Students who have little or no experience of violence, will often fall into the trap of believing that real-life violence reflects their training environment; this may also get reinforced by watching combat sports such as MMA, as both the training and sport environments of the martial arts and self-defense share many properties that don’t exist in the real-world e.g. they both occur in uncluttered environments, where there is a good deal of space in which to maneuver (in fact, a cage or ring is designed to allow combatants to demonstrate what they can do – it is designed to enable, not restrict the athletes). In this article, I want to look at some of the ways in which real-life violence, differs from the typical training environment, and how we can better prepare ourselves and our students, for dealing with real-life violence. I readily acknowledge that these components, factors, etc. are based on my firsthand experiences of violence, and that other individuals may have had different and equally valid experiences. I hope that by sharing these, and possibly encouraging debate, those instructors and students who haven’t ever been involved in a fight or confrontation may gain a better idea of what reality actually looks like, and what to expect if they ever have to use that which they have learnt in the studio/dojo. If your expectations are based on wrong assumptions, it is likely that you will be crippled into inaction very quickly when you are confronted with the reality of violence, and suddenly realize how unprepared you are.

The time and distance that you normally have when you practice, is going to be halved and halved again, in a real-life confrontation. In a training environment, partners, even when they come at you fast, will rarely come at you as fast as an attacker in a real-life confrontation. This may be due to the fact that they fear being injured and/or fear injuring you. Also, many training partners don’t know how to attack, like a real-life attacker e.g. they don’t recoil the knife, they don’t attack in a frenzied manner, they don’t close distance at speed, etcetera, etcetera. It is hard in the training environment to convey that in real-life scenarios, assailants don’t attack - they assault. An attacker with a knife, is not going to try to stop you performing a technique, they don’t care, because their intent is simply to cut you and stab you as many times as they can, and this normally sees them moving in to you at a speed, something that is rarely replicated in training – this is why training with resistance, doesn’t always replicate reality; attackers will often not resist, they will be focused and completely concentrated on their attack – and this will be the “resistance” that you meet. This is one of the reasons why it is sometimes necessary to look beyond the attack, and at the attacker.

Violence can be multi-phased. Often in training, when a technique is performed, the scenario or situation ends, however this is often not the case in reality. This is probably most clearly typified in the practice of gun and weapon disarming, where once the assailant has been disarmed the “scenario” ends e.g. a gun is disarmed, the disarmer steps back and mimics “tapping and racking” the weapon; end scene. However, reality may not be that clean or clear-cut. What if the attacker, attempts to get their weapon back? What if they pull a knife and charge you? What if their friend or other third party pulls a gun on you? Always training for one outcome, and always achieving the outcome, is simply choreography, and does not represent real-life. Sometimes, solutions don’t work, or they are temporary. Do you train what to do, when a technique or tactic doesn’t work? I have punched people so hard, that I was sure I’d knocked them out, but I didn’t; I’ve thrown people so hard that it should have ended the fight. In real-life, “that should have worked”, doesn’t cut it, you need to be able to keep going, and going, and going. If you have only ever trained for success, you will have little/nothing to respond with, when you’re not at first successful. I often hear people talk about improvised weapons as if they are a solution in themselves e.g. if somebody has a knife, grab a pipe or piece of scaffolding and start attacking them with it, etc. What do you do when that attacker gets inside the swing of your pipe? What if they aren’t particularly affected by its use? Getting an improvised weapon doesn’t be default end the fight, though this is often the implication in training.  

Most of our training, is conducted in an environment conducive to the practice of our techniques, however in real-life there may simply not be the space in which to execute them. I remember a stabbing in a crowded nightclub, where the victim had hardly any room to move, due to the people around him (many of whom were oblivious to what was actually happening). A friend of mine was mugged on an escalator – his attacker came and stood on the step behind him, and put a knife to his back. If he’d needed to perform a control and/or disarm, he’d have had almost no room to move, and would have been on a different elevation to his assailant. Have you ever trained for such a scenario? Since hearing about it, I’ve always walked up escalators to avoid such a situation. Predatory individuals, understand how to use the environment against their victims, in a way that gives them the greatest advantage. Have you ever tried and tested your groundwork techniques in the backseat of a car, with the child-locks on? What you have found to work on the mats, and which you are confident that you would use, may fail you in a real-life situation because you find you rapidly run out of the space needed to get it to work. 

You can start to combine these things together e.g. maybe you successfully deal with the attacker on the backseat of the car, only to have them pull a knife as you start climbing through the center console to get to the front seat, etc. Is this an extreme scenario? Possibly, but it starts to put some of the real-life components into the training. If we only train the simple scenarios, with “attackers” who give us time and distance, who don’t change their attacks, and are always suitably affected by our techniques, etc., we are not training for real-life; we are simply showcasing our systems, and this should not be our goal.