It is all too easy to get technique-focused in our training, especially if we are working to, or following a syllabus that has a list of techniques we need to learn and be proficient at for a particular level or belt e.g. we need to know how to escape a rear strangle, a side-headlock, a guillotine, etc. The danger with this, is that we become really good at dealing with these individual attacks and problems, but lack the context in which they occur; nobody just puts a guillotine on you, there must be a “phase” in the fight that precedes it where they manage to get control of your head, either because you tangle up together in a clinch, or you slip/trip forward, lowering your head for them to get control of etc. Going a step further, there must be a phase/stage that precedes the clinch, and so on. There’s a story to any attack, and that needs to get told in our training. This is where Multi-Phase and Multi-Dimensional training becomes important.

When you first learn a technique, it is important to practice it as a technique i.e. learn how to perform it properly, be able to perform it dynamically, and against a resisting/reactive attacker, etc. But it’s important not to stop there. At this point, we are simply good at performing this particular technique - in fact, we may even be good at performing it under stress and duress - but that doesn’t mean that we’ll be able to perform it successfully in a real-life confrontation. We may have both the physical and emotional skills/attributes to get it to work, but we haven’t trained it in any type of context e.g. we haven’t looked at the types of attacks, situations, etc., that precede it, and the responses an assailant may make to it; we haven’t placed it in the story, and without doing this, we may not recognize such an attack in a real-life conflict.

This is something that many people who haven’t any experience of violence often don’t realize. In the middle of a confrontation, it can be really difficult to identify what it is that is actually happening to you, and what the appropriate solution is. In the moment, you may focus on one detail of what is happening to you, and base your response on this, rather than correctly identifying the actual threat/danger. I once witnessed a knife attack, where the person being attacked managed to get two hands on to the attacker’s arm, stiffen their own arms, and hold the knife at bay. In this case, the attacker was the one who wasn’t able to make sense of what was happening, and began pulling and pushing his arm, trying to rip it free, and never once thought about changing/passing the knife to his other, free hand – this struggle lasted about 10-15 seconds, before two doormen were able to get to the attacker and subdue him. With his focus solely on the knife, he wasn’t able to understand what was actually happening, and what his options were. I see a similar phenomena in my school when teaching groundwork skills. I will demonstrate the difficulty of trying to perform an arm-lock on somebody, when you are in their guard, as they can normally prevent you by holding you back, by straightening their body and keeping you trapped between their legs, however when it comes to rolling and being “competitive”, I’ll see people try and dive for an arm when they are in their partner’s guard i.e. they don’t understand where the arm-bar is positioned in the story e.g. it comes after they have escaped guard etc. When we become so focused on one detail, we can forget and lose context.

Surviving a violent encounter is often done incrementally, rather than all at once; you do one thing that puts you in a better position but doesn’t completely solve your situation, and then you do another thing which improves on this, and another, and another, etc. This is especially true if you are caught by surprise, and find yourself a long way behind on the curve. Attacks, such as guillotine chokes and side-headlocks, often are started from a clinch, or a scramble - they are rarely isolated attacks, and in both your attacker has to bring your head down in some way. In our training, we want to become familiar with the feeling of having our head brought down, and the positions we may find ourselves in, that allow this to happen. When we train our defenses/techniques from here, we will recognize and identify the threat much sooner than if we simply train these techniques from the perspective and position of having been caught in them – we will also start to understand those things that we can do to prevent such attacks from being fully applied e.g. it is much easier to deal with a guillotine attack as it’s being made, rather than after it has been applied.

One way to do this is to chain techniques together in an escalating/progressive manner e.g. teach a defense against a wrist grab, a push, or a swinging right, where you end up in a clinch, and from the clinch the guillotine defense, and escape - and then put them all together. At any stage in the chain, you can have a successful outcome e.g. the attacker makes a wrist grab, you escape/deal with it, and they follow up with a push, which you successfully deal with and are able to end the confrontation there. Sometimes, the situation doesn’t end with the push, and the attacker keeps coming, making a swinging right, from which you end the confrontation, by blocking and launching into combatives, etc. Sometimes it ends in the clinch, sometimes it runs right through into the guillotine, etc. In this manner, you are creating stories that have context. You can start the story much earlier, by creating a story about why the person grabbed your wrist in the first place e.g. was it a situation which you tried to deescalate but were unsuccessful, was it part of an abduction attempt, or did it involve somebody who didn’t want you to leave, etc? By doing this, you can introduce the self-protection/personal-safety aspect of your training, and teach people how to identify, predict, and avoid violence.

We must also introduce other dimensions into the training of techniques e.g. a knife can be pulled in the midst of a fight, not just at the beginning, and we should train for this. If we train our grappling dimension in isolation to our knife defenses, and vice versa, we are training our techniques in distinct and separate channels. Few fights start off on the ground, but groundwork is commonly taught in isolation of everything else, and because of this, many people don’t understand why, how, and when fights go to the ground.  We can train multiple-dimensions, within Multi-Phase training e.g. in our chain, once the clinch stage is reached, our training partner can either pull a knife, or apply a guillotine choke. In this way, we start to open up a closed drill, into something that is more likely to reflect what a real-life confrontation looks like.

Although our goal as practitioners is to end every situation as quickly as we can, we must recognize that this is not always possible, and that a fight can move through many phases, which can involve other dimensions of our training; for example, grappling can involve striking and weapons, etc. It is important to train our threat recognition abilities, so that we can quickly identify attacks, and what is actually occurring in our situation, rather than responding at the last moment. Understanding the context and story of violent assaults through this type of training allows us to do this.