What would your 10 week self defence course be?

[Slindsay]

If you had to do a ten week course as an intro self defence (Something that could build on more later) what sort of stuff do you think you would include in it? Lets say you got 2 1.5 hour lessons a week.

Me personally I think this would be a good course:

In the first lesson introduce the important concepts of awareness and evading the fight, verbal defusion and the like. Then to keep it interesting I would teach a couple of basic techniques.

After that in each lesson keep stressing the importance of verbal defusion at the start of the lesson and teaching basic techniques then introducing their usefullness in scenarios alongisde the use of verbal diffusion and the like.

For example, for the jab-cross technique introduce it as a technique for when a stranger has invaded your space, is acting aggresively and you feel the need to strike first, then have people run away. But give the cahnce to verbally put off the attacker sometimes without the need to fight and have the attacker try to grab the persona as they run.

Anyway, the training would need to become more and more realistic so make the scenarios more and more freeform and closer to sparring as time goes on.

The actual techniques would be:

Basic Punches taken from boxing with some consideration to the no glove element (Possibly use open hand strikes as well)
Knees and elbows
Clinch Work in similar fashion to Muay Thai

Basics of groundwork focusing on escaping from the mount

I though about Weapons work but disregarded it because it would simply be to great a scope for ten weeks.

Other than this I would make sure to include a lot of work on coping with adrenal stress, which means generating lot's of adrenalin in lessons, to me that would mean padding people up and have them go at it in sparring and scenario based work and as part of the scenarios include loads of verbal abuse because in my experience this really makes the adrenalin spike.

[Nomad Fighter]

Hmm, good idea that, dunno what exactly i would have said if i had not read this first but now cant really think of a better way to structure the teaching.

The only difference i would have is what i would teach, comming from a different style and personal background.

However, i think its all a great idea, nice one :D

[iolair]

In ten weeks (30 hours of training), you won't build up the reactions needed to use these techniques effectively. So, why try? (unless you want to use it as an introduction to further training).

I would focus mainly on developing awareness of surroundings, avoiding danger spots, and building confidence. The 30 hours might be enough to build up some useful skill on one or two core techniques - two or three boxing punches perhaps.

I agree padded sparring would be good, in terms of building confidence and learning to deal with the adrenaline rush.

[KSprenk]

I think a cool self defense course would be me going into the jungle and have people randomly attack me for ten weeks. Not constantly, just whenever so I have to stay alert. And I would have to hunt for food. My only equipment would be, lets say a knife and a compass and maybe some rope and a Bo.

[NewLearner]

My initial focus would be environmental awareness and understanding potential conflicts that a person may face. Then I would move to methods of deescalating confrontations. I would also cover particularly vulnerable areas that you need to protect on yourself as well as strike on the opponent and how to turn things in your environment into weapons.

Each class would have some physical hands on approach including practical stances, reducing the damage that you take, and how to deliver effective basic kicks and punches.

[pj_goober]

I agree entirely with iolair. In 30 hours of training you can learn next to nothing of use in a real situation, so you're better of teaching avoidance, awareness and de-escalation techniques, plus some super-basics (how to properly knee someone in the groin, etc.)

Or just get them running. runnings a good form of self defence, 30 hours of running practice. that'll get the punters flocking in!

[Talyn]

In ten weeks (30 hours of training), you won't build up the reactions needed to use these techniques effectively. So, why try?
Well, if the course wasn't an introduction, all it would be is 30 hours of me moaning at them to take martial arts up for real :D

[itchyfeet]

Basic Punches taken from boxing with some consideration to the no glove element (Possibly use open hand strikes as well)
Knees and elbows
Clinch Work in similar fashion to Muay Thai

Basics of groundwork focusing on escaping from the mount

I though about Weapons work but disregarded it because it would simply be to great a scope for ten weeks.

Other than this I would make sure to include a lot of work on coping with adrenal stress, which means generating lot's of adrenalin in lessons, to me that would mean padding people up and have them go at it in sparring and scenario based work and as part of the scenarios include loads of verbal abuse because in my experience this really makes the adrenalin spike.

I think 30 hours is too short to teach the fundamentals of knees, elbows and particulaly punches. It takes a fair bit of time to be an effective striker and with the bones in the hands liable to breaks...I'm not sure.

As a pure self defence course, I'd concentrate on awareness of surroundings. For technique I'd look at the dirty, basic ones such as biting, scratching, gouging and some open hand strikes. Knees and elbows are damn good but it's quite deceptive that they do need a lot of training to make them dangerous. Most importantly, IMO, is the need of training to control the adrenaline dump - whether this means being able to talk / run out of the situation or being able to execute a technique.

EDIT:
Controling adrenaline also means being able to 'let go' when the need arises, not just about staying calm. A lot of RBSD courses have scenarios where the 'victim' just goes absolutely effing apesh!t. This can be enough to deter many attackers.

I remember my wife told me a story that happened over 5 years ago. Basically, this guy went to sit right next to her on a bus, even though it was empty. He kept on staring and staring at her. She deliberately manifested an major 'twitch' on the right side of her face, neck and shoulder.

The guy walked off!

[Nick K]

What you can use is state-dependent, so drill big simple movements - palm to the face, knee to the groin, knee to the head when they bend over is a simple sequence - under adrenalised situations, again and again and again. Your comments about awareness, de-escalation, escape are well made. What about something about the law and reasonable force and survival in a crowd situation?

[Saz]

Moved to Self Defence

[Davey Bones]

What I'd focus on:

1. Awareness.

2. Preparedness. Get your keys out of the purse before you get to the dark garage, and always keep a cell phone in a pocket, not your purse, and carry a fake wallet or just cash and an id. Just examples.

3. Improvised self-defense weapons. Carry car keys? Great, you've got a weapon. Even a bottle of perfume can be good if used properly.

4. Make the sudents hit people. They need to get over that, and quickly. And I don't mean one of those padded dummy suits either. They need to hit someone who is not covered in 75 pounds of padding.

5. Simple techniques. All discussions on techniques should start with YELLING. If you think someone can hear you, YELL. Attracting attention is a good thing.

6. Hit the sweet spots. Gut, nose, groin, instep, eyes. Also be prepared to run as soon as you do it, because none of them are guaranteed fight enders!

7. Since I mentioned it... RUN! Every self-defense technique you could teach in 10 weeks is going to be good enough to get released and run like hell. And that's all you need to know for self-defense purposes. Gun and run.

8. When to resist and when not to resist.

EDIT: You may not be able to teach people to perfection in 10 weeks, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. As long as the students leave with (1) an understanding that they aren't invincible after 10 weeks, and (2) enough self-confidence to not be a victim, then you've accomplished your goal.

[Bil Gee]

I think the ideal scenario would be a course tailored to suite the individual needs of the students.

A group of little old dears who are worried about getting mugged on pension day are going to need to adopt a different strategy to a group of students who are worried about getting beaten up when they are out on the beer. A massive guy built like a sumo wrestler may be better off standing his ground and using his weight and presence than risking a coronary by sprinting away.

There needs to be some compromise as it's unlikely that you would get a completely uniform group, but it should be possible to find some time to give specifc individual advice to students.

[martini]

I use to teach short martial arts programs. I made a point of priortizing
my concepts from most important to least important. The following two
were near the top.

1. Safety and training
2. Martial Arts, Health and the Long Term

Then I made sure I covered these in depth and
REPEATED the more important concepts significantly.

Other priorities included.
- stances, footwork, blocks, parrys
- locks, chokes ( I avoided certain leg locks and ... )
- high percentage combinations
- basic martial arts theory

Martini

[tellner]

Well, my wife and I have put hundreds of people through short term self defense courses and learned a couple things about it. Slindsay's program is a pretty good one. Here are some changes I'd make.

1) Get rid of the punches. Hitting someone in the head with your untaped, unwrapped, ungloved hand is an invitation to boxer's fracture at the very least. Palm heel strikes can hit every bit as hard and are a lot less dangerous to the hitter. Besides (see below) the good old fashioned Fairbairn/ Sykes/ Applegate chin jab gets them in close. One of the things I've noticed is that in a short term program punching leads either to wild swinging or pushing the attacker away. Both are counterproductive to good self defense.

2) More headbutts, knees and elbows. They need to be comfortable up close and personal. And they need to have simple tools that hit hard. You don't have years to develop all the great stuff that a good MA program teaches. Just changing the attitude from close in == intimidated to close in == ready to fight is one of the single biggest services you can do to for your students.

3) The environmental awareness and de-escalation are great. But in most self defense courses, how do I say it, it's like driving at highway speeds. If people go too fast you need to slow them down. If they go too slow you need to speed them up. If your students are young, dumb and full of, err never mind, they need to learn de-escalation, non-aggression and how to let things slide. If they're female and are uncomfortable with the idea of physical aggression you need to get them comfortable with owning that power.

You'll have an easier time selling a self defense class to women. For men choose a name like Adrenaline Stress Close Quarter Combatives.

4) I'm not real big on specific scenarios for physical technique. The students may perform fine in that situation, but their bag of tricks can come up empty when reality varies from the preset pattern. It's a lot like the problem with most kumite/bunkai training. Better perhaps to have them drill the basic techniques a lot, do a lot of combinations and have confrontation drills further down the line. For verbal work scenarios can be very productive, especially if you mix them up.

5) A few simple, reliable takedowns can be very useful. So can a few hours spent on learning to fall. After all, your students may never get in a fight. But every one of them will fall down at some point. When the students practice taking each other down they also practice falling and learn to take a hit (in this case from the ground) without getting hurt and without realizing that's what they're learning.

[tellner]

Another thing, working them up to a little work in the guard can be very useful. Many people, men and women, are uncomfortable in that position. Deconditioning that fear will help a lot in many of the situations that women particularly are afraid of.

[tellner]

What I'd focus on:

1. Awareness.
Always good, but it depends on exactly what you mean. "Be aware" is pretty vague. It can mean anything from utter paranoia to not actually walking into telephone poles. Colonel Cooper's Color Code is a really good tool. I switch the analogy from gunfights to driving; people can relate to awareness in driving pretty easily.

A great exercise is the Working Mugger Awareness Drill. Have pairs of students go to a public place with a lot of foot traffic and some place to sit. They pretend they are working muggers looking at everyone going by as a potential target. Each rates each passerby as go or no-go. After fifteen minutes or so try to find patterns. If there are people the two disagree on take a closer look at them. Another one is to go to a shopping center. Look for secondary crime scenes, interruptions in lines of sight, out of the way restrooms and ATMS and so on.

4. Make the sudents hit people. They need to get over that, and quickly. And I don't mean one of those padded dummy suits either. They need to hit someone who is not covered in 75 pounds of padding.
Whom are they supposed to hit? Each other? You'll lose all of your students except the stupid ones within half an hour. The instructors? If you're teaching them anything worthwhile you'll take too much damage. I don't care how tough you are, a few minutes of full out ground-and-pound or one good headbutt will take the starch out of you. We won't even get into what a solid elbow to the back of the head or a knee drop to the liver or bladder can do. This stuff accumulates, especially head injuries.

Even wearing the padded suit has its hazards. I've lost track of the cracked ribs and broken fingers and toes. And I've had one too many concussions even with RedMan's best helmet (thanks to Modern Warrior for their generous advice on how to improve that). After ten or twelve scared ticked off people get through hitting you for a minute each you will have taken a pretty good ass whipping even if the padding only lets in the equivalent of two or three good hits each.

5. Simple techniques. All discussions on techniques should start with YELLING. If you think someone can hear you, YELL. Attracting attention is a good thing.
Simple techniques - good.
Yelling - eh.
Attracting attention - not even.

Yelling can be good for some things, but let's take a closer look. My wife and I are both asthmatic. A lot of people aren't in great shape. Wasting good oxygen by always kiaiing cuts down on how long you can fight or run.

Another problem is that if you teach people to yell with their strikes it slows them down tremendously. They will yell, hit, inhale, yell and hit when they could have hit three or four times.

<Dear Moderators, please excuse my use of foul language here. I apologize in advance but contend that it is not a breach of terms of service. I am trying to accurately explain and illustrate lifesaving technique, not swear or curse gratuitously>

Yelling can be very useful for raising up aggression and focusing that adrenal response. In particular, swearing, especially when done by women towards men, has a good track record of making the attacker pause - giving him a pattern break. One good "Mother****er! I'm going to rip your nuts off!" has a lot more deterrent effect than any number of "Yuss! Yuss! Kiai-To!"s. It focuses the attention wonderfully and channels aggression, the whole "Fear into Anger" thing.

It's also proven to work very well in cases where the aggressor is expecting a compliant victim.

Attracting attention? It's nice, but Sir Galahad just isn't going to come and rescue you. The shining armor is in the shop. The gallant white charger is at the vet's. The best information we have is that the overwhelming majority of people won't do diddly squat to help someone else, especially if it means risk to them. cf. Kitty Genovese and thousands of others who didn't want to get involved.

Now, things like embarassing the aggressor early on (<Lifting up aggressor's hand> "Did someone lose a hand? Did anyone lose this hand? I found it on my butt.), calling attention to bad behavior and the usual trained sequelae to attacks (<Pointing>You! Call an ambulance! You! Call the police! You! Call 911/999!) are useful. Making noise in the hope that some stranger will come and rescue you undermines self defense and leads to dependency-based defense.

6. Hit the sweet spots. Gut, nose, groin, instep, eyes. Also be prepared to run as soon as you do it, because none of them are guaranteed fight enders!
Decent targets, but gut and instep aren't great, especially since you are advocating hitting once and running. Besides, they are pain-based. Pain compliance depends on the other guy being reasonable. If he was reasonable he wouldn't have attacked you. Better to teach something that has a better chance of making him less effective at hurting you. There are no guarantees, but there are better and worse bets.

Groin? Everyone knows about the knee or kick to the goolies. Everyone is waiting for it.

Eyes? It depends on how you mean to attack them. I won't go into the details here, but there are good and not so good ways to do it.

Base of the skull, throat, knee (again I won't go into the particular techniques), dislocate fingers, floating ribs, bladder. Those are all examples of things that give better odds of doing real damage to an attacker.

Hit once and run away might work, but it has serious drawbacks. You've just hit yelled and run away. That means you ticked him off, gave him a shot of adrenaline and acted like prey. The downside should be obvious. The best advice I've gotten from people who have lived longer than they had any right to and old cops who studied and investigated thousands of assaults, rapes and officer-involved incidents is pretty unanimous. If you think it's safe to turn around and walk away it's probably safe to run like hell.

7. Since I mentioned it... RUN! Every self-defense technique you could teach in 10 weeks is going to be good enough to get released and run like hell. And that's all you need to know for self-defense purposes. Gun and run.

See above. Running is one of many excellent strategies. But the advice of those selfsame wise and dangerous old men and women was unequivocal. You have only a limited amount of ATP and adrenaline. Every second in overdrive is precious, and you don't have nearly as many of them as you'd like. It might be useful to run. It might be useful to make sure you won't be followed.

The other disadvantages of overstressing running are "Do you have somewhere safer to run to?" and "Can you turn, get your bearings and accelerate faster than he can come after you?"

8. When to resist and when not to resist.

I'd be very interested in knowing when you would advise resistance and when you would advise compliance. In general we try to give students tools and options. We avoid "You should" or "You shouldn't", "Do" and "Don't" for the most part. If they have decent tools and learn to trust their Lizard in emergencies I figure they'll do better than if we try to pre-guess and prescribe what they do. If self defense is about anything it's got to be about personal power. After all, they are the ones on the ground with all the information.

About the only time we say "Never" is when it comes to being tied up or taken somewhere else. The way Tiel puts it is "If that happens you aren't coming back. The best you can look forward to is being raped, robbed, tortured and killed in no particular order. Never ever let him restrain you or take you away. Run or fight like your life depends on it, because it does. If he's going to kill you make him do it there in front of everyone."

EDIT: You may not be able to teach people to perfection in 10 weeks, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. As long as the students leave with (1) an understanding that they aren't invincible after 10 weeks, and (2) enough self-confidence to not be a victim, then you've accomplished your goal.

Amen.

Good padded attacker confrontation exercises really help on both counts.