Chris, I have the greatest respect for your knowledge and experience with combatives training. Thanks for sharing your views.
From my own perspective, training isn't real. There is always(?) that innate trust and knowledge among us that the action stops once someone goes oppossum or gives some other sign of surrender. It's hard to remove that pretendness as it is. The trick is to create the mental/emotional state where that measure of safety is forgotten long enough that the experience of that personal isolation is indelibly present in one's mind. As a facilitator/active observer, I believe I need that level of failure to get the bare-bones honesty of a person's responsiveness (perceptual issues and attendant natural movement) at the outset, before work can begin on tactical method based on that framework. Once that honesty has been recognised and respected for what it is, things evolve quite quickly.
... and even young/big/strong/macho males, such issues can exist without either the awareness and/or disclosure of the participant. Full-intensity training in this material can trigger existing issues and can even in some cases cause them from scratch
Agreed. Perceptual and associative issues constitute the glue I use to hold my model of personal combat together. I know that territory very well.
As to "Nobody's going to do that for them in a real situation" as a reasoning for tossing 'em in the deep end, that reason doesn't stack. If it did, that very same reason, verbatim, could just as easily be given for tossing people into the deep end to begin their training in every area of content, not just multiple situations. Since we know from experience that incremental training that proceeds to a high level of intensity produces a superior product to the sink or swim method, the reasoning begins to lose its validity. As illustration, nobody is going to give someone a chance to incrementally learn to handle a firearm correctly, or a knife, stick, etc. in a real confrontation either. Yet that fact is untenable as a reason to start people with live rounds training in a combat handgunnery course before they've even learned to turn the safety on and off and check the chamber for rounds
heh I shouldn't have even written that seeing how far it could be taken. It really has nothing to do with sink-or-swim, though. It's more about exploration followed up with practical solutions which allow a person to predict, merge and deal effectively with pressure. My training is like a safety meeting where everyone's concerns are respected and taken seriously so that personal preventive and/or coping practices can be developed accordingly. If someone wants to learn to swim, they need to get a feel for bouyancy and resistance before they can learn strokes and breathwork. If they want survival swimming skills, they already have a solid foundation of those basics. I believe people already know how to fight. They do it all the time with no training at all. Most of the people I've trained have had that basic truth proven by fire in their first training session. For one-on-one and mass attacks, that approach has stood up well over the years.
If you are concerned with discovering an individual's authentic failure responses under realistic levels of pressure, be assured, an incremental approach to training does not eradicate it
I agree that it doesn't necessarily eradicate the possibility for that discovery at a later date, because it can be introduced at any time. But failure by its very nature is where what is trained breaks down. I think this is where we differ most. I'm only interested in a person's immediate, current responsiveness. And believe me, their first experience with it is something they always laugh about by the end of the training session.
Anyway, you're right in that there is plenty of room for different approaches. I should have been more respectful of your own views and only offered mine as an alternative. I hope my disagreeing wasn't construed as an outright dismissal of your methods. Apologies if I gave that impression.
