities does you no good. We need to also have tools that address different levels of conflict. A firearm is a great tool when deadly force is needed but does little to help with an aggressive bar patron or hostile woman in the parking lot of your local grocery store. Just as the law enforcement community has realized that there are levels of use of force and reasonable responses to them we too have to come to this realization. Not every fight will be life and death. We have to be able to have a response for these differing situations. We cannot approach every encounter as life or death, we can always be aware that it may become a life or death struggle, but it can also go the complete opposite way.
Sport training provides a great amount of physical tools to deal with most unarmed and in some cases armed attackers. Even better than the tools provided is the environment in which they are polished. Generally speaking these environments are ones where two people attempt to actually defeat the other using skills learnt in class at real speed and with full resistance. Simply by having the experience of using the skill in this environment will help the sport trained fighter when he has to do the same on the street against yet another uncooperative person who also wants to physically dominate.
It is here where we must branch off for a moment as many reading this will think that "sure a sports fighter can punch or kick, so what happens when a knife is pulled?" and these people are right, the sports fighter may not be prepared for this eventuality as he may still have a certain connotation of what a fight is, and that idea may be far different from the person he is fighting. This is a distinct limitation of sports fighting. The fact that weapons are rarely introduced in technique, or even more rarely in sparring. RBSD training prepares the person for this eventuality, what I believe it does not prepare them for is how to adequately persevere in the encounter.
It is important to distinguish between training techniques and training methods, I will argue that the method of training is far more important than the techniques being trained. It does little good to know the theory behind a punch and be unable to use it against a resisting opponent. Technique refers to a physical tool. Training method refers to the way that tool is learnt. Both must exist, but the training method will determine the success of the tool. If you have realistic training methods you will quickly find which tools work and which do not. You will also find which tools work well for you and not other and vice versa. Martial arts is replete with techniques that simply do not work, they may have worked for one person one time but no one else. But due to the reliance on technique and not training method people continued to practice them placing faith in the tool and excusing lack of effectiveness on the practionner not the tool.
One point of continuous contention is that of ground fighting. The view that the RBSD community has no place for ground fighting is a flawed view in my mind. I believe the RBSD practioners readily admit that ground fighting is as important part of the fighting arsenal as any other. That being said they also would be the first to say it should not be the first response to a situation as well as the oft repeated warnings of broken glass, syringes, and generally unkempt sidewalks in major urban sprawl.
There is though an extremely important part of ground fighting that both schools of thought should agree on. That is the importance of learning how not to go to the ground and how to get back up when you find yourself there. Being on the ground in a fight is not the place you want to be. As discussed earlier you often don't get the chance to dictate and you may find yourself on the ground and it is here that having ground fighting skills will come into play. You may know 1001 dirty tricks, including biting, scratching and poking eyes, but the person on top can do all the same and more. You need more than simply tricks you need to have an ability to dominate position. The place you learn to dominate position in by grappling in class on a mat. I guarantee you that if you can dominate in the class you can dominate on the street. You do not need to ignore the eye jabs, and biting, etc. you simply need to see these as secondary to the situation at hand.
I teach students to fight in a clinch; the clinch is a position where two people are entangled together trying to control the other person normally through use of holding the other person. The clinch is a position which many people will find themselves in time and time again and which needs to be trained. Unfortunately trainers will often dismiss the clinch as "grappling" or "suicide" due to the close proximity the people are to each other. In a perfect world we will not be near our attackers, we will in fact be miles away in our homes relaxing and watching a good movie on TV. Alas this is not the perfect world and our wishes and desires often bear no resemblance to the situation at hand. Environment dictates solution; this is a mantra to meditate on. We must have solutions that will work in various environments. We have to take the time to understand that if we only train in advantageous positions we are only cheating ourselves. There is a desire it seems to ignore "bad" situations, such as fighting from close range while being held on to, as it may be seen as sporting, due to the fact that sports fighters use this range quite effectively, but they do so for a reason, due to it's very effectiveness.
I mention the clinch specifically because it seems a position that is often ignored at peril. I will not go into the mechanics of fighting from the clinch for the armed individual as it would be beyond the breadth and scope of this article but the position does provide one with a the ability to both control the attacker and control the attackers ability to use weapons. "Hands Kill"; it is heard in every police academy class throughout the nation, it was drilled into me. The armed professional wants to see the hands, and control the hands. The clinch is a position in which even if we lose visual reference of the hands we can still control them. The RBSD student can easily take a wrestling drill such as pummeling and learn effective hand and arm control while also being aware of the potential for weapons. This training is especially effective for law enforcement as it bridges the gap between the pat down/handcuffing and the subject becoming resistive.
The clinch is an example of a sport training method that is easily adapted to RBSD training. It in itself is neither intended for sport or combat it is intended instead for teaching to deal with someone attempting to grab and control you. The technique is neutral the method and reasoning you use to train it is the important concept.
The sad fact is that many people dismiss the training tools of the others due to lack of understanding of just what people are trying to accomplish. I feel that the onus truly lies with the RBSD instructors as these people (myself included) promote self-defense as the primary purpose of what they do. Those of us who teach RBSD have to take into account that the sport fighters' primary purpose is not to fight on the street, and yet they manage, all things being equal, to do far better than the RBSD proponent in unarmed combat. By and large they are unprepared for weapons, and though they seldom work against multiple attackers, they still seem to completely dominate the world of hand to hand combat.
We must not fall into the trap of thinking that though they can fight without weapons due to the fact we are armed we will automatically prevail, and therefore offer a better solution. If we cannot prevail in the empty hand portion of combat it is unlikely we will have the ability to escalate to weapons. We have to ask ourselves honestly how many times we've trained with little in the way of protective equipment while someone tries, really tries to attack us. For those of us who do, we then have to ask how many of us have then attempted to access weapons, and deploy them. It can be done certainly, but it can be done far easier if we have more control in the fight and our not off put by the attack. If we can fight standing, if we can fight in the clinch, if we can fight on the ground then we are simply giving ourselves more chances.
We have to dismiss this idea of sport fighting as men in tights who fight in a cage and instead think of them as people who have achieved the height of ability in a certain field of combat. Rather than be threatened by them, we need look to them to provide us with valuable information on just what works best in the realm of personal unarmed combat. This does not mean we abandon reality training, it simply means we look at the situation critically and accept that someone out there may be doing a better job at one certain task. I would not ask a UFC fighter his opinion on how best to deploy a weapon in a fight but I would not hesitate to ask him how best to free my hands from a clinch so that I may deploy the weapon. The difference is subtle but not to be overlooked.
Show Posts
