Experience in combat sports methods have helped myself and others survive real criminal encounters, and permitted higher quality knuckleheads to prevail in the types of situations that are, well, stupid, like Dante knocking out a crowd of rednecks in a Churchville, MD bar, and Strong Devil locking himself in a cage in a correction facility without backup to extract a silverback.
When examining these things, the events do not replicate the space of the ring or cage or strip and our success, nor round length. While using methods used in ritual combat, successful encounters involve abandoning the ritual context, the 16 by 16 foot ring, for instance, or circling. Even in the ring, circling, or orbiting, can get you into a lot of trouble, especially with weapons. If you have a mobility edge, you can circle in the ring and cage. But, in a self defense setting, when one is outnumbered, you cannot count on mobility being your trump card—they have four, six, maybe eight legs!
When Strong Devil went into the cage, he went direct, no circling. That is a good application. And, he’s mentally “Special.” Most people don’t have his grit and direct mindset.
Over the past year I have tried to focus on close mobility in training: rolling, cutting angles, checking, cornering, fighting off the robes, etc. It is hard, especially for new fighters, and the really fit alpha types—the two opposites of the spectrum—to avoid using all that space. James Anderson and I, during our 29 machete duels, conducted as a study, did some where we determined that we must stay within two steps, under a tree, to replicate fighting over something or in a confined area. His rugby playing turned my smart idea against me—I got stuffed against the tree and introduced to sudden defeat after many lengthy duels. Holding a belt between us is the best way in big spaces to practice knife fighting without stalling and playing for time.
This battle energy, I think, is very important. Forcing ourselves to stay closer for training sets, and for certain types of bouts—especially for the competition sets—will force our egos to train and fight in a compressed time and space more conducive to actual survival situations. I have also noted that when we have more than four fighters working on the same skills in round robin, that about half of the participants will tend to drift off while they are on deck. This misses the ideal learning opportunity of watching the man who just aced you do it, or fail to, against another man who you also train with.
When we look at fights for self defense, whatever kind of fight it is, we are best served by finding a point of contact when one fighter gets into trouble and then studying the next, 3, 5, 10, 15, 30 seconds. Beyond that time span looms a cop-involved blood bath or disaster. You don’t ever want to take that long. Ten seconds is a long time. Checkout the Violence Project for time frames of the roughly 1700 violent acts documented. Most are under 10 seconds of decisive action, way under.
Chuck and I used to use the tip-off circle in the basketball court to do escape room unarmed against the knife scenarios—the most instructive knife work we did.
Submission boxing in the tip-off circle with Beast O’Neal over the past couple years worked very well in forcing the issue into brief rounds.
I trained with The Operator last year in seated scenarios, with him at a table and chair and me using various types of armed, unarmed and pickup weapon attacks [like hitting him with the coffee cup in front of him] and this served as a good acid test for weapon deployment, with knife and firearm, and for finding cues for aborting the weapon deployment until empty hand proximity defenses had made a draw secure.
I really wanted to spar in the hallway of the dressing room, but it is light construction dry wall. The hallway to the bathrooms has pictures hung on the walls, important memorabilia. Ideally, any serious self-defense school, that can afford it, should have a padded hallway, a padded doorway, a small escape room that replicates a bathroom, and a small bedroom, with a bed. Especially, for armed combat, practicing meeting threats and evading lethal force, should start in the bedroom. Where else are you when the home invader kicks in the door?
I would start with doorways, doorways being the most common tight structure we are likely to be attacked in. Stairs should play a roll but really need to be padded and worked on progressively.
In the short term, I have an idea. The Meat Hall. Whoever is not sparring, drilling, should form, with their bodies, with linked arms or hands, an attack space. One man should be assigned attack, the other defense. This should work with boxing, grappling and MMA sets, and with weapons, if the men that make up the wall where head and face gear.
Fights should be tried with and without time limit, but with space limits, sometimes with one end of the hall closing behind the defender. Perhaps the small man has to get past the big man, and the big man has the goal of forcing the small man back out of his end?
Try a small circle with an opening, a semi circle opened in one spot.
A V, with the attacker coming in at the opening might be the most sustainable shape.
If you have enough men: a C, a T a U, might all be viable.
Another idea, is to use structures like dressing rooms and bathrooms and hallways in schools, and to have men on deck act as padding, protecting the sink toilet, dry wall, etc.
If I were designing a school, we would put in a dummy ATM machine, a bar, a plexiglass T, and apply unarmed, armed, mixed, multiple attacker and group fights.
The other aspect we should address when we have enough people is protection, having a smaller man play the defender’s helpless primary and delaying against two attackers. How about starting the defender in the middle of the area with attackers coming in at both ends?
Ideally, such training methods that we come up with should be used for drills, slow sparring, light sparring, fast sparring and also competition. Knife fights will be very nasty in confined spaces, which accounts for much of the real world lethality.
Let’s try it.
