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You are here: Home / Archives for Self Defense

How to Drop a Big Guy

May 18, 2016 by Jared Voelker Leave a Comment

In my opinion, the trained martial artist is always going to be able to beat an untrained street fighter.
-Horrible kick boxer I briefly sparred with in college.

A common mistake that martial artists make (and is unfortunately propagated in schools) is to envision easily defeatable attackers. Usually this imaginary attacker is about your height and weight and buckles under the onslaught of your counter attack.

You’ve met this guy, right? You see him when you are working your stuff solo.

If you are an average sized person (ie people don’t consistently talk about how big and tall you are) then preparing for an attacker your size is… risky. What if an attacker is bigger and taller than you?

Something that people don’t often consider is that a person who has a significant weight advantage (think 50 lbs and over) can usually weather hits from a smaller person pretty well. Their mass eats up a lot of the force. If you don’t believe me, go find a big guy and start punching him. You’ll see what I mean.

The gist is, even if you are fit and strong, sometimes it’s just not possible to generate the force needed to take out a big guy like this. The big guy, however, does not have the same problem with you.

What to do?

You need to go internal.

There are a variety of tools and skills you can build that will help generate the power to even the field between weight classes. One such skill is to put your whole body weight into every hit. This requires you to line up your joints so that when a hit is delivered, your body weight transfers through the strike.

To get an idea of what effect this has on the other person, consider the following:

You weigh 155 lbs. If you lift weights, that’s a bar with a 45 lb and a 10 lb weight on each side. Imagine picking up that bar and throwing it at a big guy like a spear. How many people do you think are going to shake off that kind of impact?

The difference between you and the bar is that when the bar hits, all the weight is transferred. When you hit, because you are mostly water and human architecture is more complex is more complex than a steel rod, not all the weight goes through. Lining up your structure for a hit gives you an effect similar to throwing the bar at the person. When it hits all together, it hits hard. If you can transfer your weight through your hit, you can penetrate the larger person’s mass and have serious impact.

The Knockout Striking Package is a five DVD set that will give you exercises to help train your structure so you can deliver whole body power with every shot. It also has tons of information on how to train your hit for maximum impact to give you an edge in a serious attack. Many applications and drills are taught so that you can easily see how to apply these skills.

Filed Under: Self Defense

How Sparring Can Fail You (and what to do about it.)

April 20, 2016 by Jared Voelker Leave a Comment

A lot of times kung fu practitioners catch flak from other stylists who claim that the sparring methods we use aren’t practical.

To fully address this, we have to look at what sparring is.

First, sparring is not fighting. Nothing that we as practitioners do is fighting (unless we’re fighting).

I hope this makes sense.

We have families for goodness’ sake. If we actually fought, as Kuntao practitioners, we would draw blades and end up killing each other.

Unless you’re Musashi, you’re chances of developing skill with this method are slim.

Everything we do from forms, to techniques, to games, and sparring are all isolated pieces of actual fighting. We break down skills and abilities into compartments called drills (or sparring) so that we can build fighting skill without having to actually fight. If you’ve trained all the pieces for fighting, even if in separate compartments, you can put everything together and have serious fighting ability.

The problem is that many stylists (including kung fu practitioners) don’t train all the pieces. These folks sometimes enter exchanges with serious fighters and just can’t hang with them. This results in suspicion regarding kung fu training practices (as it should).

This doesn’t mean that you have to resort to full power bare-knuckle fighting, you just have to plug in the holes in your approach.

Sticky hands is a good example. If all you train is close range sticky hands, there is probably a hole in your ability to navigate a decent entry for someone who is keeping distance and being cagey. It doesn’t mean your sticky hands won’t work, there just might be a hole you need to plug up to round everything out.

Having a complete, well rounded approach to sparring is vital for transferring the skills you practice into real life application.

Complete sparring methods that impart ALL the qualities a practitioner needs to transfer what they do in the school to the street can be difficult to find. That’s why Master Clear developed The Art of Sparring for Self Defense. The two disc set is loaded with information and method for how to adequately pressure test your art for live attack situations.

…and it’s just one of the videos in the Clear Defense Instructor Package that contains everything you need to become a Clear’s Silat Instructor (except the hard work. You have to supply that yourself.)

Stay safe,
Jared Voelker

Filed Under: Self Defense Tagged With: Chinese Martial Arts, Kung Fu, Sparring, Sticky Hands

Self Defense must be Simple, So Why Bother with High Level Skill?

April 14, 2016 by Jared Voelker Leave a Comment

Most folks who have experience in combat and self defense situations, will tell you one thing about your training:

Keep it simple.

These folks realize that, in a live situation, complexity will gum up the works. You need something that will do the job and is as simple as possible.

These two conditions are required for optimal self defense. As you get away from these conditions, your self defense becomes increasingly less optimal.

So if this is the case, what’s the point in spending hours developing complex, high level skills? Why not just stick to what most people would consider simple approaches?

Because as situations grow in complexity, responses must become more advanced.

While it’s true that a handy-dandy eye strike works great for a basic attack from one person, it is not sufficient alone for dealing with two or more attackers, a bladed attacker, someone who has surprised you and has you on the ground, etc…

While the eye strike can still be used, it now has to be used in conjunction with other skills because the situation has become more difficult than what a single technique can deal with effectively.

However, advanced skills are only complex if you haven’t trained them properly.

First, everyone needs a base.

Something that is simple and effective for basic self defense, but can also be a platform for building more advanced skills.

This way, as you’re working on advanced skills that appear complex, you can also feel safe and secure knowing that you’ve got something you know will work for an attack.

As you master those advanced skills, they become ingrained in your body and are no longer complex. They are now simply part of your base and you can begin working on even more advanced skills.

Clear Defense Certification program is designed to do just that.

This program provides a simple, powerful, and effective approach for dealing with attacks.

Once learned, this approach will provide you with a powerful base for building increasingly sophisticated and advanced skills.

We are having a Clear Defense workshop in Maryville, TN on July 14-17. At the seminar, you’ll learn this blistering fighting method, how to use it against a full speed attacker, and how to prevent freezing up during an attack.

The early bird price for this workshop is only good until April 21st

If you can’t make the workshop, get the Clear Defense Instructor DVD Package when it’s on sale April 19 – 21.

Filed Under: Self Defense

Self Defense Positioning for an Attack

April 12, 2016 by Jared Voelker Leave a Comment

Strategic self defense positioning is probably one of the top three most important concepts you have to own if you want to develop high level martial arts skill. It can also be a difficult concept to grasp for many folks.

Unlike ground fighting stylists who spend the majority of their training how to achieve desired positions on the ground, stand-up stylists tend to have less understanding of how to train positioning for stand-up approaches.

What does positioning mean in a broader sense?

Positioning means that you are occupying a piece of space in time (or space-time for you B theorists of time out there) that is optimal for strategic advantage. This means that the place you chose to be was the best place you could have been. It had the greatest defensive and offensive capabilities.

On the macro level, the optimal positioning you can take is to locate yourself far away from the likelihood of attack. This means that you try not to live (position) yourself in a high-crime area, you don’t visit your local abandoned warehouse district in the middle of the night, and you get your gas and groceries during day-light hours when the likelihood of attack is relatively low.

This is macro positioning and is optimal positioning to avoid an attack. You know that friend of yours who is always getting in fights? This is probably his problem. He is probably positioning himself to get in fights (but you already knew that).

If we scale down quite a bit (and skipping a few important ranges as we do), we find ourselves squared up with an attacker. In this situation, positioning comes from controlling distance, how our bodies are aimed at each other, and hand position relative to the attackers.

As the attacker approaches you, are you optimally positioned for how he is coming at you? Are you controlling the distance, the aim of both your bodies, and do you have your hands positioned in the best place to defend and attack?

If not, adjust things. Considering the context of what your attacker is bringing, what would be optimal right now?

Initially you can do start and stop sparring with your partner where you size each other up at a stop to notice where you are position-wise. Then make adjustments to find the optimal position. If you train this, you can begin to position yourself relative to your attacker while moving in real time.
Finally, on the micro level, comes internal positioning. From where you are, is your lower back in its best position for power? As you defend or strike, is your body aligned all the way up through the structure? These considerations absolutely factor into proper positioning and developing high level skill.

Your positioning skill is one of the most critical factor is beating faster stronger opponents.

The Clear Defense Method will teach you exactly how to use position to dominate your opponent.

Learn how to apply this method at the Clear Defense Certification Workshop in July.

…and if you can’t make the workshop, get the Clear Defense Instructor Package when it goes on sale for 3 days. (April 19-21, 2016)

Stay safe,
Jared Voelker

Filed Under: Self Defense Tagged With: Positioning, Self Defense, Self Defense Positioning

Don’t Drink the Kool-Aide (How to Keep It Real in Martial Arts)

April 7, 2016 by Jared Voelker Leave a Comment

We often talk about how an organization can sometimes change the way its members see reality. Being immersed in the culture of any organization tends to change a person, and sometimes the ways a person views the world around them.

If the culture is good, this kind of immersion is great for a person. If the culture is not so good then…

One insidious element that can permeate a martial arts school culture has to do with the reality of street attacks.

No one (I hope) does this on purpose, but the temptation to view street attacks through the artificial lens of a particular art or style is powerful. The result of this split with reality is that people train differently than what is best.

Ever heard of the popular phrase “train the way you fight and fight the way you train?”

The reality is that people “train the way they expect to fight.” Your expectations of what will happen in the street ultimately guide what you end up working on and how hard you work at it.

What happens so often in training is that our perceptions of what will actually happen are slowly obscured over time by our preferences and biases.

  • If you train a lot of grappling, eventually you can develop a bias towards believing that every attacker grapples and doesn’t lead with strikes.
  • If you strike a lot, you can eventually develop a bias towards believing that no attacker is going to grapple you.
  • If you train empty hand, you can forget about guns and knives.
  • If you train patty-cake, you can forget the speed, ferocity, and viciousness of actual attacks.

This happens without anyone noticing, and no school is exempt from the temptation to do this.

Despite the difficulty in overcoming bias, there are a few safeguards to help you avoid drinking the martial art school kool-aide.

First, do brief meditations on being attacked throughout your training. When you do so, sculpt the attacker into someone who is strong, fast, and vicious… and sort of sloppy but in an effective way. Keep in mind weapons and multiple attackers. This is a great way to keep your mind and expectations sharp regarding attacks.

Second, pressure test everything you do. Skimping on this element can get you and your students/classmates in a lot of trouble if they have to use what they’re training in the street. When using pressure testing, work to expose your own weaknesses instead of masking them over with speed. Take your time to make everything solid and powerful.

“The Art of Sparring” is an in depth resource on how to pressure test your art for self defense.

Here are a few examples of the drills & sparring games we teach in that video:

The Art of Sparring is included with the Clear Defense Package that will be on sale for 3 days starting April 19th.

This is just one piece of learning to teacher Clear’s Silat. If you’d like to become a Clear’s Silat instruction check out the Clear Defense Certification Workshop in July.

Stay safe,
Jared Voelker

Filed Under: Self Defense Tagged With: Martial Arts, Self Defense

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