New Self-Protection Course (diary entry)

21.04.18     This morning I began a new course with a new client. Training was conducted at my home address, where a make-shift gym is beginning to see an increasing number of new students. We covered the first two hours of my bespoke 10 hour self-protection course. Having already been provided with advice on some reference material for personal security, we began the session with an overview of soft skills in general. I cover these areas quite extensively in previous diary entries. However, my general approach is to provide a description of various points that need to be acknowledged before training what happens prior to an antagonistic situation becoming physical.     We discussed attitude (never give in, maintain discipline and develop self-preservation behaviours), situational awareness (people, places, times and hazards), Jeff Cooper's Colour Code, the three Rs (Mo Teague's OODA Loop adaptation), typical violent offender profile, defining a possible threat, typical soft targets, pre-incident indicators, the legality of self-defence under British Law and pre-emptive striking, and finally the Fence concept. All of these points are addressed in my past four podcasts, which also contain relevant links in their shownotes.     Then we began training the physicality of the Fence. Training commenced with basic line-ups, understanding how to guard personal space in a pre-fight situation. The Fence was materialised with a leading negotiating and stopping hand. After drilling targeting, the mechanics of using a straight rear hand strike and applying the strike we began using full-force strikes against the focus mitt. The open hand was selected for ease of training and offsetting the risk of injury. We first trained how not to telegraph the strike via restrictive training. Restrictive training included striking with his back against the wall and striking from a sitting position.This type of training also encouraged my client to begin using the right muscle groups and to engage the right force vectors. We covered the preference of elastic/impact force over plastic/impulse force. Next we built on some extra tactics. This included the importance of throwing a succession of uninterupted strikes off the same hand and maintaining constant forward pressure until the threat is neutralised. We looked at referencing with the non-striking hand to ensure more accurate targeting. Then we looked at the removal of obstacles and striking over obstacles to finish.