How Much Practice is Enough for Self-Defense?

by Brad Parker

People tell me they want to learn how to defend themselves.  But, they want to be able to do it quickly and without too much effort.

(Buzzer sounds) Wrong!

The fact is that you will have to defend yourself in a situation where the attacker has all the advantages and you have all the disadvantages.  You will need to develop a level of skill to be able to defend against numerous types of attacks, all with their own unique set of circumstances.  You will be under incredible stress.  The situation will be spiraling out of your control so fast that it is difficult to think clearly.  The suddenness and intensity of the attack will threaten to overwhelm you.

And, unfortunately, we are not born with the ability to fight.  We might have the instinct to fight, but we don't come prepackaged with the techniques that will allow us to successfully defend ourselves from predators.  

So you will need to learn how and to train. This could be the one of the most important things you ever do for yourself and your family.  It is important, and one of life's truisms is that important things are seldom easy.

You might have heard about four levels of physical skill being classified as "unconscious incompetence", "conscious incompetence", "conscious competence" and "unconscious competence".

In the first case – unconscious incompetence – a personal is totally unaware that they have no idea of how to perform a skill. When someone is consciously incompetent, at least they KNOW that they don’t know anything. After someone has practiced their skill enough, they can perform when they think about the steps involved. This is conscious competence. The pinnacle, obviously, is to become so skilled that you can perform your skill without even thinking about it -- the unconsciously competent level.

I also heard John LaTourette refer to a similar progression of skills as "mechanical", "physical", "mental" and "meta-physical". The first level --mechanical – means you are learning the skill and can perform it in a halting, unpracticed motion. When you progress to the physical level, you can perform the skill while thinking about it, but often you must be told which skill to perform. This might be akin to the intermediate karate student who can perform a technique well during drills, but might have difficulty in using those techniques in sparring. Contrast that to, say a brown belt, who is performing at the mental level. This is the person that who can perform all the physical techniques in a superior fashion and is only concentrating on which technique to choose. The last level is meta-physical, which is the black belt and above level.

This "meta-physical" or "unconscious competence" level is your goal. You have mastered the physical mechanics or your martial art or skill. You don’t have to even think about which response to use.  In many of your fights it seems that the opponent is acting in slow motion. To observers it may appear that you can read your opponent’s mind and – indeed – sometimes it might even appear that you move before your opponent when, in reality, the opponent has just begun to make his move.

In one famous karate match in the early part of the last century, 80-year-old Okinawan karate master Ankoh Itosu was seen by ringside spectators to fell his Japanese opponent with only a piercing yell (kiai). Itosu admitted that what really dropped the opponent was a short right punch to the man’s solar plexus. The move was so quick that most observers missed it.

In a bizarre case, two undercover narcotics agents had a shootout in a car. One officer was so incredibly skilled that he appeared to have executed the other one when witnessed by the two other officers in the car. By way of background, one of the undercover cops was on the take. The other officer had developed information which would put the dirty cop away. The dirty cop knew this and had begun to draw his gun to shoot the clean officer. However, the responding officer was a competitive shooter and was SO quick that he actually outdrew the first officer and fired one fatal shot inside the car. The investigation showed that the dirty cop was just beginning to draw his gun when the other cop recognized the move as a threat, drew his own gun and delivered the hit.

Massad Ayoob documents another case where a Nashville Police Officer actually outdrew and shot a suspect who was already pointing a pistol at the officer and was preparing to shoot him. The officer was a competitive shooter and firearms instructor.

In my own law enforcement experience, I wrote a report documenting a bar owner who had a shootout with approximately a dozen bikers, fatally shooting five of his attackers with six shots, despite being wounded himself in the initial volley of shots by a .38/.357. The man had acted in an amazing fashion, dropping each attacker with a single shot each from his .45 during a wild run-and-gun situation that started outside and ended up inside the bar. (Any old-timers out there remember a custom 1911 made by Detonics? This was what this guy was shooting). Again, the man was a competitive shooter.

I have several training partners who have defended themselves against multiple opponents without receiving any injuries to themselves. They all can describe their fights in great detail and relate their experience in that it was "just like class".

To many outsiders, these individuals have attained a level of self-defense skill that is extraordinary. This is true, but the individuals themselves are only extraordinarily skilled because they have worked hard enough and long enough to reach this level. I almost said that these individuals may seem ordinary. True, most of them LOOK ordinary, but they are not ordinary if only because they have the work ethic and dedication lacking in "ordinary" people.

So, how much work is necessary to reach this level?

"Experts" differ in their answers. I’ve heard some people relate that it takes at least 1,000 repetitions. Massad Ayoob says he’s heard that it takes 3,000 to 7,000 repetitions. I’ve seen it estimated that Olympic-caliber athletes have practiced their skill about 250,000 times!

But I contend that you should not just consider the quantity of your repetitions, but also HOW you practice and WHAT you practice. I’m sure some of you had P.E. coaches who told you over the years, "practice does not make perfect, only perfect practice makes perfect." That’s great. But I’ve never really been able to understand what "perfect" practice was. I know, I know, they are trying to be cute in telling you that your practice needs to emphasize the quality of your practice. Fair enough.

But I contend that there are a couple of other things you need to consider when you practice.

1. Practice a usable motion or a complete technique.

For shooters, this would be the complete draw from grip, to presentation, to sight picture, to trigger press. For empty-hand fighters this might be a series of movements that might begin with a parry and ends with a combination of strikes and kicks. For a takedown, practice the grip, the entry and the actual throw.

Ideally, these complete sets or techniques are your best and have been proven in combat or in sparring. They are "your" techniques -- the ones you have used successfully in the past and have confidence in using for the future.

You might polish or spend some extra time on individual parts of the technique, but the bulk of your time should be using the COMPLETE series.

It is said that Olympic-level judo players know about 250 techniques. Yet, they typically use only five techniques in their matches. These are the bread and butter techniques that have worked for the athletes over and over again.

The key is that your move is so ingrained that is just "happens". I’ve used techniques in real fights that seem to have sprung out on their own and the combination continued without any conscious thought on my part. The movements seemed to overwhelm the opponent because they were continuous – I was throwing the next part of the combination even before the previous blow hit.

In our own training, we find that fellow training partners begin to figure out how to counter our favorite techniques. Sometimes you will get discouraged that your favorite moves aren’t working as well as before. Don’t despair. The problem is that your training partners get to "see" your techniques over and over, thus you don’t have the element of surprise on your side. Naturally, our competitive training partners are going to work on negating your advantage. You might get discouraged and stop using your favorite technique. Don’t. Keep working on it. Certainly you should try new techniques, moves and tactics to expand your arsenal, but don’t automatically throw out your best stuff. A caveat here. Your best moves are the ones that work on the majority of your training partners, especially new training partners that don’t "know" your moves. If your pet move does not work reliably on less experienced partners or new partners, you might be deluding yourself into thinking you’ve got a "usable" technique when you really don’t.

A surprising note here, most of the "usable" techniques I’ve seen actually used in fights (or had reported to me by students or fellow instructors) are actually very, very basic. A two-punch combination, a strike-kick combination, a clinch- takedown-mount or a standing guillotine have ended many, many fights.

So be careful what you practice. Spend your time on the tried and true techniques. Rorion Gracie has a video tape out called "Gracie in Action 2" (you can find it at www.gracieacademy.com). In it, you will see the Gracie brothers defeat numerous challengers in real fights and brutal challenge matches using the same basic techniques over and over. If you spend all of your time trying to perfect a jumping spinning back kick, you’ll shortchange yourself the time you should have been working on a combination or technique that is more likely to be used in a real situation.

This means that your combination or technique should be specific to fighting. Spend the vast majority of your time training your fighting and fighting techniques. Cross training is good, but don’t fall into the trap of losing sight of what you are training for. Take the example of the overzealous father training his kid to be the high school football fullback. He took this kid out into a plowed field and made him run across the field putting each step into one furrow. Presumably, the dad thought this would teach the kid to move his feet. In reality, all the kid could do at the end of the summer was run in itty, bitty choppy steps. I know a guy who wanted to get really good at kicks. So he practiced slow graceful kicking movements to build strength. Unfortunately, he only got good at slow graceful kicks. I know another guy who took up mountain biking to work on his cardio. He spent so much time biking that his fighting skills suffered.

If you spend all your time on kata, you’ll get very, very good at kata. Get in there and spar. Find out what works – and what doesn’t work. Try different sparring partners for a real eye-opener. I’ve got really fast hands, but I cannot OUTBOX a boxer. It only took one night of sparring with a couple of boxers to learn this painful lesson. But, I can OUTFIGHT most boxers, I just have to make sure I play my game and not fall into theirs.

2. Practice your techniques in a realistic environment.

Remember I said that many of our students and instructors report that their real fights are "just like class"? That’s because we spend about half of our training time on sparring or drilling in a realistic fashion. (The other half is learning and drilling technique. We spend very little time on conditioning, that’s something you should be doing on your own and the second half of class is pretty damn tough anyway). No, we don’t kill each other, but we work as if we are in a real fight. We go less than 100 percent, use protective equipment and stop short of hurting each other, but the main point is that we are working techniques and situations that are real world.

If you are grappling for NHB, judo or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, you’ve got a good set up for the realism part. Grappling workouts let you go pretty hard in a realistic manner without really hurting each other. You can exert a lot of effort and be able to back off a technique when you know it is getting critical. There is a bit of a paradox here, because I usually see fewer injuries during BJJ workouts than in standup sparring. But, the injuries I do see in BJJ are substantially more savage. In my standup sparring experience, you usually get rocked or knocked silly numerous times. There is the odd assortment of sprained toes, split eyebrows, bloody noses. But in BJJ I’ve seen major injuries including broken bones and a number of dislocated knees and shoulders.

But a good training environment with alert instructors should eliminate much of that risk.

A good training environment will also include the opportunity to work a number of "fight" simulations. If you are training for NHB, then you’ll get to spar with the gloves on for a duration consistent with regulation rounds. If you are a tournament person, then you’ll have mini-tournaments. If you are working self-defense, then you’ll have a number of attack scenarios. And make sure the scenarios are comprehensive. I’ve actually had an advanced karate student tell me that he was completely flabbergasted when someone grabbed his hair in a real fight. He had never trained for that. (As an aside, buzz cuts are the norm for me and most of my training partners for just this reason).

Workout with your street clothes. Spar a little bit out in back of the club. We have done extensive sparring and grappling in the dark.  Find out how to use the ambient light to your advantage. See what it is like to be approached by two opponents on either side of a car. If you are shooting, set up your scenarios to include multiple opponents at extremely close range. Shoot at night. Shoot from your car. Shoot targets while you are sitting/lying on the ground.

Introduce stress into your training sessions to pressure test your techniques. One of the best ways to do this is to enter competitions. Groups like the International Defensive Pistol Association put on realistic competitive shoots. If you really want a stress test for your techniques, enter a NHB tournament or match. That is sure to get your heart rate up. Simply joining a martial arts school or self-defense program is a good stress component for many people. You’ll be moving out of your comfort zone and, if you get the right instructor, you’ll get a good training environment on a regular basis. Some schools periodically have specific stress days or events. Geoff Thompson has a day called "Animal Day" that steps up the fighting scenarios significantly for one day. Some dojos have very difficult and realistic tests for rank promotion. Other schools have their big stress days right after the New Year.

There are three main subpoints that should be noted here:

1. You should work against non-compliant partners;

Real attackers and bad guys have no respect for you or your famed jodan tsuki. They will not cooperate by standing still for foot stomps or eye pokes. They don’t care what belt you are. They will muscle you and try everything they can to punch in your face or squeeze your head off. You need to work with people who are trying to spoil your technique and win with their own.

 

2. You should take scenarios from real (or at least realistic) confrontations or situations;

Most real fights don’t start with two guys squared off in a 16-foot ring. It’s usually a short, confusing, ugly start. You’ve probably been drinking, the band is loud, the lights are flashing and you had no idea that the girl you were dancing with had such a muscular and protective boyfriend.

Or someone approaches you and asks for the time and sucker punches you or draws a weapon. The punch is often preceded by a short, sharp push. The Department of Justice says that 80 percent of all assaults start with a shove or a grab. I’m also continually surprised to see how many fights start with a tackle or a headlock. These are two very common attacks by untrained fighters, yet I’ve seen "trained" people completely baffled by their unorthodox nature.

Take note of published accounts of attacks. Keep a mental note of other people’s situations and what happened to them. Try and duplicate the attack scenarios for training.

While no two fights or attacks are ever alike, there are a number of aspects that any fight, shootout or confrontation will share. Practice being an attacker as well as a defender. That gives you an idea of what a bad guy needs to successfully launch an attack.

 

3. You’ll probably HAVE to train with others.

There is a guy named Ernie Lipps that really worked me over in my first degree black belt exam. Besides the spinning back kick to my gut, I’ll always remember Ernie for his advice on training methods for the individual alone.

Ernie took some time off from the dojo to pursue training on his own. When he returned to the school, I asked him what he did to train by himself. He said he tried a number of programs unsuccessfully and settled into the "Chuck Norris method of training". When I asked him to explain further, he said that he eventually began to sit around and watch a lot of Chuck Norris movies, fooling himself into thinking that he was learning something.

I doubt that you’ll ever be able to play a good game of tennis if you only practice by hitting the ball against a backboard. I also doubt that you’ll be realistically able to develop your skills fully if you don’t workout with training partners. You just won’t be able to fully develop your techniques and timing otherwise. 

If you train in your garage with one training partner, that’s okay. It might be better to be able to train in an environment with multiple partners. That way you don’t get used to one partner and you get to work with different body types, different abilities, different responses, etc.

Ben Franklin said, "The used key is always bright". Devise a method or schedule that allows you to practice your self-defense skills regularly in an environment that attempts to replicate realistic attacks. Keep with the program and, over the course of a year or two, you’ll have enough repetitions and practice that you, too, will be on your way to owning extraordinary skills.