Risk is required for learning. It is unavoidable. When practicing anything new, you must attempt to perform a movement before you have any experience with it. You repeatedly take the risk of making mistakes as you practice a technique. When you test a combination, a takedown or a disarming technique in sparring, you risk failing. Failing could mean you get hit, you lose a match or you just feel like an idiot when you mess up in front of everyone. The truth is, taking risks and learning through failure is the only path to mastering your skills. Risk, Failure and Learning You must focus on taking risk and making mistakes in training in order to learn and grow. If you do not attempt anything that challenges you, then you will miss the chance to expand your skills beyond your current leve...

How to Get the Most out of your Self Defense Training (in a short period of time) Don’t mess around.  Your life depends on it.   Time is precious because we have so little of it.  Obligations of work, family and personal life all leave little time for training, but training is important.  Without it, your chances of prevailing in a violent attack are greatly diminished.  In addition to pushing your training up the priority list, you have to train efficiently.  It’s all about managing the time you have to train in order to get the most out of it.   After teaching for more than 20 years, I have seen that there are a few simple things students do to learn faster.  If you follow the advice below, you will avoid wasting your valuable time while also ...

Are you training the transition?  If not, the expression "change or die" may have a more real and immediate meaning to you. What I mean by transition, is the transition from one technique or tactic to another. Though a curriculum may contain many great techniques, it may not include a training approach that specifically prepares the student to switch to another technique when one fails or is inaccessible because of position, injury or environmental conditions. When I started teaching law enforcement personnel in the mid 90's with Erwin Ballarta, I saw a huge disconnect between empty hands and firearms training.  This was actually true in law enforcement as well as in the firearms community of private citizens.  Though there has been some improvement over the years, it is sti...