I am going to use an example here to show how all these categories on my website fit together in a system. It will be based on my approach, but still an oversimplified model. This is to show the ideas involved and hopefully to give you some useful information to get you thinking about how you would approach your own development of a training strategy… one that is appropriate for you. Don’t wait for “perfect”… that’s really an unattainable goal. Establish a reasonable starting point, evaluate the results you are seeing and any unexpected effects (it would be surprising if there were none), and make adjustments to optimize your results and avoid unwanted training effects as you go.
Someday. That’s a dangerous word. It’s really just a code for ‘never’. – Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) Knight and Day (2010)
I am going to use the categories on the website for the O3M as a template and use an oversimplified variation of what I do to give you an idea of where everything fits.
There are 10 categories we use for discussions with the training group. Here is an introduction on how they fit.
Worldview – Everyone has a worldview, whether they know it or not. This functions as a meta mental model (Taking the Red Pill) that will color everything you do. If you are looking through green glasses, everything looks green. If you are looking through red glasses, everything looks red. You get the idea. This is important in regard to self-protection because your worldview will inform your ethical choices. I will do another full post on ethics and use of force. For now, understand that your worldview, whether examined or not, shapes your decisions with regard to use of force. This is why it is worth considering.
Awareness – The second element is awareness. Self-protection skills are, by definition, skills applied in a competitive environment. Every decision we make is based on information that comes in through our senses. In the Strategy element, one of the things we will be discussing in greater detail in the future is the OODA Loop decision making model (among others) created by Colonel John Boyd. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Awareness drills are focused primarily on the “O’s”. Observation is the intake of data by your senses, and Orientation is the understanding of that data. This is not objective. It is based on training and experience and the quality of your Decisions and effectiveness of your Actions are directly related to the quality (current level of expertise / accuracy of your interpretation) of your Orientation.
Breathing / Meditation – This element impacts the overall system in several ways. Some involve controlling your emotional state under stress. It is helpful to your performance under pressure if you maintain a level of emotional arousal that allows effective action. Additional uses are for Non-Sleep Deep Rest (recovery tool), and development of mental tools. Sport psychologists and coaches in numerous disciplines have found great usefulness in visualization drills etc. These tools can be developed and used in this element.
Unarmed Skills / Contact Force Multipliers – These are the hard skills for personal combat at contact distances. What you choose to focus on would be determined by your unique circumstances and inclinations. I make no recommendations as to what “style” you “should” study or what tools you should choose to use. I do not consider myself a “knife guy” or a “gun guy”, or even a “martial arts / combatives” guy. I believe that kind of thinking unnecessarily limits your options by using rigid thinking models. Have you ever heard the saying, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail?”. Additionally, it is important to understand that it is not the tool that makes someone dangerous. Dangerous people are dangerous… tools just enhance their options. People today, both those who like weapons and those who are afraid and would like them all to disappear, treat the tool like some kind of supernatural fetish that imparts extraordinary abilities to the user. Again, this is ineffective thinking. In this element, I include training in unarmed skills, as well as contact range tools in the following categories: impact, piercing / edged, flexible, environmental / improvised. For our discussions here, I am assuming self-protection scenarios rather than combat sport, so we always assume a weapons-based environment and potential complications like multiple opponents or disparity in size etc.
Ballistic Force Multipliers – This element is for those who train in tools that apply force outside of contact range. Primarily for me, that is firearms, but this section would include thrown tools as well as things like archery, slings, etc.
Conditioning / Attribute Development – This element covers your conditioning program. Specifics will be dictated by what is important / prioritized by the skills you have decided to develop. Also, it is important to note that a good program will include mental skills development along with the physical skill and attribute development. I include exposure training in this category as well (heat and cold exposure). Like all of these categories, there is significant cross over with other elements, so it is helpful not to get too caught up in thinking of these as isolated categories. For example, bag work can be categorized as specific conditioning (impact conditioning, strengthening the aerobic engine), but it can also be skill work (the domain of Unarmed Skills / Combatives). When you are working the bag correctly, you are not just getting your heart rate up, you should be throwing every strike with proper structure, form, skill, etc.
Strategy – This element is for our group’s discussion of strategic studies. Whether you pursue this deeply or not will depend on your interest, but you will be making some strategic and tactical decisions by default as you choose the methods you will train. Your overall approach will be dictated by the tools you choose and the skills you develop. Having at least a basic understanding of the principles will help you more effectively approach your training and not waste your time pursuing side roads that are cool, but not directly relevant to your individual approach.
Communication – This element covers both verbal and non-verbal communication skills. Both giving and receiving. In the competitive environment, we engage with people and multiple levels. I forget where I first learned the term, but we can protect ourselves or attain our goals in multiple “spheres” (Definitions: 3 Spheres), known as physical, mental, and moral. These skills are relevant to escalation and de-escalation. Here is a brilliant post by author Marko Kloos from, I believe 1994, that makes this point:
Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it.
In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.
When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force. The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gangbanger, and a single gay guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.
There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we’d be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger’s potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat–it has no validity when most of a mugger’s potential marks are armed. People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.
Then there’s the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser. People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don’t constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level. The gun is the only weapon that’s as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weightlifter. It simply wouldn’t work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn’t both lethal and easily employable.
When I carry a gun, I don’t do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I’m looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don’t carry it because I’m afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn’t limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation…and that’s why carrying a gun is a civilized act.
– Marko Kloos (an essay from his blog “The Munchkin Wrangler”[link])1
You see in his model of persuasion and force both the elements of communication and the hard skills of the unarmed or tool oriented self-protection approaches.
So, let’s take a quick look at how these kind of fit together in an overall system…
In the Awareness element we will talk about the USMC’s Combat Hunter program and development of sophisticated tools to sharpen your ability to detect trouble before the “action” starts. In that program they talk about “biases to action”. What this means in short, is that when you observe a significant cluster of behavioral cues, you have biases to action based on your observations. I am not a Marine deployed in a combat zone, so my biases for action are different than those taught in the program to those who were to be deployed in that environment. My biases are, in order of preference
- Avoidance
- Deterrence / De-Escalation
- Physical Conflict Resolution
We will talk more about that in future posts, but generally speaking, the Awareness skills allow the first and most generally preferable option, Communication skills are important for the second option, and your hard skills in combatives or force multipliers are relevant for the last option. This is a brief picture of how these things fit together.
Mental Skills – This is an element I use for any studies that further my understanding of my priorities. It is very wide and covers quite a few, sometimes seemingly unrelated subjects. My Rolling Resume is mostly up to date, though sometimes I forget to add stuff. That has a looooong list of things I have read over the years if you want to check it out.
Miscellaneous – This is a catch all category for everything else. Since I look at things in terms of patterns and models, even my recreational activities provide useful insights. This is the section that will be most wildly different between individuals. What is it you do for fun? What holds your interest? What do you have unnecessarily long conversations about? It will probably fall into this category.
My suggestion would be to identify your priorities and options first. Determine how much time you have to devote to improvement of whatever skills you think will be useful. Note that some skills don’t require dedicated training time. Many of my Awareness drills, for example, are conducted during my normal daily routines. Once you have determined what skills or tools are important, identify the hard skills that represent the “fundamentals”. Drill those relentlessly. No, there is no end to doing this… it should be a regular and large part of your daily practice with ongoing improvement over your lifetime. These fundamentals should be drilled to the degree that you can perform them consistently and their execution is handled subconsciously (Unconscious Competence… more on this later). You want your conscious mind to be free to handle the rapidly evolving situation.
This has been a brief overview of how the categories I use relate to the development of your training plan. I hope it is helpful.
1 The original blog post is no longer online. I found this repost on the blog The Cornered Cat which is also worth a look
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