It is always interesting how life presents little lessons in the most unexpected way.  These small lessons can have huge impact however in larger applications!  Take the reaction of someone trained versus someone untrained to a violent encounter.  They can be very different reactions with life affecting consequences!

Yesterday, while going to a local pharmacy to pick up medications for my wife, one of these little lessons happened with my 11 year old daughter and myself.  We were walking to our vehicle when vehicles on either side of us simultaneously started to back out of their parking spaces with us between the two.  My untrained daughter froze.  I, on the other hand, almost ran over her trying to get out of the way and take her with me.  Two opposite reactions to the same dangerous stimuli.  It reminded me of what I have seen spending years doing combatives arts and working in Law Enforcement.

When encountered with violent situations, sometimes those new to the profession will freeze momentarily.  This is part of the OODA Loop where their brain is processing the situation and trying to Orient and get to the step of taking action.  We call this an O-O Loop where their brain ping-pongs between Observation and Orientation while seemingly taking forever to get to Decision and then Action.  Not everyone does this, however.  Some seem to spring into Action very fast.  I suspect their O-O Loop is just really small and thus extremely fast.

I have seen this freezing be very serious and pose risk for fellow officers.  We have seen people freeze for 20 or 30 seconds or more while a fight was taking place.  Sadly, the outcome is often having to encourage the individuals to seek employment elsewhere as the risk to themselves and others is too high.  This long of freeze without rendering help to a partner could easily lead to serious injury or death.

I have also seen this in training.  When doing firearms Simunitions training with marker rounds, we have seen people entering a room in a building search, encounter a threat, and freeze and stop in the doorway, processing the OODA Loop.  This has been catastrophic!  Not only does the one officer “die” in such circumstances, but the rest of the team is unable to clear the door and provide support.  This is why the “Point Man” on an entry team cannot be the “greenest” team member.  It is also best if that not be the most critical team member either as they are often “bullet magnets.”  No one wants to be the rookie but seniority does not always come with its privileges!

Movement is your friend.  Moving targets are harder to engage but it also does a lot more.  By forcing the brain to stay in Action mode, you limit the likelihood of the freezing.  Inaction leads quickly to freezing due to inertia.  We try to train people to keep moving when they encounter threats.  That is one reason we train shooting while moving so much.  If your firearms training is only ever done stationary, people will instinctively stop moving to engage threats.  You cannot do this!  You have train to where moving is reflexive and threats are hit while in motion.  The major exception to this rule is of course if you are behind cover or concealment.  In those cases, it may be best to stay put.  Out in the open, however, you should most often be moving.

Does this apply to Martial Arts?  Sure!  When we are attacked with a punch, kick, choke, grab, etc., we need to learn to move.  That can be our feet or hands or both.  The freeze gets us hit!  I generally prefer to see someone take a less than optimal response than to see them take no action at all and freeze.  We should never forget the word “Martial” in Martial Arts.  We need to study and apply the experience of real world fighters and operators to our Martial Arts training.

I had a retired real world military and security operator ask me an interesting question once.  He said the answer to the question reveals a lot about a person’s operational experience.  “You can learn that from one question?” I thought.  He was right.  The disparity between training and real world is a huge gap.  He posed the following scenario and then asked his simple question.  “If you are entering a room with five threats spread out within the room and your job is to kill everyone in the room, who do you shoot first?”  Now, this extends beyond a Law Enforcement rules of engagement but does provide an interesting military ROE.  My firearms training dictated engaging threats based upon their relative distance from me and ease of engagement.  That is how we do it in shooting competitions and are graded upon such.  He chuckled and said “Yeah, that is what they teach you on the range.  In the real world however, that could get you killed!”

So, what is the right answer?  We would love to hear how you would answer that question in the comments.  And yes, he did give me the right answer, which makes perfect sense.  Instead of giving the answer right away, we want to engage your brain; you will get more out of having to think about it than just getting a quick answer.  Maybe someone reading this will have the right answer.  It was obvious to me that he had “been there and done that.”  Let us know what you think…

OODA Loop is a concept created by USAF Colonel John Boyd. It is an acronym for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Action.

He created this primarily for helping fighter pilots get through the mental process for taking action more quickly. In the business world, “time is money” but in life-and-death situations, “time is death.”

If one can minimize the time it takes to take a correct action greatly increases one’s survival rate. Taking too much time or getting hung up in the Orientation Phase can kill you.

First, let’s remember that we have dealt with the Observation Phase of OODA by discussing the Levels of Awareness. Being more aware of your surrounding, gets you through that phase much faster.

As I said, most people get caught up in the Orientation Phase. This is where one must filter the information collected in the Observation Phase and process it. One’s ethics, morality, religious inclinations, and such have a tremendous impact on how long this phase takes. For example, if someone believes killing is always wrong, it will be extremely difficult to overcome this in a real-life situation.

Unfortunately, many people never consider how they feel about this until it is too late. Instructors should regularly help their students confront the question of whether they are prepared to injure or even kill another individual if the situation arises.

Mental imagery can be used to help one answer these questions and pre-program their minds to take action when necessary.

We have also looked at the Decision Phase with the study of Hick’s Law. As you may remember, fewer decisions leads to a faster response time.

The final step is the Action Phase. If one reaches this point, strikes and/or defensive actions are taken and then the process begins again. After fighting back, more Observation is needed to determine how the opponent reacted. This information must then lead to Orientation, more Decision, and likely more Action.

The possibility exists, however, for an individual to get “stuck” at some point in the loop. If fear is not controlled, it will escalate into a “Fear Loop” which can get stuck in a repeating cycle if one does not break out of it, but more on that later…

It is also possible, for someone to get to one phase such as Orientation and decide they do not have enough information and thus go back to more Observation. This can happen at any point. It may even happen just before taking Action, thus delaying Action until more Observation, Orientation, and Decision.

It should be real obvious by this point that we must learn to get through this process as quick and efficiently as possible to survive an attack. It is also interesting to note that an opponent goes through the same process. Wanna bet who typically gets through it faster?

There is a common principle that many Martial Artists are familiar with called Hick’s Law.

Hick’s Law is named after British psychologist William Edmund Hick. The HickHyman Law (for Ray Hyman), also called simply Hick’s Law, describes the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices he or she has to make. The Hick-Hyman Law assesses cognitive information capacity in choice reaction experiments. The amount of time taken to process a certain amount of bits in the Hick-Hyman Law is known as the rate of gain of information.

In the equation, ‘b’ is a constant which is determined empirically by fitting a line to measured data. Basically log2 means that you perform the equivalent of a binary search algorithm with each decision. Binary search is where each choice, cuts the remaining choices in half. The first choices are the most costly, but each choice still adds dramatically to reaction time.

To measure this, Hick used a set of 10 lamps that would illuminate at random and the test subject had to press the corresponding button. He then varied the number of buttons which could illuminate from 1-10. Measuring the response time for a pre-determined number of choices led to an increase in the time to react. From this research, he formulated his equation.

According to his research, the first choice adds a 58% penalty to your response time. This means that if your response time is 300ms, then the first choice could slow you down to about 474ms! That is dramatic and could mean the difference in success and failure! Thinking back to my previous experiment on response time, this could mean an additional foot or so to the non-reactionary distance!

Also take a look at Fitt’s Law, developed in 1954. This is based on Hick’s research, but takes into consideration adding movement and accuracy to the equation. In these calculations, the smaller the target, the more time it takes for cognitive processing and motor movement, thus response time. This has real application to the combatives practitioners as you can imagine.

There are those who dispute their research, but the principle holds true nonetheless. Additional decisions take time to process. And time is not on our side during an attack!

What can we gain from studying this kind of research? A lot I think. We know that to be successful in combat, we have to limit our choices as much as possible since decisions equal more time and distance. How do we do we limit choices? There are a few ways and we will talk about that in future training reports.

Until then, remember that Hick’s Law is not just for Rednecks!

Are you familiar with the principle originated by Jeff Cooper called Levels of Awareness?

Depending on who you ask there are a number of levels. The idea is that a person’s awareness of their surroundings directly affects your response time. Those with a lower level of awareness will take longer to respond to a threat than those who are anticipating or even expecting one.

The basic levels are white, yellow, orange, red, and black. Some have removed orange and added gray between red and black, but the idea is the same. Regardless of what you name the levels, the concept is what is important. As you go through the scale, the level of awareness increases.

In Condition White, an individual is practically oblivious to the possibility of an attack. If someone were to attack, they would be completely and utterly caught off guard. They would also likely experience denial that an attack was even happening! These people are targets for predators!

In Condition Yellow, people believe that it may be possible to be attacked but aren’t expecting it. These people will take a casual glance in the back seat before getting in their car or look behind the bushes or around the corner every once in a while, but don’t expect to find anyone there. If they did, they would be shocked but would react a little faster than the previous individuals.

Condition Orange is a heightened state where one thinks that an attack is more than a possibility, maybe even likely. Someone in this state, will take more than a casual look. Many consider this paranoid, but it is not necessarily. They make difficult targets because it is so hard for a predator to sneak up on them!

In Condition Red, attack is imminent. Think of an officer on a tactical team about to enter a room with an anticipated hostile. Stress is high and heart rate is likely escalating. In order to keep things from going off the chart with their adrenal system, they will likely need to control their respiration, use visualization, and other stress inoculation techniques.

The highest level is typically called Condition Black. This is when there is no denying that you are in danger and the threat is present and the fight is on!

Realizing that there are levels of awareness is the beginning of not walking around oblivious to potential danger. The more aware you are, the less likely you are to be a victim.

Ever notice people around you with headphones? Reading their phones? Reading magazines or newspapers? To a predator, these people are prey. They are without a doubt in Condition White!

So, go out and walk around the mall, down the street, or anywhere for that matter, and notice what level of awareness those around you seem to be in. Then ask yourself if you were a predator, who you would likely choose as prey. I bet you will find they are those in Condition White!

During our research, we have discovered dozens of Body Alarm Responses. Since it is beyond the scope of these reports to examine them all, we will jump to the topic of controlling them and using them to our advantage.

If our techniques are based primarily on Gross Motor Movement, then we assume that a heart rate between 115 and 145 may actually help us. The initial adrenaline and noradrenaline dump into the bloodstream will give us energy to fight. If the heart rates rises above that, then we run the risk of most all of our techniques becoming inaccessible for us.

So, the real question becomes how do we manage our heart rate? Well there are only a few methods to do this:

• Lower stress levels
• Engage the mind
• Proper breathing

Let’s look first at lowering sress levels. At its most basic level, this is calming ourselves down. If we look at the situation from a practical standpoint and realize that we are trained for violence, then this may help alleviate fear. Remembering successful training encounters for this situation will go a long way in instilling confidence and thus lowering stress levels.

Engaging the mind in active planning of defense and/or escape will free it from the Fear Loop that dominates many people under stress. This is primarily a snowball effect where fear begets more fear until it is out of control. Planning kicks you out of this endless loop and avoids the dangerous spiral it produces.

The final method is proper breathing. Pregnant women during childbirth have used the Lamaze method of breathing for many years to lower anxiety levels. Qigong practitioners use breathing to promote health. Karateka often use sanchin breathing to build energy. It seems everyone focuses on some sort of breathing techniques. The question is whether this helps calm one down in real encounters and the answer is an emphatic “Yes!”

Many in the military arena refer to this as tactical breathing. It is a simple process where each step of the breathing process lasts for a four count. Here are the steps:

• Breath in through the nose for a four count.
• Hold your breath for a four count.
• Exhale through the mouth for a four count.
• Hold your breath for another four count.
• And, repeat at least two or three times.

It is that simple!

Law Enforcement and Military have been using this for years with much success. Martial Artists and even pregnant ladies have had the answers as well! Slowing your respiration rate has a direct effect on heart rate.

That is all there is to it!

Now, get started learning to breathe and go practice!

Body Alarm Response (B.A.R.), or as some like to call it, Adrenal Stress Response, is a reality of most violent encounters. Fortunately, it can can make you stronger, decrease your cognitive processing time, protect you from bleeding too rapidly from cuts and other trauma. Unfortunately, it can also make you do the exact opposite of all of those things if not kept in check!

There are a host of physical, psychological, and perceptual distortions that can occur that you need to be prepared for. While it is beyond the scope of these reports to go into extensive detail. We do want to explore some of the most obvious ones.

Let’s start by looking at how heart rate impacts performance under stress.

As heart rate rises, it will (at first at least) improve some skills. These are primarily gross motor movements. Once the heart rate reaches about 115, you will notice that the adrenaline and noradrenaline dump into the bloodstream can improve your strength and gross motor flailing strikes. Sadly, those with little training seem to get better while those who are more “trained” tend to perform worse. How? Well, those with higher levels of training will often use more fine motor movements. How do these hold up to stress? Not well.

As heart rate increases, fine motor skills deteriorate rather rapidly. This means that if you intend to use them at all, it had better be sooner rather than later! Once you feel the adrenaline hit, it is basically too late!
In case you are wondering, let’s define some basic types of motion. There are three basic types for this discussion:

• Fine Motor – This is any movement involving the fingers and/or toes. Think small joints.
• Gross Motor – These are movements that involve the whole arm or leg. Think large limbs.
• Complex Motor – These are movements where arms or legs are doing entirely different things at the same time. Think simultaneous block and strike with arms moving in different directions doing different actions.

By the time heart rate reaches around 145, complex motor skills are becoming inceasingly difficult to perform!

At a heart rate of 175, things rapidly deteriorate in the cognitive processing realm and defending becomes increasingly difficult! And remember that heart rates of 220 in a real life-and-death struggle are not unheard of!

Of course, you have to remember that stress is a perception. Not everyone perceives stress in the same manner. What would scare one person speechless, hardly affects another. It is all based on how you perceive your level of danger and your ability to handle it.

Let’s look at the case of an individual who has extensive experience dealing with gang members, killers, and such, in prison working as a guard. Seeing these aggressive people everyday and having to deal with them would elicit less stress from them than the average person on the street. Imagine a rookie’s first time dealing with this and then imagine going back and seeing the same rookie years later. Would you expect his/her stress resposne to be lower? I would.

Perhaps you have heard about the research where students were exposed to disturbing images during a college course and their heart rate and blood pressure was monitored. In the beginning, everyone’s levels spiked! But, by the end of the course, some students showed almost no response at all to the same stimulus after being subjected to it every class! This is amazing!

So, the basic take-away from this is that the more realistic our training, the less “aroused” we will likely become to violence. Ask yourself, “Am I training so in role-playing scenarios that mimic real life aggression? Or, am I doing static practice with a freindly, smiling partner?” I think you know which will better prepare you for real life!

While you are at it, ask yourself “Do my techniques rely upon Fine Motor Skills, Complex Motor Skills, or Gross Motor Skills?” If you do an honest inventory, you may be surprised!

The first steps in CombatiXâ„¢ training is to trim the proverbial “fat” from what you do. Please understand I am not suggesting you drop your traditional Martial Arts training. Far from it. Just understand that there is a time and place for everything. If you are in a controlling situation where stress is low and you get to move first, the deteriments of stress are not necessarily yet debilitating. If, however, you find yourself in the middle of a struggle and your heart rate is spiking rapidly, it may be best to rethink what you have previously been taught.

It is all a matter of understanding how and when to apply what you know! Again, as Grandmaster Moneymaker says, “Knowledge is not power. Application of knowledge is power!”

For a detailed listing of the effects on your body, check out our poster on the topic.

The Eyes and Ears

The next stress response we will consider is what happens to the eyes and ears during stress.

In the Bubishi, the old Okinawan text that was handed down from master to his most prized student, there is a seciton known as the Kempo Gokui. These are principles of combat.

One is roughly translated as “the eye must see all sides.” Another translates as “the ear must listen in all directions.” Practitioners of Isshin-ryu Karate may recognize this is the Isshinryu Code. Look at the Bubishi and you will see where founder Tatsuo Shimabuku got it.

How do we understand these principles? Well, it is simple. It seems early Martial Arts masters understood
that it was important to remind the student to try to keep their eyes focused and alert and their ears hearing sounds from all directions. Sounds simple, but in reality it is very hard!

Under stress, one fixates on the source of stress. The one individual who is initiating the stress will receive the focus of the eyes and ears. Changes in the shape of the eye structure under stress along with this target fixation, will lead to a condition known as tunnel vision.

Tunnel Vision is like looking through the cardboard roll that is at the center of a roll of paper towels. All you see is a small area. I have personally experienced this one, along with most all of the B.A.R. effects in my lifetime. I can tell you that it is very real!

A student of mine was held at gunpoint once by a robber and he swears he saw the details of the bullet while looking down the barrel of the handgun! That is tunnel vision.

The problem is that in under stress, the brain is receiving so many signals from the environment that it simply cannot process them all at once. It is sensory overload! So, the brain has to ignore some of these signals. People and objects around the threat are ignored so that the brain can gather as much information as it can on what it believes to be the real threat. The problem is that this other stimuli is often equally important.
In these scenarios, it is not uncommon to have individuals miss the friends of the person they are fixating on, stepping up to his/her aid in the situation. Afterwards, they will state they never saw anyone else. And they are right!

In like manner, the ears will exclude sounds that are not coming directly from the perceived threat. This means that others shouting at them nearby and giving them challenges or orders will often go unheard provoking more hostility. And the steps of these aggressors will never be heard, nor will their words! This is called auditory exclusion.

Now imagine a scenario where a Law Enforcement officer is giving challenges to you in a heated situation, and your imagination will lead you to some very bad scenarios where they think you are being defiant or unresponsive. Not good!

As if all of this is not bad enough, near vision is also often very difficult as eyes adjust to fixate on perceived threats some distance off. If you are using a firearm, imagine how difficult sighting your weapon becomes in these circumstances!

Perhaps the author of these words in the Bubishi was light years ahead of his time as we remember that “the eye must see all sides and the ear must listen in all directions.”

I have talked previously about the Tueller Drill for firearm training. This time, we will be talking about my corollary to this drill that measures response time to an unarmed opponent striking.

For my experiment, I set up a scenario where I defined a successful response as stepping forward, making a block, and then a palm strike as a “successful” response to the attack. One might argue that this could be improved by stepping, blocking, and striking at the same time, but remember the effects of B.A.R.? This is not very likely to happen as this is a complex motor movement and those deteriorate rapidly at heart rates of around 145 BPM! So, I stand by my original assumption of breaking these into separate movements.

We measured the average response time of our defender doing these movements. More on that in a minute.
Now, we setup a target with distances in increments of six inches. We went from one foot from the target to six feet. Then, we had people wait for a stimulus (a beep) and then strike from the various distances. Response Times were charted. These numbers would be used for a hypothetical attacker.

“But wait,” you say! Response Time? Attackers are action only! And action beats reaction. Right?!??!? Well sort of!

To get Motor Time for our attacker, we subtracted their Reaction Time from their Response Time (remember the equation?). This was pure action – no reaction.

Finally, we just needed to graph the results and look at where the defender’s defensive response (react, step, block, and strike) equalled the attacker’s action time of simply stepping in and striking. Sound reasonable? This would be the time where the defender first has a chance of defending themself. At a lesser distance, the opponent’s strike would land on the defender before they had time to execute the response.

Would you like to know what that distance is? It is more than you think! Most early Martial Arts were called either “One Meter” or “Three Meter” systems. That means that the opponent was assumed to be either one meter or three away from you as the defender. As Martial Artists became more progressive in their thinking most abandoned the idea of a 3-meter system because it was too far. Sadly, this lead to a lot of bad teaching!

While it seems unreal, I found that most students needed around 4 and one-half feet to react! That is more than 1-meter but within the confines of a 3-meter system. When you understand that B.A.R. will slow you down even more, the 3-meter option sounds more likely.

Think you are faster, setup your own experiment. You may get a little better if you “pre-program” your response, perform complex movements combining all steps at once, anticipating the attack, and whatever else you can think of to try to beat the system. But, remember the goal is to try to mimic real life as closely as you can.

So, how does this help you? Knowing what your limit is on distance in order to get an effective response off in time, is just the first step; but a major one it is! You still need striking skills; anatomical targeting; and more. Those will come with the training. Hang with me.

Anything less that the 4 and 1/2 feet is what we call Non-Reactionary distance. Knowing it can save your life because you know to never let anyone get closer than this!

So, you must keep an opponent at least 4 and 1/2 feet from you no matter what! When someone invades that space, you have no choice but to open distance with them, verbally de-escalate the action, or take defensive action. There are really no other options. If you cannot calm things down or get away, striking may well be your only option. That is the tough reality. Only you can decide whether the situation warrants a physical response, and if so, at what level of force.

Now that you have an idea of what Non-Reactionary distance looks like, take another look at your training. How far do you stand from your partner when you practice? Is it within the non-reactionary distance? I bet in many cases it is. So to quote Dirty Harry, “you gotta ask yourself…Do I feel lucky?” When my life, or the life of my precious family, is on the line, I don’t want to gamble. I don’t want to take chances. I want to know how to survive.