Beware of “compliant training” when you’re learning and rehearsing DT techniques. This trap sets you up for losing, not winning, street confrontations.
Trainer Bob “Coach” Lindsey, winner of the ASLET Lifetime Achievement Award, explains:
“Too many instructors believe that the measurement for learning good techniques lies in the number of repetitions you do. Unfortunately, experience suggests otherwise.”
“Say you’re told to do 25 high blocks in a slow-for-form, non-touch drill while your partner performs a downward strike directed at your head. The first ten are excellent. The next five, your hand drops toward your forehead as you start getting tired and a little careless. The next five, it’s at your forehead. The next five, it’s down around your eyes. Your partner’s fist, meanwhile, has drifted off center and to the side, making it easier for you to deflect his punch. Invariably now you’re able to anticipate his moves. When you go to full-force applications with simulation gear, this kind of lax, compliant pattern gets repeated.”
“With arm-bar takedowns (leverage movement), you may start strong but pretty soon your partner goes down from just a light touch. You don’t really apply enough pressure and don’t really keep his or her wrist in a wrist lock. You think, ‘Boy, I can really defend against an overhead attack’ or ‘I can do a straight arm-bar,’ but really you can’t. Then on the street you get hurt because you’ve emerged from training with false expectations about violent encounters.”
Lindsey recommends doing fewer but more meaningful repetitions. Carefully monitor yourself and your partner and see that applications of the “assault” and reactions to it are accurate. After each rep, pause, close your eyes and visualize the attack or resistance and your proper countermeasure for it. Then, after the visualization (“crisis rehearsal”), do another live repetition.
Continue this alternating pattern through a dozen or so repeats. If either you or your partner sense compliant carelessness creeping in, call the other on it: “Stop what you’re doing. You’re not doing your part. You need to perform the right action. You’re hurting me, not helping me.”
“The responsibility for teaching falls on the instructor,” says Lindsey, “but the responsibility for learning falls on the student. If you, as a student, sense that you’re not getting a full share of a thorough training experience, it’s your responsibility to correct the situation so that you and your partner both benefit.”
The combination of accurate repetitions and visualizations, Lindsey believes, “bonds you physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually” to the techniques you’re rehearsing. “When you keep it real in practice,” he stresses, “you’ll set yourself up to win when it’s real on the street.”