The Urban environment you live, work, study or socialize in, is potentially a lot more hazardous than you might ever have imagined. Almost any place you go, you will be surrounded by dangerous “weapons” and not even realize it! What looks like ordinary cutlery, bottles, tools or even pieces of furniture to you, in reality, are the most common objects used by scum-bags to cut, stab and beat decent people with in the real world.
Forget about what you see in the movies or even the most sensationalistic crime reports in newspapers or on TV, in the real world people are not usually being attacked by samurai swords, ninja throwing stars or balisong knifes but by everyday tools, writing implements and objects that are just as dangerous but completely innocuous. Statistically you are far more likely to be assaulted by some form of improvised weapon than by what most people fear and perceive to be actual deadly weapons. Although, improvised weapon attacks are overwhelmingly the most common form of armed assault they are one of the most neglected aspects of self-defense training and this kind of ignorance can have deadly consequences. According to the crime statistics repositories nearly a quarter of all street assaults will involve some kind of weapon. Are you prepared?
I wanted to prompt people about this for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I want to remind the public that I covered these issues in great detail in my previous post, From January 6th, 2016, “weapon Defenses For The Street -a conceptual approach”. That post is now buried deep in among a lot of less important information so I thought I would bring it to your attention again and encourage people to take a look at it.
When I originally posted that material I did not bother explaining the origins and original purpose of that information, I just wanted the public to have access to it. Furthermore, as standard “posts” go it is very lengthy and a lot of people might have been intimidated by its size and passed over it. The reason it is so long is because it was no ordinary post.
That content was originally compiled and written to be part of a printed manual that supplemented a video course I had been hired to do. I believe that video course is still available through a couple of on-line sources but the printed manual was never released. That manual was the result of a few months of research and writing and contains a lot of quite unique conceptual, but very practical, self-defense information that is relevant to both armed and unarmed defense and that I have never seen or read anywhere else. In fact, it ties together the most important concepts for both unarmed and weapon self-defense which goes a long way in exposing the underlying problems with most other approaches to self-defense. Furthermore, it is backed up by facts and the statistical work and research I did for it was an attempt to set a new standard for what I came to call “evidence-based’ self-defense.
Therefore, it is by far the most important, valuable and carefully written and researched information I have yet posted on this blog so I did not want people to think it was just another banged-off daily post from way back. I was quite proud of the results of the time and hard work I put into that manual and the only reason it was not released is because the company that commissioned it never paid me for my work. Yea, welcome to doing business in the martial arts world.
That weapon defense program was the first follow up course I was hired to do after my “Top Ten Most Common Street Attacks” APP program became the “world’s” highest selling self-defense App on the APPLE network in 2012. That first release was very influential and I think it started a trend in self-defense circles since I now have seen a Krav Maga book on the “top ten most common attacks”, that has come out. Yea, once again, just remember who was first and who actually did research into those attacks and not just made stuff up.
Anyhow, I digress, that first APP program’s success made me one of the few people in the world who could legitimately say they were the “world’s #1 self-defense instructor”. After that I knew there would be a wide audience and wanted to follow up with something really valuable to people. The result was the Top Ten Most Common Weapon Attacks, program of which that manual should have been a part off.
Unfortunately, that company that hired me and produced the video lessons took a low budget approach so the editing and so forth was never entirely up to my standards. Sure there are much fancier self-defense videos out there, with higher production values and more bells and whistles but I always stand behind my content 100% because of my real world experience and painstaking research. Thus, anything that had my name on it, despite the APP Company’s goofy advertising and unauthorized use of my name, was going to be of the quality I would give my personal students. That was one of the reasons I put so much time and effort into the manual, to make sure any information that was not filmed because of time, budget restraints or edited out would still get to the customer. That didn’t happen so I rewrote the intro and such, even adding some new material and got it out there myself on the blog.
Therefore, I wanted folks to know that in terms of length and quality of content that blog post is more like a complete E-book that I am giving you for free, so I hope you will go back and take a careful and more appreciative look at it. The blog content is not the entire manual but a large portion of it. The original also contained additional information to go with specific video lessons. Much of this additional information, along with excerpts from the original video lessons, is contained in the “COURSES” section of this web site. Also for free.
My last quick point that I want to make here, is to remind you that as valuable and on the cutting edge of realism as MMA type training can be, for self-defense, it may be leaving out an entire 25% of what you need. I want to emphasize that improvised weapon attacks are not some rare or isolated occurrences but as easy as reaching out and grabbing the nearest handy object. Anyone looking for real world self-defense skills should not ignore this.
Furthermore, I want to also remind people that authentic Brazilian jiu-jitsu has an extensive weapon defense component that was the basis for my APP program and has “saved my bacon” on a couple of hair raising occasions-so I have always taken this part of the curriculum very seriously and feel it is far more important than “irrelevant tournaments”- (that is a Rickson Gracie quote by the way).
Ergo, If we are going to save Brazilian Jiu-jitsu as the world’s most complete and effective system of self defense we must hold its instructors to a higher standard. The public should be aware of the plummeting standards within the Brazilian Jiu-jitsu community. Beware of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu “Black Belts” that at the very worst actually don’t even know the weapon defense curriculum. Secondly, be wary of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu “Black Belts” who may have learned the material years ago, because their old school instructor made them, but have not practiced or updated it since. These guys are nearly as useless as the ones who never learned it at all. Thirdly, encourage but expect more from Brazilian Jiu-jitsu Black Belts that teach the weapon defenses only in a kind of static non-contested, “kata” like way. This is just the beginning phase and like all self-defense methods weapon defenses need to be tested and refined with increasing amounts of resistance, surprise, pressure and realistic tactical scenario training. This is what authentic Brazilian Jiu-jitsu needs, not more goofy tournaments. In future posts we can explore ways we can do this effectively.