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FEAR FACTOR
Author: Sara Fogan
What the 41-year-old taught yesterday might have been unknown to him last year, and what he teaches tomorrow might not be the same as what he teaches next year. Unlike many traditional martial artists, he is willing to admit that theories change and methods improve. In accordance with that theme, Black Belt presents the following update with the psychologist of street fighting. —Editor
Black Belt: What is the state of the art of reality-based self-defense training?
Tony Blauer: There’s so much happening these days. I started teaching this sort of thing in 1979, and ever since the 1988 launch of my Panic Attack streetfighting videos, the face of reality-based training has changed. There are so many new guys spreading the word, helping make the world safer. All I can say is, it’s about time.
BB: What’s happening in your world?
Blauer: So much. I’m on the road 250 days a year, I’m up to 59 videos and I’m doing lots of train-the-trainer courses.
But the most exciting thing recently is that the federal government of Venezuela has adopted my SPEAR system for use by an elite agency within its intelligence community. They chose it after a year of research because it’s a behaviorally researched, close-quarters ambush system and that’s the problem in South America: the close-quarters ambush.
BB: What does SPEAR stand for?
Blauer: It’s an acronym for Spontaneous Protection Enabling Accelerated Response. It’s based on scientific research surrounding the physiological system’s withdrawal reflex. My training and about 14 years of research created drills around this reactive response to facilitate the tactical conversion of the natural startle-flinch response. A lot of people in the martial arts community don’t understand it because they look at pictures of the SPEAR as opposed to the SPEAR system. In its totality, the system encompasses two decades of research on performance-enhancement, psychology, fear management and the withdrawal reflex. As a system, we’re three-dimensional: We work on the emotional, psychological and physical aspects of combat. We also focus on awareness of what takes place before a fight begins.
BB: What role does awareness play in self-defense?
Blauer: It’s everything. So many martial artists pay lip service to awareness.
In class, they’ll start by saying: “Remember to run away if you can. And remember that awareness is everything.
Now let’s work on our palm strike.” In an average class, one minute may be spent on the principle of awareness and two minutes on the principles of verbal defusing and de-escalation— and the rest of the time is spent developing muscle-memory techniques. But the most important things are awareness and then the verbal component.
I teach the principle of the Three D’s: detect, defuse, defense. If you can detect, you can avoid. If you cannot avoid, you can defuse, meaning “take the fuse out of it” or “take the power out of it.”
And if you can’t defuse, you’ll have to defend yourself.
In the military, they talk about readiness factors: If you know the fight is on, how long will it take you to deploy?
How long will it take you to get ready?
I started thinking about how that could apply to self-defense, and I concluded that all too often martial artists work with too much consent in training—not in the literal sense, as in we must consent to train, but in the scenario sense.
Real fights do not involve any consent.
We must strive to replicate that emotional duress in training if we’re going to ready ourselves. For example, if I say, “Today we’re going to work on lapel grabs,” we’ve just consented to the drill.
Because we’ve created awareness that something is going to happen, it’s not a true test. When somebody tries to carjack you or mug you, there is no consent and no awareness. After all, if you’d had awareness, you wouldn’t be there.
BB: Are you saying it’s easy to make virtually any technique work when there’s consent but difficult to succeed with those same techniques during a surprise attack?
Blauer: If all you’ve done is consensual drilling, then yes. The mitigating factors in any close-quarters fight have more to do with awareness, time and space than with technique. The bottom line is, if your style says use a side kick and this style says use a reverse punch and another style says use an armbar, it’s all predicated on consent—knowing a fight is going to happen and knowing what the actual attack will be. But if you’re lacking awareness, it’s a surprise attack. In the self-defense realm, people think about what they are going to do in a confrontation as opposed to what their opponent is going to do to them first and how that relates to their response.
Irrespective of training or skill, if you’re not aware the attack is happening —if you’re reading a magazine, looking out the window or tying your shoelaces —you’re off-guard. Your reactive brain creates what is called a startle-flinch response, and it has nothing to do with your cognitive, muscle-memory-learned tactics. If you don’t weather that ambush, you won’t be able to get to your system or use your favorite move. The fight will be over. That’s what the SPEAR system’s philosophy is about: weathering the ambush to get back in the fight. Selective listeners misinterpret this reality as condemnation of their approach. The majority of systems base their tactics on that space-time model I mentioned, but there is none in a true ambush. What I teach is not about disrespecting other methodologies; it’s about recognizing that you’ve got to get the immediate job done before you can get to your favorite move. You’ve got to take care of the sudden aggression, and that’s an emotional and psychological problem, not a technique or style problem.
BB: Do you find that a lot of martial artists plan to defend themselves by using their favorite move?
Blauer: Everyone has a favorite move, but I always tell people, “Your favorite move might be the trigger for your opponent’s favorite counter.” The superior warrior has no emotional attachment to any range of fighting. In other words, train for adversity through diversity.
A graduate of my police-officer survival course recently confronted a suspect alongside the road. The officer was jumped. A ground fight ensued, he emptied his pepper spray and they were struggling mano a mano. The guy broke free, ran to the cop’s car, jumped in and tried to steal it. The officer ran over and jumped on the guy before he could drive away. The guy was so big that he dragged the cop into the car and slammed him up against the roof inside the car and was choking him upside-down.
Fortunately we had discussed and simulated unusual circumstances in class. He fought for six minutes and almost died, but he ended up knocking the guy out with the tactics he’d learned. The bottom line is, if he had tried his favorite move, it likely wouldn’t have worked upside-down in a car with a guy throttling him.
Nevertheless, every martial artist has a favorite move, and every style has a few moves it’s known for. But for your own safety, I urge you to reflect on this famous chess quote: “The height of strategy is not doing your best move; the height of strategy is doing the worst move for your opponent.” If your favorite move is a head butt and you’re fighting a guy who just got off a motorcycle and is wearing a full helmet, your favorite move is out the window. People who have been attacked know there isn’t a move that works all the time.
BB: Are there specific moves that you do encourage?
Blauer: When the scenario dictates, I teach what I call a close-quarters toolbox. It includes about 10 different moves, or tools, and every single close-quarters fight will involve one or more of them. The nucleus of all this emerges from the SPEAR system, which is made up of how your body naturally moves to start with, so within it are rakes, palms, forearms, elbows, grabbing and securing tactics—all contained within one move. That’s why our slogan is “the power of one.” It’s amazing how ready the human body already is before we start undermining it with complex motor- skill notions.
Most martial artists have been taught there are hundreds of ways to be attacked and that there is a counter for every move and a counter for every counter. That premise is true for codified fighting or sport matches, but it’s not true for real fights. On the street, there are specific initiation attacks, or moves that start a fight. And the bottom line is, if you develop your ability to identify those initiation attacks, you can disengage or engage the threat at that moment. You can stop the fight within seconds. But if you don’t know what those signals are or end up getting into a sparring match, you may be in for a long, ugly fight.
BB: If you don’t teach actual techniques, what do you cover in your courses?
Blauer: I teach something called the Three T’s: tools, targets and tactics.
You should know what your personal tools are. You should know how to use every natural weapon on your body.
You should know what the targets are on your opponent’s body—which places are the best ones to hit with the tool you’re using.
Combine tool and target, and the result becomes a tactic. Let the opponent and his targets inspire your counter. If you fixate on your shin kick or knee thrust or elbow strike in advance of the problem, you can’t flow.
You’re not as spontaneous.
Now, we make a distinction between technique and techniques. We do have technique, meaning we learn about neuromuscular communication, how to use the right muscles at the right time, which part of your shin bone to hit with, how to rotate your hips for maximum effect and so on. But we don’t teach memorized techniques because that encourages you to fixate on a particular move that may or may not be appropriate in a real fight.
BB: What led you to develop the SPEAR system along those lines?
Blauer: There were a few events. One of them was, I was always afraid. No matter how good I got physically, I always seemed to be afraid psychologically, so I started developing drills that would help me overcome my fear. I would force myself to be in what I called positions of adversity, where I had to weather what was happening until I could get to a better place in the confrontation.
Instructors tend to make up drills so the technique is successful, but that’s the wrong way to teach. Remember that in real life, we don’t know what the bad guy will do because he’s in control and we’re walking into his set-up.
Even though we may be winning, his behavior and actions are the stimulus for our response.
BB: What does the SPEAR system teach students to do if they are jumped by two people?
Blauer: I can’t answer that. You never know what you will do. That’s not to say you can’t plan with respect to speed, aggression, proximity and the time-and-space relationship between awareness and reaction if the assailant telegraphs his intention. In fact, we do this all the time. I just made a new video about multiple assailants, and it’s not about palm strikes or kicks or whatever.
It’s like a mathematical equation or a matrix: If you lack awareness and your opponents are violent, vicious and aggressive, anything you do will be primal- based. It will be based on a startle-flinch response because of your body’s survival mechanism.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a 20th-degree black belt—if I attack you just as you’re getting out of the shower, you won’t do a jump front kick. You will yell, “Holy cow!” and jump back. That is the withdrawal reflex, the recoiling from danger. As the opponent telegraphs, your possible responses change. For example, if you’re sitting in your living room watching TV and suddenly I start rattling the door trying to break in, and I come in just as you get up, your movement will be protective.
You’re surprised but moving toward the problem. You won’t be coming forward tactically because at that point you’re still telling yourself, “Somebody’s breaking in!” It’s sensory overload.
Most instructors who teach self-defense mistakenly use a sport model, not a street-defense model. That sport model says: “I know what’s happening.
I have awareness. I have consent. I am now going to ....” If you asked a Thai boxer what he would do if a guy with a knife attacked him, he might say, “I’d kick his leg.” If you asked an aikido player, he might say, “I would grab his wrist and use a dynamic joint lock to roll him this way.” That’s the sport mind-set, the sparring mind-set. In reality, you don’t know what you would do. You might [defecate] in your pants. You might get cut first. Of course, you might drop him. You need to replicate the scenario to achieve the greatest theoretical advantage from training.
BB: Once an attack begins, how long does a person have to initiate a selfdefense response?
Blauer: There are people who actually answer that question. There are instructors who say, “If you don’t do something within the first four seconds, the fight’s over.” But I tell people this: If you memorize something that encumbers your survivability, you’re helping the bad guy beat you. You’ve got to be a warrior and a survivor. One of my female students was attacked, then dragged into an alley. And after being cut and raped for about 45 seconds, she beat the guy off her. Had she been told she had four seconds or else she was dead, well, she might be dead now. Fight back when you can. If you’re so terrified it takes you six hours to find your indignation, so be it, but obviously sooner is better. A lot of it is about the window of opportunity— when the bad guy makes a mistake.
Sometimes you must be patient. Our training maxim is, “You can only beat the opponent who makes a mistake.”
So wait for that mistake. An attacker might be very tactical and clever in the beginning, but then he might slip up a minute into the confrontation. That’s when you make your move.
BB: Where do you see the SPEAR program going during the next five years?
Blauer: I’d like to see more crossover into the general public. I recently started a professional development program for instructors, and that is going to be a vehicle for that crossover.
I’d love to see more conscientious instructors accessing this research on the startle-flinch response and withdrawal reflex, and I’d like to see that information be used to help the people who really need it: the general public, the citizens.
And of course, much more work needs to be done with scenario-based self-defense. And people need to train in awareness and pre-contact cue development because if you can increase your perception speed, you can dec ...