“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!

“The way in which knowledge progresses, and especially our scientific knowledge, is by unjustified (and unjustifiable) anticipations, by guesses, by tentative solutions …  These (guesses) are controlled by criticism; that is, by attempted refutations …Criticism of our conjectures is of decisive importance: by bringing out our mistakes it makes us understand the difficulties of the problem which we are trying to solve. This is how we become better acquainted with our problem, and able to propose more mature solutions: the very refutation of a theory–that is, of any serious tentative solution to our problem–is always a step forward that takes us nearer to the truth. And this is how we can learn from our mistakes.”
Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations

This quote is from a book of scientific philosophy and basically I take it to mean that science can only progress by welcoming criticism.  “Criticism”, as he says, “is of decisive importance.”  We must put all out hypotheses to the test.  Will it work in real life?  And while I welcome the UFC and other sports arenas as partial laboratories, the ring isn’t the street and so we can’t make apple to apple comparisons.  We have to use our brains and make conjectures and inferences and hypotheses and then test them.

Wing Chun is the science of in-fighting.  We need to approach it scientifically.  Can I really deploy this action fast enough to work when my opponent is fast and aggressive and possibly armed?  This is true times 100 if they are actually armed.  Is the action you are using in your school a fantasy?  Put on some gear and creep a little closer to the line, as close as you can get.  To me, this is not squared up at a distance but standing face to face as in an argument in a bar or in the doorway of your house.  If some young, strong, fast opponent suddenly swung on you, what would work?

We can easily fool ourselves.  Sometimes, we get an unpleasant wake-up call in a beat down.  Lets test our hypotheses in the Kwoon, not on the street.

““I aim to fire off very short bursts of repeated shots – such as a palm strike or punch – assess – then do it again, or switch to another shot if the target changes for any reason and keep going until the threat no-longer exists.”
Mick Coup

Re-post of a discussion with Mick Coup, a former UK soldier and doorman now teaching people to fight.  I like these no-nonsense “blokes,” a breed of tough dudes the UK produces.  Reminds me of Geoff Thompson, Vinnie Jones, and every Guy Richie hero and villain.

The thing they all have in common is no-nonsense no-bullshit approach to fighting.  It’s said that you start with simplicity, travel through complexity, and arrive back at simplicity again with more clarity.  The “a punch is just a punch” idea.  The Wong Shun Leung version of Wing Chun has this perspective.  Its the perspective of experience.  Street fights will clear your head of BS!  Wing Chun, in its essence, is a no-BS system.  While we may not often find it practiced in this way, the ideas at its core are (as we say ad infinitum) simple, direct, and efficient.  Not fancy!  Many of his ideas could have come straight from the Wing Chun playbook (aka Wung Chun Kuen)

Some more good stuff below.

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