Martial Logic Episode 9: The Science of Countering the Bystander Effect

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Reference videos

Martial Logic Episode 8: The Basics of Verbal De-Escalation

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Martial Logic Episode 7: Travel Tips & Etiquette for Safety & Growth

Martial Logic Episode 6: Awareness & Avoidance Strategies

Part 1

Part 2

Martial Logic Episode 5: The Societal Change Delusion

Part 1

Part 2

Martial Logic Episode 4: Crawling Out of the Abyss

Martial Logic Episode 3:How to Stop a Time Bomb

Martial Logic Episode 2:The Argument & Self Defense Weapons

Martial Logic Episode 1: The Jigsaw Juxtaposition

Introduction to Martial Logic

The Jigsaw Juxtaposition

        
 The following post is an excerpt from the upcoming book Martial Logic by Paul Green




     You know I tend to read alot and do alot of research when I'm not teaching. I have alot of friends in the defense industry and sometimes I like to bounce ideas around with the ones that I respect. Often I'll look at a thread on facebook or some forum just to see what people are talking about and more often than not lately it seems to be things like which is better striking or grappling. At other times it's some dumb ass that thinks only striking works or vice versa with grappling and that the other camp is full of crap. The problem is in some instances both are right and wrong at the same time. It seems to me that it isn't what they are saying if it's in the proper context it's that they are not clarifying what they mean to the other people. This usually results in a big long thread with people arguing when they are basically saying the same thing but none of them have the ability to communicate what they mean to each other. The point of this section is to clarify where some of these tactics fit best and where they don't and compare the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle these legends in their own minds have created in regards to grappling vs. striking.
      Context is very important and there is no one catch all situation. I want to cover about three different situations where these things come into play based upon what the individual instructors are trying to focus on, or rather the group they are trying to teach. As far as which is better it really depends on what the hell you are doing. A mugging type situation is going to be inherently different from two guys at a party getting pissed off about something and decide to take it to the back yard. It's even more different when you’re in a professional setting such as police or security of some kind. These things affect what tactics make sense and what tactics don't fit. Let's take a look at each of the three.

The Self Defense Situation

       Now first I want to explain what I mean by a self defense situation. I mean they are all self defense situations but what I am referring to here is a robbery type thing or some type of attack where your best course of action is to flee for your safety.  In situations like this grappling can be kind of pointless. Let me set this up. A girl is at a party and has to use the bathroom upstairs. Everyone else is in the living room downstairs and in the kitchen. One of her guy friends is drunk and has a crush on her and has decided to make his move. He stops her in the hall as she tries to exit the bathroom and starts flirting heavily. She say he's drunk and she isn't interested right now or maybe she doesn't see him that way and just wants to be friends. Well he doesn't like that and there is no one around so he decides he's going to take what he wants. He just got turned down and his ego can't handle it so he tries to shove her back into the bathroom. Does she drop and pull guard and go for a wicked bad ass helicopter sweep? No, that wouldn’t be a wise move for her to do. She screams for help as loud as she can and claws the hell out of his face. Maybe she catches an eye and knees a groin and runs back downstairs for help and safety. You’re trying to get out of there why would you want to tie up with someone. The best course of action is getting out of there as quickly as possible. This is where incapacitating blows would come in such as eye gouges, groin attacks, throat punches, ear slaps, etc. The only way you may need to use grappling here is if you end up on your back and need to use leverage to get them off of you. Even then the right shot could get you out of there. This is also the situation where they are the most likely to have a weapon of some kind. If a knife threat is not already taking place it could be shortly so time is of the essence. A little awareness and avoidance training can go a long way in this situation as well but we will be covering that more in depth in another section of this book. This could also be something that could happen on the job if you’re a supervisor and you have a disgruntled employee were a verbal de-escalation technique may serve you better. Once again we will cover that in a different section as well. One of the ways I do see a grappling tactic being used here is if there is some type of edged weapon involved and you are able to capture the weapon bearing limb and control it while you perform some blunt force trauma with the other hand. If you’re talking about a situation where striking is better then, this is it. This is where it shines. In most instances here grappling is pointless when all you want to do is flee.

Get Your Scrap On

       This is about as common as water in the ocean. Big Merle and Cletus are at a party. They both get to drinking and having a good time and Cletus notices Big Merle talking to some girl he wanted to talk to. He doesn't like that at all and he suddenly thinks he should whoop Big Merle's ass for doing such a thing. Well Big Merle doesn't quite think Cletus can whoop his ass so they decide to figure it out outside past the tire swing where it's safe away from the pickup trucks (wouldn't want to ding those...I mean hell it's a damn truck!). So a crowd gathers around to see who can whoop whose ass. Both have friends there watching to make sure it's a "fair fight." Though sometimes you will, you’re less likely to see a weapon brought out in this situation. There are too many witnesses and too many people to scream foul. This isn't the old west anymore. I hear it said all the time," There are no rules in street fighting." My reply to that is this.......bullshit! I understand there is no referee (though sometimes there actually is a referee...seriously). However, even outside the fact that all states have some form of judicious use of force law that you need to memorize, in most situations like this there tends to be some form of social conduct involved. You see in this situation alot of times the fallout from the fight can be more dangerous than the fight itself. This is one of the ways that mma and street fighting are different. Both of these guys have friends there. If one guy starts "fighting dirty," meaning the use of the aforementioned eye gouges, groin attacks, etc. He becomes a social pariah. Rules or not if Cletus pulls that crap Merle's friends are gonna think he's a punk. Maybe they decide to jump in the fight now and beat Cletus down, then his friends jump in and you have a huge battle royal type deal. I've seen this happen at house parties. I've seen this happen in clubs. I've even seen it happen at sporting events. It's common when alcohol gets mixed with stupidity. There doesn't even have to be a girl involved it could just be the good old fashioned, “He was looking at me sideways." It could be my personal favorite," Hey mother fucker why you eye fucking me?" Someone could have just farted in the other person's general direction. Who the hell knows with some people? It could be a million different things that started it. My point here is depending on how this is handled it may not be over when the fight is over. If one side feels wronged then maybe the next week they are all out somewhere else and another fight starts based on the previous fight. Maybe this time someone gets stabbed or shot because egos are bruised. It sounds crazy but this is what happens every week somewhere in the United States and I bet it's happening all the time in other countries as well. Sure some punches will be exchanged but if Merle gets Cletus on the ground and controls him with something and talks him down and isn't hitting him or trash talking maybe some of Cletus's friends tell Cletus enough is enough and they break it up and go have a beer. I've seen this scenario play out alot as well. Hell I've done it! Do you see how different this situation is than the one before it? In this situation using grappling instead of trying to maim the guy got you alot further and could potentially stop alot of fallout from ever taking place. I can't tell you how many times when I was younger I saw guys beating the crap out of each other then an hour later they are doing shots together at the bar, mainly because one knew when to knock it off. In these situations you aren't trying to flee. If all you know how to do is strike and the guy covers up and dumps you on your ass you could be eating knuckles. No one has to be a grappling expert to tackle someone everyone pretty much knows how to do it. Do you need to strike?Yes! Do you need to grapple? Yes! Personally in these situations I prefer grappling because I can use it to limit the other person's offense and I usually have an arm free to convince him to stop fighting.

The Professional 

      You’re a police officer and you've just given a field sobriety test to a guy that failed it badly. This wasn't at a checkpoint he was weaving on the interstate so you stop him and you’re alone on the side of the road. You go to handcuff the suspect to arrest him but he yanks his hands away and resists. This is his third DUI and he doesn't want to go to jail. He decides to knock your ass out and run. They rarely think about the dashboard camera at the time. So what does the officer do? He pokes the guy in the eye and runs like hell screaming for help down the interstate right? Of course not, that even sounds stupid! It sounds stupid because this isn't self defense as we've defined it. This is a completely different situation. This is your police, security, bouncer type stuff. It is a little different than the other two. In this scenario the person you’re fighting may be trying to flee as opposed to just standing there and fighting you. As you can guess grappling and restraints become more important in these situations. I've seen people recently claim that restraints don't work and I want to address that in this section. If restraints don't work then every bouncer who ever broke up a fight is hallucinating. I must be clinically insane because when I was bouncing for 10 years all those fights I broke up and held the people outside for the police were figments of my imagination. That and every suspect who ever tried to keep from getting handcuffed all got away and the streets are full of them running around. Well obviously none of that is true. If someone says restraints don't work the reply should be," no...YOUR restraints don't work.  Here's the thing with that. There are alot of really bad restraint programs out there. They tend to teach overly complicated fine motor techniques that would never work under stress if being applied by someone who doesn't have alot of experience. So what happens is you get martial arts types that come from striking based arts with poor grappling that take these shitty programs. They can't get the stuff to work so instead of looking further they just dismiss an incredibly important part of training and their students suffer for it and have incomplete training. Part of me thinks they never wanted it to work in the first place. There's a form of cognitive dissonance called, "Adaptive Performance Formation." The term itself was coined by Norwegian social and political theorist Jon Elster.  Basically what it is referring to is this:

Someone wants something

They can't attain it

They convince themselves it isn't worth having and criticize it

       There's an Aesops's Fable that illustrates this called," The Fox and the Grapes." In the story the fox sees some grapes he wants to eat but they are too high and he can't reach them. He can't figure out a way to get those grapes so he just tells himself they aren't worth eating by saying they probably aren't ripe or are too sour or something. Frankly that's all it is. Forget about fine motor and go for gross motor. On a side note I find that it's normally the restraints they teach for hospital employees that tend to be the worst.

      The simple fact is in this situation if you got someone that doesn't want to go to jail and they are barreling down on you so fast you can't get a punch off or you got dumped on your ass because you thought you could get to a weapon and were standing too close and misjudged the distance you better damn well know how to grapple and if you don't know how to restrain someone properly then you’re going to be on the side of that road fighting all night long.

     So in conclusion you can see that these situations are very different. Someone who only teaches self defense to the public is going to have a very different view than someone who only teaches police, and neither of them are going to have the same view as someone who just flat out teaches people how to fight. All of them have something to offer in the context of what they do but what they do is different. It is a different tool for a different job. As long as everyone understands that then it's fine. When people don't understand that then you have a problem. When you have a self defense instructor trying to talk about police tactics or a defensive tactics instructor trying to apply their tactics to self defense when the rules of engagement are different, you get jacked up stuff like a military firearms instructor telling civilians it's better to be judged by twelve than carried by six when the fact is that is only a valid statement when those are the only two choices (that's rarely the only two choices). It's just apples and oranges. Hopefully this clarified some things and when you see those arguments on the internet you can laugh because you know where all the pieces of the puzzle actually fit.

The Martial Intellectual

   You know some people may look at that title as a good thing. A martial intellectual. You know the truth is it can be a really good thing if it's done correctly. Unfortunately sometimes people get so into what they are doing they can lose the connection they need to benefit the very people they are trying to help. When you try to bring this to someone's attention it can be the most frustrating thing in the world and alot of times there is no nice way to go about it.
   For me a martial intellectual is something I don't want to be I'd prefer to be an artist. Famed writer Charles Bukowski once said, An intellectual is elitist by nature. They take things that are simple and make them hard to understand so they can only be enjoyed by other intellectuals. An artist however takes something hard to understand and makes it easy for everyone to attain." I'd much rather be a martial artist.
   Have you ever listened to someone give a lecture that obviously loves the sound of their own voice more than you? Have you ever worked with someone who takes 15 minutes to explain something you could've explained in 2 minutes? If so then you have a good idea of what I'm talking about here. Now imagine you just got a job as a cop fresh out of the academy and you don't really know anything and you walk into a class taught by one of these verbal masturbation aficionados.  You may know how to throw a punch when you walk in that door but you won't know how to wipe your ass when you leave. I wrote an article years ago about a similar situation where people that were pretty good fighters before learn how to fight badly by taking certain martial arts. This article isn't about quality of techniques in a given art this is about learning. I'll give you another example. I currently have a 4th Dan in Judo. When I was coming up through the lower ranks we had to learn the Gokyo no Waza. This is 5 different sets of throws you learn on the way to your 1st Dan belt. There is a throw in the first set called O Goshi. O Goshi is the main hip throw you always see done. Then later on there's Harai Goshi but they aren't in the same set. To train these throws separate leads to memorization not learning. The gokyo no waza though it has some great techniques sucks as a teaching model. First of all you have to learn the names of the throws. The problem is that judo throws don't have names what you are actually learning is a description of the throw...it's instructions. As an instructor your supposed to be giving those. So if your not traveling to non english speaking countries why do you need to know the descriptions in japanese? The functional answer is that you don't and you shouldn't have to learn them. It just sounds impressive for you to know them. Kind of dumb isn't it? I bet you would learn Harai Goshi alot easier if I said, " Hey sometimes when your doing that hip throw the person can slide off your hips and counter you so if you feel that swing your leg back and up and flip them over it. Makes alot more sense that way doesn't it? Oh but the martial intellectual can't handle that because they don't get to say japanese words and make you feel less intelligent than them for not knowing them. By the way I did learn all the techniques in japanese.
   So you see that stuff in traditional but oddly enough it's even worse in modern martial arts. Enter the reality based martial intellectual. These are the guys that read all the science books and know all the statistics. They know everything you can't tell them anything. First of all I want to say it's good to do that research I do it myself. That is definitely a good thing. It can help you maximize the efficiency of your programs tenfold. The problem is when they don't keep it in it's proper perspective and become an educated idiot. That means book smarts but no common sense. I use science and statistics to keep my programs current. However when I'm talking to others whether it be through an article or teaching a class in person I try to simplify my language. This is not to say that people are dumb by any means but this isn't there field it's mine. If I went to their job I probably wouldn't know shit either. I can have all the knowledge in the world but if I can't transmit it then it's useless. I have friends who have written books and I know they are brilliant people. When I read their books I have no idea what they are talking about. I can tell how smart they are when I read their work but it's all wasted because they can't communicate with the public. Whenever I teach police I usually give a 10 minute talk about the program and use some psychological terms but they are functional and the only reason I do it is to explain why what we do is different than what they may have seen in the past. I've read articles in the past where these guys get so into themselves they actually come up with new terms for things like saying doctrine instead of concept so they can correct people about it and expect them to know it. Frankly, that is irrelevant bullshit. It isn't helping anyone defend themselves to know it. It's nothing more than the martial intellectual verbally masturbating for themselves and they don't even know it. I almost called this article Your So Smart Your the Dumbest Mother Fucker I've Ever Met. Always use the terms people are the most familiar with not what makes you look the most intelligent. It's about helping them not you. Maybe verbal masturbation is too spot on I should say non physical self gratification so they will feel better about it.
   About a week or so ago I posted on a thread. Now I generally hate posting in groups and try not to join them because no one ever learns anything from them. It's just a bunch of chiefs with no indians trying to one up each other. It's a complete waste of time. I can't even remember the original post but it got around to whether or not there was a growing MMA style threat that police needed to account for in their defensive tactics. Now the fact is that is a real threat. Defensive tactics programs all over the country have had to account for it. 20 years ago you didn't see alot of groundfighting in police training now it's everywhere. Why? It's because of MMA. I had to work a defense for rear chokes and strangles into my program because I had several officers have incidents where they were on the ground cuffing someone and another person came from behind and yanked them off the assailant by using the so called rear naked choke. Now was this around before MMA? Of course is was it's been in the Judo syllabus for a hundred years. Was the attacker an MMA fighter? Probably not he probably just watched pay per views. Most of these attacks probably aren't by the actual fighters themselves usually wannabees. The students however know these as MMA attacks that weren't being done 20 years ago so if it is or if it isn't doesn't matter. It's how they know it and that's how we'll deal with it. Well there was a guy on that thread. Actually a brilliant guy and from what I can see has a good program as well. However he is a martial intellectual. His point of view was that MMA techniques used against officers are not on the rise. He had this whole breakdown of skilled, experienced, and some other thing. The fact that officers I teach see these attacks on a weekly basis didn't matter to him he was right regardless. Demanded proof as if he was some governing body of whatever. It seemed really odd to me and I became annoyed by it. If you push me I'm going to push you back so eventually I just left because talking to this robot was pointless. I had other friends there and didn't want to start a war plus I was starting to lose my cool over the idiocy of it all and wanted to keep things professional. The fact is it doesn't matter if the guy is skilled or experienced or anything else. It doesn't matter if he was in the octagon or just watched pay per views. If you don't account for that type of attack in your training you will be undone by it. It's becoming more common I get questions about it daily. The guy actually agreed with me at one point on certain types of training for it but he continued to hurl back handed insults to save face for some reason. My point is that whole thing was over irrelevant verbiage. It was pointless and stupid it was a martial intellectual at his worst. People know the term MMA they don't need a history lesson on the origin of each move. They don't need a complicated breakdown of three things when one will cover it. They don't need your bullshit they need your help. Answer these questions:

Does knowing this term make me a better fighter?

Does understanding certain verbiage help me defend myself better?

Is there a simpler way to say this than what I'm hearing?

If you answered no to the first two and yes to the last one then someone is wasting your time verbally flogging the dolphin on your dime. Martial arts have been around a long time. You can study book after book and more than likely all you are going to do is learn new terms for old terms because until you can learn some terms that are going to make people's knees grow on the back of their legs what you know isn't that big of a deal. If your a martial intellectual get over yourself your not that smart. People have been defending themselves for thousands of years without you. They have been doing it forever without your groundbreaking verbiage. The fact is correcting people and all that stuff just makes you look like an ass and outside your circle nobody cares what you think and they do just fine. Outside my circles no one cares what I think either and that's just fine with me. So guys if you run into one of these verbal masturbators try not to get too offended by them. Instead pity them and all the free time they must have to come up with all that irrelevant pointless bullshit they cling to. Oh yes......... and have a nice day.