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Kit LeBlanc
16th June 2001, 16:28
Okay, maybe I can kickstart this, my favorite E-Budo forum. I asked a similar question on another board where a lot of "operators, " combat vets, and cops hang out. I'd like to hear what some folks here, particularly in the "community," think.

What is with the GLUT on "tactical" and "close quarters combatives" trainers?

Now I am not really referring to the people that LIE about being SEALS or SWAT or what have you to bolster their own images. Several have been "outed" here and on Don C's website exposing fraudulent claims.

I am talking about the people who appear to want to be Bad by Association. Those with *zero* operational experience, and no tried and tested professional background in tactics or combatives, TEACHING same and advertising their wares through the web and tactical magazines.

The promotional material is often oblique, but not dishonest. Someone has "trained" police, SWAT, spec ops, etc. but they never seem to mention THEIR OWN real world experience. Or, people are "attached" to XYZ department, a "member" or "special member" of ABC team, etc. when basically the translation is whichever team or group bought a bill of goods and invited the instructor in for a training.

Or they become reserve police officers or get "special comissions" (whatever that means) and tout that as proof of been there, done that. To someone in the know this can be suspect. One can be a reserve for LAPD and have engaged in far more than I will ever see in full time police work, or one can be a reserve for a three man department in Happyville USA where being a police officer is checking the doors on the hardware store and responding to barking dog complaints.

Setting onesself up as a civilian "close quarters combatives" instructor may be worse. Why not call it what it is, self defense? What gives a martial artist with NO actual fighting experience the expertise to teach others how to defend themselves "for real," beyond basic techniques and time honored advice that anyone can read in the newspaper?

Is it all about the image? Getting your picture taken with an MP-5 in your hand, hanging out with "the team?"

Don't get me wrong, I think there are a lot of things that can be learned from civilian or non-real world tested trainers. Several big names in the biz are just that. But you have to look carefully at what is taught to glean what is really effective based on actual field experience. I can't help but think that some of the fine untested trainers would be so much better if they did in fact have field experience. And I mean more than a few brawls with drunks 10 years ago....

AND there is no guarantee that the quality standard will be high with people who ARE real world experienced (I have seen some of the quality standards for some trainers and it is frightening, but all the instructors were military, SWAT, etc.)

So what is the deal?

Kit

Mark Brecht
16th June 2001, 16:49
Kit,

I do see your points, and in many ways agree however let`s look at this from another light.
I don`t know very much about Football... (even tough I played it in my Senior HS year...), but as far as I understand there are several coaches of top teams who themselves never played in the pro leagues... It is maybe not just how often you played the game, rather if you understand how to play it and if you are able to teach it...

AND there is no guarantee that the quality standard will be high with people who ARE real world experienced (I have seen some of the quality standards for some trainers and it is frightening, but all the instructors were military, SWAT, etc.)

That is an excellent point I highly agree with you there...

Kit LeBlanc
16th June 2001, 17:25
Originally posted by Mark Brecht
Kit,

I do see your points, and in many ways agree however let`s look at this from another light.
I don`t know very much about Football... (even tough I played it in my Senior HS year...), but as far as I understand there are several coaches of top teams who themselves never played in the pro leagues... It is maybe not just how often you played the game, rather if you understand how to play it and if you are able to teach it...


Yo, Mark. Not really being a sports guy, I can only say that I would imagine those coaches at least coached college and probably played college ball. Considering the level of competition in college ball these days, I would think it would prepare them for coaching pro leagues.

As far as understanding, I do not think that one can truly understand something to it's core without actively engaging in it. Isn't that one of the tenets of Budo? How can we apply a different measure to the actual application of what we are practicing in budo study?

Unless of course we agree that the practice of the thing replaces the doing. I don't. Through practice we might be able to understand elements of it, we might be able to get close, but truly deep knowing comes from experience.

I can *understand* rape. I can know what it physically entails and I can reasonably surmise I could perform the physical acts, I "know how to do it." It takes a far greater leap in my mind and spirit to actually perform the act, with everything else that leads up to it, and I think I can only *know* what it is like to rape another human being after doing so.

As far as teaching, those that can, do..... You know the rest.

I don't believe this is true for all cases, or for all aspects of each case. But the fact that it is so common a phrase leads me to believe this issue is a recurring one.

Kit

Sochin
16th June 2001, 17:32
Good morning Kit,

RE: "Setting onesself up as a civilian "close quarters combatives" instructor may be worse. Why not call it what it is, self defense?"

when I teach cqc, I'm not trying to capitalize on the badness of military reputation but to differentiate my "self defense" course from the traditional karate I also teach...why doI call it cqc? Because the cqc boys were the ones who helped me to bridge the gap between the sport and fighting, between the traditional and self defense. They taught me how to field strip my own "art" until it was practical in real life situations.

By the time I got to that place, my fighting days were over but my teaching days are still going strong. :)

Joseph Svinth
16th June 2001, 23:09
I think a lot of it has to do precisely with being photographed with the MP-5. Take a look at photos of cowboys from the 19th century -- they always feature Bowie knives and six-guns in the studios, Barlow clasp knives and ropes in the field. Go back further, and you see fat old guys dressed in armor for their portraits. A man's magic resides in his clothes, said the Greeks, two thousand years before that...

Neil Hawkins
17th June 2001, 05:13
I think it's commercial as well. There seems to be a 'trend' toward CQC these days and the public want it because it is advertised as quick to learn and effective. Instructors in many styles get out of their gi's, put on street clothes and call their art self-defense. Some will take the next step, put on fatigues and call it CQC, because there is a demand.

The ego thing is big though, who wouldn't like their photo taken in a flash suit, gas mask and MP5? Ever since the SAS took back the Iranian Embassy it has been an image that everyone associates with ruthless efficiency. If you believe all the stories there must have been 500 people on that roof! I've personally met six people that were there (I only believe one, and he never talks about it, I found out through a third party).

I started playing with CQC when I was in the Army because there was no official doctrine, and the stuff that was being taught was crud. My instructor has WWII experience and was approached to teach the Aussie SAS, so the stuff that he taught them, I trained with and taught to some others. But it was and is mostly for my own consumption, I refuse to teach it to people that don't need it. I will teach them SD instead. But I still prefer to teach traditional MA's every time, I enjoy that more.

Most of what is taught is common sense and you could get it from reading books, but people like to be shown and told stories (passed off as anecdotes). So as long as there is a demand there will be people who with bend or strectch the truth to get a name or make money from it.

Maybe we need to find the next trend and start pushing it so all these guys sell their fatigues and start wearing loinclothes whilst they teach, the Native American form of karate, long undiscovered, but exactly as taught to Apache Braves 400 years ago.

Ok, so I'm a cynic. :)

Regards

Neil

Kit LeBlanc
17th June 2001, 16:52
Originally posted by Neil Hawkins

Maybe we need to find the next trend and start pushing it so all these guys sell their fatigues and start wearing loinclothes whilst they teach, the Native American form of karate, long undiscovered, but exactly as taught to Apache Braves 400 years ago.

[/B]

Too late! It's been done here in the States. Weapons used are tomohawks, they do sweat lodges and vision quests, etc. Mix of karate and Native American shamanism.

Kit

George Ledyard
19th June 2001, 14:55
I must admit here that I do not have fighting experience on the street. I had about 15 or so years of experience doing Aikido when some Seattle Police guys asked me to do a class. During the first year they taught me as much as I taught them in terms of learning about what they really needed to know and the conditions under which they function every day.

Since that time my students and I have invested thousands of hours refinining the program. We have continued to attend other traiing and added whatever we found tyhat was good. And always the students reported back how it worked for them on the street.

Street "experience" is an important part of becoming truely functional as an officer. That is why i never tell them what to do but rather suggest ways for them to look at what they are doing. I am not the one who is out there each day. On the other hand, most officers are so busy doing what they do that they ofeten do not have much time to think about it. They take the "if it's worked so far, why change it approach". Whereas I am a professional instructor. I spend all my time thinkning about possibilities. What is likely, what is possible and how would the system cover those eventualities.

I know a lot of guys who are experienced in street fighting. They have survived years on the force by being street aware and tough. But they don't even come close to having the knowledge of how the body works, how control techniques could be more efficiently executed, how to deliver fast and devastating impact technique, etc. that I have. This is what i do. The typical DT instructor has under two hundred hours of training. If he is lucky he gets the chance to actually teach what he knows for a few hours each year. If you include my Aikido I have over ten thousand hours of training. In DT alone I teach over five hundred hours each year. That blows away most de[artment instructors and matches most academy teachers.

Cops are apt to disregard anything not shown by another cop. But I can put a guy on the floor in a fraction of the time that the typical and I can hit a lot harder and faster than most of them. And I can teach it. So I give them what I know and they can incorporate it into what they know and it works out well. Almost all of the guys who have trained with me for any significant time have ended up as the DT instructors for their own departments. I think that must say something about the worth of the program.

Their is no substitute for experience but one can benefit from the experience of others. I have spent a lot of time educating myself so that I don't teach something that isn't effective. I think it has resulted in something of value even though I have not myself needed to use what I teach. All reports from those who have are positive.

Kit LeBlanc
20th June 2001, 01:40
[QUOTE]Originally posted by George Ledyard
[B]I must admit here that I do not have fighting experience on the street. I had about 15 or so years of experience doing Aikido when some Seattle Police guys asked me to do a class. During the first year they taught me as much as I taught them in terms of learning about what they really needed to know and the conditions under which they function every day.

Since that time my students and I have invested thousands of hours refinining the program. We have continued to attend other traiing and added whatever we found tyhat was good. And always the students reported back how it worked for them on the street.

*******************




George,

Thanks for being so forthright. To a certain extent I am playing devil's advocate with this topic, which as you know comes up a lot when I am posting, I think to work through my own biases which I admit are quite strong sometimes. Part of it is my desire to understand where other people are coming from. In this way, this topic is becoming very fascinating for me.

Clearly you have spent a considerable portion of your adult life studying combative methods and martial arts (there is a VERY big difference, I believe). I have probably half or less the martial arts and far less of DT training that you have, and I am sure there are things that you could show me that would make my combative techniques better and more technically sound.

But I came up in martial arts with always the burning question "does this stuff really work UNDER PRESSURE?" I surmised maybe some does, maybe some doesn't. It probably comes from the fact that prior to my own studies, I had friends who studied that would demonstrate wrist locks or knife disarms that I simply twisted out of or blitzed through. After I began training, and to this day, I encounter instructors teaching stuff and making bold pronouncements on technical efficiency that have not at all been borne out by my personal experience. So I continue to question.

In order to answer some of my own questions, I did private security work (basically a doorman/bouncer/roundsman and all manner in between) and finally law enforcement to really put things to the test.

I do not mean the next question as flippant, or insulting, but it is a very personal one. I have often wondered how or why someone would specialize in a fighting art, devoting so much time and effort to it, certainly to the extent that they would eventually teach combatives to professionals, without ever wanting to test it in a socially acceptable manner?

There is no dearth of opportunities for this. Law enforcement is of course difficult to get involved with for many and requires a considerable investment of time, and a high tolerance for frustration and the willingness to undergo extensive unneccesary stress, but acting as a doorman or working in a higher risk security profession (as does Jeff Cook on this board), or bodyguarding can be both very fun (hotels are great to work for!) and very instructive in terms of learning first hand the dynamics of confrontation and dealing with actual physical confrontation. Many of these jobs can be done part time or even one or two nights a week. Doing so for even a year or two can provide live experience which will reinforce good training and demonstrate weaknesses in other training. This experience will also add credibility which is very much an issue in the teaching of professionals)

So why don't more non-fighting combatives instructors do this?

******************

Street "experience" is an important part of becoming truely functional as an officer. That is why i never tell them what to do but rather suggest ways for them to look at what they are doing. I am not the one who is out there each day. On the other hand, most officers are so busy doing what they do that they ofeten do not have much time to think about it. They take the "if it's worked so far, why change it approach".

*******************




Which is a good point, but it is a blade which cuts both ways, in my opinion. To some extent "it's worked so far why should I change it" is the CORRECT response, particularly for most officers without extensive training or martial arts experience. Why should they learn several more techniques, some of them which they will NEVER make work considering present and future training opportunities or desire? Perhaps what they do now, which MAY be very effective for them based on their job needs, simply needs to be refined with one or two more natural options or more Force on Force training with a resistive partner to refine their application. Many officers without martial arts training, and who are not very good at DT training, are very effective in the street and are so without being excessively forceful. They may not do the wristy-twisties the right way, if at all, but they are able to function within the force continuum using effective if not exactly the same methods being taught by some DT instructors, who I can tell you from experience may NOT be as effective.


***************

I know a lot of guys who are experienced in street fighting. They have survived years on the force by being street aware and tough. But they don't even come close to having the knowledge of how the body works, how control techniques could be more efficiently executed, how to deliver fast and devastating impact technique, etc. that I have. This is what i do. The typical DT instructor has under two hundred hours of training. If he is lucky he gets the chance to actually teach what he knows for a few hours each year. If you include my Aikido I have over ten thousand hours of training. In DT alone I teach over five hundred hours each year. That blows away most de[artment instructors and matches most academy teachers.

Cops are apt to disregard anything not shown by another cop. But I can put a guy on the floor in a fraction of the time that the typical and I can hit a lot harder and faster than most of them. And I can teach it. So I give them what I know and they can incorporate it into what they know and it works out well. Almost all of the guys who have trained with me for any significant time have ended up as the DT instructors for their own departments. I think that must say something about the worth of the program.

***********





Understood, but to me this is only HALF the equation. Certainly most officers are by no means proficient to a professional level in combatives. For many INSTRUCTORS even, ALL they get is department/state DT training and think they rate teaching others. I have seen recruits return from the academy and demonstrate stuff which is ludicrous, and this is what the State instructors are teaching, or at least what the recruits are getting from it. I have seen DT instrcutor's who could teach the basic movements designated by the state, but have NO base of real skill on which to build their instruction. Refer to my above response for more of my thoughts on that.

And is that the yardstick you really want to be measured against? Most officers? This strikes me as off for combatives instructors or martial artists who denigrate, rightly so, the abilities of most officers yet at the same time use them as the yardstick to measure their own prowess, in training drills, and their own teaching methods.

Further, a lot of the stuff that is performed under controlled mat conditions does not work in real world, meth-maggot/drunken EDP brawls. Most unskilled officers will little interest or motivation in DT training on the mat may be giving up or getting controlled by stuff that will not cause a motivated aggressive or egressive subject to submit.

************

Their is no substitute for experience but one can benefit from the experience of others. I have spent a lot of time educating myself so that I don't teach something that isn't effective. I think it has resulted in something of value even though I have not myself needed to use what I teach. All reports from those who have are positive.

************




Which is really what I am talking about. Understand I applaud people like yourself who devote so much time and so much skill to making officers safer and more effective. But do you think that you might have even more to teach, or teach with greater depth, with real physical confrontational experience?

I ask this because my own crazy idea is that skilled, serious budoka would make the best officers. Trained in effective technique to a deeper level than ANY DT program alone can provide, they would be the ones making professional use of force decision and have the skill to carry them out without having to break bones to gain compliance, or breaking bones very efficiently and adeptly if the situation so required.

More later...

Kit

Neil Hawkins
21st June 2001, 04:13
Kit,

I think you touched on a very good point, I'd like to elaborate a little bit on it.

Most people have fairly good survival skills, and these should always be enhanced as part of the training. If a LEO or Military Person, does have good skills the worst thing you can do is try to change the way they would react. What you can do, though is make them more efficient. George mentioned this but it was buried in the rest of the post.

Simple things like being aware of balance and correct use of power can radically improve things that someone is already doing, without the stress associated with learning new things.

Your right, nothing beats practical experience, but you have to get to a certain level of proficiency before you are exposed to the street and all the vagaries that it poses. Training in realistic scenarios will always benefit the student, and to address your "double edged blade" it will also highlight any inadequacies in what they do. These inadquacies can be addressed, corrected and refined in a safe environment prior to the dangers of the street, where any mistake could be fatal.

The difficulty is in balancing the training and finding an instructor that has something of value to offer, regardless of their background.

Some interesting points coming out of this though.

Neil

Kit LeBlanc
26th June 2001, 05:39
Well,

This topic died on the vine again. I am often left asking why? Without trying to push more buttons I can only guess that not too many people in the burgeoning CQC field either have the experience that is crucial to being fully expert, and unlike Mr. Ledyard do not care to disclose such for whatever reason. Perhaps it would hurt business.

George, however, seems to know exactly where he stands and why he believes what he does is effective and worthwhile for his students, based on what they bring back to him from the field.

I am partly trying to draw out rationalizations. I may agree with them, after all. I have learned a great deal that I apply in my work from people that have never been in a real fight. But as I said before, something in me looks sidelong at practitioners who spend so much time learning and perfecting a craft, in this case "professional combatives," without ever putting their training or themselves on the line. So far everyone seems to agree that there is no substitute for practical experience, so why do so few seem to seek it out? And I do mean actively look for it in an accepted manner. In what better way can a serious budo practitioner serve?

Let me just add that personally I am no combatives guru. My clock gets cleaned regularly and deftly on the jujutsu/judo mat. I am no Ken Good or HK Instructor or even a "medium speed" operator. I am learning, and I am trying to apply what I can from the martial arts to effective strategies applicable to the modern day with modern weapons. These other weapons and strategies will be what I depend upon when I encounter that someone that I just might not be able to handle. That's right, I said someone that I JUST MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO HANDLE.

And there was the first thing EXPERIENCE taught me. Having around three years in martial disciplines when I started getting into rough and tumbles as part of my job, I found out that people DON'T fight like they do in the dojo. Some of them are not trained in anything and DONT THINK and DONT MOVE like the blue collar or white collar people that we train against on a regular basis, who also happened to be conditioned to "play by the rules" of cooperative training even in the most hard core of so called combative schools. "Train hard but don't get hurt."

These untrained people can STILL FIGHT, some are quite dangerous. They are very unconventional and are often given heightened abilities due to alcohol and or drug intoxication.


And then the second issue. Dealing with my own emotions and thought processes. Yes, at first the fear. Then learning how to deal with the shakes from the adrenalin rush afterward (or shaking during and being worried the guy thinks I am afraid.... ) And questioning myself, and my training. Why is this happening? Isn't my training supposed to prepare me for this sort of thing? Then how come that lock didn't work? Why are my hands shaking when the fight ended an hour ago? I have trained in the supposedly more "combative" classical methods and yeah, I found it more mentally stressful than unarmed "sport" training to have a bokken swinging full speed toward my head, but it was nothing, I repeat NOTHING, like having a drunk raving lunatic trying to gouge my eyes with his thumbs or the assault suspect coming up over on top of me after I hit the ground during a fight (another thing which WILL happen even though your art makes it impossible to take you down. Okay, what if you slip?).

But that stuff started to become mitigated with more experience. Not with more dojo preparation, or talking, or posting coulda, shoulda, woulda's), but more practical real life experience down in the blood and the guts and the beer. Successfully dealing with repeated physical encounters bred a confidence that I think only the most intense force on force training can come close to (of course, now everyone will be trying to convince themselves that their own training is that intense and they don't need the real world experience).

But then I got into law enforcement and it was a whole new world. Now I had WEAPONS that I had to be worried about when I got into it with folks. Not only that but more of THEM seemed to have weapons, too. Of course there was the added stress of my training officers looking at me and knowing I was at the top of my class for DT at the academy and knowing I knew "martial arts" and expecting to see magic whenever I got into a donnybrook. So my adrenalin rushes came back full force and in a much more complicated venue. It was like starting all over again.

The same after getting involved with the tactical team and operating in a tactical environment where now almost every situation involved weapons and I had to think about other team members as well as my own tactics. I am still a long way from getting good at this last. But the journey is teaching me a great deal.

The more experience, the more the adrenalin and fear gets better. Certainly it is there (thank god for that,) but it affects thinking and tactics much less. I did not drop the hammer on the several edged weapon wielding EDP's I have faced or the guys that actually put hands to guns because I did not have to. I did not brutalize or otherwise even injure most of the people I have been in knock down drag outs because I did not have to and had the control not to.

Some of the skills I was taught DID NOT WORK, either because I did them incorrectly, they did not work in the environment the altercation occurred in, or the guy just plain wasn't affected. This will happen to EVERYONE, I do not care how good you think you are. EXPERIENCE has shown that I have a certain element of mental and physical control that I can exercise in these situations EVEN WHEN I AM NOT ABLE TO CONTROL THE SUBJECT. I have BEEN THERE before and am far more comfortable adapting based on that experience.

Those practiced only in training environments may have ALL the individual tools but not have the transitions, or may have the transitions but not have the level of mental and physical control that they normally do in training because they are now having to do so with an enormous adrenalin dump and/or fear that they are not conditioned to (or stress inolculated against) because it does not normally play a role in their training. High stress force on force training can come close and is a great method of preparation, but the stress is different in some ways.

I really do think we only know what we think we know when we can do it at our worst, at our most unprepared and with the hindrances built into high stress interpersonal confrontations. Not in the training environment. My own personal belief is that it behooves those of us teaching others or contemplating teaching others how to operate in the former environment to know what that environment really feels like.

Kit

Joseph Svinth
26th June 2001, 09:27
You’re asking multiple questions here. So multiple replies. Purely speculation, mind you, nothing quantifiable here at all.

1. On this board, remember that only a few of the couple thousand members admit to having had military or police experience. Throw in folks such as George who have spent significant time around them, and the numbers really don't increase much. Thus the number of people inclined to answer on this forum is limited.

2. Although the draft ended decades ago, why don’t more MA practitioners voluntarily join the military or police as a way of broadening their martial horizons? Some guesses. 1) At entry levels, the job doesn’t pay especially well. 2) The job titles don’t impress one’s friends. 3) The hours suck. 4) You get your hands dirty. Meanwhile, dressing up in Halloween costumes is cool, and a new sword feels better in one's hand than the J-model Smith with four rounds of 158-grain ball that they used to issue.

3. Okay, but then why don’t people with experience teach? Every one of them does, every day s/he serves. But, for better or worse, most folks wake up one morning to discover that what was once a passion has become simply a job. Hopefully by the time this happens retirement age is nigh, but sometimes it happens before, and then you see these sad folks desperately holding on. But anyway, one day something happens and our hero finds himself ready to move on. So he does.

4. Finally, remember that not everyone is into inspecting his/her fantasies and seeing them for what they really are. I mean, lots of folks secretly think of themselves as the Lone Ranger. So what if under duress the ol' Lone Ranger was to be seen peeing his pants? "What you mean, wee, white man?" says Tonto, and there goes that macho self-image. Subconsciously or consciously understanding this, many people therefore avoid the risk altogether, and thus maintain their macho facades. Now, their friends and family may be fully aware that the facade is an illusion, and so laugh like hell behind their backs, but to their faces? Yup, you're Super Sokey, says so right there on your sign.