“Asymmetrical Adrenal Stress Scenario Based training has proven to be the very best and quickest way to overcome the negative effects of the adrenal rush and even to use the power of adrenaline to fight with the ferocity and force necessary to prevail against a real attacker. Symmetrical vs. Asymmetrical Symmetrical armored assailant scenario training is where both combatants wear protective armor to spar with one another. Most of the other body armors commercially available are designed for this style of training. Some of them allow pretty hard contact, and there are plenty of effective training systems out there that train this way. But they don’t allow full force strikes to the head and groin, and thus are less effective training for a real fight. Another point is that most fights are typically asymmetrical events where the attacker usually has the psychological advantage of surprise and often of physical strength or some equalizer. Since we do as we train, asymmetric training is the best way to train for an asymmetric event. Asymmetrical training is a cutting edge yet largely misunderstood method of training. Students are trained in the desired skillset to be applied in the fight scenario. The padded attacker surprises the trained defender, elicits the high adrenal rush, and the defender dynamically overcomes the freeze response to fight with full power strikes to vulnerable moving targets. The padded attacker plays a unique dual role of both aggressor and coach to provide a dynamic and effective scenario experience by rewarding when a full power strike is thrown. Thus the fight is not so much a test, but the final fusion where the training all comes together very quickly and effectively. This training permits low training time with maximum retention. Any Body Armor used in such training has to allow for absolutely full force strikes to vulnerable areas to allow the safe experience of “flipping the switch” into and out of the adrenal rush, and the muscle memory to hit with maximum power to vulnerable areas. Anything less than full force is actually much less in this case and greatly reduces training effectiveness.”
Predator Armor website

Our school recently purchased a set of Predator Armor, a technology that utilizes special padding to enable the training partner wearing it to sustain full power strikes to the “head” in simulated confrontations.  This sort of training has been perfected over many years in such systems as Model Mugging and the work of Peyton Quinn.  They say you “fight like you train,” but in fact, you fight at some weird partially reduced, partially enhanced percentage of your training level, since adrenal stress causes you to lose fine motor control, lose the capacity to fully see and perceive your environment, to be more impulsive, and on and on (see this article for more details), while you may experience reduced pain thresholds, increased strength and ferocity, and other adrenal effects.  Its a great idea to find out exactly houw your body reacts.

Here is a video showing my teacher, Greg LeBlanc, working with a training partner wearing the suit.  I wouldn’t want to be taking those shots on my bare skull!