What are the best self-defense techniques for real-life situations?
When too many people have too much invested you are not going to get honest answers. Unfortunately, the self-defense industry is like many political parties or religions there is little collaboration or coexistence.
I would recommend for people starting this journey to not fall into the trap of adopting, defending, or representing any martial art.
The commonly understood definition of self-defense is to protect oneself using force or fighting. The dictionary defines it as countermeasures that involve defending the health and well-being of oneself from harm.
There is a phrase “left of boom”. It’s a military idiom that refers to the U.S. military’s effort to disrupt insurgent cells before they can build and plant bombs.
In the book of the same title, it details the experiences of Doug Laux, who served for eight years as an undercover case officer for the CIA, first in southern Afghanistan and later in the Middle East, particularly Syria.
The left of boom concept means getting ahead of terrorist activities before attacks occur. It requires proactive and innovative strategies to include targeted transaction monitoring, vigilance, and situational awareness.
Essentially the good guys document all the moments that led up to a boom moment for future use in spotting patterns and making predictions. Let’s outline the important elements of a good self-defense program.
- How critical is fitness in self-defense?
- Understanding how predators choose their victims
- How to develop situational awareness skills?
- How can you improve your verbal conflict de-escalation skills?
- How can I move through high-risk environments?
- How do you manage fear?
- How to spot pre-attack indicators?
- How do you recognize Pre incident indicators?
- What is the psychology of violence?
- What is the effective use of force skills?
- First aid or trauma remediation
How To Use The Left of Boom Concept?
Using the left of boom concept we will turn our self-defense outline into a timeline by inverting it to create a threat timeline with the boom in the middle.
Most people spend 100% of their time in one of the areas. Most self-defense sources today teach only use of force skills. A few speak on the individual topics at great lengths. Very few discuss how they interrelate to each other as it pertains to you. The use of force skills is just one aspect of a multidimensional event.
Tieing It Into The 4 Top Principles That Determine Your Survivbilty Of a Violent Encounter
Take a look at the research that has been conducted on thousands of violent encounters over 100 years, four basic truths for survival are found in almost all of them. The keys to survival cost almost nothing which is why you don’t hear about them too often.
Top Elements To Survive Violence From Least Important To Most Important
4) 5% Least Important Self Defence Techniques
3) 15% Emotional Desensitization to Violence
2) 30% Conditioning – Cardio, Agility, and Strength (in that order)
1) 50% Most Important Going Home Mindset
These Four Elements of Survival are in order of importance. Number 4 is good to know and 3-1 are essential.
Use of Force Skills In a Life Or Death Event
Yes, chokes’ armbars and submissions and have a place. Our experience is what works best is the objective of shutting down the command and control unit of the threat, the brain. The quickest way to do that is a proficient striking ability. The best way to stop violence is to hit hard.
Win by overwhelming force ending it quickly avoids a protracted fight situation that can give the opponent time to think and get a foothold on you.
Lee Morrison describes it best, “Martial arts is 99% skill where self-defense or combatives is 90% attitude and 10% skill. Martial arts has reciprocal exchange to it, I go, you go, I go. Street violence is 1 sided asymmetrically.” Street violence is; Typically the person who goes first with the most goes home.
With the understanding of what has been discussed in this article, hopefully, you can see what self-defense is and isn’t. A shift of 1 percent of your capacity will change your potential now and your trajectory. You don’t need years of training. You need commitment and regular practice.
Fausto Alarcon is a self-defense instructor with AxxNox Self Defense Training and has been a student of violence-conflict for 40 years to the present day. Fausto specializes in proactive and innovative strategies which include hard target buildup, pre-attack planning, and situational awareness. He has direct experience with violence 1v1, 1v3, 10v10, and has studied Krav maga, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Gutterfighting, MMA, Kickboxing, and edged weapons.
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