Children's Self Defence Workshop Report (diary entry)

27.01.14

Children’s Self-Defence Workshop

This was a condensed yet general one and a half hour workshop aimed at children of various ages.  It should be seen as a very small taster for my “When Parents Aren’t Around” seminars.

The course focused mainly on hard skills, as the title suggests, but I began it with a series of exercises that helped expose the attendees to the feelings of fight, flight or freeze. This began with the warm-up, where regular students were led to believe they would follow the rough format I use to warm-up the class. This abruptly changed when individuals found themselves having odd numbers of repetitions and also being made to continue for extended periods of time. The whole procedure culminated in a discussion on chaos. Humans have evolved to naturally seek patterns and expect incidents to follow a certain format. When patterns become difficult find and the norm is broken, they tend to panic. Real world violence does have various pre-incident signals, but the nature of it is generally quite chaotic especially if you are not exposed to it on a regular basis.

Moving on from the cardiovascular warm-up the chaos theme was carried over into an even more relevant exercise. Chaos drills consist of asymmetrical combative exercises, where a student does their best to remain on their feet or regain their footing against multiple attacks. There are many ways to conduct them, using different environments. Today we simply used focus mitts and kept all the training on the mats. We kept to a rule where there was no exit until the coach stepped onto the mats.

With everyone suitably fired up we then immediately moved into pre-emptive striking drills. The idea here was that everyone present was now feeling as they would when faced with the imminent threat of violence. We used role-play to further enhance the experience. Strikes were executed from restricted positions, eliminating an immediate exit point until the threat was removed. We added on incidental combinations.

The issue of range was then covered, drilling pre-emption against larger attackers. This is a particularly important point when training children, as a child’s most likely threat is someone bigger than them.

Upping the threat level we looked at concealed weapons and pre-empting attacks with these. Use of the voice was covered, as was tactical escapes.  With immediate exits blocked we looked at the use of incidental weaponry.