Your Critical Combat Training Decision

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Combat Training Principles – Secrets For Staying Alive When ‘Rules’ Don’t Apply

“You do things the way you train.” It’s Your Critical Decision!

You need to know something about principles — about the ‘why’ — of what you’re doing, as well as the techniques. It’s training your mind along with your body. Without it, you’re doing what everyone else is doing — just learning techniques for specific situations. So before we even consider the principles of any good fighting system or martial art, you must first answer this question:

“What is my goal for this training — to enhance my athletic competition skills or to learn to effectively deal with potentially lethal physical attacks from one or more thugs hell-bent on harming me and/or someone I love?”

It truly amazes me how many people just stumble into various martial arts or combat sports never having once considered the above question. Yet your answer to that question makes all the difference in determining whether you really get what you want from training.

Here’s why.

If you answered “for competition” – then understand you’ll find numerous martial arts and combat sports that provide excellent instruction and challenging forms of competition. There you can SAFELY match your skill level against another competitor, within agreed upon RULES and under the supervision of a judge or referee.

The combat sport athlete has my greatest respect, and you can certainly learn some very effective lessons in competitive strategy and tactics from these sports and disciplines. I know many of you may also enjoy the sometimes-extensive physical training these arts require in order to excel in competition.

Unfortunately, if “sport fighting” is your thing … if it’s your answer to my first question, well, you won’t find Target Focused Training of much use. No hard feelings. Read a little more though to understand more of the reasons “why”.

Now, let’s return to the question.

If you answered that your goal for training IS to learn to effectively deal with real life or death threats, then Target Focused Training is the right place.

There’s one more group I must address. It’s those of you who answered the question, “I want to train for BOTH athletic competition AND life or death attacks.”

Why am I concerned?

It’s simply this … YOU CAN’T DO IT!
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That’s right. And the reason is very simple:

“You do things the way you train.”

Let me repeat that — “You do things the way you train.”
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If you train in a combat sport or martial art that has rules restricting you for reasons of safety during competition, then you’ll react to a violent criminal assault …

— Restricted By Those Very Same Rules!

But understand, those rules only apply to you. Not to your assailant.

He has NO restrictions.

That’s why you must to be extremely careful when physically training for self-protection.

You see, there’s a coding process that gets ‘installed’ when training — and it’s this process that ultimately determines your responses under stress.

Examples? There are many.

But one of the more disturbing involved a major police department’s firearms training program.

The range where this city’s police officers performed their firearms training was run by a rangemaster more concerned about keeping his range clean … than keeping his officers alive!

During practice with their revolvers, the officers were required to shoot all six rounds, then eject these spent cartridges into their hands and put them into their pockets.

This ‘RULE’ was enforced because the rangemaster didn’t want his pristine range littered with empty cartridges.

Problem was — in a REAL life or death gunfight, an officer must reload his or her weapon as fast as possible. And to do that with a revolver, you obviously just dump the empty cartridges on the ground while quickly reloading with your free hand.

But surely these highly trained police officers would not let their training impact them negatively in a real situation, right?

Unfortunately, it wasn’t until 2 officers were shot dead in a gunfight that the facts were revealed …

— “You do things the way you train.”

Both dead officers were found with empty cartridges in their hands, EXACTLY as they trained on the range, even though they faced a life or death situation where those extra seconds may have been the difference.

So return to my initial question, and make your decision: “What is your goal for training?”

Until next time,

Tim Larkin
Creator of Target-Focus™ Training
http://www.targetfocustraining.com