Self-defense - Will You Be Able To Use Your Self-defense Training When You Need It Most?

Every day, millions of people - young and old - children and adults

, attend martial arts classes and participate in self-defense training. They train to be able to survive a dangerous situation should they ever come face-to-face with a brutal attacker. And yet, after speaking with more than a few of these people, I've found that many of them actually doubt whether they'll actually be able to use their skills in a real-life situation.

The primary reason that many of these people have doubts is, quite simply, they know themselves. More specifically... They know how they act under pressure everyday, and they're not being attacked by an animalistic assailant who wants to beat, break, or kill them.

Keeping your cool under pressure is no easy task - even for the best of us. But, you had better learn to do it if you're going to survive to tell others about "the idiot who tried to jump you."

There are things that you can do to help prepare yourself for the kind of pressure you're going to face in a self-defense scenario. But, before I go into that, let me first begin by saying that, it's not your fault that you're not prepared.

Okay. Maybe it is a little bit.

But, you're responsibility for not being fully prepared after having gone through a training program pretty much ends with...you not getting all the details.

The sad fact is that, most people teaching martial arts and self-defense classes...have NEVER been in a real-world, street fighting, self-defense situation!

Most have never had to survive more than a few minutes in a karate tournament, and many of them have never seen even that much pressure!

The problem with most of the programs that are being offered is that they don't adequately cover the important aspects of a self-defense encounter that you'll have to deal with. Most spend way too much time on step-by-step techniques. And, those who do cover the stress and confusion that goes on in a self-defense situation, limit their lessons to just talking about it.

In order to be prepared for a lethal encounter with an attacker on the street, you're going to have to be able to deal with pressure. Two good ways to do this are:

1) Put yourself in the types of everyday stress situations that you typically avoid so that you can desensitize yourself and learn to operate under pressure.

2) Participate in games and exercises that create a stressful situation that you must deal with to win.

While the first option is something that is personalized to your life, option two should be a part of every self-defense course or martial arts program supposedly teaching self-defense. If it's not in the program you're enrolled in, you're only getting part of the solution to being able to protect yourself.

An example of a game that induces stress and simulates the stress of a real fight, but under controlled conditions, is sparring. This is common to most martial arts programs, even though I believe that most schools teach sparring WAY too early or it's not done as a teaching lesson but as an activity that only the most intuitive can learn from.

Sparring, when done correctly, leads the student in a step-by-step fashion through several stages of progress where you can add more and more of the skills you've learned until you're doing it like you see in the movies. Control and set limits based on a student's level, knowledge, and skill-base should be considered at all times. Otherwise, a student will just fall back on self-preservation and the habits of the past, rather than learn anything from the exercise.

Of course, there are literally thousands of exercises that could be used to add this dynamic factor to the study of self-defense. The point is that it should be done. Otherwise, students will have some information and, if you and the instructor aren't careful, something even worse.

You'll have a student that either has a false sense of confidence or...

...a student who has training but still has the fear that you won't be able to do what you've learned when you need it most.

by: Jeffrey Miller

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