"Human Demolition" - by Chris Ranck-Buhr
Here is a copy of an email I received yesterday and I wanted to share it because it paints a crystal clear picture. My unarmed/armed combatives training follows right along the same line.
He has a great way of articulating things....Way better than I can, thats for sure.
HUMAN DEMOLITION
To win in violence you must break things inside the man.
While the truth about violence is simple enough, the process to get that result becomes quickly complicated when you can't see clear to the solution for all of the perceived problems—issues relating to the social and antisocial aspects we drag with us into the maelstrom. Competition and fighting require training, technique and a plan to find a way through.
The untrained winners in violence know you don't need any of those things. They do just fine without them. They have nothing but intent to get that result—call it hurting people, injury, or breaking things—disability by any other name is just as crippling.
Take the broken ankle. Not the "my foot hurt for a week and sure enough after the x-ray my doctor said I had a fracture," broken ankle but the "rolling around on the ground screaming with the foot pointing in a horribly wrong direction" broken ankle. Regardless of how it happened—by accident, running and landing on it all wrong, getting dog-piled in good-natured sport, or having someone want it, take it and break it—you cannot improve upon that result.
It's broken, he's crippled, and no amount of wishful-thinking or mental toughness is going to make it work again without medical intervention and time to heal. Neither of which are happening in the next three to five seconds. That makes him yours.
As a sane, socialized person, it's easy to lose track of this simplicity as you create problems for yourself in training, technique and planning. To get a functional baseline, you must simplify. Two ways you can do this are by using a checklist to drive straight to, and through, that goal and by clarifying the simplest possible picture of what that goal is.
The Checklist
As I've said before, the person with the shortest to-do list in violence will tend to prevail. If you show up with a list that says:
1. Assess the situation
2. Determine threat level
3. Create distance
4. Assume ready position
5. Watch for offensive movements
6. Prepare to counter
7. ...
And his list just says:
1. KILL
You can see how much trouble you're going to be in when you both start working down your respective lists. You want to take an eraser to any list more complicated than the untrained winner's and write in that goal of breaking something important inside the man. Of course, his list is so simple it wraps all the way back around to confusing. "KILL" is a clear imperative with a yawning gap between you and the result. Even pencilling in "BREAK SOMETHING" is little better help.
What you need is to find the simplest process to get that goal, the minimum process by which you can achieve a nonfunctional state; in essence, you need the few small, implied steps inside that big #1 above:
1. Find a target
2. Smash it
3. Check for success
4. Loop back to #1
Find a target
We get asked all the time, "What's the best target? Is it the eyes, the throat, the groin?" The smart-alecky answer is, "The one you just smashed." A more helpful answer is, "The one you can wreck." That's not always going to be one of the Big Three, but it will be the one right in front of you, the one you can get to, the one you can break. And that's a far more useful answer—and approach—than setting yourself up for failure by over-reliance on specific targets that may or may not be there for you. You may plan on the eyes, you may want the eyes, but if you can't reach them you're screwed. If you planned on a more general approach, "Break the one you can get to," then you're covered no matter the situation or position. There will always be some part of his body available to you for breaking—smash it and the rest resolves itself.
Smash it
This is best thought of as throw yourself through it. Take everything you've got and throw it through that one square inch to break it. Ideally, you'll use a single square inch of yourself—the two large knuckles of your fist, a coin-sized chunk of your ulna bone on the pinky-side of your forearm, the point of the your elbow, knee or heel of your boot—braced properly to transfer the most kinetic energy possible into and through that target to wreck it.
And if that sounds like a whole lot of head-scratching, just smash it the way you'd break any inanimate object anytime, anywhere, else. Do it like you'd break a stick on the curb, or smash a can, or otherwise wreck something that wasn't a person.
The problem here is that when we think of fighting or competing with another person, simple "monkey slapping" becomes sufficient—the shoving, cuffing and throwing of haphazard punches you see when people fight. This is fine to convince another primate you're seriously angry and make them capitulate or run them off your territory, but it is typically insufficient to break important things inside his body. In fact, many of those movements would be insufficient to break inanimate objects.
So smash it like you know how to break things. As hard as you can, all the way through, because you don't want it to work anymore. That's as complicated as it gets.
Check for success
Look for that reflex reaction—does he move in response to the injury? If he does, good job, you broke it. If not, it's time to break something. This isn't hard to figure out. Either everything will change dramatically in your favor, or it won't. The beautiful thing is that no matter the outcome, you go right back to finding that next target and smashing it.
If you recognized success, then it's just piling it on and taking him to nonfunctional. Break the next thing. And the next. And so on. If not, you break the next thing and keep looping the list until you get the results you want.
The Simplest Conception of the Goal
Smash it, break it, wreck it—however you want to think about it, you need to break important things inside the man so they don't work anymore. His eyes, his throat, his knees, whatever. This is the "secret" that makes the untrained winners in violence seem so powerful. They don't show up to compete, or fight—they just wade in to wreck things. They keep going until they recognize success, and then they pile it on.
What is it you're really doing? Are you learning self-defense, or how to fight, or hand-to-hand combat? Ask the same question of a bullet, and the answer becomes clear. What does a bullet do? It breaks things inside of people. A bullet is defined by it's result. Yes, there is a process to learning how to use a firearm, learning to shoot with accuracy, and that is analogous to our physical training to learn how to approximate that work with your bare hands from zero to three feet. But that process is all for a single purpose—to destroy human tissue. The more critical the function, the better the result.
There are a lot of complicated methods and processes to look at firearms training, but in the end the truth is you pull the trigger to get the result. You would never take seriously the fantasy concepts of "curving the bullet" or pistol-fencing, and yet that kind of complication is somehow tolerated when training to use fists and boots.
Really, what you're learning is where and how the human body is most likely to break, how to make it most likely it will break, and the advantages that broken piece grants you.
Human demolition.
Smashing things.
That's as complicated as you need to make it. Everything beyond that is just about increasing your options.
The goal is a single piece of wrecked anatomy—and there is no way to improve upon that result. We can only improve the process... but it's pointless to talk process until you have that result down cold. You have to know what it means, what it will get you, and that once you get beyond the distractions of competition or fighting, breaking the human body is like breaking anything else.
Last edited by BLACK LION; 01-16-10 at 12:46.
"Everyone has been given a gift in life. Some people have a gift for science and some have a flair for art. And warriors have been given the gift of aggression. They would no more misuse this gift than a doctor would misuse his healing arts, but they yearn for the opportunity to use their gift to help others. These people, the ones who have been blessed with the gift of aggression and a love for others, are our sheepdogs. These are our warrior"
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