Conflicts in training - Safety vs. Realism

Throughout history, trainers have been faced with the same dilemma: how do you walk the line between training safely and preparation for a real life and death confrontation under unpredictable and often adverse conditions? As our society becomes more and more litigious, this predicament increases significantly. As we dive into this dilemma, it is important to understand the four main motivations potential students have for seeking training.

1. Health and fitness. Case combat tactics take on a lesser role and the trainer can concentrate almost entirely on aerobic, anaerobic and strength training. As long as the trainer makes sure that their training equipment is well maintained and there is enough supervision and monitoring, the student’s chances of injuring themselves through over enthusiasm, recklessness or ignorance are greatly reduced.
2. Self satisfaction. These are the types of students most found in traditional martial arts training. With this type of training, proper monitoring takes a priority over equipment and there can be more emphasis on repetition than tactics. Proper form goes a long way to give the student the self image they are seeking. This type of training leans heavily on protocols and is usually very technique oriented.
3. Tournament/Competition. When conducting this type of training, it is important that the trainer allow his students to compete in a safe and effective manner. How he teams up students is important to ensure that the student isn’t competing so far over their head that it breaks their spirit to the point that they want to discontinue training entirely. Proper conditioning is also an important aspect of this training. A thorough understanding of the rules of the competition is also essential to keep the student from disqualification when the real competition ensues.
4. The fourth and most difficult type of training is self defense or practical combat training. It is here that the trainer must be both well grounded in real life combat, and creative enough to create the types of training environments which most resemble real life combat conditions. While doing so, they must also make sure that the training is safe, effective and, yes, stressful enough at some point to ensure the student can indeed survive (and win) a life or death confrontation. It is this type of training that this article will focus on.

Some of the components create conflicts between practical combat training and the other three aforementioned types. Unlike training geared for health and fitness, practical combat training is often most needed by those that are not healthy and fit. Unfortunately, these people will likely never be as healthy or as fit as their potential attacker or attackers. The sad fact is the very young, the old, and those with physical limitations are often the choice of predators, whether it applies to the animal kingdom or human society. While a person in good physical condition will often have the option of escape, that is usually denied to those most in need of self defense or practical combat training. This may also apply to those in law enforcement or the military, where the need for self defense is often conflicted with a mission that must be accomplished for the protection of others.

In addition to their desire to protect others, law enforcement and the military are often burdened with additional weight due to the equipment they carry. This means that for some subsets of society a long, dragged out confrontation is not in their best interest. Because of these factors, the philosophy behind self defense or realistic combat training must be “a shorter fight is a better fight.”

Self satisfaction training is good for the soul and has made many people live better and happier lives because they have indulged themselves in it. However, it is essential that it not be confused with self defense or realistic combat training. Looking good while you do a perfect kata or kuen in front of a mirror has little to do with real fighting. In real world combat, the ability to adjust in the middle of a move is much more important than being able to remember and perform a series of moves in perfect sequence. It is important to remember that developing muscle memory by doing the same sequence of moves in the same order for thousands of repetitions can work against you as easily as it can work in your favor. Because of the chaotic and unpredictable nature of real combat, muscle memory is likely to work against you more often. The self defense or combat trainer must instead develop his student’s ability to observe, adjust and take advantage of what he or she sees quickly and effectively. Students must learn to “roll with the punches” and overcome any unexpected measures taken by the attacker. This can only be done effectively with scenario based training, and those scenarios must be changed often and without prior notice to the students.

Another conflict may exist between tournament/competition style training and self defense or practical combat training. Although this type comes closest to real combat training and often covers many aspects of self defense, it is in fact neither. All competitions have the following three elements in common: Controlled and predetermined environments, rules, and safety protocols. Real-world combat has none of these things.

No matter how rugged the competition is, because of the very nature of competition, the trainer’s primary goal is not to have his or students disqualified or to lose countless training hours due to unnecessary and long lasting injuries during training. The student must in effect be trained to perform better than those he or she is competing against.

In direct contrast, the real world combat trainer is in fact mandated to train his students how to win the fight that logic dictates they are supposed to lose. In other words, because predators choose those they believe they can dominate as prey, the person chosen as prey must in fact be trained to win the fight they are not supposed to win. On any given time and day they must have the capability of defeating someone who is, under most circumstances, a better fighter than they are. They also (in most cases) have no prior knowledge of their attacker’s training habits or skills before the fight occurs and no time to prepare and train for the particular attacker they may be confronted by. Because of these things, stress levels are much higher and much more sudden than they are when confronting an opponent you have prepared for, or at least confronting the type of opponent you have prepared for.

In order for self defense or practical combat training to be optimum, the trainer must include high stress levels into the training at some point, as well as sensory overload which helps keep stress levels high. Students should be trained to fight with just one arm or just one eye, or with just one arm and no sight at all. How about training in heels, or with a heavy backpack that shifts as the student moves? In addition, the training environment needs to include adverse environments like wet and slippery spaces, poor lighting/limited vision, or uneven ground and confined areas replete with obstacles that can be tripped or stumbled over during dynamic scenario based drills. Confrontations almost never happen in perfect environments, so why train in only those perfect environments?

It is a disservice for the health and fitness instructor, the traditional martial arts instructor or the competition instructor to make a potential student who is looking for real life combat or self defense training think that this type of training is their best option to achieve their goals, just as it is a disservice for the real word combat or self defense instructor to make a potential student believe he is the best replacement for any of the other three.

A good instructor should always stick to what he or she does best, and what he or she does best should never be collecting monthly fees at the potential cost of a student’s health, self esteem or life.