CHAPTER NINE
TRAINING TO INFLICT INJURY
Pain don’t hurt.
—Road House, 1989
Violence begins and ends with injury. Injury is its raison d’être. In a fight for your life, there is no substitute for inflicting injury on your enemy. It is, in no uncertain terms, the arbiter of success in violence. Those who fully understand this have a distinct advantage over those whose understanding is dim and instinctual. That’s why I teach these principles to everyone who comes through my doors and why I have made some version of this point multiple times already in this book: I want to sear the knowledge, and the advantage, into your brain for all time.
When you’re left without a choice, act first, act fast, aim for a target, and give it everything you’ve got until your attacker is incapacitated and you’re standing where he once stood. Injury, injury, injury.
Injury changes everything in your favor. In violent conflict, injury is the portal through which you get to pass into the rest of your life. When things go bad—let’s say your attacker pulls a gun—your options narrow to a single question: “Act or hope?” If he shoots you dead, it’s over. But if you get a thumb into his eye, like Sara did to her attempted rapist, and he falls to the ground with debilitating, agonizing trauma, it’s the key opening the lock to the rest of your days.
But how do you know if you’ve actually injured someone and that door to your future has been unlocked? How can you be sure you did it right—accurately, with proper form and enough force? For the purposes of determining effective violence, injury has three primary criteria: it is objective, it is decremental, and it is lasting.
Injury is objective. When an injury has occurred, all disinterested third parties can agree. A broken leg is obvious from across the street—someone crumpling to the ground holding a limb bending sharply in an unnatural direction is hard to miss. Someone clutching their throat gasping for air is unmistakable. The stunned look of someone who has just had their own knife turned around and plunged into their chest is impossible to forget. Moreover, as we’ve already covered, injured people move in predictable ways. The body responds to injury through the somatic reflex arc—the spinal reflex reactions I talked about earlier. These are pre-programmed, specific movements, triggered by a large stimulus (like crushed testicles). The threshold switch that decides whether to trigger the reflex is in the spinal cord, not the brain. Thus, there is no conscious choice involved, just physics and physiology.
These reflexes are injury-specific, meaning that a boot to the groin elicits the same basic response in all humans. A man you’ve kicked in the groin will bend his knees and double over with his chin up—whether he wants to or not. This means it is very difficult for your opponent to hide his injury from you, or from anyone who knows what they’re looking at. And since you can already predict from your training how your enemy will move when you injure him in a specific way, you have a knowledge base against which to verify his reaction and, ideally, take full advantage of it.
Injury decrements body function. Injury alters the normal functioning of the body in a negative, unavoidable way. A broken leg just plain doesn’t work. It may, in fact, prevent the entire body it’s connected to from working. This is the key distinction that separates pain from injury. Pain can slow function, but that effect is relative since different people have different pain thresholds. For some a torn fingernail is agony, for others a torn-off finger goes unnoticed. That’s because much of our response to pain originates from the brain once the nerve endings at the site of trauma make their way up through the dorsal horn of the spinal cord.
Injury, by comparison, takes the brain completely out of play. The concussive force at the site of trauma sends shock waves through the nervous system that slam into the dorsal horn, creating an automatic reflex response before the brain has even been able to register what happened. The equation is simple: Excessive force plus a vulnerable anatomical target equals injury. This has nothing to do with pain or the psychological state of the recipient. Even for the person who can ignore a ripped-off finger, there’s nothing his brain can do about his physical inability to pull a trigger or press a button with that finger. It’s just not going to work.
This is true for any injury that eliminates his ability to function, no matter how great his physical and psychological advantages were before the trauma. Is he stronger than you? Not with a crushed throat, he isn’t. Is he faster than you? Not with a shattered knee. Is he far more dangerous than you, with scads of training, experience, a gun, and an indomitable iron will? Not with a broken neck.
Injury is lasting. Injury lasts for the whole course of the encounter, and beyond. It requires medical attention to heal. If your leg is broken, you can’t “rub some dirt on it” and then expect to “walk it off.” You can’t walk at all. All true injuries open the same opportunity: to take advantage of a degraded opponent in the throes of a spinal reflex reaction who has been rendered helpless against being injured again and again.
I’m sure that sounds a little dark, but just remember, in a fight for one’s life, fairness is out the window. Anything we do that does not cause an injury is worthless to us. Every time we touch him, we need to break something inside him. Every time we touch him, we need to make a part of him cease normal function. Injure him, drop him, and keep on injuring him until he’s nonfunctional. We’re not done until we’re sure he’s done. And the way to be sure is if he very obviously cannot function and won’t be able to for some time (if ever). That’s how we know we’ve done our job.
The rest of this chapter is dedicated to the principles behind the three fundamental methods for causing injury. Three mechanisms for taking all that knowledge now etched into your brain and transferring it through your body into the vulnerable areas of a violent predator who attacks you.
They are: striking, joint-breaking, and throwing.
Striking is the most basic way to inflict injury: throwing your entire mass through a single target to wreck it. It forms the basis for all violence; every method by which to deliver injury will derive its power from striking. Striking is what drives the knife deep into the body and opens the skull with a blow from a baton. It’s how injury gets done.
Joint-breaking is applying the principles of striking to vulnerable joints. It is not a joint-lock aimed at compliance or submission—the way that martial arts bouts usually end—since those don’t have permanent injury as a goal or outcome. Breaking a joint is about blasting past the pathological limit of that joint to destroy the connective tissue so it doesn’t work anymore.
Throwing is applying a strike to get people airborne and power them into the ground. It allows you to do things you can’t do with your bare hands—like fracture his skull. Throwing is just another way to cause injury; it’s beating the man with the planet.
These are the things you need to know how to do when you are training for injury.
STRIKING 101
Striking is about tearing, rupturing, and shattering. Striking is about wreckage. The goal of striking is to impart the largest possible load of kinetic energy (kE) into your target to achieve that state of injury and disrepair. The most obvious examples of striking are kicking and punching. Yet the number-one fallacy regarding striking is that it has to be done solely with the arms and legs. This misconception leads to a loss of focus and proper perspective—the punch or kick is immaterial; it’s never about the fist or foot. It’s all about the broken ribs.
When we think of striking as something done with the limbs alone, we enter a negative feedback loop that keeps us from achieving the goal of violence, because our arms and legs are not able to generate the kinetic energy required to cause debilitating injury, without fail, every time. Even worse, untrained students often hold back and snap off their punches and kicks, failing to follow through—a defensive instinct that may temporarily prevent your opponent from grabbing hold of you, but also reduces the likelihood of causing useful injury to him—which of course just makes you that much more reluctant to commit to any one punch or kick. Then targeting goes out the window. There is even less follow-through now. He remains uninjured. And so it goes until someone gets tired of getting slapped around and quits, either by capitulating, disengaging, or pulling a gun and escalating the scenario.
Thinking “I’m punching now” puts you on the wrong side of the problem. You want to focus less on what your limbs are doing than on the damage that you’re inflicting on your opponent. Punching and kicking also put you on the wrong side of the question—him or me?—by putting you in a defensive posture and keeping you at what feels like a safe, noncommittal distance. They pull your focus to the emotions going on inside of you, when where you really want to be is on the other side of the question, inside of him. That is where the solution to your problem lies—in him broken and screaming, you standing where he once was. When using your boots and bare hands to accomplish this—to break things inside of him and absolutely wreck him—you’re going to need something more than your muscles. You’ll need to recruit the largest amount of kE you can access: your body weight in motion. Without that powder charge of body weight in motion, you end up throwing bullets at him instead of shooting them. When your life is at stake, which would you rather do?
MASS, MOVEMENT, STRUCTURE, AND INTENT
The mechanics of striking—the intentional generation and balanced transfer of energy through your body weight in motion—drive every application for causing injury. Balanced body weight intentionally in motion is the powerhouse behind striking, the irresistible force behind joint breaking, and the explosive core of throwing. It’s even the base engine of grabs and holds: a grab is simply a strike that ends with you holding on rather than letting go. When you strip out the base engine of striking, when you lose the power of body weight in motion, the potential for inflicting injury ceases to exist and you’re back to rolling the dice and hoping for the best.
Mass
Mass is where the mechanics of striking begin. The simplest strike you can execute is falling on your enemy. That is a rudimentary transfer of energy through mass, by dropping your body weight, gaining energy through the power of gravity, and diffusing it entirely into the target—his body doing double duty as the energy-damping airbag that arrests your fall.
Every strike is based on this concept: a fall that is arrested and then transferred inside the target. To increase effectiveness and amplify the trauma, you simply add distance (the higher you fall from, the more energy you generate), specific targeting (groin, spine, skull, solar plexus) and appropriate tools (knees, boot heel). It’s nearly artless, being barely more complicated than simply falling, but these minor additions begin to make all the difference as it relates to mass and injury—converting raw, unbridled energy into predictable, reproducible trauma. And as you learn to apply your mass effectively in this way, you start to make injury a one-way street, where your enemy feels like he just got hit by a bus, and all you feel is the gas pedal under your boot.
Movement
To understand movement in the context of violence, we also need to understand the concepts of potential and kinetic energy in relationship to injury.
Let’s say you bend over and pick up a bowling ball. The bowling ball gains potential energy as you lift it (fig. 1). If it slips from your fingers and it begins to fall, the potential energy is converted into kinetic energy—the energy of motion. If the bowling ball lands on your foot, it will transfer the kinetic energy into your foot. The energy gets “spent” breaking your bones (fig. 2).
When you don’t have a bowling ball, and you are striking with your body, the same principle holds. The bowling ball is your body. It stores potential energy (that is, energy that is potentially kinetic) in two forms: in chemical bonds inside your muscles, and in the elevation of your mass in Earth’s gravitational field. You can convert this potential energy to kinetic energy in two ways: using your muscles to accelerate your mass or lowering your mass in the gravitational field (like dropping the bowling ball).
Figure 2
In the most basic striking mechanics, this means stepping in and bending your knee(s) to strike. “Stepping in” is the acceleration of your mass through your muscles. (The phrase “step in” can be a little misleading, as it is more likely to manifest in real-world scenarios as lunging, driving, and body-slamming into your attacker, driving your entire mass into and through the target, his body, and the space he’s standing in.)
“Bending the knee(s)” is about dropping your weight into the strike, letting gravity help you deliver force to the target. This is a small and subtle movement when compared to the driving lunge. You don’t want to bend your knee(s) past 90 degrees as it will be difficult for you to efficiently recover from a drop that low* and your opponent will likely react away from you faster and farther than you can follow. Instead, you want to bend your knee just enough to drop your weight into the strike while still maintaining a comfortable recovery so you can step in and strike him again, staying right on top of him the whole time.
I call this a drive-and-drop movement. If you’ve ever been to one of those Sky Zone–type trampoline parks—probably for a child’s birthday party—you’ve seen this compound movement in action on a virtual loop. The person jumping on the trampoline will bend their knees at the bottom of their jump and then drive their mass outward in sync with the rebounding trampoline to send them sky high. It produces a rocket-like motion toward the ceiling. But at the bottom of a jump, have you ever seen someone bend their knees and then driven their body weight outward at an angle to move to the next trampoline? They look like a guided missile, like a bullet shot out of a gun, until they use their arms and legs to alter and slow their trajectory.
When you take this drive-and-drop movement out of the Sky Zone and into the battle zone and you apply it to a strike through a target on a human body, what you end up with is the most efficient and effective way to convert potential energy into kinetic energy, which can be used to inflict injury. The drive gives you a large vector of your weight in motion laterally. When you bend your knee as you strike you get another vector of your weight dropping straight down. Add those movements together, synchronously, and your opponent gets to eat a 45 degree–down vector strike. You become a guided missile (fig. 3).
It’s not always one knee you will be bending, of course. Whether you bend one or both knees depends on what kind of strike you are doing: to put your fist through the solar plexus of a standing man, you will bend the leading knee into a forward stance; if he’s lying on the ground, you’ll bend both knees in a full stance to drop your weight into him.
Regardless of the type of strike, it is essential that your movement be unidirectional with complete follow-through. When striking to injure, everything you have must move in a single direction into and through a single target. Pulling the arm or leg back out of the strike to “snap” it off (like many martial arts and combat sports teach) only means you’re moving in a second, alternate (in this case opposite) direction, and that means you’re not putting your all into wrecking your attacker. By definition, to achieve injury your body weight must move in the same direction as the strike—toward, in, and through the target.
If you are holding still or moving or leaning away from the strike, that lack of unidirectionality and follow-through precludes you from hitting as hard as you can. It’s like trying to hit a home run by squaring to bunt. When you want to go deep, you make a full-throttle swing that nearly covers a 360 degree arc as you make contact and then follow all the way through. It is the follow-through of the swing, in fact, that completes the transfer of kinetic energy through the ball and out of the park.
The same principle applies to striking a violent predator coming at you. You are the bat and he is the ball. A big, juicy fastball right down the middle that you are going to drive-and-drop toward and through in a single direction with all your power.
Structure
Now you know to throw your entire body at your attacker, and drop your weight into him when you get there—stepping in, bending knees—to drive through him. The next piece of the physical puzzle is proper structure—in other words, being braced for impact.
This is a critical and often overlooked component of effective striking. Too often our tendency is to focus on how much force we can generate, and we forget to prepare for what happens when that force meets its target. It’s an issue of basic physics. Newton’s Third Law, to be precise: “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” When you throw your body weight at your attacker and exert that force on him, an equal and opposite force will result, trying to push you backward, away from him. If your body is not structured properly to absorb that oppositional force, your strike won’t stick and you’ll bounce off your target.
Fortunately, good structure is straightforward and easy to evaluate. It starts from the ground up: foot, leg, hips, spine, shoulder, arm, fist (fig. 4).
Figure 4
You want your feet planted flat on the ground, typically in a forward stance. Your back leg locked straight. Your hips square to your target. Your spine straight. Your upper arm squeezed to your side. Your forearm locked straight out. Your fist balled tight. With this structure, it is much harder to be moved off your position by the equal and opposite force your target will exert in response to your strike, because you’re basically braced against the earth. To him, it’s going to feel like he ran into a concrete-filled steel post. He’ll be the only one moving away. And from there you’ll be free to step in again as a single, solid unit—like a battering ram—and continue raining ruination down upon him.
Just remember: structure will always buckle at the weak point. You can have everything aligned perfectly taut and tight, but if the heel of your planted foot is off the ground, that’s where your structure will blow out. You’ll strike him and get driven back on that wobbly foot, perhaps losing your balance. And the more you move away from the strike, the less effective it will be.
Intent
The final piece of the base engine is the motor itself, the thing that drives us to send our body weight through our human target: intent.
As I’ve said throughout this book, intent is typically the only differentiating factor between the average person and the criminal sociopath. The sociopath has no qualms about hurting people, and wants it to the exclusion of all else. The normal, socialized human doesn’t want to hurt anybody. But we’re not talking about “want” here. The point of this book is to prepare you for the unlikely, black swan event of asocial violence where what you want is irrelevant and what you need is of paramount importance.
You have all the knowledge, all the tools. Now you need the intent to employ them because it is intent, ultimately, that makes the difference. Intent—the focus of all your efforts—drives striking. Without it, striking becomes halfhearted and limp. It lacks spine and prevents positive results. It is flaccid motion devoid of commitment.
When you strip all the social baggage away, intent is nothing more than the business-like execution of a single-minded goal: the infliction of injury to save your life. A strike driven home with the intent to knock your assailant into the ICU gets the job done. A strike with the hope of discouraging him from hurting you does not. The will to injure him is the spark that fuses all your assets and your efforts—your body weight in motion, your structure—into a single terrible unit that will hit him with everything you have.
IN RHYTHM AND ON TIME
I don’t want you just to be comfortable and effective with the tool of violence. I want you to be explosively efficient. Have you ever read a spy novel and heard the writer talk about a bone breaking with “a satisfying crunch?” That seems like a strange, dark feeling, but I want you to get to a place where you can relate to that. Where your training creates an expectation that, if ever challenged, you’ll know what’s supposed to happen as a result of your actions. I want any violent predator foolish enough to target you to regret ever crossing your path—but only after they’ve regained consciousness. If they regain consciousness. The way that happens is by striking your enemy multiple times, with perfect rhythm and perfect timing.
Striking with rhythm is just like it sounds: striking an opponent repeatedly with a steady beat as if you’re following the tick of a metronome only you can hear, tolling out his doom—one—injury—at—a—time. It begins with the weight drop we discussed earlier in this chapter. You drop your weight to fire off a strike backed with momentum, then you raise it again to reload your potential energy reservoir for the next strike. This rise and fall over time generates a waveform. This waveform is the basis of rhythmic striking.
Getting into a rhythm this way does two things: It allows you to take full advantage of your opponent being in Effect state as a result of the initial injury, and it maximizes your efficiency in following up on your first strike.
Injury, if you recall, creates a spinal reflex reaction in its sufferer that leaves him incapable of voluntary movement for some period. Rhythmic striking allows you to injure your opponent again before the reaction runs its course and he regains the use of the uninjured parts of his body. Once you start in on him like that, you are the one who gets to decide you’re done with him. One injury follows the next, neatly in lockstep. There’s no hesitation, no looking for the next opening, no waiting to see what happens next, no flailing around ineffectually. No wasted time whatsoever. This cycle of compounding injury, therefore, sets up an inescapable death-spiral. From the first injury to the last, your opponent has no say in the matter. No counters, no retaliation, no escape. Just a steady, rhythmic, breaking of his body, decrementing its functions until he’s no longer a threat.
You can enhance your rhythmic striking by actually using a metronome, set to a moderate pace of forty beats per minute, while training with a partner. Your goal is to cause an injury on every beat. Every time it clicks you want to be driving a strike through a target, breaking a joint, and/or throwing your partner. You will move between beats, slowly, so that the injury occurs on the beat. At first this might not seem very slow—forty beats per minute means one strike every 1.5 seconds—but that’s a lifetime compared to real-world violence. Jorge Orozco took Officer Michelle Jeter to the ground and landed nine vicious blows to her head in less than nine seconds. The Nuestra Familia assassin stabbed the shotcaller multiple times in five seconds. Still, if you find yourself falling behind, or having to use bursts of speed to keep up, slow the metronome down until you can move smoothly from one injury to the next. When in doubt, slower is always better. Remember: slow is smooth, smooth is fast, fast is deadly.
You should always train at the rate where you are in complete control of your base striking mechanics, because aside from contributing to getting into rhythm, control is essential to good timing. A groin injury, for example, will cause a man to bring his head down with his chin out, exposing it to an uncontested uppercut. Imagine, though, how much more damage you could do if you met his chin with the uppercut just as he was snapping his head down into it! This is the basic idea of timing—making things happen when it is most advantageous to have them happen—and it is a natural complement to the concept of rhythm striking. In fact, the cultivation of good timing is the point of developing rhythm, because together they open targets, maximize your efficiency, and compound your enemy’s injuries.
None of this should distract from the most basic truth in striking: body weight in motion is the terrible engine that causes injury. Pull out the base engine of striking, remove body weight from the equation, and you’re going nowhere. Take body weight out and countering and blocking by your opponent become possible, the likelihood of injury evaporates, and the chances of saving your own life go with it.
Body weight in motion crushes and ruptures tissue. Body weight in motion tears out joints. Body weight in motion propels people to the ground. You can spend years learning thousands of techniques, but if you don’t have body weight behind them, you’re not going to hurt anyone. When your life’s on the line, that’s not okay. So get everything you have, everything you are, in there. Don’t settle for the weight of your arm, or leg. Use your entire mass to wreck him, whether it’s a traditional single strike, a joint-break, or a throw.
JOINT-BREAKING 101
The lever is the simplest machine, and one that has been utilized by humans forever—especially when you consider that our bodies are full of them. The human skeleton is a fine example of the power of levers—an ode to mechanical advantage writ in bone and sinew. Levers are the basis of human movement—and are therefore used constantly in violence. They magnify the power of strikes, they allow a small person to throw a much larger one, and they give us the ability to generate and transmit the forces necessary to break joints.
Understanding what makes a lever—its parts and how different arrangements of the parts have different advantages—will allow you to tell whether you can break a given joint from where you are, with what you’ve got.
There are three parts to a lever: fulcrum, force, and resistance (fig. 5). The fulcrum is the point that the lever arm pivots or turns on; the force is where effort is applied at a distance from the fulcrum; while the resistance acts on the other side of the fulcrum.
The only thing you need to remember about levers is this: force applied to one end of the lever is transferred across the lever arm, resulting in work done on the resistance at the other end of the lever. Simply put, pushing on one end makes things happen at the other. In the context of violence and injury, that means breaking or tearing out a joint.
What does it mean when I say we are tearing out a joint? I know, that phrase sounds very savage and un-technical. What I mean is that you are tearing the strong bands of connective tissue that hold the joint together and allow it to function. You are tearing ligaments and snapping tendons.
Ligaments are tough, fibrous bands of tissue that connect bone to bone. When you tear ligaments, the alignment of the bones on either end of the joint is compromised, making the joint more likely to dislocate, and less likely to work properly.
Tendons are the ropes that lash muscles to bones, allowing the joint to move. The tendon-to-bone connection is so strong that sometimes the bone itself will fail before the tendon or muscle tears, resulting in a sliver of bone peeling off. Either way, when you tear tendons, the muscles can no longer pull on the bones and the joint cannot move properly.
To break a joint, you must use leverage to drive it past its pathological limits—that is, the point at which the joint “locks out.” The lockout position is the end of that joint’s natural range of motion. Any movement beyond that point is where the damage begins. Pushing beyond that pathological limit is the only way to ensure that you tear tendons and/or ligaments. It is the only way to break a joint.
Breaking a joint is not easy. It doesn’t just happen because you’d like it to. Tendons and ligaments are very tough; joints themselves are put together to minimize the chances of getting torn out or broken. To overcome these factors, it’s going to take everything you have—your mind and body working in conjunction with physical law—to get it done.
All the intent in the world, driving all those body weight forces you’ve harnessed, will come to naught, in fact, without a good, solid lever arm to send those forces against. There has to be meaningful resistance on the other end to create the proper leverage, and the fulcrum to pivot yourself against. Without that mechanical advantage, all the force of will you can generate gets dissipated into so much heat and noise. And while that can be dramatic, it doesn’t get you that broken joint.
When petite Bonnie incapacitated her larger attacker, she used the resistance of his body weight to identify the fulcrum point (the knee) along the lever arm (his plant leg) through which she would send the full force of her body weight by way of a heel strike. The result was a complete, catastrophic knee injury that put her attacker down for good.
Shawn used the bottom of the car door as his fulcrum and gravity on his downed assailant as his resistance. The injury came when he grabbed hold of the man’s foot and applied upward force, letting the car door do all the dirty work.
GETTING A JOINT-BREAK DONE
Now that you know what it takes to break a joint—intent, force and a lever arm—let’s look at some of the details that make sure you can get it done.
Prior Trauma
No one is going to let you walk up and grab their hand, set up leverage, and break their wrist. You’re going to have to injure him first. Both Bonnie and Shawn inflicted an initial injury before delivering the strike that incapacitated their attackers. Gouge him in the eye, kick him in the groin, strike him in the liver or the kidneys, it doesn’t matter. Just make sure you injure him sufficiently before you go in for the joint-break that puts him out of commission. Remember, it is only injury that will induce the spinal reflex reaction that will render him unable to prevent you from breaking the joint of your choice.
Quality of the Lever Arm
A flexible lever arm is no good for getting work done. You need a rigid structure to transfer force across if you’re going to snap that joint. Two things will help ensure this happens: isolating the bones of the lever arm, and a tight grip on the end of it. This is precisely what Shawn did when he got his attacker’s straightened leg and secured his grip on the foot before wrenching it skyward toward the bottom of the car door.
Imagine kicking your attacker in the groin to create the prior trauma you need to grab his hand and break his wrist. He does a textbook groin reaction—knees buckled, bent over, chin up—and then proceeds to collapse onto the ground on his side. If you had a casual grip on his wrist you’re probably going to lose his hand. If you crush his hand in your fist and he goes down, you’re going to keep control of it and apply enough force against the resistance offered by his slumped-over body to get what you want—a broken wrist.
Crushing his hand in your fist also causes the hand to behave like a solid unit rather than many smaller flexible units. This allows you to isolate the bones in the lever arm (in this case, his actual arm) and minimize movement in nearby joints as you engage the joint you want to break (the wrist). Imagine trying to break his wrist by grabbing several of his fingers. As you apply force, the joints of his fingers would eat up that force as each individual joint bent. In the end, the force finally reaching the wrist would be far too small to break it.
To get a broken wrist you need to make sure that the wrist is the only joint that’s going to be allowed to move. Just the wrist—not the whole hand. Having a solid lever arm isn’t the only factor in the transfer of forces, however.
Setting the Leverage
Set the leverage close to your center of gravity to ensure that you’re using more body weight than muscular strength. With your hands out away from your body, you lose leverage and less body weight can be transferred. When you drop your weight with your arms out, some force is used up in bending your shoulders and the transfer of force is sloppy. With your hands in close to your center of gravity (pelvis), you can use muscular strength to hang on tight while you drop your weight to break the joint.
Keep Your Back Straight
Keeping your back straight when dropping your weight brings more of your weight into the lever. If you bend your spine, rounding your back, you are only dropping the weight of your arms and upper torso into the leverage. This is only half of you. Drop the whole hammer on him—keep your back straight and bend your knees to drop your weight.
Apply Force in the Optimal Direction
This may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s a detail people often miss. Imagine you want to lever a big rock out of the ground. The most efficient way to do this is to push straight down on your end, to lever the rock straight up against gravity at the other. If you apply your force at an angle other than straight down, however, say at 45 degrees to the vertical (pushing sideways as you push down), some of your force is going to be wasted trying to move the lever sideways. In fact, the force could cause the lever to slip out from under the rock, wasting your time and effort.
This works the same way in joint breaking. If you want to break an elbow by locking it straight and hyperextending it, you need to apply the force straight down into the elbow along the same plane that the elbow would bend up through its normal arc. If you apply force at an angle to this plane, the efficiency of your leverage is reduced. In fact, if the angle is far enough off, the elbow will simply bend in its normal arc instead of breaking.
And then you’re in real trouble, because now a violent predator realizes you might not know what you’re doing.
THE SIX BASE LEVERAGES
All joints break the same way—by moving past the pathological limit and tearing the tissues that hold the joint together. But where is that pathological limit? And what’s the best way to move a joint to get there, and go beyond?
That’s where the six base leverages come in: six different directions to break every joint in the human body. Every joint-lock or joint-manipulation technique that you have heard of, seen, or experienced is one of these six base leverages or a combination of two or more. In fact, every possible way to break a joint can be derived from the six base leverages, which is why I focus on these instead of techniques. The leverages are the rules of multiplication; the techniques are the multiplication table.
These leverages are based on the three degrees of freedom every mobile joint has—bending, twisting, rocking to the side—and the ability to move forward or backward in that manner. These are the principles of joint-breaking, and each one has its own distinct, physiological name*:
1. Extension (bending forward, or “straightening”)
2. Flexion (bending backward, or “bending”)
3. Supination (twisting or rotating away from the body)
4. Pronation (twisting or rotating toward the body)
5. Adduction (rocking away from the body)
6. Abduction (rocking toward the body)
Here is a simple exercise to help you remember all six base leverages by moving through them in sequence. Start with your left hand out in front of you, palm down, fingers pointing away from you. Now:
Bend your wrist so your fingers point at the ceiling, palm away from you, like you’re motioning for someone to stop. This is extension.
Bend your wrist in the opposite direction, so your hand folds down, fingers pointing toward the floor, palm toward you, like you’re showing someone your new engagement ring. This is flexion.
With your hand in flexion, rotate your forearm so your fingers point at the ceiling, palm still toward you. Keep rotating to try and point your thumb at the floor. Your elbow will want to bend slightly. This is supination.
From supination, rotate your forearm 270 degrees in the opposite direction so your fingers point away from you off to your left, palm toward you. Your elbow will straighten. If you were to put your arm behind you when you did this, it would be the same motion you make to put your arm through a jacket sleeve. This is pronation.
Move your hand back to the starting position (palm down, fingers pointing ahead of you). Keeping your palm parallel to the floor, rock your hand out to your left, trying to point your fingers to your left, like you’re sliding cards across a table or like a DJ scratches a record. This is adduction.
Now rock your hand back the other way, keeping your palm down and parallel to the floor, trying to point your fingers to your right. This is abduction.
Did you feel the tightness in the wrist joint at the end of each of these motions? That’s the edge of the pathological limit for your wrist in each of those six directions. If you continue the motion beyond that tightness, with enough force, you will tear the joint out.
KNOW YOUR PATHOLOGICAL LIMITS
Now you know every possible direction in which a joint can be broken. That knowledge is only partially useful, however. What makes it fully applicable is knowing how far you have to force each joint in each respective direction in order to break or tear it out. That is what this section covers.
Extension (Straightening)
This is the state of most joints in the human body when standing erect—most joints are naturally ready to break through hyperextension.
Ankle: 20° (called “dorsiflexion”)
Knee: 15°
Hip: 30°
Fingers/Toes: 50°
Wrist: 70° (dorsiflexion)
Elbow: 15°
Shoulder: 45°
Spine: 30°
Neck: 55°
So, to break the knee with extension, for example, you need to make it bend backwards farther than 15 degrees. A stomp to the front of the knee will make it move 90 degrees in the wrong direction—making him sit down like a flamingo. This is more than enough to tear it out.
Flexion (Bending)
This is bending the joint and then compressing it beyond its range of motion. Note that fewer joints are susceptible to breaking in this direction—typically because the body “runs into itself” and ceases further motion in the joint.
Ankle: 45° (called “plantar flexion”)
Knee: 130°
Fingers/Toes: 30–110°
Wrist: 80–90°
Spine: 75°
Neck: 70–90°
To break a knee with flexion, you need to bend it beyond a 130-degree arc—not easy to do. This becomes easier when you add a big fat fulcrum into the crook of his knee for the knee joint to bend around—like your fist, a baton, or his other shin. Now the knee will separate and tear out more readily.
Supination (Rotating from Inside to Outside)
This is getting rotation inside of the joint by cranking on a lever (typically at 90 degrees to the axis of rotation) outward, away from the centerline of the body.
Ankle: 0° (ankle isolation difficult)
Knee: 40°
Hip: 45°
Fingers/Toes: 25°
Wrist: 90° (rotates at elbow, injury at wrist)
Shoulder: 70° horizontally (vertical flexion: 180°)
Spine: 70°
To tear out the knee using supination—with the victim on his back, for example—you could grab his foot and snap-rotate it outward. Any rotation past 40 degrees will tear the knee. Note that the ankle is notoriously difficult to isolate in supination. Forces put into the ankle will translate upward into the knee first, before it ruptures the ankle because the knee is the weakest structure in the leg system, and the weakest point always fails first. In the case of supination it will always be inside the knee that goes, then the ankle or hip—all of which are debilitating.
Pronation (Rotating from Outside to Inside)
This is getting rotation inside of the joint by cranking on a lever (typically at 90 degrees to the axis of rotation) inward toward the centerline of the body.
Ankle: 0° (ankle isolation is difficult)
Knee: 10°
Finger/Toes: 25°
Wrist: 90° (rotates at elbow, injury at wrist)
Shoulder: 110° horizontally (vertical extension: 60°)
To tear out the knee using pronation—again with the victim lying on his back as an example—you could grab his foot and snap-rotate it inward. Pronation of the leg is significantly more limited than supination. Any rotation past 10 degrees will tear the knee, which means injury is quicker than with supination if you apply enough force. Just as with supination, though, the ankle is notoriously difficult to isolate in pronation so any forces applied there will translate upward into the knee before affecting the ankle.
Adduction (Rocking to the Outside)
This is rocking or bending sideways toward the pinky side of your hand (in the wrist).
Ankle: 30° (called “pronation/inversion”)
Knee: 0°
Fingers/Toes: 30°
Wrist: 30–50° (called “ulnar deviation”)
A simple way to break a knee using adduction would be to stomp on the knee from the outside, breaking it sideways into his center. This is the classic chill-your-blood football injury—though because the knee has no range of motion in this direction, the force doesn’t need to be massive to be effective. When Bernard Pollard hit Tom Brady on the side of the knee in Week 1 of the 2008 NFL season and knocked him out for the year, Pollard was on the ground and dove from his knees to make contact. There was no massive, full-speed collision. That’s how brittle the knee is during adduction: it doesn’t bend, it just breaks.
Abduction (Rocking to the inside)
This is rocking or bending sideways toward the thumb side of your hand (in the wrist).
Ankle: 20° (called “supination/eversion”)
Knee: 0°
Hip: 45–50°
Fingers/Toes: 30°
Wrist: 20° (called “radial deviation”)
Shoulder: 180°
Spine: 35°
To break a knee using abduction would be to stomp on the knee from the inside, breaking it sideways to the outside. Once again, the knee has no range of motion in this direction, but unlike adduction it is not an injury you typically see on the football field unless a player’s cleats catch in the turf. Otherwise a hit from the inside simply sends the player’s legs skyward.
Now you know that there is one fundamental way to break a joint—move the joint past its pathological limit—and there are only six ways to get it there—the three degrees of freedom (bending, twisting, rocking) both forward and back. Just six base leverages to break every joint in the human body. And you know them all.
It doesn’t matter what body part you use to apply the force, or if it’s even a body part at all: you can use your hands, feet, hip, or shoulder, or a briefcase, car door, the curb. If the leverage is set properly, the joint will break.
That said, break it as soon as you grab it. Don’t monkey around. The longer it takes you to get a hold of the lever arm, isolate the bones, and set the leverage to get it done, the longer your enemy has to get past his initial spinal reflex and kill you. Break it now. If for some reason you can’t get it done, let it go and immediately strike another target. Injure him again to keep him busy and then try again to break it. Just because you want to break a joint doesn’t mean that’s all you can do. As long as you are alive and mobile, you always have options.
THROWING 101
Gravity and hard surfaces probably cause more accidental injury than every other method combined. Simply falling—solo, with no help from another person—can result in some trivial embarrassment, or it can, in the rare occasion when everything lines up just right, cause death.
If we add another person into the equation—someone to shove, trip, or otherwise knock down the victim—willful use of gravity and hard surfaces can function as a tool for violence. Now we are throwing people. Of course, a throw—no matter how simple or complicated, how cool or mundane—is only as good as the injuries it inflicts.
It’s tempting to look at throwing as a specialized art, its own discipline, removed from other aspects of violence. A throw looks like nothing else. It’s much easier to see the connection between striking and joint breaking. Stomping an ankle looks like a strike, as does hammering the back of an elbow to break it. But a throw… a throw must be a special technique, unlike any other method of injury.
Throwing is nothing more than a special case of striking. Striking, as we define it, is applying body weight in motion through an anatomical target to break it. When that target is a joint at the pathological limit, we get a joint break. For throwing, the only change is in the target. Instead of a piece of anatomy, it becomes your adversary’s balance, with the goal of disrupting that balance to initiate and accelerate a fall—an aimed and assisted collision with the ground, typically isolating a specific piece of anatomy or cluster of targets (like the head) for that collision. Instead of smashing ourselves through that anatomy (as in a basic strike) we’re going to smash the anatomy against the ground.
Once again, I’m not interested in complicated techniques that you have to memorize. The answer to the question, “What’s the best throw?” is, and will always be: “The one that puts the man down so he can’t get back up.” Instead of the crowd-pleasing, super-impressive throws that only the most coordinated, athletic, and highly trained could ever hope to achieve, I am going to share with you the base principles that drive purposeful, useful throwing.
Practically speaking, throwing is as simple as knocking people down. It’s doing the work of a patch of ice or a crack in the sidewalk. It’s simply recognizing a situation that would cause someone to struggle to maintain balance. The moment at the top of that last step on a set of stairs, when their body weight is out of balance—the moment when, if you needed to, you could give them a good, hearty shove down the staircase without much effort.
At a very basic level, throws involve recognizing opportunities to manipulate balance into a fall, and seeing a through-path from where you both are now into either a slip or a trip. If he’s already moving, he’s already falling—catching himself is a matter of him getting his legs back under him. Sticking your shoe in his gears, either by preventing him from getting his feet under him or knocking him down, is technically a throw. With two bodies in motion you don’t really have time to sort through a mass of techniques looking for just the right one—you need to be able to take full advantage of where you’re both going to break his structure and put him down.
While throwing doesn’t take as much effort as you might think, it does take a little bit of know-how, as well as some setup. Fortunately, throwing people into the ground also gives us some big payback for the relative (small) effort—namely, head trauma. It’s the only way, absent a weapon, that we can get directly at the brain. We’re going for concussion, skull fracture, and serious head injuries—bleeding in the brain. On the way there we’ll almost certainly get some other injuries. Going headfirst into the ground with all his body weight over him isn’t going to do your opponent’s neck any good, so cervical injuries are a real possibility. Not to mention the injuries he’ll sustain when he reaches out to break his fall—sprains, dislocations, and breaks of the hand, wrist, elbow, and shoulder are possibilities. He can also end up with the same kinds of injuries to his legs, even broken bones if he lands awkwardly.
Furthermore, injured people operate particularly poorly on the ground. The standing person can very easily engage more body weight against the downed man, through stomps and knee drops, upping the severity of further trauma.
In this regard, throwing could be seen almost as an injury multiplier that magnifies your efforts. A single strike applied through your attacker’s structure can get you multiple life-threatening injuries, put him into a vulnerable position, and allow you to really ramp up whatever you do next in order to survive your life-or-death encounter. That’s a lot of gain for a single strike. The punch to the throat, by comparison, gets you a single injury that will take time to manifest fully. If you can recognize the opportunity and seize it, a throw can shorten your encounter to the blink of an eye.
Technically speaking, all throws, from the simplest takedown to the most complex example of “free flying lessons” arise from the same set of rules—simple, easy rules anyone can remember, recognize, and master.
THE COMPONENTS OF A THROW
If you only utilize the most basic requirements for a throw—intent, prior injury, and body weight—what you really end up doing is shoving an injured man to the ground. While not a bad way to start tipping the odds in your favor, it’s not optimal, either. There’s nothing—other than perhaps an injury you’ve already inflicted—that says he couldn’t conceivably catch his balance and arrest his fall, or fail to break anything important when he hits the ground.
That’s not good enough when your life is on the line. A real combat throw is more than a happy accident—it’s making the fall as destructive as possible to your assailant. To do that you need to break his structure, take his balance, aim your target at the ground, and accelerate his fall.
Break His Structure
All things being equal, your enemy would prefer to stand with his center of gravity stacked on top of his legs. When everything sits nice and neat like this—center of gravity over legs over base—he can easily maintain his balance and move his weight around at will. You want to break his structure by knocking one of these pieces out of alignment. That can mean buckling his leg so he starts to collapse, or knocking his center of gravity past his feet so things aren’t stacked up so nice and neat anymore. Imagine kicking a leg out from under a stool, knocking the stool over. This is your body weight striking through either his base or his center of gravity to get him moving or make him vulnerable to a fall.
Take His Balance
Starting the fall usually happens in conjunction with breaking your opponent’s structure, but not always. Take his balance and use it to wreck him—but don’t inadvertently give it back. In other words, don’t break his structure and then grab on to him and hold him up so that he has a chance to regain his balance. Keep him moving into the throw, with the new equilibrium of balance occurring when he smacks down at the end.
Aim the Target at the Ground
Isolate a single body part for impact. The head is the ideal target, but it can also be a single shoulder (from the side), the scapula (shoulder blade), the coccyx (tailbone), even the spine. Aim, in this case, is a two-part deal, with an “X marks the spot” on the ground and a projectile (the anatomical target) that you’re hurling at that X. (Of course, the specific X that you choose doesn’t matter—what matters is visualizing directing your opponent into the ground, and choosing an imaginary X can help.) Your job is to make sure the two connect as precisely, and as violently, as you can.
Accelerate His Fall
Accelerating his fall is all about adding your body weight to the mix. This is one of the features that makes throwing so devastating: ideally, you’ll have his body weight in motion for the strike, and yours on top of it, finishing it off. This doubles his mass for the fall and final impact. Imagine weighing 400 pounds and striking an opponent with fists of concrete. That’s the level of force you can achieve with a well-executed throw. Also, accelerating him into the throw screws with the timing of his catch-fall reflex. Chances are his arm will be late for the party, though his brain will get there just in time.
Using these specific protocols, we can turn any shove-and-fall accident into an effective combat throw with minimal training. If you grab the injured man by the hair, or neck, and buckle his leg by driving through it with your own and then ride his head down into the concrete with your entire mass—either shoving it away to accelerate and bounce it off the ground or simply landing on it—you have performed a targeted and controlled sequence of events that make serious head injury as likely as possible. Instead of shoving and hoping for the best, now you’re taking charge of the situation, leaving nothing to chance, replacing all the variables with constants, and increasing your chances of survival and escape.
THE TWO TYPES OF THROWS: SLIPS AND TRIPS
There are two principal ways to go when we break our opponent’s structure and take his balance. We can either blast his base out from under his center of gravity, or push his center of gravity so it falls outside his base. This produces two basic types of throws: slips and trips.
Slips are just like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football and falling as it’s yanked away—his feet shoot out from under his center of gravity and he falls. Slips are the least robust of the two type of throws, simply because there are only so many ways to knock someone’s feet out from under them: pushing, pulling, or kicking one or both of his legs. The simplest operational expression of this idea is the leg sweep.
Depending on where your opponent’s weight is, and which leg you have access to, you have to make a determination whether to pick up his leg to get him off balance or kick it out. A leg that is not bearing weight, whether due to injury or the fact that you’re catching it mid-stride is easy to hook, pick up, push, or pull to take him down. In that case, you’re simply moving the weight of his leg outside of where he expected to land it and the rest of him falls as a result.
However, if he does have his weight on the leg you can reach, you’re not going to be able to do any of that. The leg will stick, anchored to the ground by his mass. In that case, you’re going to have to strike it out from under him with your entire mass, using something akin to a shin kick or full body check while violently displacing his feet out from under him with yours.
Most of the time with a mobile attacker it’s obvious which leg is bearing weight, but many times it’s not. It’s important to at least figure it out, so you can choose the proper method for taking that leg out from under him. The basic rule of thumb is:
When in doubt though, just blast through it with a strike. Technique and nuance be damned. If the leg has little or no weight on it (meaning it was “sweepable”) you’ll knock it out from under him and drop him, no sweat. If he was standing on it after all, it won’t matter because you’ve directed all of your body weight in one direction, with full force, right through a target.
A drawback of slips, especially leg sweeps, if that’s all you’re doing—taking his feet out from under him—is that then you aren’t targeting a specific piece of anatomy for the collision with the ground. You’ll produce an uncontrolled fall, for both of you, that leaves resulting injury up to chance. Absent prior injury, it’s equally likely that he smacks his head or that he has enough wherewithal to be able to protect his brain.
If he gets his hands out in time his reflexes will save his head, and then you have to hope for sprained or broken wrists, jammed shoulders, and the like. Maybe he’ll get the wind knocked out of him, but maybe he won’t. All told, slips like a leg sweep are not terribly reliable unless you’ve gone the extra mile, like grabbing him by the neck to ensure that as you kick his leg out from under him you’ll be hurling his head at the ground as he goes down. Without such measures, leg sweeps are a spin of the injury roulette wheel—sometimes a good number comes up, sometimes it doesn’t. So, either make it happen or be prepared to stay right on top of him, putting more injury into him when he hits the ground.
Trips, by contrast, are like that infamous crack in the sidewalk—the feet catch briefly, holding still long enough for the center of gravity to fall outside the base and send the person headfirst into the ground. Pretty much every pratfall you’ve ever seen a physical comedian do that didn’t involve slipping on a banana peel is some version of a trip. Trips are a much larger family of throws than slips because there are multitudes of ways to make a person’s center of gravity fall outside their base, knocking them down.
From the very simple “hip push” (to drive his pelvis past his feet and into the ground) to the more advanced shoulder throw (replacing his base with yours and then making him fall outside it on your terms), to base-break throws, drop throws, and hip throws, there is an arsenal of trips at your disposal to help achieve incapacitating injury.
Base-break throws are those where you break the opponent’s balance by attacking and breaking the structure holding him up. This can be as a stomp through the ankle or knee, breaking the joint, or it can mean applying your body weight to buckle his leg (rather than simply smash straight through it) and drag his center of gravity out past his base. Obviously, this is also a strike and a joint-break, but it fulfills our definition of a throw as well.
Drop throws are where you attach your mass to your opponent and lie down to throw him off balance. Imagine putting your shin through a man’s groin, then grabbing him by the neck and lying down in front of him to body-slam his head into the concrete. He’ll hit as if he weighed twice as much, and it’ll be twice as ugly as doing it all by himself.
Drop throws come in two basic varieties: attaching yourself to the top of the opponent’s spine by grabbing the hair, head, neck, lapels, shoulders, or arms, and attaching yourself to the bottom end of his spine by grabbing the hips or knees (usually from behind him). In either case, you are dragging his center of gravity out beyond his base and using it to accelerate his fall into the ground.
Hip throws got their name from the use of the hip as a fulcrum point for the throw. The victim is kicked up into the air by the hip and rounds the hip on his way into the fall. While the hip is indeed the fulcrum point for the throw, the legs are the primary actors in providing power for the maneuver. The hip is more properly the contact point upon which you’ll balance his center of gravity. A better way of understanding the hip throw, and how it is indeed a trip, is to look at it this way: you’re replacing his base with yours, taking him off his feet while balancing him over your own, and then making him fall outside your base.
Shoulder throws are similar to hip throws with the fulcrum point at the shoulder instead of the hip. What we get out of this is a hip throw with an added lever arm the length of your spine. This takes your opponent through a longer arc, resulting in a higher throw, which gives you more time to accelerate him through the fall from a greater height. When we couple this with an Earth-shattering “John Henry” swing of your arms slapping him down by his arm, we get the most powerful throw possible. Especially if you drop to one knee, pulling him down out of the sky as you go, to ride him down with your mass.
This throw gets you so much hang time and projection you can throw a man upside down through a plate-glass window, or into/onto/through anything else in your environment—the curb, a fire hydrant, traffic. In training, I’ve seen lights cleared off the ceiling by the victim’s feet. Much like the hip throw, if you know what you’re doing, it’s well worth the effort.
I know that’s a lot of different throws, but my intention is not to make your head swim, it’s only to show you what is possible, what is sitting latent inside you now that you have the knowledge and the know-how as it relates to all forms of striking.
The key is in recognizing what all these things have in common and then keeping things simple. Just as every joint only breaks one way, so it is with throwing. There’s only one throw—someone falling. That fall can be caused in only one of two ways, making his feet come out from under him or making him fall outside his feet. Everything else is just detail work. In other words, don’t overthink it. It’s still just striking, only this time we’re using the entire planet.
WE’RE USING THE PLANET, BUT THIS ISN’T PLANET FITNESS
In the last chapter I talked about the virtues of training slow. It is critical for perfecting all aspects of the tool of violence, particularly striking for the purposes of injury. But if you think going slow means easy, soft, light, and painless, you’re dead wrong. Slow means correct—spot-on targeting, constantly driving your body weight through the opponent’s structure to buckle it, full follow-through. When it’s done right, it’s methodically cruel and, yes, can even result in you suffering some painful bruises. As it should be.
There’s a huge difference between pain and injury. Pain hurts, and then it’s gone. Injury is lingering and long-lasting. Pain in training tells you that what’s happening would be truly terrible at full speed; it reminds you what you’re here for. If you know what to do with it, pain can help you focus your efforts and fan the flames of your intent to injure in time to save your life.
If I hit the mats for a painless hour and walk off not feeling like I’ve been in a fight, without a mark on me the next day, I might as well have gone to Planet Fitness and knocked out some reps on the squat rack instead. I hit the mats to feel it, not play at it or pretend. For the next couple of days I carry with me the badges of honor that show I trained hard for violence: bruises, scratches, the marks that training knives leave on the body.
The ones that make me proudest are the most accurate and controlled, like dime-sized contusions precisely over my heart, because that means the training is dialing in. Training, after all, is about precision, and precision is about learning control. Control means that everything is tight, focused, and right at the edge without tumbling over. I want my training partner to have total control over what I’m doing and where I’m going at all times during his turn, so I don’t get dumped on my head, thrown haphazardly onto one shoulder, or get something broken because he held it loosely and went for the target with sloppy technique.
When he gets it right it’s going to hurt; even going slow, he’s going to put one bony square inch of him through one square inch of me, meaning my rib cage will bounce off his elbow, and not the other way around. If his structure is properly immovable, it should feel like I ran into a steel knob at the top of a concrete-filled post.
I’m going to do the same to him on my turn, because anything less is screwing around, and sloppiness could get you killed out there. I must practice with total precision and control, so I can drive that head anywhere—straight into the concrete in the real world, or tucked under for a roll, in training. I’ll tuck it on the mats, exactly, and I’ll pile-drive it outside, precisely—getting exactly what I want instead of hoping for the best.
They say that pain is a great teacher, and I know this for a fact; I seek nothing but instruction every time I hit the mats. I’ve learned that what we do works, I’ve learned that pain can’t stop me, and I’ve learned to use it to focus my intent.
SURVIVING SURVIVAL
We’ve discussed—in sometimes queasy detail—just what it’s likely to look like and feel like if you, say, tear out an opponent’s knee joint. We’ve considered just how much force and intent it takes to achieve that level of damage. We’ve done that because entering a fight for your life without that intent will get you nowhere—but also because thinking clinically about the human body and its vulnerabilities is good for your peace of mind after the fact of violent conflict, as well.
Think of it this way: What happens after survival? When you’ve put yourself successfully through a violent predator and are now standing where they once stood? You’re mobile and they are incapacitated. You are alive and they are dead. The most sensitive and skeptical of my new students and seminar attendees often ask me some version of that question. They’ve read or heard dozens of stories in the news and online about PTSD and survivor’s guilt, nightmares, and regret. Soldiers—true heroes—who come home afraid to go to sleep, haunted by the question of “why him and not me?” Police officers who have pulled the trigger on mentally ill attackers who were imminent threats to their families or their neighbors.
These scared students don’t want to be haunted. They don’t want to die at the hands of an asocial predator, to be sure, but their desire to be free of guilt and shame and torment can feel equally strong. They think that understanding the tool of violence and training to effectively deploy it will increase the likelihood of all those things happening. Not so much that they will be turned into aggressive predators themselves, more that by choosing to study violence they are inviting violence into their lives at a karmic level.
I understand this point of view. I get where it comes from. The reality is, though, that it is understanding the principles of violence that makes mental and emotional trauma less likely. Of course, there’s no perfect solution—soldiers who are trained in the principles of violence can still suffer emotional trauma, for instance—but it is no coincidence that the special forces operators who train the principles most rigorously, and end up having to use lethal violence most often, are the least likely by percentage to return to civilian life with crippling emotional distress.
There is a final piece to Bonnie’s story that shines a light on this very fact. During her interview with the police officers on the scene in the immediate aftermath of her attack, one of the officers, seeing her therapy dog in the backseat of her car, asked Bonnie if she was licensed for a concealed carry weapon. She told him that she was and that the weapon was currently in her purse. The officers looked at her somewhat surprised.
“Why didn’t you shoot him, ma’am?” They asked, curiously. “You would have been well within your rights.”
“He was already nonfunctional,” Bonnie told them calmly. “I determined there was no need.”
Bonnie was now a two-time victim of asocial violence. When she came to us for training, she was fully in the clutches of PTSD from her first encounter—a brutal assault. It’s not hard to imagine that a second attack might have sent her over the edge. She’d either freeze like a deer in headlights—Not again, why me?!—or go nuts and empty her pistol into her attacker’s head, chest, and groin, before retreating inside herself like an emotionally broken zombie.
None of those things happened. Bonnie’s knowledge of and training in violence stripped all the emotion and moral judgment out of it. Nothing that occurred in the Home Depot parking lot was a reflection on her inherent goodness or the unfairness of the world. It was the reality of an asocial predator meeting the reality of a prepared woman. I have spoken with Bonnie many times since her second attack, and she remains as mentally and emotionally strong as she is physically.
One person I haven’t spoken to, for decades now, is a high school friend whom I’ll call Efram. I haven’t seen or heard from him since I got out of the Navy, since he killed a man.
Efram was a student of a Filipino martial art called Kali that focuses primarily on stick-and knife-fighting. When I knew him, he was already very good. One night he was out with his girlfriend in San Diego when a pair of armed men accosted them. It was unclear to Efram whether they were muggers, rapists, or what. All he knew was that one of them had a knife and the other had a gun.
With zero hesitation, Efram pulled his blade. Acting immediately, he knocked out the attacker with the knife, closed the distance on the attacker with the gun, disarmed him and, summoning all his martial arts training, carved out the man’s throat. The attacker bled out right in front of them.
Strictly by the standards of physical training, Efram did everything right. He didn’t hesitate. He acted first and fast. He put all his weight through both men, targeting vulnerable areas on their bodies that, when injured, produced an insurmountable spinal reflex reaction that took their brains out of the equation—knocking one out and killing the other.
But that was no consolation to Efram, because none of those objective facts could overcome the sound of gurgling coming from the dead man’s throat and the sight of his eyes bulging from their sockets, blood pulsing rhythmically from his neck, and the life quickly leaving his body. Those sights and sounds haunted Efram and dogged him, no matter what he did to try to silence or escape them.
That’s what his father told me, at least, when I ran into him one day in Mission Beach and asked him how Efram was doing. The whole thing really messed him up, Efram’s father said. It had been five years and he still hadn’t recovered. I didn’t pry, but it was clear that drugs and alcohol had become a major part of Efram’s coping mechanism.
So why did the justifiable use of violence in an inescapable life-or-death situation break Efram but strengthen Bonnie, someone who’d already suffered a traumatic attack? Of course, I imagine that part of the difference had to do with the fact that Efram took a life to protect himself, while Bonnie didn’t have to. But I don’t think that’s all there is to it: a key difference was that Efram was only trained in the techniques of violence, not in their principles. He didn’t know what the trauma he had trained to inflict would look like or sound like if he were ever in the position to inflict it, because that is not the end goal of most martial arts. He didn’t know why the targets he struck were targets. No one ever taught him what an injury was from a physiological, anatomical perspective.
Bonnie knew all that stuff. She had studied and trained on the principles of the tool of violence, so that if she ever had to wield it she would know what to expect. By training slowly, deliberately, and repeatedly, she set her intent—inflicting debilitating injury to save her life—and she imagined what such an injury might look and feel like, just like we showed her in our training. She knew how her attacker was likely to move if she collapsed his trachea, and she understood the structural, anatomical damage she could inflict by shattering his knee. She didn’t experience those things beforehand, but at least she was as prepared for them as it is possible to be—more prepared than Efram was.
That knowledge strengthened her mind as much as it strengthened her body. It left her fully prepared and, as such, completely at peace with herself, her choices, and her world.