Friday, October 19, 2012

Ground Survival 101 Course

    I decided to put together this course after seeing so many flawed ground programs being taught by so-called reality based instructors. As in most modern self defense courses they attempt to innovate in the wrong area and in alot of ways over think the problems. Now alot of these guys are my friends but the fact remains they still got it wrong. This course is a part of a more comprehensive  called Stonewall Tactical Judo that we also teach. This one however focuses solely on ground survival.
    Typically what I see are courses geared towards only protecting against the lowest common denominator of criminal. This is a huge mistake. Attacks are as random as people. You simply cannot predict exactly how someone can attack you or how they will react to your defense.Too many out there try to take shortcuts and try to tell you that you can just bite them or poke them in the eyes or twist their heads or something like that and complete ignore geometry. Now don't get me wrong I've seen these things work but I've also seen them fail miserably. Everything works sometimes and nothing works every time. The fact is as educators,warriors, or whatever term you would like to use our job is to give you the best ways of protecting yourself with the lowest possible amount of flaws for the highest rate of success and take every possibility into account. Now let's say someone is straddling you and punching down against your face and you buck your hips to make them post their hands on the ground. You reach up to grab their head and do the head twist. All they have to do is sit straight up and you can't reach their head. Then your laying there on your back with your arms stuck out and your head unprotected. That isn't going to end good for you. You can't bite them at that point either. If that was all you had your in alot of trouble and it can happen I've seen it many times. As a grappler myself with over 30 years experience on the mat I can tell you a little fact. The first thing a grappler with real experience will do when they put you on your back is completely immobilize your head and arms. Bye bye grabs, pokes, and biting and all the other things they tell you will work on anyone. Scary thought isn't it?
     Well here is the deal with our program. By learning just a few body movements you can escape these positions easily and the escapes we teach WILL work on everyone not just the lowest common denominator attacker with little ability when you apply them correctly. Anyone can do these techniques, but we don't just stop with techniques.
     You see that takes us into another issue which is improper training. Many seminars you will attend will show you an escape. Let's stick with the full mount example. Let's say you learned an escape in a class. So now you've reversed this bad position. Now what? Well in most classes you would move on to the next technique. Once again....that's a big mistake. Just because you rolled someone doesn't mean the altercation is over. How did you get into the situation? More importantly...how are you going to get out of it? What do you do if your getting out of one position and they switch to another one do you know what to do?
    You see an attack is like a disease. When you deal with just a specific attack and move on such as some type of pin, or strike, or choke, or whatever you dealing with a symptom of the disease and not the disease itself. When your escape is facilitated that is the point your looking at something quick to end the threat. Remember what the law states. The law can differ slightly from state to state so check with your attorney general's office on the judicious use of force laws for your state but they tend to be similar to this: You can defend yourself against a person until they are no longer a threat. Basically in our context that means if you roll someone off of you and straddle them and continually bash their face in and they are defending then you've become the attacker. Then even if they attacked you then you can still go to jail for assault. I don't make up the laws I'm just telling you what they say. You can generally strike them but you can't just keep doing it over and over. We however can show you how to end the threat without ending up on someone's Iphone explaining yourself in court.
     Just to review with this course we can show you a few simple body movements that will get you out of these bad positions against attackers of varying skill levels not just the ones that don't know anything. We teach you how to deal with attacks as they change and you learn how to string things together to become more proactive in your defense. We can also show you how to do it within your states use of force policies. The best part is we can do it in 2 days. If you want a real solution to the problems we've presented then contact us on the Contact Us page.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Stonewall Tactical Judo

First and foremost Stonewall Tactical Judo is a modern day fighting system. It isn't so much based on classical judo as it is based on American Combat Judo from 1944. Though based on Jujutsu it includes more modern and scientific developments in self defense as well as learning strategies. It also draws from other systems such as Catch As Catch Can Wrestling, Boxing, Muay Thai, and other modern systems from all over the world.
     So why call it Judo instead of Combatives or something else? Well frankly with all the saturation and marketing behind it as well as the so-called reality based self defense movement the term "combatives" has lost it's meaning for me. What people are actually teaching today is more like combat martial arts. Combat martial arts basically means your doing the same old mcdojo tactics but your more aggressive with it. People are just taking whatever they do and slapping the word combatives on the end of it for marketing, it just doesn't mean anything anymore. The simple fact is that if you look at the upper level kata of Judo you will find disabling blows,knife defenses, stick defenses, and gun defenses. Does that sound familiar to you? Yep it's everything they teach in modern self defense today. By the way I didn't just pluck the word judo out of  nowhere. I have a 4th dan in Judo and a 6th Dan in Jujutsu as well as a Professorship( Kyoshi Sho). I also have a 5th Dan in Ninjutsu but hey  let's stay on point. Now we don't use the same weapon defenses they teach in Judo I'd like to think we are a little more evolved I'm just saying the blueprint was always there. Actually, W.E. Fairbairn was a Judo exponent as were most of the original "combatives" guys.
    If you've looked at the rest of the site you will notice I teach police departments all over the country and we are going international soon. This system uses the same teaching methodologies as I employ when teach defensive tactics to police. If you read the testimonials over on the S.T.A.R. Method page you will see this teaching method works wonders for these officers. Taking these ideas and applying them to martial arts will get you much better and much faster than you will see in other so- called combatives or reality based systems. I've always disliked the term reality based self defense because it is subjective and situational. We start you out learning verbal de-escalation then managing awareness and avoidance. You can't be attacked if you aren't there. Then we teach you basic self defense. You will be able to reasonably be able to defense yourself after just a few classes. Not a couple years like other systems. Once you have a firm foundation then we can add other things. Want to see us in action? if your in the North Alabama area contact us through the contact us link about a private class. Outside that area you can contact me through the same link about hosting a seminar at your school. You will definitely notice a huge difference in quality. Let us show you that difference.

Monday, October 15, 2012

The Falling and the Fallen

    It's 4:31 in the morning and I can't sleep.I'm angry I'm just really angry. I'm not sure how this article is going to go but I just know I have to write it. It could go into a million different directions or none at all. I'm so angry I'm on auto pilot. As alot of people have I've been following this Amanda Todd story. A 15 year old girl being bullied into committing suicide. There is no excuse for that there never was at all. I remember when I was 15 and being bullied myself. I wanted to commit suicide. I had to be on medication for a couple years. You see this isn't new it's the same old shit that's always been. With the same old lame ignorant excuses. I've paced the floors this morning and even came close to crying a little because I look at the society we've built and find it disgusting. I think everyone is bullied at one time or another. It surprises people when I tell them I was bullied but it's true. Since then of course I became a martial arts champion, worked as a bouncer and bodyguard for many years, and now I teach police hand to hand combat for a living. But hey we are our own creation and we all started somewhere. I was bullied for simply being a freshman on the football team. I had my food tampered with and poisoned. My tires slit on my car. Several once tried to hold me down and sodomize me with the armrest off a pair of crutches. One  of the other players was injured and they actually took his crutches away from him to remove it. For no other reason than they could. They couldn't hold me down thank DNA I'm a pretty big guy and strong as an ox but they sure as hell tried it. This was back in 1988 I believe. The teachers all knew it was going on and did nothing. They like the other students considered it a rite of passage. Schools have always supported bullying that isn't new. Schools support bullying now more than ever. They support it  by using a strict no tolerance policy on fighting. In other words if you give a bully what they deserve your going to be kicked out of school. So bullies use that for leverage. Kids have to take that abuse because if they fight back then they are going to be expelled and bullies know it. There is no stand your ground policy against bullying like there should be. If they just tell a teacher they get beat up worse. It gets worse if parents get involved. That is the reality of it. All the teachers will do is have the parents talk to them which is meaningless. There is currently no real punishment for bullying. There is no real deterrent as long as the bullies are slick.
    People are so self absorbed these days they aren't going to act on anything unless they are afraid of losing something. People claim they work too much these days and don't have the time to watch their kids. Really? If the parents could be arrested and put in jail for things their children done I'm pretty sure they could find a little time to watch their children and be better parents and make sure their children are on the correct path to becoming good responsible people. If that bully lost something important to them and had to really pay for what they did they may not do it anymore. Fear isn't just a tool for them. Self absorbed adults are producing self absorbed children with no concept of reality, a false sense of entitlement, misplaced priorities, lack of personal responsibility and ethics. You see....we got soft. We got so progressive in our thinking that we out thought ourselves. We listened to and became a society that is nowhere near as smart as it believes. We are failing our most precious asset....our children. We are failing them by not guiding them, by not being there, by not paying attention, not setting boundaries, and not being real parents.
    Years ago I remember when President Clinton was in office. He was considering making school uniforms mandatory for all public schools. The reasoning was that many children were being attacked and murdered for a certain brand sneakers and other trivial things. If everyone wore the same thing then they would have to be judged on their merits as a person and not what they wore. I thought it was a great forward thinking idea. I think to some degree that it would have worked. Not completely of course but I think it would've curbed alot of things. The hell that was raised over it was immense. Even though it was just an idea the parents decided the government was going to try to force them to pay for the uniforms. Which  no one really knows if that's true one way or another because it never made it to that stage as far as i know but they used that as an excuse and raised hell anyway. The kids railed against it because it supposedly kept them from expressing themselves and all that stuff. It ended up not happening because the kids didn't like it and MTV buckled to the kids and it went downhill from there. It was the lamest excuse I ever heard. Forget the other 16 hours in the damn day. They said it would keep them from expressing who they are. Well first of all your kids so you don't even know who you are yet. Most adults don't know who they are either and if they did they would be horrified. If you don't know who you are then you can't really express it so shut up. The purpose of school is for learning not expressing yourself or socializing. In North America our schools produce some of the dumbest people on earth and they are worried about expression. Asia is destroying us in math and science because our priorities are completely out of order. Your worried about expression? What are you trying to express?...That your a moron that doesn't know what really matters? That your parents don't know how to instill the correct values in you? If that's the case then good job message received.
     What happened to Amanda Todd should never happen to any child.She should've been able to go to school and feel safe. When she made mistakes she should've been able to talk to an adult. When she got suckered by a pedophile on webcam where was the investigation then? When someone posted child porn on facebook where were the arrests? She had to move three times so obviously some adults knew about it. Where was the staff at the school when kids from another school came onto school property and assaulted her. There was no teacher around what the hell? We may never know these things. What really bothers me is some of the responses I see from trolls about her death.If this girl's death doesn't rip your heart out then you aren't a real person your just scum. Some of the things I've seen should never be uttered by an adult in reference to a child. To me even worse are the ever pretentious armchair activists.These are the ones that say things like," well your posting all the stuff about this girl that flashed a guy and had sex at 13 but what about the starving kids in Africa." Well here is thing thing with that. You can actually feel bad for both asshole. People that say things like that don't care about children in Africa they do it to attempt to sound intelligent. They fail miserably. They are the people that talk yet do nothing. They are the bystanders... the ones who say someone should have helped but never think of helping themselves then explode with faux outrage when something happens. I have no use for these people.
     Now I'm about to say something and bring this to a close. Whenever I say you in these statement I'm including myself as well since I'm a part of this society. There's alot of things wrong with this society but we can fix this one we can fix bullying. We can fix it by modifying existing laws and creating new ones for more accountability. We can give this society a dose of reality and we can hold ourselves accountable for our failings. We can take more time with our children and instill proper values. We need stricter laws for when these values are not upheld. People need to know they will truly pay for what they've done our children must be protected.
     Each and everyone of us should mourn the loss of Amanda Todd and every child that suffers the same fate. We should do it because as a society we killed them. We failed to protect her. We built a society that allowed a pedophile( I'm assuming it was an adult or at least a much older kid) to have access to a 13 year old girl and extort her. We built a society that through our tax money helps pay the staff that wasn't around when she was beaten at her school and they still have a job. We built a society that covets things and not people. We built a society that allows television to dictate reality. We built a society that allows our children to be sexualized, We built a society that robs children of their childhood. We built a society that doesn't guide it's children and show them the right path because we are on the wrong path, We built a self centered society that allowed Amanda Todd to be abused and bullied to the point she took her own life to escape from it. Don't just sit around talking about how sad this is or how it's a tragedy. Instead look in the mirror and make a change. We can do better and we've got to do better we have too much at stake.
     Finally to Amanda Todd though you aren't here anymore I have some words anyway. I'm so sorry we failed you. As a society we should have been there for you and we failed. We didn't keep the bad people away. We didn't have our priorities right. From the bottom of my heart I feel society owes you an apology and I intend for you to have it. Though you aren't here understand that you are everywhere. I know this tragedy has touched many I only wish you could have known how much you mattered.Though cells may die  energy is forever and now you are a part of us all. In a safe place where no one can hurt you anymore.

                                                               R.I.P. Amanda Todd