Self-Defense For The Older Man - Bradley Steiner

[** Serge **]

Self-Defense For The Older Man

“Mind must be the stronger, heart the bolder, courage must be the greater, as our might lessens”

Marcus Salvius Otho Caesar Augustus

                              



SO . . . what’s “older” ?

Knowing the phenomenon of close combat as we do, and being familiar with physical training, muscular strength, conditioning, and the human body’s process of development and decline, I’d say that older, speaking of personal capacity for optimum performance in hand-to-hand and close-in personal defensive combat, can reasonably be said to begin to apply to individuals  roughly between the ages of 40 and 60. Perhaps younger. It certainly appears to me obvious that anyone 70 or older qualifies as an “older” man, speaking strictly of his physical capacity to engage in violent personal combat, with or without weapons.

“Forty?” some may be saying (or thinking) with raised eyebrows. “Who the hell is ‘old’ at forty?”

I am not saying that any individual is necessarily “old” at any particular chronological age, in all respects. One’s mind may be sharper than the statistically average teenager’s when one is 90 (not all that much to say today, when you think about what teenagers are like), and one may indeed be healthier, fitter, and muscularly stronger at 80 than most others half or one third his age. But middle age, believe it or not, begins in one’s mid-to-late 20’s, and there is no question that one’s physical resilience, energy, capacity to recover from injuries and trauma, and agility/athleticism definitely are at their peak between the ages of about 18 and 29 or 30. (Yes, I know that one may be actually able to lift more weight in one’s late 30’s to late 40’s than one had been able to lift in one’s 20’s — assuming he is a regular weight trainee — but that indicates only one of the many attributes that contribute to what may be regarded as the indicators of a person’s being in his, let us call it, physical combative prime.

                           

Like to hear it or not, you are not going to retain or remain in your “peak” condition physically for battle, forever. Age creeps up on us all, and when the halcyon years for your physical capacity to engage in single combat decline, you will (unless you are that sad sort of character known as a dilettante) want to be able to defend yourself just as well as you did when, as a teenager or fellow in his early 20’s, you first took up martial skills.

Can you do it? And if so, how do you go about insuring that you actually do do it?

The first  question is easily answered in the affirmative. Men like Charles Nelson, Gene Le Bell, Jim Harrison, and Jack Dempsey, as well as many others, have proven that. In Sword & Pen, our Newsletter, we referred to the “elderly” retired British SAS trooper who dispatched a few young scumbags when they attempted to mug him. The ex-SAS man was nearing 80. So there is no question or doubt that it is easily possible for any serious student of practical close combat to retain a most viable and superior capacity for hand-to-hand combat. And this capacity will be formidable against considerably younger, stronger men. But this must be clear: Just as is the case with any other attribute or capacity, if or when all other things are equal, the younger combatant will win. Derive cosiderable encouragement from, and take great heart in knowing that rarely if ever in any form of combat are “all other things equal”. If you’re solidly schooled in authentic close combat and self-defense skills, you can be ready at any age to handle a dangerous opponent. And I quite honestly have no knowledge of any person of any age who had been well-trained in close combat, ever starting trouble with anyone. The “younger assailant” will either be a bully, street punk, impulse-dominated troublemaker, or other disgraceful criminal life form.

                                

Well then, since it is quite possible for even a considerably senior individual to defend himself well, and to retain that ability for his entire lifetime, the next question is: “How can you now, whether you are in your teens or in your fifth, sixth, or seventh decade, insure that you are cultivating that ability?”

First and foremost you must, must, must, be ever mindful to cultivate proper mindset. Mental conditioning is vital . . . and you can verify through your own research if you wish, that whenever a senior gent made quick work of some young lout who attacked him, that senior was really ready mentally — he was set, prepared, and conditioned, and no nonsense about it! The transition to a war footing took place in a flash, and the younger punk or punks who thought they’d have an easy time rolling the “old man”, realized that they had stumbled upon an old tiger, instead. And they realized it too late.

Second, train in viable skills. These are not classical/traditional “art” forms. Nor are they competition methods. People retire from competition. There is no “retirement” from self-defense, or from being vulnerable to attack. You can be mugged when you’re 95. The techniques you spend time learning and practicing should be simple, direct, extremely damaging, retainable, adaptable, and war-proven. By “war proven” I simply mean techniques that have been employed in actual combat; not merely skills that look beautiful, are a challenge to practice and master, and that win contests. We teach these skills in American Combato, and a select few other teachers also offer similar methods. But such techniques do not constitute the fare imparted to students of karate, ju-jutsu, hapkido, kenpo-karate, or other “martial arts”, per se. And they certainly are irrelevant in any sporting approach to close combat (i.e. wrestling, boxing, judo, or what we regard as the less-desirable sports of UFC, MMA, and cage fighting). Worthy as any of these activities may be, they do not address real combat and survival. What you want to learn, study, practice, and internalize is the real kill or get killed stuff; the skills that know no rules and that you can rely upon to cripple or do worse in a dangerous confrontation.

Third, practice regularly. This need not be excessive. Devoting 20 to 30 minutes a day to training is plenty. You certainly can do more if you are interested in and enjoy the subject, but approximately a half hour a day (every day) will do. It also provides some healthful exercise, however exercise must be placed on a back burner when you train. Imagine your life is at stake. Make your sessions of practice really count. Obtain a heavy bag, post, or dummy, and get used to smashing full force blows into a target.

Fourth, follow an exercise program. Keeping in as good shape as you are able makes good sense for a multitude of reasons — and of course one of them is that it keeps you ever-ready to do your best work in applying the self-defense skills you’ve acquired. It also enables you to maintain strength. Workout with weights. There is no better physical training method in existence.

Fifth, cultivate your natural advantages. With age comes wisdom, guile, and a somewhat sophisticated understanding of human nature. Develop your ability to be sneaky, underhanded, and above-all willing to use the foulest, most ruthlessly brutal and savage gutter tactics imaginable if you are attacked. Cultivate hatred for human predators. Realize and appreciate that the more senior you become the more legally justifiable savagery becomes when you defend yourself! Capitalize upon that knowledge and make up your mind that anyone who attacks you is going to pay a terrible price, because you will exercise no restraint, apply no mercy, and feel no reluctance to destroy your tormentor.

                          

Sixth, use common sense and weapons. Obviously, you want to avoid violence and trouble if at all possible. However, you want no disadvantage save the unavoidable fact of your age, to hinder your capacity to deal with whatever you must. If you can do so legally, learn how to use firearms properly in close combat, and avail yourself of a powerful, reliable handgun as close to 24 hours a day as possible and permissable under the law. Learn how to use a knife in combat. Master the stick (a weapon that, in some form, is nearly always available). Learn how to use improvised objects-at-hand in self-defense. Approach personal defense comprehensively.

If you follow the six-point approach that we have suggested, then, God willing, you should remain well able to deal with any human garbage that attacks you or that endangers those you love, regardless of your age.

Self-defense is for everybody of any age.

                              

© - 2011 - Bradley Steiner

http://seattlecombatives.com/?cat=1

[DavidManise]

Donc, en clair, on fait comme on fait d'habitude

Mindset, coups de p*te, entraînement quotidien, sport, utiliser des armes...  Du coup, chose rare, je ne vois pas vraiment la valeur ajoutée de cet article de Bradley Steiner.  On met déjà toutes les chances de notre côté, et on espère que ça suffise.  En avançant en âge, c'est "même combat"...  

Ou alors j'ai loupé un truc trop subtil pour le jeune con que je suis toujours (enfin j'ai le pire des deux mondes, je ne suis plus jeune mais je ne suis pas encore sage )

David

[** Serge **]

Ce n'est pas faux.

Il n'y a effectivement aucune valeur ajoutée apportée par cet article.
Libre à toi de le passer à la trappe.

Pour gagner en bande passante, et faciliter la propagation d'un meilleur signal.

[Chris-C]

Valeur ajoutée je sais pas, mais une borne ou un marche pieds utile à chacun, lorsque l'on manque de motivation, d'imagination.
Tout au long de notre vie même pour les moins influençable d'entre nous, il arrive que l'on est besoin d'un exemple, une phrase,
une photo, qui va nous fournir l'élan nécessaire pour continuer, poursuivre, maintenir les objectifs fixés, surtout ceux sur le long terme.

Bref moi rien que la 1ère photo me donne la gniak 

a+

[Patrick]

Surtout pas car, c'est à contrario, la démonstration que si on s'entraîne de façon "athlétique" on combattra de façon athlétique jusqu'à ce qu'on ne soit plus en capacité d ele faire et on se retrouvera fort démuni quand le poil grisonnera.

Par contre, le mindset lui, ne décline pas, je dirais même bien au contraire.

Attention toutefois car les anciennes générations d'anciens avaient tous connu des situations de crise extrêmes qui avaient tout particulièrement forgées un mental adapté.

Ce n'est plus forcément le cas de la génération qui arrive à la soixantaine.

[Chris-C]

Surtout pas car, c'est à contrario, la démonstration que si on s'entraîne de façon "athlétique" on combattra de façon athlétique jusqu'à ce qu'on ne soit plus en capacité d ele faire et on se retrouvera fort démuni quand le poil grisonnera.

je comprend ce que tu dis, mais déjà que sur le long terme il est difficile de conserver un cap (motivation, aléas de la vie),
si en plus il faut dire à un jeune de ne pas s'intéresser au coté athlétique et de déjà penser à leur efficacité lorsque le poids des ans
fera son oeuvre, c'est pas gagné.

Je pense que celui qui conserve le cap accumule l'expérience l'aide à adapter sa pratique. Pour peux qu'il soit éveillé.

a+

[DavidManise]

Sergio : non, je ne le passe pas à la trappe !  Du tout.  Il rappelle les fondamentaux de la self...  mais pas que pour les vieux. 

Je me suis mal exprimé...  ça faisait un peu "cet article est inutile", alors que ça n'est pas ce que je pense.  Du tout.

David

[** Serge **]

Dans l'existence, il y a une importance stratégique et tactique à apprendre les canevas.
Je crois que c'est aussi le message sous-jacent dans l'article de Steiner, qui a éveillé mon attention.

Ce qui m'a fait penser à cet article ( dont, exceptionnellement, je ne fournirai pas le lien source, que je me permets de ' couper ' un peu et avec lequel je ne suis pas complètement d'accord ) :

Patterning Chaos

Learn the pattern, practice the pattern, integrate the pattern, become the pattern, discard the pattern. If you don’t, you risk failure when Chaos comes.

CR Williams

The Fight.

Havoc. Confusion. Distraction. The Fog of your very own, intensely personal WAR. SHTF. Pain and fear and anger. Adrenaline dumping to the bloodstream. Tunnel vision and auditory exclusion and tricks on your perception and thinking and memory. All of that and it feels like more.

Chaos, let’s call it. Entropy focused in time and space, entropy squared where you’re at and when you’re there. The three laws of thermodynamics rolling into a point and hitting you square in the head and heart, driving into your world at a time and place of the bad guy’s choosing and, as much as he can make it, under his control.

Your mission if that happens, whether you want to accept it or not, is to manage that sudden Chaos enough to be the one that goes home when the fight is over and your life has returned to its normal and invisibly-entropic state. Your mission is to not just survive, but to regain and impose order through the Chaos, enough order so that the bad guy’s plan suffers its own sudden and unexpected entropic onset and collapses on him.

Put more plainly, you want to win the fight you didn’t know was coming and you want to win it decisively.

How do you do that? By planning and preparation and practice and training. Everybody knows that.

Everybody also knows that the fight is fluid, the fight is chaotic, and you can’t predict when the fight will come or how the fight will develop and happen. You won’t know where, you won’t know when, you won’t know who, you won’t know how many, you won’t know…

By definition, you can’t really expect the unexpected. That’s why it’s called ‘the unexpected’ in the first place, right?

So how do you prepare for something you won’t know about?

Here is a paradox of preparing for the fight: To be able to handle Chaos, you have to learn about Order. To deal with what is fluid, you must first build a foundation of and on that which is solid.

You have to learn the Patterns. You simply will not fight as well without them as you will if you have learned them well enough to discard them. And that is another paradox of the fight: To have the best chance of winning decisively, you must yourself fight without a pattern, and you can’t do that without first learning what those patterns are.

If Combat Is Chaos, though, why do we have to learn Patterns? Why can’t we learn a bunch of techniques (some of which are themselves Patterns, mind you) and then apply them ‘on the fly’ as needed?

Patterns teach us concepts and principles that stretch over, organize, and direct us and the techniques we learn. .../...



Patterns give us automatic responses that start us acting while we’re still surprised. There is a saying about finding yourself in a survival situation that goes something like: “Do SOMETHING even if it’s wrong!” The idea is to start yourself moving and acting in order to keep yourself from stopping either because you panic and freeze or because you over-think the situation and hesitate to do anything that’s not near-perfect. The same principle can apply to the much smaller time-scales involved in a fight for life. Patterns integrated and made automatic can get us moving when the tendency might be to stop until our mind processes the input of the attack. The repetitive practice of the pattern gives our subconscious, the ‘monkey brain’ that takes over in those moments, a familiar thing. You know what to do without being conscious of it, and as you’re getting caught up consciously, you’re taking action, even if it’s not perfect. That gives you a chance to get ‘on course’ while it throws off the attacker’s planning about how things will go. You catch up, you get ahead, you win. Without learning the pattern, the risk is increased that you freeze while you’re assessing things. You fall further behind and you lose. Better to have the ‘automatic’ built in somewhere.

The Patterns we learn are sometimes all we need to Win. There are many cases where just the first move, or the setup for the first move, whether that’s drawing the weapon but not using it to the first automatic block/deflection/evasion and counterstrike, will change the attacker’s mind about continuing. Starting the pattern you have learned and made automatic starts your mind and spirit on their way to ‘fighting’ mode as well. The physical reflects on the mental which alters the physical again, and on and on. By assuming the ‘attitude’ that a particular Pattern forces on you, you may tell the attacker that you’re more of a risk than others and make them decide to break away. You go home unharmed. That’s a Win.

Patterns are the basis of the improvisation that we need in the fight. There are a limited number of chords and notes in music, but look at the music that is generated from that. There are only three primary colors that, mixed together various ways, produce all the hues and tones we see and use. The human body only moves in certain ways over certain ranges, and the most efficient ways to move are limited, but that has not limited the sports and the martial arts that have been developed to use those movements over those ranges. The patterns we learn in the beginning are what we will use in the near-continuous adaptation to the specific threat and the specific fight we may or will face—and I can all but guarantee that we will have to adapt, to modify and add and subtract from and combine those basic patterns to meet the demands of the moment. Broad similarities? Surely so. But even fighting the same opponent in the same place, something is always different, something will always demand at least some variation and adaptation to the demands of the instant. If it happens in controlled environments—the ring, the Octagon, the dojo—how much more likely is it to happen in the parking lot at 8pm?

Patterns, then, are important, and not just something to grit your teeth and bear until the instructor gets to the really neat stuff. Because…and trust me on this one…you won’t do the really neat stuff nearly as well unless you’ve given more than a cursory nod and some lip service to the fundamental concepts and principles that Patterns teach you. And unless you can do the fundamentals and the basics well and almost forgetfully when you’re on the range shooting straight up and straight ahead, you risk not being able to do them in the drugstore parking lot at 8:30 in the evening when you’re caught between two cars and the guy on your left with the big knife.

Musashi might have put it this way: Study the Way, make the Way part of you, become the Way, forget the Way and be what you really were in the beginning. I say it this way: Learn the Patterns, integrate the Patterns, make the Patterns natural, forget the Patterns, and so become more comfortable in Chaos. Either way you put it, if you do this—and it doesn’t take as much effort and time as you may think to—you will still end up being able to defend yourself and destroy your enemies far better and more quickly than you could before.

And that’s the bottom line to all of this, isn’t it?

Be safe out there. And if you can’t be safe, be dangerous.


© - 2011 - CR Williams