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TRAINING
30 Questions to Ask Yourself: You Will Fight the Way You Train
By Loren W. Christensen and Lt. Col. Dave Grossman
You will fight the way you train. I’ve been around the martial arts long enough to remember when no one said this now often-repeated phrase. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, most martial artist never thought about it or, if they did, they just assumed they could alter their training to fit a real situation. Or worse, they assumed their bad training habits and methods would win the day.
While driving home after our first karate class in the summer of 1965, my buddy and I were confronted by a road rager, long before there was even the term “road rage.” He pulled up along side us and threw a beer bottle at our car, missing the windshield by inches. Psyched from our introductory class, we just laughed at the bearded giant, convinced that what we had just learned would be more than enough to whip this guy into confetti. Fortunately, oh so fortunately for our dumb hides, the guy cackled madly out his window, then turned right at the light.
Over confidence is a terrible thing, and sadly, there are far too many martial artists walking around convinced that their tournament training or their aerobics kickboxing class is going to save them.
The problem isn’t an isolated one in the martial arts. It’s also a problem in police work and in the military. Fortunately, cops and soldiers are more aware of it now than ever and the problem continues to be addressed and fixed in their training. Also fortunately, more and more martial artists understand the concept, though, in my opinion, they are still behind cops and soldiers.
Lt. Col Dave Grossman and I wrote about this phenomenon in our book On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflicts in War and Peace. Here is an excerpt titled:
Whatever is drilled in during training comes out the other end in combat - no more, no less
Whatever you would make habitual, practise it; and if you would not make a thing habitual, do not practise it, but habituate yourself to something else.
Epictetus (1st century A.D.)
How the Semblances of Things are to be Combated
In January 2003, Col. Grossman went to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, to train the 2d Marine Division. He filled up the base theater twice, each time giving a four-hour block of instruction to Marines about to deploy to Iraq. “As usual,” Col. Grossman says, “I taught them, and they taught me. One marine told me, ‘Colonel, my old Gunny taught me that in combat you do not rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training.’”
We can teach warriors to perform a specific action required for survival without conscious thought but, if we are not careful, we can also teach them to do the wrong thing. Some trainers call these “bad muscle memory” or “training scars.” They are “scar tissue” in the midbrain that is counterproductive to survival.
One example of this can be observed in the way police officers conducted range training with revolvers for almost a century. Because they wanted to avoid having to pick up all the spent brass afterwards, the officers would fire six shots, stop, dump their empty brass from their revolvers into their hands, place the brass in their pockets, reload, and then continue shooting. Everyone assumed that officers would never do that in a real gunfight. Can you imagine this in a real situation? “Kings X! Time out! Stop shooting so I can save my brass.” Well, it happened. After the smoke had settled in many real gunfights, officers were shocked to discover empty brass in their pockets with no memory of how it got there. On several occasions, dead cops were found with brass in their hands, dying in the middle of an administrative procedure that had been drilled into them.
Stories like this would be hard to believe if you heard them in a bar. It is “passing strange,” indeed, but after hearing about this repeatedly in personal interviews and seeing it in scholarly research we know that it is actually happening. In biomechanics and kinesiology this is called the Law of Specificity. In other words, you cannot get stronger legs by doing push-ups; you must train your specific leg muscles to get stronger legs.
One police officer gave another example of learning to do the wrong thing. He took it upon himself to practice disarming an attacker. At every opportunity, he would have his wife, a friend or a partner hold a pistol on him so he could practice snatching it away. He would snatch the gun, hand it back and repeat several more times. One day he and his partner responded to an unwanted man in a convenience store. He went down one isle, while his partner went down another. At the end of the first aisle, he was taken by surprise when the suspect stepped around the corner and pointed a revolver at him. In the blink of an eye, the officer snatched the gun away, shocking the gunman with his speed and finesse. But no doubt this criminal was surprised and confused even more when the officer handed the gun right back to him, just as he had practiced hundreds of times before. Fortunately for this officer, his partner came around the corner and shot the subject.
Disarm practice
When you practice gun, knife, club, and arnis stick disarms, do you hand the weapon back to you partner each time?
After reading this chapter you might want to reevaluate whether that is a good way to train.
Whatever is drilled in during training comes out the other end in combat. In one West Coast city, officers training in defensive tactics used to practice an exercise in such a manner that it could have eventually been disastrous in a real life-and-death situation. The trainee playing the arresting officer would simulate a gun by pointing his finger at the trainee playing the suspect, and give him verbal commands to turn around, place his hands on top of his head, and so on. This came to a screeching halt when officers began reporting to the training unit that they had pointed with their fingers in real arrest situations. They must have pantomimed their firearms with convincing authority because every suspect had obeyed their commands. Not wanting to push their luck, the training unit immediately ceased having officers simulate weapons with their fingers and ordered red-handled dummy guns to be used in training.
Consider a shooting exercise introduced by the FBI and taught in police agencies for years. Officers were drilled on the firing range to draw, fire two shots, and then reholster. While it was considered good training, it was subsequently discovered in real shootings that officers were firing two shots and reholstering - even when the bad guy was still standing and presenting a deadly threat! Not surprisingly, this caused not just a few officers to panic and, in at least one case, it is believed to have resulted in an officer’s death.
Today, in most police agencies, officers are taught to draw, fire, scan, and assess. Ideally, the warrior should train to shoot until the deadly threat goes away, so it is best to fire at targets that fall after they have been hit with a variable number of shots. Today, there are pneumatically controlled steel targets on which photo realistic images are attached. The shooter might fire two rounds and the target falls, or the exercise can be designed so the target is supposedly wearing body armor and remains standing even after it is shot multiple times. To knock it down, the shooter must hit it in the head. Even better, in paintball or paint bullet training, the role players are instructed not to fall until they have been hit a specific number of times.
You do not rise to the occasion in combat; you sink
