Karate

Karate and Self Protection from John Titchen

Scenario Training

The sobering reality of a fake abduction

James van1On Saturday, under my supervision, four teenage boys (aged 13-14) experienced a fake abduction. This was a single scenario in a multi faceted training day for both adults and teenagers. While this is a very rare event, it is perhaps one feared the most by parents, and so we wanted to see what we could learn from replicating an example.

Like all training, we had to make compromises for safety. The most glaringly obvious compromise was that the boys knew they were going to experience an abduction attempt. They also knew which vehicle the attacker(s) would use. What they didn’t know was how many people would be involved or how we would set them up.

That wasn’t the only compromise:

– due to a scheduling clash we had to stage our scenario outside a venue filled with young children with open doors for ventilation, so the teenagers couldn’t shout for help or bang on the vehicle,

– the vehicle wasn’t scrapped so we couldn’t kick it or hit people into its bodywork.

– for safety all shots to the head were pulled; the attackers wore headgear in case of backward uncontrolled strikes,

– the teenagers were bare-headed and we decided to proceed on the basis that the attackers would use body shots to subdue them so as to preserve their looks.

Each teenager entered the scenario ‘blind’, not having seen the ones that went before or having had opportunity to get any information from the previous participants. They were asked to walk down a particular passageway as if on their way home from school or visiting a friend. An aggressor would run up behind like a jogger, and then grab the boy to lift him into the van where a second person could assist in controlling them. A third man was behind the wheel.

This obviously represented a possible attack. More people could have been involved. We could have used a fake weapon for intimidation. The aim of the exercise was for all of us to see how difficult it was to escape once the attack had begun, and how quickly it could be done.

The results were chilling as you can see here.

Of the four participants, three were taken with the van ready to drive away within 12 seconds from first contact. The longest resistance lasted 35 seconds, and had he not been pulling his shots (for safety) that young man might have escaped or caused his attackers to abandon their attempt for fear of being caught. As it was we did attract some outside attention.

One of the most obvious things to take away from the exercise is that awareness of your environment is everything. Anyone listening to music on headphones would be easy prey. Hoodies would reduce peripheral vision and reaction time. Choice of routes, walking in company, wide corners and how you react to people around you in terms of innocuous hand positions (scratching the back of your neck for example) would make a difference in reducing the odds of being a victim and in being in a better position to resist.

These abductions featured bear hugs in what is their most likely use. These particular scenarios reinforced that unless you act before it is fully on, you are not going to get out very easily, and you probably won’t have a stable ground platform to work on. I teach bear hug defences to illustrate principles of movement, and to try and ingrain the reaction to move before it is on, but I recognise that the attack is both rare (because there are very few scenarios in which someone would do it) and that once it is on then most defences I’ve seen demonstrated (including my own) are ineffective until the person starts to release you.

If you want to theorise about bracing against a van, or pushing off from a van, or a car boot… try it. Come up with ideas, but then try them until you have some high percentage solutions.

This was nothing more than a training exercise, but it has given all those participating something to think about.

kicking in self defence

To kick or not to kick, that is the question.

This debate comes up regularly on martial arts forums and such discussions tend to produce variations on a number of regular characters:

  1. The person who is convinced that whatever he or she does in class will work.
  2. The person who sees kicking as a low percentage strategy but advocates low kicks if kicks are used at all.
  3. The person who has used kicks ‘in real fights’ and therefore believes that they are a high percentage effective strategy, especially high kicks.
  4. The person who has used kicks in competitive fighting and therefore believes they can do so in self defence.
  5. The person who has no opinion but just wants information.
  6. The troll.

 

So who’s right?

When it comes to applying martial arts techniques in self defence, context and training methods determine the results. We get good at what we train for.

If you don’t train kicks regularly then the likelihood of being able to use them in a self defence situation decreases considerably.

Whether you can use kicks bears no relation to what someone else has reputedly done in self defence or in the ring, it depends not only on how much you train them, but how you train them.

If the opportunity to kick comes in the form of relative positioning and pressure that is familiar to you, then you are likely to be able to employ that skillset. Everything comes down to how you train and to a large extent how many of the six things you should do in physical training for self defence are present in your approach.

A few years ago I put together a video showing all the kicks and attempted kicks used by participants from a range of different martial disciplines in my Sim Day scenario training. The clips came from hundreds of simulations, but featured very few kicks indeed (although knees were very successfully employed).

This was in part due to the enclosed environment, but primarily because most people had no experience in trying to kick at that range or under those conditions. Although we don’t kick in many of our regular drills, of the participants my personal karate students (and a very experienced LEO who is also a Ju Jutsu instructor) kicked the most because the environment and range was familiar.

Since then I have seen more kicks employed successfully because the kickers are returnees to the Sim Days and are not only more comfortable with the environment and range but have also made little tweaks to their own training based on the lessons from previous sessions.

So can you kick in self defence?

Maybe.

Only you and your training can decide that.

 

 

 

 

Environmental awareness

Photo of scenario trainingEnvironmental awareness is a crucial attribute in self protection. It is also something that is often given lip service without further explanation of what people need to be aware of or indeed how to improve their awareness.

The majority of self protection lies in the assessment, avoidance, deterrence, and de-escalation of aggression and situations where conflict is likely, but regrettably this is not always possible.

Training your physical skills against habitual acts of violence increases your understanding and recognition of their telegraphs, an attribute that can increase the likelihood of reacting in time to a physical attack or preventing one through pre-emption.   Scenario training can increase your comfort in dealing with verbal aggression and increase your ability to identify the behavioural precursors to a physical attack (if these are accurately replicated in the training).

Unfortunately we can often miss these indicators due to our focus on trying to resolve the situation peacefully.  Our brains can become overloaded by the tasks of watching the person in front of us, trying to hear what he/she is saying, trying to think about whether to talk or hit or run, wondering what our friends will do, or what our partner or children will do, working out what to say and watching other people etc… This means that despite our knowledge of the telegraphs – we often miss them.

One solution to this in regular training is to work pad drills from a fence practicing hitting (or ducking) while listening and talking and adding in additional distractions.

In this video students and instructors from a range of different styles get caught off guard and hit by role playing aggressors.  I hope the footage proves useful to you in your own training.

While training for event management is good, improving your ability to avoid the event altogether is more important. The ‘Driving School’ method of self-narrating what you observe in daily life and thus highlighting things that you might otherwise miss or dismiss is a good way to improve your ability to recognise potential dangers and to have greater mental stamina with regard to staying alert in public. I’m very bad at facial recognition until actively engaged in conversation so I tend to read people by body language and location rather than recognition of known versus unknown quantities. With practise and experimentation people will naturally gravitate to approaches that work best to how they think, and rather than being an intrusive or ‘paranoid’ approach this should become as background and unobtrusive in our thought processes as checking for traffic before walking across a road.