Proven in Combat - You Can Learn Self Defense From a Video

It seems that for every person who tries to learn self defense by buying an instructional video there is at least one other who claims that it is impossible to learn to fight without actually attending a live class for months or years. Likewise, for every instructor who tapes his lessens and sells them on the web, there is at least one other who claims that it is not possible to learn anything without going to his school and attending his classes in person. I think it is time to set the record straight!

Like my training, all of my articles are based on reality, so let me use an example from real life to demonstrate how little "training" is necessary to effectively perform realistic close combat techniques. A little less than one year ago, I was sitting in a small bar with a friend of mine when two young men and a woman walked in. Having enough experience and training in recognizing threats, both my friend and I were immediately aware that one of two other men standing in another corner of the bar started showing signs of aggressiveness. He didn't do anything (yet!) but it was obvious that he was very agitated by the presence of the new customers and that it would probably translate into physical violence. His friend, the non-aggressive one, started making a sort of bowing movement and tapping his forehead and nose. The angry young man then walked up to one of the two men that entered the bar with the woman, grabbed him by his shoulder to get his attention and turn him around and, after he did so, smashed the poor guy's nose with his forehead!

From the first contact where he grabbed his victim's shoulder to the point where the other guy was laying on the ground with eyes watering and nose bleeding was at the absolute maximum two seconds. It turned out that the head butter was the ex-boyfriend of the girl that had entered the bar and wasn't ready for his ex- to have a new man in her life, which explains his sudden anger at their presence, but that's unimportant compared to the fact that the bowing movements that the other guy made were part of an extremely short training in close combat. He was giving a lessen in a new striking technique, the head butt!

The point that I'm trying to make is that he proved that it is definitely possible to learn self defense from a video! The fact of the matter is that a very effective technique for damaging another human being was effectively "taught" in a matter of seconds and was successfully used less than one minute later. The head butt "trainee" had no martial arts or combat sport experience, nor did he possess above-average physical fitness. The head butt "trainer" also had no formal training, he just spent enough time in seedy bars to see what works and what doesn't in real fights.

Did you grasp the significance of what I just wrote? One person saw a head butt used in a fight and remembered it, should he have to fight someday himself. His friend expressed the need to hurt someone and he showed it to him. He "saw" the technique being demonstrated, retained it in his mind and later "showed" it to his intoxicated friend, who was immediately able to use it, without training of any kind! Now couldn't they have done the same thing with a video? I mean, if the first guy had seen the head butt in an instructional video, wouldn't he have been able to understand it just as good, or even better, if the video instructor explained it while demonstrating? And if he showed it to his friend in the dark corner of a bar and his friend understood it, he could have explained it in front of a running camera, too.

The bottom line is that you need to be careful what you learn, not how. If a technique is simple enough to work in combat, it is simple enough to be learned from a video. If a technique is too complicated to be learned from a video, it is also too complicated to work in real combat. You would be far better off learning head butts, stomps to the legs, throat strikes and eye gouges from a video than spending years of daily training in a school with a trainer trying to tell you that jump-spinning-flying dragon kicks to the head will work when your back is to the wall.

Christopher "Bob" Roberts is an ex-soldier who relocated to Europe and now earns his living as a tactics and close-combat instructor for military, police and private security companies.

For more information about armed and unarmed self-protection, subscribe to his free newsletters at www.extreme-measures-institute.com and receive access to an exclusive video interview series, where he explains the fundamentals of truly effective self defense.

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