Pain in Combat

I clicked a link over at Kojutsukan to a t.v. interview/panel discussion on pain. 

To summarize, two elite athletes, one in Cricket and the other a boxer, discuss pain, or the lack of pain, that they experience during their chosen sport/profession.

The boxer discusses how she has only been hurt or felt significant pain twice in her fighting career.  She was aware she was being punched in the face but it didn’t really hurt. 

Is she superhuman?  Immune to pain? 

No.  She goes on to say that she feels agony when she stubs her toe at home.

There are panel guest who explore the why’s and how’s of it all.  I watched a good deal of it.  Here’s the link, if you're interested.

Well, it got me thinking...

PAIN:

People experience pain in varying degrees and in varying situations.  This stands to reason. 

If you are training to survive a violent encounter, you must factor in the fact that you and your opponent may experience pain, or my not experience pain, during combat.  

Bottom line, if you are fighting for preservation in a real world attack, the techniques you’ve practiced that hurt like hell during controlled, partial power practice, may have little or no effect on your attacker.  This will be exacerbated by the attacker’s level of commitment, focus, anger and adrenaline. 

Pain is an interesting thing.  As Dalton said in Roadhouse “Pain don’t hurt”.

  

Many people practicing martial arts have never been hit, not really been hit.  Hopefully most people won’t ever be assaulted by someone who is really trying to hurt them.  But if you are, you may feel pain, or you may feel numbness, or confusion, or a combination of these sensations.  

I’ve been on the receiving end of a couple good hits in my lifetime.  While shocking to a degree, I did not feel pain, per say.  I was acutely aware that I had been hit hard, possibly injured, but the actual acute pain didn’t set in until a while later, when the situation was resolved.

The experience is quite off-putting, to say the least, and if you aren’t prepared for the shocking nature, you may naturally sort of ‘shut-down’, covering up (natural to a degree) as opposed to defending yourself.  There are a lot of videos on-line where you observe people just kind of ‘taking it”.  It’s tempting to ask why they just stand there or cower and continue to receive a beating.

Like so many things, you have to prepare yourself mentally.  If you haven’t been hit before, understand that it might hurt or it might not but it will be a jarring experience.  Visualize receiving this shocking blow and use the mental rehearsal to create a trigger or response stimulus.  For those of you who have experience, do the same.  Use it like the gun going off to signal the start of a race.  The race in this case being your survival.

Beyond your own reaction, be aware that your attacker may be less fazed by your defense than you anticipate.  They may not be stopped by a well-placed strike or two. If they are on drugs or alcohol, their pain centers may be further impeded.

This is why, when training for the worst case scenario, the situation you couldn’t extricate yourself from safety, you need to make sure your training is effective, brutally effective. 

Any training for realistic self-perseveration should include techniques that do real damage. 

Consider joint locks and breaks and attacks to vulnerable targets like eyes and throat. 

Even if your attacker doesn’t feel pain, you need to disable their attack ‘delivery system’.  If they can’t stand or their limb or hands are disabled, or they can’t breathe or see, then they are less able to injure you and you are more likely to be able to create an opportunity to get away to safety and get help. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  Real violence is ugly and nasty.  Make sure that your training and mindset is prepared to match this reality. 

Be safe.

JM.

Further reading:

I posted some time ago about pain compliance techniques and when they can (and can't) be used effectively.  Click here and here.

More reading on pain:

Joint Locks and the Pain Game Part I

Joint Locks and the Pain Game Part II

Enjoy.

Post Violence - Surviving the Aftermath - Part I

It happened.  Even with all your awareness training and attempts to avoid it, it actually happened.  You were involved in a violent encounter.  Now what?

Real violence, unlike in the movies, is ugly and disturbing.  It's unpredictable and unsettling.  It's shocking to most people.  It is typically outside of the realm of normal human experience for the vast majority of what I'll call 'normal' people. Normal meaning decent people, not predators and not those accustomed to violence by way of profession.

There are a number probably outcomes:

1.  You 'lost'.  In truth, if you survived, you've won, but for the purposes of this discussion, we'll call it losing.  You either did nothing and took the beating (quite common), or you tried to defend yourself and it didn't work.

2.  It was a tie.  You took some lumps but so did he/she.  You may be injured but you defended yourself and it ended before your attacker's intended conclusion.

3.  You won.  You fought back and it worked.  The other person gave up, ran away or was injured to a point where they could not or did not want to continue.

Let's take a closer look at each scenario and the impact it may have on you, as a peaceful warrior.

1.  You lost.

For many, when real violence occurs, they freeze up.  The mind simply cannot resolve the issue of what is happening.  For normal people, many times they simply cannot believe it is really happening.  It causes this freeze-up effect.  The body doesn't respond because the mind can't make sense of what is going on.  So you just stand there, hoping to weather the storm.  If this is you, don't beat yourself up over it.  It's very common in peaceful folks to have this response. What you do with this learning experience, what you can take from it will be key as you move on with your life.

If you didn't freeze-up, you fought back but it didn't work.  Also quite common. The controlled safe environment of the dojo is very different than facing someone who is really trying to hurt you on the street.  You may have practiced this technique or that one, hundreds, or thousands of times, but it didn't work.  You may have become too focused on trying to perform one technique to the exclusion of all else.  You may have reverted to a more primal style of fighting back, or you might have started fighting and then turtled to protect yourself until it was over.

You may be injured.  
Your confidence will be destroyed.
You may cry, lash out or be afraid to go outside.
You may become hyper-vigilant and experience a degree of paranoia.
You may think your training was useless.
You may stop practicing martial arts.
You may arm yourself.
You may train everyday.

You will go through a roller-coaster ride of emotions.  The physical injuries are far easier to heal from than the mental scars, which will linger.  

First off, realize that some, most, all, or very few of the above reactions may occur.  Every person is different and will have different reactions to real violence. Whatever reactions you are having, they are perfectly natural.  You are not a coward, you are not overreacting.  Don't try to fight it.  Let them run their course.

You may require professional counselling depending on the severity of the encounter and your reactions to it.  Remember, seeking help when you need it is a sign of strength, not weakness.  If you are re-living the experience over and over again, not sleeping, or self medicating just to get by, you may need to speak with a professional.

In Part II, I'll further discuss the potential impact that an experience like this can have on your day to day experiences and on your future training.  After that, I'll discuss the similarities and differences between losing or winning a violent encounter.

Stay tuned and be safe.

Tough Questions About Training

You've just had a great session training in your martial art.  You worked up a good sweat, you worked the heavy bag, you drilled your blocks, strikes and stances. Maybe you sparred or did kata, or both. You nailed all of it.  You're on a post workout high, all those feel good endorphins running through your veins.  It was a good night.  Not a night to question what you're doing.  Or is it?

From time to time you've got to ask yourself some tough questions about your training.  Did that fantastic workout get you any closer to your goals?  Assuming your goals are self defense and preservation, that is.  

So here's the tough question.  Do any of your training methods answer to the type of risk or attack you might face in the street?  

All of the aforementioned training methods have some value, but they must be applied properly, or realistically.

Take the heavy bag.  Sure it's got lots of benefits, but are multiple combinations of punches and kicks really responding the the realities of an attack?  How many punches and kicks can you actually expect to land in a real encounter?  How likely is it that you'll land more than one, and if you do, once you add in the dynamic of movement, where are your strikes going to land?  You could easily injure your hands, feet and shins, even breaking them if you catch your opponent's hard parts.

Sparring?  Well, sparring is great too, but it's not real fighting.  No one bounces back and forth for extended periods of time playing tag and stopping once they land a technique.

Kata?  The core of many martial arts.  Misunderstood, there's not much value to them, from a self defense standpoint.  Understood, yes there are self defense benefits, but many just go through the motions.  Sadly, most kata is so exacting and inflexible in it's execution, it can be challenging to learn how to respond to anything other than a 'perfect' attack.  And some of those scripted attacks on which kata is developed are unrealistic in the first place.  It's easy to get lost in the minutia and miss out on the concepts contained therein.  

Stances?  You need some form of stance for all you do, but to root into one for long periods of time will do little to assist you in a constantly changing assault.  

Blocks, strikes and kicking drills.  All good too, however in a real encounter, after the first block or strike or combo, you'd best be moving to a position of advantage, to get away or as a set up for the next technique.  

So, throw away all your training methods?  

Of course not.  Just adapt or adjust them to match the real world.  There is now nearly unlimited access to actual assaults that have been recorded on the internet.  Watch how they happen.  Put yourself in the shoes of the person that was attacked.  What would you/could you do to respond to the attack?

Study how you could have avoided it altogether. Then study the pre-attack cues, the hints that troubles on it's way. Then study the attack itself. How you would respond, first to the initial attack, and then what would you do as a follow up? You'll likely discover patterns in attackers attacks that you can then develop drills for.

Figure out what you'd do and where you'd move.  Then make sure your training syncs up to that reality.  

The next time you're using the heavy bag, think knees and elbows (harder to injure yourself, easier to injure your attacker, even if they're covering up).  Do your strike, or knee or knee elbow combo and then move.  Come around behind your imaginary opponent or practice getting out of there altogether.  

Sparring has some good movement, or it can, but most sparring prohibits any striking to the back of your opponent, so not many people practice getting behind their opponent.  So make sure you do.  Also, from time to time, keep going after a successful hit (if you do point sparring).  Don't drill yourself to stop fighting as soon as you make contact.  If you're an in close type of fighter, after you've tagged your opponent, move in and tie them up/set them up for a finish.

Kata?  That's a bit harder.  Take a kata technique and practice it against different types of attacks.  You may have to do it a certain way in a grading, but that shouldn't prevent you from experimenting with a concept and adjusting as necessary.  

Stances, go into them, but practice popping out of them and moving.  You don't want to be fighting in a straight line, so get off the tracks, you can always drop into another stance once you've angled off to the side or back of your opponent.

Nicely put, Nike

Blocks, strikes and kicking drills?  Same thing, strike and move.  Move in, move out, move to the side, move behind.  Every technique you do should improve your position, make your opponent's position worse and protect yourself from injury.

One of the best things you can do for self defense is to study actual attacks and then tailor your training to respond to those realities.  Training to respond to the most likely type of attacks from the most likely type of attackers will put you miles ahead of most in the self defense world.

"You will fight as you train" 

This is very true in martial arts.  Under stress, your training will kick in.  So make sure your training is addressing the type of violence you're most likely to face.  If all your training is static straight line training,  you'll never move to a position of advantage under high stress.

We are lucky in many ways to have access to such a large database of actual attacks.  It is now possible to tailor training to more accurately respond to what's happening in the real world.

Food for thought.

You fight as you train. And what's with the tap?

In my last post on the dangers of point sparring,  I referenced the fact that we will fight how we train.  I’ve said this before in previous posts, but it bears repeating.

The discussion I had in the comments section inspired this post. 

First, why do we tap?

Tapping out is fairly common in the martial arts, but what are the reasons we use it?

There are two main reasons that we use the tap.

1. It’s universal.  No language barrier exists.  Train anywhere in the world in most arts, and the tap is understood.  It’s also audible and tactile (I recommend tapping your opponent whenever possible, just in case they don't hear you tapping madly on your own body).
2. We fight as we train. 

When you train long enough, you get certain moves or techniques burned into your head.  In fact, this is one of the purposes of continued repetitive training movements.  It’s so they become ingrained in your body and mind.  This is usually a good thing.

Since we fight as we train, we tap instead of saying Stop! or Ouch!, or yelling out.  If we trained using the word stop whenever a technique was applied, we would be subconsciously teaching ourselves to let go when someone said stop or yelled out.  In a real fight where you are forced to defend yourself, this is the last thing you’d want to do.  

This brings me to another important point.

When your opponent taps, never just let go.  It is extremely important to only ease up on whatever technique you are applying.  You need to keep the technique on.  In a real violent encounter, you need to stay in control.  If you practice by letting go when someone taps, you are conditioning yourself to do so whenever you hear or feel a tap.

You never know, someone on the street might tap in a real situation.  I might, only because I am so conditioned to tap when a technique is about to injure me. 

In the discussion over my last post, I told the story of a police officer who practiced a specific gun disarming technique repeatedly.  After each successful disarm, he handed the gun back to his training partner and repeated the drill.

This officer later had an encounter on the road where a suspect pointed a gun at him.  The officer, from his extensive practice, was successful in using the gun disarming technique that he had drilled over and over.  The only problem was that he started to hand the gun back to the bad guy. 

He caught himself in time, but it was a valuable lesson.  He fought as he had trained. 

As a result, the training program was re-vamped.  This disarming technique remained but officers were trained to take control of the person after they had disarmed them or to create time and distance or obtain cover etc.  It never ended with handing the weapon back.

We will fight as we train, so we need to think about how we are training.  The tap, while a great tool, does not mean let go, it just means ease off but stay in control.  Your mind under stress we revert to your training.

Training can, and should, be an enjoyable experience.  While practicing, however, you need to keep a serious mindset and understand what bad habits you may be burning into your psyche.

Train well. 

Fight or Flight Survival Response

To oversimplify, the 'fight or flight' response occurs when people undergo extreme stress, normally in the context of facing danger.  It's an evolutionary response, which, amongst other things, causes a massive adrenaline dump, which temporarily makes you stronger, and more able to fight or to run away. It also desensitizes your pain centers, making you more apt to make it through whatever you are facing.  There's a bunch of other physiological things that occur, but that's the substance of the concept.

John Coles wrote an interesting post on his blog on the fight or flight response.  Read it here.

In previous posts, I've touched on the fight or flight response, the survival mechanism and the adrenaline dump that occurs during combat or extreme stress.  It's important to incorporate some form of stress induced training to your regimen, and to understand what may or may not happen to you.

Equally important, and often overlooked, is understanding that your attacker may be experiencing all these same things, making them temporarily stronger and more resistant to pain.

So what happens when the fight or flight response doesn't kick in?  And why wouldn't it?

First off, it's a complex issue.  So many things are happening 'behind the scenes' in you brain, that it's pretty tricky to figure out all the whys and hows.

Next, it's important to note that the same person may react differently to the same stimuli on any given day.  So one day, the response might kick in at the slightest whiff of danger, and another it might wait until an attack is underway, or maybe after.  Or even not at all.

There are very real advantages and disadvantages to experiencing the adrenaline dump brought about by the 'fight or flight' response.  Following are just a few of both:


Advantages:

Increased strength
Increased speed
Increased tolerance to pain
Increased endurance
 

Disadvantages:


Loss of fine motor skills
Auditory exclusion
Tunnel vision
Distortion of time


Without the response,  you are more likely to intelligently respond and recognize threats and plan and identify options,   The irony is that, by experiencing the response, you could arguable be better equipped to carry out that plan or escape.

Brains or brawn, too bad you can't always have both.


Can you overcome or prevent the 'fight or flight' response?

Yes and no.

Training can reduce or eliminate the response.  Repeated exposure to simulated situations de-sensitizes you from the effects of the response.  This is only true of serious training.  If your mind isn't in the game, it's just playing around.

For military, law enforcement and security, training is developed to over-ride the stress response, or at least mitigate its effects.  This is where stress induced training methodologies can be useful.

More traditional martial arts training can do the same thing.  This can be a double edged sword though, especially for people who have never been exposed to real violence.  It can backfire.

Take a martial artist who has never seen or experienced any real or disturbing violence.  This person trains for a while, and feels pretty good about their skill level.

Now, this person gets attacked.  Since their minds have experience hundreds or thousands of attacks in the dojo, they don't get the immediate adrenaline 'fight or flight' dump.  Their attacker may be jacked up, but they are as cool as a cucumber. Until their response/defense doesn't work.  Wait a sec!  This has always worked in class, and it's not working now!  Oh Sh_ _!  And I'm hurt, I'm bleeding!

Now the panic sets in, the response kicks in, but it may be too late.  If it had kicked in a bit sooner, they may have been able to get away or fight back enough to gain the advantage.

Some will posit that we should never try to overcome this natural response. There's some strength to this argument for the majority of folks, but this is not always realistic or advisable, especially referring those tasked with making legal use of force response decisions.

The other reason to train for both scenarios is the variable nature of your own response.  What if you don't recognize someone as a threat, but they turn out to be?  You might not get the benefits, or the associated physiological responses until after the encounter has ended.

So you need to train for both scenarios:

1.  Instant 'fight or flight' response
2.  Delayed - begins during an encounter

It is for this very reason that I stress the importance of learning effective self defense techniques that take into account both scenarios.  In my Mind the Gap series, I discuss this in greater detail.  For true, survival self defense for the vast majority of people, the techniques must work in both cases.  There is no adjusting for adrenaline.  You can never know, with absolute surety, when or even if, the 'fight or flight' response will activate.

For military, law enforcement and security, you need to train differently for both scenarios.  Adrenaline can help or hinder.  Just think about the effect an adrenaline dump would have on trigger pull and aiming and how tunnel vision and auditory exclusion effects threat identification and communication.

This is a much broader topic, but this is where mindset training is so important.  The will to win and the never-give-up mindset needs to be in place when everything else goes down the toilet.  The 'fight or flight' response can sneak up on this group and catch them more off guard than most folks, if only for the reason that it's unexpected after all the training.  When you've survived multiple violent encounters and have remained calm and fully in control, when you do experience the dump, it can be a very unwelcome surprise.  But I'm getting off topic.

It's very important to gain an understanding of what you may experience in a violent confrontation.  Research, find instructors who've experienced violence, keep a serious mind and make sure your training offers you the highest likelihood of success no matter how your body and mind respond.

Nature has given us a survival gift in the 'fight or flight', but we need to realize that some situations in the modern world do not allow us to maximize this evolutionary advantage.  Food for thought.

Train safely.

Stress Response Training and the Flinch

John Coles from Kojutsukan blog made a comment on my post on Part VII of my knife survival series discussing the flinch response.

He said,

"A lot of these concepts are used these days to lend credibility to a way of doing things or to develop a way of doing things."

I felt this comment was worthy of a bit more discussion on my part.  I have to agree with the comment that these concepts are used to lend credibility to a way of doing things.

For the most part, I think this is born of ignorance or inexperience, not out of malice.  (John didn't suggest it was malicious, by the way).

The problem is that some of the concepts or techniques are being taught because they make sense to the person who is teaching them.  It seems logical and rational to them, so it must be true.  In reality, it's more of a 'best guess' approach from people who have rarely been in any form or combat or violent encounters.

Even for those who have actually experienced real violence once or twice, it is often a result of the natural mental process of having to make a volatile, confusing situation and/or reaction make sense.

After periods of high stress and traumatic circumstances, it is a natural part of the healing process (mentally) to break down a volatile, unpredictable, confusing situation into manageable, somewhat orderly 'chunks'.  The situation will replay over and over again and the mind needs to find solutions to the parts that did not go well, or could have gone better.  That way, eventually fear and emotion can fade away, often with the help of similar situation scenario training.

The potential shortcoming with any such training is that in extreme situations, it is often impossible to recall exactly what happened, and in what order.  The brain, as a defensive mechanism, fills in the blanks.  This has the potential for people to draw inaccurate conclusions about what they did, what they should have done, or what would have worked better.  It is here that (often well meaning) teachers authoritatively teach students about how they will respond when taken by surprise.  They teach a comprehensive course of study on potentially flawed data.  The students, many of who have not experienced true violence, can't weigh the material against real world experience, so they believe it to be accurate.  After all, it makes sense rationally.

To illustrate the mental gaps that occur under extreme stress, you just have to look at the example of police involved shootings.  Over and over again, it has been shown that the officer discharging their firearm rarely remembers how many rounds they fired.  You would think this would be an easy enough thing to do, but it's not.  And shooting a gun is a practiced skill that's drilled over and over again throughout an entire career.  If this can occur for something like this, how can you accurately judge how you reacted or would react to a surprise attack?  There are other factors such as time distortion, auditory exclusion, or selective hearing, tunnel vision, feelings of detachment and time slowing down, or speeding up.  I've barely scratched the surface on these issues but plan on writing about them in the future.

Some systems out there are researched fairly well, but as with everything, buyer beware.  To truly paint a picture of what goes on when attacked, you need to find someone who has experienced it, has viewed footage, has read studies and most importantly, in my opinion, has had the opportunity to speak to people who have experienced it (if they trust you enough to give a honest recount of upsetting events).

There's no easy way to collect enough data to make concrete conclusions.  In addition to my personal experiences, I'm lucky in the sense that I'm privy to a variety of sources or research, and a lot of people.  Another point to take away is that while there are things that are common to us all, there are also differences.  People react differently to a variety of stimuli.  This makes it important for any form of training to be fluid and flexible.

Many of the systems out there teaching flinch response training are pretty good.  Just make sure you have a critical eye when any definitive statements are made about how you are guaranteed to react in any situation.

I think I've rambled enough for now.  I encourage everyone to research the flinch response and stress response.  It's fascinating and applicable to serious martial arts training.