I once read that many self-defense courses are very ineffective in real-life situations because they fail to take the element of surprise into account - that is to say, it’s all well to learn self-defense techniques in a controlled, safe environment when you’re all prepared and ready in the gym and you know when your “assailant” is going to “attack” you - but in a real life situation (robbery, assault, etc), many people freeze in instant panic or surprise, their mind goes blank, and all of those self-defense techniques go for naught.
If so, what methods are good for retaining learned information in the midst of panic? I’m assuming that military personnel, aircraft pilots, firefighters, police officers, etc. are quite good at remembering taught things in dangerous situations, so is it just a case of “Keep practicing repeatedly until it’s muscle memory?”
You answered your own question. The best way to prep for situationa that are by definition unplanned is to simulate them over and over, until the learned countermeasure becomes second nature. Even that may not work, but it’s better than not preparing at all.
Don’t be surprised. Keep your eyes open and pay attention to what’s going on around you. Notice if somebody’s standing in a doorway or alleyway up ahead, or if somebody’s walking behind you. Don’t be a victim or an easy target.
Self defense classes fail because they’re fundamentally flawed to begin with. They are for profit more than getting results so they are almost always nothing more than feel-good self-help seminars with some basic exercise thrown in. The only way to become proficient at something like that is to make a very serious commitment, we’re talking months of all day, intensive training akin to what you’d get in the military or a police academy.
There are no shortcuts. Anything short of this will be essentially useless for the reasons you stated…
Some time ago, I took a course from an ex-cop about how to keep yourself save in a job like mine. It wasn’t a self defense class; it was about reading behavior, wearing a clip on tie not one that wraps around your neck, that kind of stuff.
He said that victims invariably say ‘they came out of nowhere,’ by which imprecise language they mean ‘they came from outside my detection radius to inside the strike radius faster than I could react.’
IMHO, it’s probably far easier to train yourself to avoid being surprised than it is to train yourself to react effectively and proportionally to a surprise attack.
Very few things in life prepare you for the confrontation that a violent attack presents. You think you have been in a fight before? Not really. The level of overwhelming physical affront involved in a real life attack will shock anyone who has not experienced it before. There is good reason people just cave in with shock. The violence that comes from a person exerting their full strength with the intent of hurting you is enormous compared to what people imagine, or experience in self defence training classes. If the attack comes from an unexpected quarter it is doubly confronting.
I say this, not from experience being attacked, but from my days playing Judo. We trained three times a week, and escalated training intensity up and down the scale. But the first time one is actually in a competition, and you are met with someone roughly as skilled as you, and roughly your size, and they have no intent other than to win the match, you learn a very swift and important lesson. Nothing in the training sessions really prepares you for this first time affront. Next time you are a bit better prepared, and you get over it. And that is in a situation where you know the attack is coming, and you know the exact time and place.
Practice, practice, practice. I fended off an assault many years ago even with my startled and less-powerful self-defense moves, only able to do anything at all because we’d done the moves over and over in class.
IMNSHO, any self defense class worth its salt will have at least one surprise blitz attack by an instructor. I usually have one of my students as a ringer in the class and I pull the attack off on her. She then assists for the rest of the class. The object is to show people that yes, it can happen and it can happen damn quick. Be aware of your surroundings and don’t take chances.
My dad taught me self-defense: Give them everything without hesitation.
He drilled that on us 5.
When a guy with a ski mask came from behind and pointed a gun asking for the car keys and couldn’t have done it faster if my wife had come asking to give a blowjob. Didn’t even have to think “Here they are”. It was only after calling my brother to pick me up that I started shaking like crazy.
And yeah, they’re a scam. If they jump you, and you can’t go through life like a comando behind enemy lines looking around every single step, no self defense move helps.
Rory Miller discusses this at some length. Crisis situations lead to a rush of adrenaline, which enhance your energy while depleting your coordination. This tends to deteriorate the abilities of the trained while increasing those of the untrained.
Does that mean typical self defense classes are useless? Who knows? There’s not a lot of double blind investigation in this area.
Model mugging approaches actually do produce some adrenaline. I see they are sometimes called full force self defense. I suspect they work very well insofar as they efficiently increase the untrained person’s combat ability in a few hours. I don’t think they are a scam at all.
Professionals may receive less of an andrenaline rush due to their familiarity with danger. But it’s still an issue. They too can freeze: you don’t get to choose your first reaction. With sufficient training though you can push through the freeze, or so one hopes.
You have to practice like you are going to fight. That is the advantage of Full contact boxing and MMA. You actually fight, you are used to the adrenaline rush and fear and taking blows and knowing which submissions actually work and knowing if that punch or kick actually lands or is two inches short. The stuff you really need to do in a real fight, poking someone in the eye, busting an eardrum or a kneecap, etc, you can’t actually practice doing that. You just do it in rehearsed slow motion and 20% power. But boxing and MMA you go full speed full power, you know what works and what doesn’t and you are used to getting hit. You train your reflexes over and over again to react to various stimuli in less than half a second. This split second reaction and trained reactions will help when someone tries to surprise you. Now, I know Krav Maga and Jeet Kun Do must be successful but I have not trained in them so I’ve allways wondered how they get around not having any realistic fighting in their training.
In my Krav Maga classes we regularly trained the lead-up to a lot of ritualized bar fights (eye contact, trash talking, pushing) with an emphasis on having hands up to provide a fence against sucker punches and palms open to make it clear to everyone else we weren’t the aggressor. The trash talking and pushing can stimulate a bit of adrenaline even in training.
I do Kung Fu now and it’s got less pre-fight emphasis and training, which I miss and try to compensate for a bit when I train by myself.
Several self-defense books explicitly talk about pre-fight rituals (see Keith Kernspecht’s* Blitz Defense *and Geoff Thompson’s Watch My Back and The Art of Fighting Without Fighting) I would consider “Putting up the Fence” as standard teaching practice.
To the OP’s last question, proper teaching training, good intense drills as realistic as possible without hurting your partners, and yes, muscle memory. If you lack any of those it’s not going to help you.
No defense from getting whacked from behind. Decent Self Defense training will make you much more aware and resilient in a dangerous situation or fight by giving a better “will to win” and better tools to do it. Doesn’t mean you’re invincible though.
You mean like really really kicking the shit out of you and breaking your bones in the process?
Well, then you got the idea wrong.
Do to the training, you should get more self-aware and aware of your surroundings. Mostly its avoiding situations, since you can easier recognize people that are preying on easy victims.
Once you end up in a confrontation, the training helps to stay calmer, portray self confidence and if worst comes to the worst it protect yourself from some damage due to the muscle memory of falling, going with the punch, etc… and/or might buy you those important second to run away.
Also you are more used to getting kicked and punched - but that all depends on the type of training and intensity.
I have had a little bit of training in boxing, and I have been in a handful of bar “fights” where the main goal was to land as many punches as possible before the police showed up and everyone scattered (no one was trying to kill anyone).
So when I was punched in the face unexpectedly by a dude on the street, it was a big shock. I went down and was stunned and defenseless on the ground for enough time that he could have stomped my face in. Thankfully, he didn’t.
If you had told me beforehand that I would go down from one punch and then lay there dazed on the ground, I’d have laughed in your face,
My girlfriend in college (now my wife of 28 years) was taking a self defense class and proudly showed me her moves as she learned them. One day I spotted her heading back to her dorm across a sparsely wooded field. I dashed over and came up behind her giving her a big bear hug around her arms and torso (carefully keeping my balls as far back as possible). What did she do? She froze and tried to scream but nothing came out.
Based on my experience I would say the OP is pretty accurate.