Scenario Training: Are You Teaching Your Students to Fail?

(Courtesy of TDA Training)

How do you prepare for an attack outside of the dojo or gym?

While training in class, we’re surrounded by friends in a controlled environment. We’re assured that we won’t be seriously harmed while practicing our techniques against one another. We take precautions, like protective gear and floor mats to help guarantee our safety. While everyone is instructed to ‘control’ their attack in order to prevent injury.

However, on the ‘street,’ its another story; there’s no safety equipment, no rules, no precautions, and our attacker’s full intention is only to harm us. This means that the self-defense techniques that we practice in the comforts of the dojo or gym may look and feel much different when we have to apply them for real.

The difference, of course, is stress. In class, we are allowed, even encouraged, to make mistakes. If a given technique doesn’t work, we may simply restart and try again. Our instructors and fellow students are hopefully supportive and give us advice to help us improve.

In a real situation, there is no second chance. You can’t count on anyone being around to help or support you. If your technique fails, you better have a back-up plan or you’re going to be in serious trouble.

The anxiety of being in this sort of situation causes an adrenal-stress reaction in the body. In order to help you survive the encounter, your body releases adrenaline into your system, causing your heart to pump faster, your lungs to take in more oxygen, your nervous system to feel less pain, your vision to narrow, and any unnecessary body functions (like digestion) to shut down.

In order to account for this type of reaction, many schools practice “scenario training;” where they try to mimic the conditions of an actual attack. The purpose of this type of training is to create a stressful situation so that the students’ can prepare for their body’s natural reactions to the environment.

The students are often further challenged by surprises during the scenario. The ‘attacker’ may suddenly produce a weapon, move in an unexpected direction, or be joined by an accomplice. The drill forces students to respond to unanticipated circumstances.

While scenario training is an excellent tool for getting people to deal with the realities of combat, it’s also the cause of the #1 training mistake that most instructors make.

The problem is that this type of training is often used too soon, before the student has a solid grasp of the way the techniques should be used.

Many instructors, in their zeal to prepare their students for the ‘real world’ neglect to first provide them with a solid foundation. The students are overloaded by the difficulty of the situation and its potential obstacles.

This is a lot like teaching someone to swim by throwing them into the deep end of a pool. Under the stress of drowning, a person might somehow learn to flail their way over to the edge of the pool, but he or she won’t really understand how to swim.

That person wouldn’t be able to win a swimming competition or save themselves if they fell out of a ship at sea. They simply wouldn’t have the skills necessary to excel at swimming.

Furthermore, this type of training could actually backfire, making the person more afraid of water than they were before the training.

Like swimming, self-defense training is best done by slowly acclimating the students to the environment. In a good swim class, students are given plenty of time to get used to the water. They are taught how to place their face in the water, how to float, and how to swim before they are ever allowed to enter the deep end of the pool.

Self-defense needs to be taught in much the same way.

First, the technique needs to be demonstrated and explained. Students should focus on learning the movement correctly and not yet bother with possible contingencies. Potential problems can be addressed after the technique has been properly learned.

Once the student can accurately perform the technique, it should be rehearsed over and over until it becomes ingrained into the muscle memory. The student must practice until he or she is able to react to an attack without thought.

Focus mitts, bagwork, shadow boxing and kata are all great training drills for improving our ability to use techniques without having to think about what we are doing. In this way, we learn to move naturally, without hesitation.

Light partner drills are also beneficial. They allow students to get used to striking or grabbing an actual person. As the student’s ability begins to improve, the partner may begin slowly increasing resistance against the attack.

It’s important to train carefully. If either partner is injured in the gym, they will be less able to defend themselves on the street. At this point, partners should only allow one another to ‘get a feel’ for the attack without having to struggle.

Next, comes the most enjoyable part of self-defense training. The instructor should now ask, “What could go wrong?”

This is where our training becomes much like a game of chess. The goal is to anticipate the ways our attacker might respond to our techniques and develop ways of countering them.

Together, the instructor and students explore the ways that their technique might be foiled. They then try to prepare for these problems and address different ways for dealing with them.

Since everyone has different strengths and weaknesses, each person needs to develop their own individual strategy for handling these issues. What works well for a short person may become a liability for a taller person. A response that makes sense for a grappler might not be a good idea for someone who prefers striking.

In the end, everyone needs to have at least one or two alternative options in case their technique doesn’t’ work as planned.

In addition, combat principles such as reciprocal action, disorientation, complex torque, pressure point activation, mechanical advantage, or variable pressure can also be used to increase the effectiveness of the technique and help to ensure that it will work when needed.

By combining combat principles with a back-up plan, a redundant strategy is created. Like the brakes on an airplane; if one system fails - another is ready to take its place.

(For example; if my finger jab to the opponent’s eyes fails, I’m still in position to strike the neck, kick the groin, or initiate a take-down. Striking toward the eyes causes disorientation which makes a groin kick possible, while also throwing my opponent off balance and giving me the mechanical advantage needed to enforce a take-down. Each piece of my strategy helps to set up another possible attack.)

Once the students have properly ingrained the movement into their muscle memory and have rehearsed possible contingencies, they may begin practicing scenario training.

They might train outside or in an area designed to resemble the scene of an attack. Training partners can engage them with threatening dialog similar to the tone used by an attacker. Everything in the environment and the manner of the opponents should be staged to recreate the conditions of an actual self-defense situation.

To increase the stress level, the opponents might surprise the defender by changing their attack or pulling out practice weapons.

Armed with the well-trained techniques, the defender should now be able to adjust to the changing circumstances and face the attackers with confidence. If not, the drill should be stopped so that the technique can be relearned or so that the combat strategy can be modified.

It’s okay to return to previous training methods if the student isn’t ready for scenario training. It’s better to review basic skills than it is to have the student endure a negative experience during the drill.

“Losing,” in a scenario drill only teaches a student how to get beat up. (Something they don’t need to learn.) This is why it’s important that the student is successful at this drill. The idea is to build confidence.

The goal of this training is for the student to feel as though he or she has already successfully faced many attacks. This way, if someone really attempts to harm them outside the dojo, they will react naturally without becoming overly anxious.

Scenario training is one of the best types of self-defense drills available. However, it’s important that students are adequately prepared.

Trying to train a high-stress scenario is much like attempting to run a marathon without the proper preparation - it will most likely result in injury. (Either physical or psychological.)

Remember, too much, too soon, is never a good way to train.

I hope you find this post useful in your own training,

Respectfully,

John

Newton's Laws Moves Me

Gunfighter Gene Hackman is shot. Right in the head. The beautiful Sharon Stone beat him to the draw in the grand finale scene of the Quick and the Dead western. To accentuate the drama, Hackman flips completely over in the slow motion macabre of a spaghetti western. How many viewers thought that such a flip could actually happen? Or just think bullets can move people around? Do bullets move people? If so, how much? What do we tell our officers, our practitioners and students about this in training?

In 2007, a police officer published a disgusted tirade in police journals trashing Hollywood and these acrobatic misrepresentations of gunfire. He stated that cinema action misrepresents the truth, confuses the public, the media, lawyers, juries and well…even some police administrators about shootings and what does and doesn't happen in a gunfight.

But this irate officer is not alone in voicing his opinion on the subject. There is always a healthy argument running somewhere about it. On one extreme, experts say that bullets hit and move people. On the other end, some argue that bullets do not and cannot move people. Semantics and science are involved here, as well as – some people just like to argue. So we have two groups, the Movers and Non-Movers.

Many of my complainants and my friends who have been shot, and research I have looked up, have repeatedly used interesting phrases and symbols to describe their wounding. Baseball came up a lot.

"It was like getting hit by a baseball."

Or your hear, "…like getting hit with a baseball bat."

Two SAS officers on a CNN special described being shot as "being hit with a sledge hammer."

And the responses do run the whole gamut from being "knocked back, knocked down" to "a slapping feeling." Knocked back or down? What say the Non-Movers about all this?

The Non-Movers quote Newton's Laws of Motions and what I nickname the Newton Impact, on this. Ol' Sir Isaac Newton has some lasting impact on the world with his three laws. His second law states in summary, that for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. In other words, if object A exerts a force on object B, then object B also exerts an equal and opposite force on object A. When this comes to shooting people, many will tell you that the force – the recoil of a weapon in your hand, or on your shoulder is equal to the force striking your target. In short, if you don't flip over when you shoot the bad guy? The bad guy will not flip over when he is hit. This would mean that if you fired a perfect kill shot, such as one by a successful sniper, 100 times, 100 bodies would drop straight down dead. They would not be the slightest tumble or turn to one side from the impact. President kennedy's head did not move when shot. Nothing. Cold. Ballistic block science. Algebra. The Newton Impact: Equal in the hand/equal on the body.

The Movers: Conversely, the Movers cite other variables than cold science, like the situation, flesh, blood, and psychology – that cause people to move in the split seconds before, during and after actually being shot.

Before: People may well be already moving in a gunfight. Also, people about to be shot at often see the gun up and aiming at them. They physically react to this presented gun by ducking, dodging, diving, spinning to run, etc.

During: The human body contains bone mass, mobile joints and a central nervous system. We yank our hand back from the hot stove. We move our arm from a bee sting. We flinch from an insect on or near our eye. Our nervous system reacts from simple touches, to bug stings or higher levels of pain and impact. When bullets strike this anatomy, live body parts react differently than ballistic clay. Explosive sound alone may make the body move. Since the 1930s there are piles of research on the startle reflex and audible responses from shocking explosions. Dr. Robert Simmons has documented as many as 25 different body responses from audible shock in what he calls his Startle Museum (24 of them are not fighting stances by the way). In these cases the bullet's sound at least, may cause movement.

After: After being hit one or more times, shooting victims often do not die right away and therefore act like wounded humans, continuing to move. Once downed, there may be "after-death" throes.

There is quite a bit of motion involved with the before, during and after of being shot. The threat of the bullet, the impact from the bullet, even the sound of the bullet causes it.
The Hackman Flip -But, since we started out with the Gene Hackman western movie sample, has anyone ever really done a "Hackman flip?" In the 1990s I discovered another Hackman-style Flip.

I was reading a Vietnam War memoir and a soldier talked about a fellow troop of his being shot in the helmet. The troop told him "it knocked the life out of me," and that he "saw his toes flip up in front of his face" then he blacked out. The author saw his friend flip almost upside down and the helmet was destroyed, virtually split in half. The guy immediately recovered and appeared unhurt. (but, the writer mentions the man died back in the states years later from a brain aneurysm?)

I Read this from the non-fiction book. Code Name: Copperhead. My True-Life Exploits As a Special Forces Soldier, by Sergeant Major Joe R. Garner, U.S. Army (RET.) "In Ban Me Thuot, a friend who had been wounded told me, 'Joe, you just cannot believe the impact that the AK-47 has. I got shot in the leg and it knocked me head over heels. My rifle went ten feet from me. The NVA came up, and if it hadn't been for one of the other men killing him, I was unarmed and the NVA would have killed me.'"

These are two Newtonian, equal-force, flipping, head-scratchers! Did both these shooters flip too when they shot these flippers? What say ye, Mr Newton? More interesting is that these two shots are complete surprise shots without warning. So the bodies were not in dodge or dive mode.

But, aside from the dramatic and unusual Hackman flips, is there more science and math than this the simplistic equal-equal force, Newton Impact equation that explains these bodily reactions to bullets? Dr. Sean Ross of New Mexico is a government scientist who works on various weapons projects for the U.S. Military. He reports:
"Newton's laws of motion do apply here, but Newton's 2nd law applies to forces - force isn't what knocks a person down unless the force is crushing. Momentum transfer is what knocks something down. The correct way to analyze this is using the time integral of Newton's 3rd law F=mA, namely I=delta P, the "impulse momentum" theorem. The Impulse is the integral of the force over time, F=-delta T. That impulse is equal to the change in momentum imparted to the body."

Okay! Got that? The 3rd law explains and allows more than the 2nd law. Even if you don't get this now, before you use "Newton Impact" line again to defend your non-moving, equal/equal argument, you should school yourself on the 3rd law, else the experts will cluck-cluck and chastise you as uneducated and ill-informed. Don't just regurgitate what some old gun magazine article or some range instructor...had regurgitated to him...and so on.

Which leads me to The Law of Violent Impact, the 7th Rule:

"No one can guarantee what a punch, a kick, a stab or a gunshot will do to you."





And another truth I hold to be self-evident? The 1st Rule!
"Who wouldn't flip over Sharon Stone in leather chaps?"