CHAPTER EIGHT
TRAINING TIME
If effectiveness is doing the right things, efficiency is doing things right.
—Tim Ferriss
This is what the path to self-protection looks like when you step onto my mats, beginning on day one:
We train anatomy to find targets
We train with a plan to inflict injury
We train with intention to bring full force
We train slowly to be accurate and accustomed
Training is never more complicated than that, because violence is never more complicated than that. Whether in the hands of an asocial predator or an innocent civilian, to be effective, the tool of violence requires the same set of circumstances: the identification of a target somewhere on the body, to bring a strike with the full weight and intention of its user, to create debilitating injury. Always. Of course, you already knew that, because that’s all we’ve talked about. To get started with your training and to actually do this stuff, begin by taking the lessons each featured scenario has taught us, and believe that you are capable of achieving the same kind of results that they achieved.
Think back to the Black Guerrilla Family members who identified gaps in the prison CERT team’s new armor and slowly struck those areas on each other to perfect their aim. Recall the patience and the force Sara deployed on her attacker, or the opportunistic targeting by Shawn or Peter or Bonnie. They went for what they could get, with whatever they could use, giving it everything they had, to create injury. You can do that, too, right now. It really is that simple.
If you’re anything like a former client of mine named David, however, you probably need to see the benefits of this slow, simple, deliberate philosophy in action to fully believe it. David didn’t just get to see it, he got to be it one night in Tijuana.
Besides being a former client, David is also a great photographer who spent a good stretch of time in Tijuana a few years ago working on a documentary. In the 1980s, when I was in the Navy and living in San Diego, Tijuana was a relatively safe place to visit. On the weekends, it was full of teens from La Jolla and Los Angeles getting drunk in bars and then stumbling back across the border as the sun came up. Today, however, Tijuana is a different story. Since at least 2008, the Nueva Generacion and Sinaloa cartels have been fighting in the streets for control of the city, a major way station for narcotics trafficking up the I-5 corridor on America’s west coast. As a result, murder has become a common, everyday occurrence.* Instances of brutal violence have become the rule, not the exception. It’s gotten so bad in some areas of town that lesser acts of criminality get completely ignored, like car alarms in an average American city. Wander outside La Sexta (the touristy nightclub district) and violence can befall you in the blink of an eye.
One night, as David returned to his hotel, he heard a woman screaming. No one else on the street seemed to pay it any mind, but when the screams continued he ran, following the sound back behind the building, until he came upon two men dragging a girl into their car.
“Stop!” he yelled out.
They stopped, but only briefly. Without a word, one of the men left the girl with his partner as he ran up to challenge David, fists clenched and eyes dead. This was a textbook asocial situation, and David quickly recognized it as such. This guy was not closing the distance because he was excited about having a conversation—he was approaching with the explicit intent to cause an injury. David’s brain quickly flipped through its rolodex of options.
He’s bigger and probably stronger than me.
He’s the one closing the distance.
He doesn’t have a weapon, and neither do I.
His hands are down.
I can get the ear.
In this split-second series of assessments, David made a calculation: he knew that if he could strike the man’s ear correctly, he’d rupture the eardrum, opening the semicircular canal and emptying all the fluid (this is the same injury I suffered during my Navy SEAL training), which would induce vertigo and rip all sense of balance away from his opponent. It might not seem like a dramatic injury, but I can tell you from personal experience, it can be immediately disabling.
David stepped forward and open-palm slapped the man on the side of the head. The blow turned the man’s head, exposing his neck, but only for a moment. The man turned back toward David and looked right through him, gritting his teeth. That was not the reaction David was hoping for.
Shit, it didn’t work! David had executed what I call an “arm strike.” He didn’t move his body weight through the blow. He didn’t use the tips we taught him, didn’t try to put his belt buckle through the belt buckle of his attacker, dominating and overwhelming the man’s center of gravity with his own. He struck him only with the weight his arm could generate, which is effectively a static strike with no kinetic force behind it.
I can imagine it was a bit like that cliché moment in movies where the action hero throws his best punch at the enormous Russian giant and it is simply absorbed with laughing indifference. It’s funny when you’re watching. It’s terrifying if you’re the one throwing the punch. I’ve seen it demoralize many a student as well. They think, that was supposed to do something, and when it doesn’t, they freak out. They scramble.
Instead of panicking, David’s brain kicked in with another automatic response: You didn’t step through. You need more force. Face to face with his potential assailant, David tried again, stepping through his target and applying his full body weight into the same move. This time, it was a textbook strike. This time, the guy went down on his ass. With no sense of balance or orientation, he was completely handicapped. When the man’s partner saw his friend drop to the ground in a heap, he took off running, leaving the girl in the car and giving David ample time to get the girl out of there and call the authorities.
When David returned to the U.S., he told me his story and described how his training helped him to recover from his initial mistake. When his first attack failed, to his surprise, he didn’t panic. In the past, he said, he probably would have fallen back on raw instinct, which would have told him to run. He would have wrongly bought into the perception that he was outmatched and destined to lose. But that instinct wasn’t there this time—in its place was what he had practiced. He processed what he did wrong, corrected himself, and performed the move correctly the second time around. All in a matter of seconds—two slaps, bam bam—that’s all it took.
I asked David what he thought it was about our training that made the difference. He said he wasn’t sure, but I knew. The key was training slow.
In my seminars, we deliberately train in slow motion—way slower than the speed of a real fight, or even traditional sparring that you’d find in an MMA gym or a boxing ring. And David, like many students, had challenged me on that. He said, “A real fight happens at full speed. Why aren’t we learning how to do everything quickly? How am I supposed to react fast enough if we only train slow?” David’s concerns sound intuitive enough, but what we need to recognize is that learning speed isn’t something we need to invest that time in.
Why? Because speed takes care of itself. We’re wired for speed (and strength). If I took you into a boxing gym and stuck you in front of a heavy bag and told you to punch and kick it as fast and as hard as you could, you can do that. What you can’t do is reliably hit specific targets as fast or as hard. Watch the average public speaker. Rarely do you find yourself saying: this guy is going way too slow, pick it up. It’s far more common that they rush through their talk, carried as they were on nervousness and insecurity. My first talk, which I had repeatedly practiced and padded so I would hit my allotted thirty minutes, went well. Then I looked at the clock—I’d somehow shaved nearly ten minutes off in front of the audience.
In a life-or-death moment, the instinctual fear response and the resulting adrenaline and norepinephrine rushes propel nearly all your critical body functions: heart rate, lung capacity, pupil dilation, fast-twitch muscle response, energy distribution from glucose stores. They all speed up in pace or increase in volume. Essentially, quickness comes automatically.
What will not come automatically is a command of the principles and techniques you need to save your life. Those you need to etch into your brain. In my experience, that’s only something a slow training tempo can provide: it allows you to internalize the movements and commit them to memory. Even when you’re afraid, even when your conscious mind feels blank, those moves remain stored in your muscle memory, ready to activate when you need them. With enough practice at the right pace, your muscles will remember how to perform the right actions, even if your conscious mind needs a little time to catch up.*
A PLAN OF ACTION
Training slow also helps you develop a plan. Everyone needs a plan. Not a step-by-step, punch-here-kick-here kind of plan, as we discussed in the last chapter. Those are unrealistic and fantastical. What you need is a set of general rules—fundamentals, really—that you will engage and follow if you find yourself in an inescapable confrontation.
Nowhere have I seen this principle more effectively demonstrated than by the La Nuestra Familia gang at another of California’s maximum-security detention centers. I was visiting this prison to meet with corrections officers and discuss the key differences in training for contact out in the yard versus contact in confined spaces. As we got to talking, one of the ranking officers told me about the recent assassination of a Nuestra shotcaller.†
This guy had been instructing his crew to produce and sell adulterated drug product to the Aryans in the prison and it was causing problems both in the prison and out in the streets. The leaders of La Nuestra Familia outside of the prison finally decided they’d had enough and they ordered this shotcaller’s lieutenants to take him out. But to pull this off, they needed a plan. In a prison under constant video and human surveillance, you can’t just attack someone and expect to both be successful and get away with it. The lieutenants decided they would take out their shotcaller on the basketball court.
You’d think out in the open in the yard would be the last place anyone would want to stage a high-profile execution, but these guys knew what they were doing. The shotcaller loved playing basketball in the yard. He’d play almost every day. That meant that the guards on duty in the towers wouldn’t think twice about seeing him out there on the court surrounded by his guys. It would look like business as usual and they could focus more of their attention on other areas of the yard. Additionally, basketball would get the shotcaller’s heart rate elevated, which would increase the speed with which he bled out if they were successful.
The rest of the plan was simple: they would play with him every day for a couple weeks. In each game, whoever was on his team would purposefully set him up for easy drives to the basket or open looks for jump shots. Whenever he made a shot, his teammates would casually come over from all sides and congratulate him. They’d smack him in his shirtless belly, pat him on the back of the neck, wrap him around the waist in a mini-hug, pound his chest enthusiastically like they were psyched up about winning. To both the shotcaller and the guards on duty, these gestures appeared like run-of-the-mill ring-kissing by lower-level guys to their boss. And by doing it day after day for a couple weeks, it became an unremarkable piece of the scenery.
What the guards and the shotcaller didn’t realize was that each of those congratulatory gestures was aimed at a specific vulnerable area on the human body. The smacks on the belly dialed in a stab to the gut and the liver. The pat on the neck homed in on the carotid artery. The waist grab found the spleen and the bottom of the rib cage. The chest punch zeroed in the heart, the lungs, and the nerve running from the neck down the shoulder. The lieutenants were getting the shotcaller used to being touched in these vulnerable target areas so when the assassin made his move, first contact would not be so difficult, which would make the second strike less difficult, and so on down the line until the shotcaller was on the ground.
When the day finally arrived, everyone played basketball as usual. The assassin slipped onto the court inside what became a ring of guys—all of whom the shotcaller trusted—who shielded the attack from view. The assassin struck nearly every body part the lieutenants had softened up for him with ruthless, deliberate precision. The whole thing took less than five seconds. The lieutenants slowly dispersed, like they did every time the game was over. By the time guards finally realized something was wrong on the basketball court, the shotcaller had bled out. When medical assistance finally arrived, he was already dead.
What I have just described might seem at first like an elaborate plan, but in reality, it was very simple. It came down to this:
1. We have one shot at this.
2. Identify the vulnerable targets.
3. Give it everything you’ve got for five seconds.
Now, morally and legally speaking, training to be a murderous predator is worlds away from training to protect yourself from a murderous predator, but in either case a basic nuts-and-bolts plan for dealing with life-or-death violence is essential to getting through it. Once you have developed and learned that plan, it’s critical that you walk through it until it’s second nature and you have the confidence to execute it with proper form, force, and accuracy. Rehearsing the assassination of their shotcaller for two weeks seared the plan into the brains of the Nuestra lieutenants and it allowed the assassin to perform with precision when it was time to act.
Despite his skepticism about training slowly, I think David understood this concept very well. His initial failure, after all, was not one of ignorance (no plan) or arrogance (no need for a plan). He had a plan for his kind of situation, one he’d practiced on the mats several times before. His training had ingrained the correct move and the proper form into his muscle memory, so that if the time to act at full speed ever came, he’d be ready. David’s mistake was that he went too fast, landing a blow in the right spot, at the right time, just with the wrong amount of force behind it. He didn’t give himself that split second he needed to load up and transfer all his body weight into the strike and through his attacker. Once he recognized his error, he simply had to re-engage his plan. He acted without hesitation and mere seconds after the insufficient initial delivery, the fight-ending blow found its mark.
Having this plan, practicing it, and training it the right way is so vital, no matter how unlikely it is that asocial violence will find you. It’s why schools conduct earthquake and fire drills by having their students crawl under their desks or move in an orderly fashion down the nearest stairwell and through the nearest exit. Going through the motions makes them readier for the real thing, which can be the difference between life and death. It certainly was for David.
SLOW IS SMOOTH, SMOOTH IS FAST, FAST IS DEADLY
Inflicting injury is all about the fundamentals. The same is true of pretty much any skill. We learn complicated ideas and actions by breaking them down into their most basic elements and mastering those elements in turn, whether we’re learning to hit a baseball or play a piano.
When it comes to self-defense, I’ve found that this crucial aspect of training is missing from nearly everyone’s curriculum, and to me, that’s a huge mistake: slowness, deliberateness, mastery of fundamentals—they’re the foundation on which everything else is built. Without form, force, and accuracy, you won’t generate the effect you want. And if you move too quickly in your training, all those things suffer. In fact, errors will start to compound themselves. If you have bad form, speed will make the situation worse. You’ll be off balance, which leads to poor accuracy, which leads to a lack of force. You’ll be like David in his first, failed attempt to neutralize his attackers. Just a slight inadequacy of force was the difference between a potentially crippling blow and awkwardly slapping someone upside the head.
Jam your thumb in someone’s eye, like Sara did, and you blind the person and produce sympathetic tearing in the other eye, so that what vision remains is out of focus. Miss by an inch, however, and you’ve created a bruised and pissed off assailant. Had Shawn practiced slips and trips at speed instead of one step at a time, when he went to yank out his attacker’s leg under the car door there could have been a very real possibility that he moved too fast and only pulled the man’s shoe off; leaving him mobile enough on one leg to reach over the car door and empty a magazine into Shawn, who would have been prone on the ground with nowhere to go.
When you’re training to protect yourself and others, speed always comes last. In the more than twenty-five years I’ve been training people in self-protection, I’ve never heard from someone who used self-protection tools in the field and felt like they suffered from a lack of speed at the moment of truth. In fact, I usually hear the opposite: it’s much more common to suffer from a lack of accuracy or force.
Remember, this is real-life violence, not a kung-fu movie or a competition. Your goal isn’t to trade lightning-fast blows with your opponent until you work him into a corner. Your goal is to inflict a decisive, debilitating injury to the best target you can find. The more you rush your training, the more likely you are to miss your target or deliver an ineffective blow. Fifteen decent hits in rapid succession is great for scoring points in an Olympic tae kwon do match, but unless you’re able to deliver that one devastating strike to a vulnerable area, it’s not very useful two-on-one in an alley behind a Mexican border town hotel.
If you prioritize speed, not only will the results be terrible, but you’ll create a negative feedback loop where those terrible results convince you that you’re still too slow—so maybe you’ll take the wrong lesson and speed up even more, which will further cement bad habits and poor performance. This is not a sustainable path to mastery of anything, because it makes it impossible to learn from your mistakes.
That’s why I don’t want you thinking you are Jackie Chan. I don’t need you at the gym rapid-fire attacking the heavy bag like your goal is Roy Jones Jr.–level hand speed. If you are ever in a fight for your life it is never going to look like Mike Tyson landing a five-punch combination in six seconds. More likely, we will be talking about one or two blows, at most. Think back to the fights in this book:
Sara used an eye gouge and a throat strike.
Mike the bouncer went down from two nearly invisible knife wounds.
Bonnie used a throat strike and a knee stomp.
Shawn used a knee drop and an ankle joint break.
Peter used his forearm to smash the radial nerve then strike the throat.
David, on his second try, effectively used a palm strike to the ear.
That is six potentially do-or-die fights ended by injury in twelve combined strikes. That’s two per incident. Excepting David’s first strike, which he learned from, each one was delivered at the right time, in the right place, with the correct amount of force to weaken and then immobilize an attacker. If you train those moves too fast, however, you’ll almost certainly make so many errors that you can’t possibly be aware of them all, and when it finally counts, you’re likely to miss, or strike with insufficient force to cause the injury you absolutely need. Training fast is training haphazardly, which is to train for chaos instead of control.
What you really want is to go slowly and smoothly to get everything exactly right. One square inch of you through one square inch of him. Visualize your mass driving whatever tool you have—a stick, a knife, your boot, your fist—three feet through him, trying to make it come out the other side. Visualize displacing him and standing where he once stood. Your belt buckle through his belt buckle. Then go and do it.
You also want to be acutely, embarrassingly aware of every mistake you make—missing the target, using an improperly configured tool (like a loose fist), losing your balance. You want these errors to pop up one at a time so you can register them individually and adjust yourself to each specific problem to correct them. This trains your brain to do exactly what you want, the way you want it, even when you add speed to the equation later.
Fundamentally, the slower you practice, the smoother your actions become, the closer to mastery you get. For the purposes of training the tool of violence, mastery is a three-factor test. If any one of them fails, mastery has not been achieved and the training in that area should be slowed down.
1. You get everything you want exactly right.
Practicing violence is training for survival. When you’re in a fight for your life, you never want to do something that you’ve “sort of” worked on or gotten good at “more or less.” Everything you go for, you want to get exactly right. That means if you miss it in training, slow down. If your mass wasn’t fully involved, slow down. If the strike, joint break, or throw didn’t work the way you intended, slow down. Adjust the pace of your training to make your practice perfect.
2. You are always in balance.
A professional baseball player in balance can hit a 95-mile-per-hour fastball 450 feet with what seems like very little effort. When he gets out on his front foot, though, he ends up reaching out and flailing at the pitch, often popping the ball up weakly on the infield. If he hesitates and is stuck on his back foot, he gets handcuffed and struggles even to make contact.
The same principle applies in violence when you are being attacked and forced to defend yourself. When you’re in balance you control where your mass goes and you can swing it like a sledgehammer. When you’re off balance, you’ve lost control of your weapon and reduced its power exponentially, and now you are the vulnerable one. Your center of gravity is compromised. You’re too far out over your skis, as the saying goes. Go as fast as you want, as long as your balance is constant and absolute. If it’s not—slow down.
3. Your partner can give you clean, clear reactions.
In a real fight, every injury you inflict changes the shape of the human machine into a new configuration of targets and balance. You need to see those reactions in your practice, too, so you can be ready to respond to them in real life. Learning those reactions allows you to use injury tactically and to fight in rhythm, predicting when and where new targets will appear based on the injury just inflicted. From Shawn’s training on the mats, for instance, he knew that once he smashed the bones in the top of his attacker’s foot, it would open access to the heel, ankle joint, and lower leg. He also knew that if his attacker had been kneeling instead of standing when Shawn leveled the knee drop, the subsequent target would have presented differently, which would have required a different approach to the injury that finally incapacitated the attacker.
The human response to particular types of trauma is predictable, but also specific to the position of the victim’s body (standing, kneeling, bent over, on all fours, prone) in relation to the position of the attacker’s body and the angle of attack. If you go faster than your partner’s ability to give you those clean, predictable reactions, you’ll cloud your training with a bunch of useless noise. In plain English, if it feels to your partner like you are bolting around the training mats like a wild person, your partner’s instinct is going to be to cover up and fend off your assault, instead of simulate the predictable human response to the injury you’re training to inflict. That is helpful to no one, because life-or-death violence shouldn’t feel like a manic slap-fight to either member of a training duo.*
This can be frustrating if your coordination is more advanced than your training partner’s and you can do things like hit the same number of targets with fewer strikes, in fewer moves. That kind of advanced coordination makes you want to go, go, go. You can have perfect targeting and the balance of an Olympic gymnast, but your rate of speed will always be governed by your partner’s ability. An expert working with a new student will still have to slow down, for example. But it’s important to realize that the goal of training is not simply to turn you into a badass. It’s to slowly increase both partners’ understanding and abilities.
Once you’ve mastered those three criteria, you can gradually add in speed. Not that you need to. The person with the most real-world experience with asocial violence in my cadre of instructors (by virtue of his job history) trains slower than everyone and has never changed. Students and other instructors call him Instructor Molasses, but he doesn’t care. He tells new people right away: “Hey, I train slow. You want to train faster, train with somebody else.” Working successfully at speed can be achieved faster than most people would believe, just ask Instructor Molasses, but only if you take the slow road to mastery.
YOU NEVER OUTGROW THE BASICS
My slow-paced, fundamental-centric training philosophy is somewhat unique to self-protection and the tool of violence, but it is practically traditional when it comes to the acquisition and mastery of a difficult skill.
Look at firearms training. If you have a good instructor, you’ll first learn how to dry fire without any bullets. You’ll learn all the fundamentals of holding and aiming a gun. After you’ve internalized that information, you’ll dry fire at a stationary target, learning how to pull the trigger with as little jerk and lift as possible. Then you’ll learn how to load the weapon. Next, you’ll start shooting with live ammunition, usually one round at a time in single-shot groups. You’ll slowly and deliberately try to hit your target, repeatedly. Then you’ll move on to multiple-shot groups, where you fire a quick succession of shots at the target. Once your aim is consistently good (which could take days or weeks), your instructor might introduce the concept of a moving target. If you maintain accurate targeting in that phase, the instructor will introduce the next phase—which is hitting a moving target while you’re also moving.
At any stage of the game, if there’s a failure or regression of any kind—if you start to lose your targeting capacity and your shot groupings start to widen—you’ll default back to the slow, deliberate targeting of a sedentary target. This is how skilled instructors train beginners in the basics, but it’s also how the best in the business stay sharp. The system never changes: break everything down to fundamentals. Repeat, repeat, repeat. When you can perform those fundamentals in your sleep, you’ll know you’ve mastered them.
When I was interviewing law enforcement officers in Los Angeles about prison gangs for this book, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department sergeant told me about a recent firearms training session his team went through at one of the department’s shooting ranges.
The session was being taught by a highly trained operator from the Army’s Delta Force unit. The sergeant was assigned to help set up the range and get the course ready before the other officers arrived. An early riser, the sergeant got there at six-thirty a.m., well ahead of the ten o’clock start time—but not ahead of the Delta operator. He was already there, waiting to do a walk-through and a practice run of his own to familiarize himself with the course.
The sergeant quickly opened the range and watched the Delta operator get to work. During the first hour, the operator slowly and dynamically drew his weapon and dry-fired from a variety of positions. In the second hour, he started adding ammo and shooting moving targets. He practiced slowly and deliberately, making sure all his shots were on the mark. During the third hour, he started moving around and shooting with various weapons systems—periodically defaulting back to the slower movements to make sure his form was crisp. When the training session finally began at ten, the operator demonstrated the course at full speed. Flawlessly.
“If I hadn’t opened the range that day, I would have thought this guy was superhuman and had amazing natural skills,” the sergeant told me as he finished his story. “I would never have seen all the slow, deliberate work that allowed him to perform at a high level.”
The Delta operator used his three-hour warm-up to make small corrections, then he translated those tweaks into fast, accurate execution during the actual course. This was a special forces operator, remember. Active duty or retired, he would easily rank among the top 1 percent in the world when it comes to handling a firearm. In his career, he has probably aimed and fired hundreds of thousands of rounds. And yet, when it came time to prepare for a moment that counted—or honestly, even a moment that didn’t really count, since he was just teaching a class—he went right back to the same drills that beginners practice the first time they pick up a gun. He did them one at a time, and he went through them slowly. He hadn’t outgrown the basics of his training, and he probably never will.
It turns out the best of the best in any discipline work this way. That deep practice, built on slow, excruciating repetition, focused on accuracy and correctness, is what separates the elite from the also-ran. This is especially true for disciplines that require fast execution. My friend Daniel Coyle wrote a book called The Talent Code that examined the tools and habits of experts in fields as diverse as sports, music, math, and science, among others. Across the board, they all used the same process: slow training, deep practice, fast execution.
One of the interesting stories in The Talent Code involves a music academy with a seemingly odd rule. If a teacher walked by a practicing violin student and they could recognize what was being played, that meant the student was playing too fast. Each stroke had to be excruciatingly slow, because what they were asking students to work on wasn’t perfecting particular pieces, but rather ingraining the habits of perfect form with the bow and fingers, understanding that it was much easier to speed up habits learned slowly than to correct for bad form learned too fast.
It was like they were taking a page right out of the book of the famous violinist and orchestra conductor, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, but not for the reasons you’d suspect. Born in the French West Indies in the second half of the eighteenth century, Saint-Georges was also known for being a duelist and champion fencer.
Early in his career, while other fencers practiced fast footwork, elaborate strikes, and clever distraction techniques, Saint-Georges spent most of his time going through a peculiar training routine. He would draw three dots on the wall and spend an inordinate amount of time slowly and deliberately poking each dot with his sword. He’d step in, and thrust. Step in, and thrust. Over and over again.* It was a regimen that earned him continual mockery from people who had never seen him duel. When they did, the mockery disappeared.
In duel after duel, Saint-Georges would dispatch his opponents with uncanny accuracy and lightning-fast efficiency. He was so good, so accurate, so effective, that even in social situations it was said that he could flick the buttons off the shirt of any man within his sword’s reach. It was an incredible feat—not only of dexterity, but of consistency—and one for which he was given the nickname, “The Button Man.”
Saint-Georges understood the importance of precision. With most his time spent on just three simple targets, Saint-Georges certainly wasn’t having as much fun as his rivals. His had to be the most tedious, most basic training technique of any of them. It was also the most effective.
Perfecting the basics of a difficult skill through deep, slow practice doesn’t just increase your effectiveness and efficiency with that skill, it has the benefit of being safer as well. My friend Tony is a professional dancer and a very skilled roller skater. He was a cast member in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Broadway show, Starlight Express. It was a play performed completely on roller skates at blindingly fast speeds. Any deviation from the choreography by a performer could be devastating to the whole ensemble and bring a performance to a screeching halt. One wrong move could cause a chain-reaction of collisions and injuries.
Everyone in the Starlight Express cast was a top-rated dance talent. They could all do challenging moves with ease—on roller skates, no less! Yet, for the first six weeks of rehearsal, they slowly and deliberately walked through every single movement on carpet, on foot, so they could get it exactly right. Until they had the routines memorized, until they could perform the entire show at walking speed on a padded surface, they never even put on a skate. When they finally strapped on their skates, they still weren’t ready to perform at full speed. They started again with slow and deliberate movements through each routine. They weren’t allowed to add velocity until every sequence was perfect.
Sound familiar? This is precisely how firearms training progresses. It’s how I construct my self-protection training methods. And it just so happens to be the safest way to do either of them. When Tony finished describing his time in Starlight Express, he told me, “Our whole group was injury-free through the entire run of the show, which never happens.”
Firearms, music, fencing, roller skating, violence: no matter the discipline, the lesson is the same. If you train slow, you never outgrow the basics, because the training hardwires them into your instincts while simultaneously taking conscious thought out of the equation for when you need to operate in a hurry.
In the context of violence, it might sound something like this: “Okay, If I’m trying to crush the throat, I want my foot to be placed here when I deliver the blow. I want to step through and use my ulna bone [pinky side of forearm]. I want to step all the way through the individual so I end up standing where he used to be. And I want to make sure I have good, solid structure as I strike the throat.”
If you move slowly enough through the moves during your training, you can literally talk yourself through each component, giving your brain time to process the information without missing anything. You also get to deliberately touch and push through target areas, which delivers huge kinesthetic learnings on top of the auditory and visual methodologies that are standard to all forms of deep practice. Then when it’s time to perform in the real world, the data is intact, the muscle memory is engaged, and in the heat of the moment, speed takes care of itself.
THE SEESAW EFFECT: HOW SPEED KILLS
One of the more popular, exciting buzzwords in our world today is scenario-based training. In this fast-paced training modality, an instructor will mock up a specific real-world scenario, then explain how to deal with it in a series of defined, exacting steps. The context and directions are always very clear.
I get approached from behind on my left side.
He places his right hand on my neck.
I’m going to do move 1.
Then I’m going to do move 2.
And finally, I will do move 3.
I’ve just cleared the threat.
Boom, boom, boom. One, two, three. Easy, right? As you probably figured by now, it’s never that simple. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my time in the Navy, and working with elite fighting units, law enforcement officers, and prison guards, it’s that real violence never happens the way you expect. You can watch ten thousand hours of violence videos and no two incidents will be alike. In that way, training for specific scenarios is banking your training on the hope that those precise scenarios are the ones that arise when your life is on the line—which is about as likely as winning the lottery. You’re better off instead focusing on preparedness, trying to identify what most violent incidents have in common, and training to exploit or protect yourself against those commonalities.
Of course, fast, scenario-based training might teach you a series of three moves to execute when someone approaches you from the left and puts their right hand on your neck, but it won’t teach you how to handle yourself when that guy shifts to your right side, or his buddy shows up, or he’s shorter than you, or he’s wearing gloves that are hard to grab, or he hits you with the butt of his gun.
Oddly, we seem to be okay with the philosophy behind this style of self-defense training, even though if you were to use those techniques to train one of the other skills we just talked about, like firearms training, it would immediately appear ridiculous. Imagine that a firearms instructor shows you how to turn off your gun’s safety, then says, “There are five guys on the other side of this door arrayed in front of you from three o’clock to nine o’clock. They all have guns. When I push you through the door, they’re going to start shooting and I want you to execute the three moves we just covered. Good luck.”
It does not take a genius to recognize how ridiculous that would be. What if the guy at nine o’clock drops behind a table and maneuvers to your seven o’clock, drawing your attention away from the guy at one o’clock who just decided to close the distance on you? What if there were only two guys all along, and in the time it took you to register that the threat was actually smaller than you thought, they’d each put three bullets in your chest?
A bullet is just as lethal as a violent predator who has targeted you, so why does this kind of fast, scenario-based training seem ludicrous with firearms, but completely fine with self-defense? What, exactly, is the fascination with creating an imaginary attack scenario?
Honestly, I think it’s because it’s fun. Because it gives students an easy (yet false) sense of security, and because it lets them play-act fights in a safe environment. They can live out those intruder and active shooter fantasies that have occupied their imaginations late at night waiting to fall asleep. It’s the kind of training that sells because it’s user-friendly, but that doesn’t mean it works. Put more bluntly, that kind of training can get you killed, because training at full speed creates a seesaw effect: speed goes up, accuracy and force go down, the likelihood of inflicting injury trends toward zero on the street, but goes up on the mats.
Think of it this way. Go back to the three major requirements for inflicting injury:
1. A target: a vulnerable piece of anatomy on the other person.
2. A weapon: a sturdy piece of your own anatomy to make contact with the vulnerable piece on your opponent.
3. Force: You need to strike with your full body weight, which means you need to step through the action.
To do all of this, you need to be accurate. We’re targeting areas of the body that cause life-threatening injuries here. These areas aren’t big flashing targets with massive bull’s-eyes (evolution wouldn’t allow that). You can’t just hit an assailant in the face. You have to target a very specific area on the face, like the eye or the ear, and strike it with your full body weight.
If you train too quickly, however, you will have a tendency to strike too fast, which inevitably forces you to sacrifice accuracy. If you lose accuracy, you end up hitting ineffective areas on the human body. You may cause nonspecific trauma, but that’s just pain (as opposed to injury), which means your enemy can gut it out and fight back. When he keeps coming, you panic, because your first attack failed. You attack even more quickly and haphazardly, with even less accuracy. Soon, you’re flailing wildly, ineffectively, fatally. That’s the worst-case scenario in a life-or-death situation. And it’s likely to happen for those who haven’t practiced the fundamentals of violence enough to make them part of their muscle memory.
This is precisely what slow training is designed to do: to inculcate foundational principles and ensure you absorb them as “deep practice” into your unconscious mind and your muscle memory so you can handle any scenario that comes your way. Repeating a move in slow motion, again and again, isn’t nearly as fun as wailing on a punching bag or dive rolling into a room after a door breach. I admit that—but I don’t want you to have fun: fun is fatal. The point of this training isn’t entertainment, it’s effectiveness. And to effectively inflict injury, you can’t sacrifice accuracy, and you can’t sacrifice force. You can only sacrifice speed. By dialing back training tempo as much as 90 percent, you increase your capacity for mastering the mental and physical tools of self-protection, and you build the kind of confidence that comes from knowing you can tackle any situation.
There’s no other way to put it: slow practice is deep practice, and deep practice leads to mastery.