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Martial Arts and Self-Defense Blog by Wim Demeere | Techniques, Books, Podcasts

Guest Post: Mark Mireles on MMA and self defense

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This is a guest post by a fellow author and amazing fighter, Mark Mireles. I’ll do a follow up post in a few days to touch on the great insights he gives here. Enjoy!

The Ultimate Martial Arts Question – Which Came First the Chicken or the Egg?

I’m a Wim’s Blog reader. I don’t say much here on the blog but I read and reflect. It has been said “observe much, learn much, train much”. Sage advice. In my voyaging time, I had the opportunity to follow the thread that outlined the argument between self defense, martial arts training and mixed martial arts.

The discussion was that no matter how visceral and brutal MMA is at the end of the day, it’s a sport that is governed by rules. There were several posts that interjected the fact that MMA does not include weapons defenses and multiple attackers. These are good points indeed. Although the self-defense crowd was very professional, at the end MMA was viewed as sport.

The MMA crowd argued that MMA was an effective fighting system because it arose out of the traditional martial arts. MMA was deemed a modern fighting system that was a sport but could be effectively used as a practical form of hand-to-hand combat. The sum was greater than its parts. Transversely, the traditional form of martial arts was viewed as limited because it didn’t address all ranges of real fighting.

At the end of the day, it appeared that the two groups agreed to disagree agreeably. From my computer (being a voyeur) I thought both sides made solid points and it got me thinking. Contemplating the point of view of both camps, I had the opportunity to witness something and wanted to share it with the “Wim-ers” (yes I just coined us, Wim’s Blog enthusiasts). If you don’t know me or my books let me tell you were I’m coming from.

Mark Mireles (top left) at an LAPD charity

Wim did an interview with me some time ago. If you didn’t read it, let me introduce myself. I’ve been a street cop for over 20 years and been practicing martial arts since 1977. After years of street experience and martial arts training, I came to my own conclusions related to real fighting, training, and teaching. [Read more…]

Martial Arts Reality Check, Part Two

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I just ran across this piece of news.

Long story short, a guy gets shot 23 times and still survives… Just stop and imagine that for a second: 21 bullets enter your body and you don’t die. Talk about being lucky!

Granted, no vital organs were hit but the guy got shot in the arms, legs, abdomen, and jaw. Even though these aren’t vital organs, there are still plenty of arteries there. So despite having no organ damage, he could have bled out and died anyway. But he didn’t.

So what?

Well, this just goes to show that you can’t always predict what’s going to happen when you use force, deadly or otherwise. Because let’s be honest: if somebody says a couple cops are going to fire 46 shots at you, hitting you with 21, would you really think you’d survive? Nope. And in most cases, you’d be right. But as this story here proves, there are exceptions.

To be clear: I’m not saying you should go out and make a LEO draw on you because you might just get lucky and survive. What I’m saying is: you never know what’s going to happen when the feces hits the rotating blades.

Now you might be thinking “Duh!” and that’s your prerogative but my point is this: even if you accept that the most unlikely things can and will happen in a fight, that won’t stop you from making assumptions about fighting and combat.  Making assumptions is just human nature and we all fall prey to this bad habit. To make matter worse, we usually don’t realize we make these assumptions. But we sure do train according to them.  And there’s the problem…

I train in both combat sports and traditional martial arts because I believe they both have value.  In fact, they complement each other very well, providing you distinguish between the different environments they operate in. To do that, you make up an intellectual image of what each of these two categories of disciplines looks like. You make this image by drawing from your own experience, reading, watching videos of actual fights, talking to others who share their experience, etc. All these things combine into some big-ass assumptions about what a fight looks like in an MMA or similar competition and how things are on the street and in self-defense scenarios.

Chances are good you’re right on the money for some and totally wrong for others (Unless, of course, you’re so totally awesome you’re never, ever, EVER, wrong about anything.)

But you won’t know that until you start fighting for real, regardless in which environment.

Dude, shoot me 45 more times! I can take it!

 

Get to the point already! Shees…

Here’s the rub: [Read more…]

Martial Arts Reality Check

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This post needs some background before I come to the martial arts stuff, so bear with me…

This weekend, I attended my brother-in-law’s wedding. He married a beautiful bride and they had a great day. The wedding party went on until early morning and everybody had a great time. Especially me because I:

  • Got to do my imitation of the Will & Carlton dance with everybody watching. The roar of laughter that followed must mean my performance was good enough. (I choose not to consider any other possibilities, thank you very much…)
  • Didn’t have to drive so I could drink a bit more than usual.
  • As a result of the previous bullet, I danced even sillier than usual. Which resulted in people laughing very, very hard. Which only egged me on to bust some more dance moves. And so on.
  • Inhaled helium and spoke in a funny voice, along with a few other people. They were a lot funnier than me but we still laughed so hard somebody actually fell from a chair.
  • Got to slow-dance with my beautiful lady on a huge dance floor. Lots more fun than dancing in the kitchen or living room like we usually do.
  • Was surrounded by people who are close to me for the entire day and we all had a great time together.

Anyway, I had a blast. In fact, it’s been a long time since I was able to kick back and relax like that. After so many years of working on awareness and prevention, I don’t feel at ease anymore in a crowd. Particularly when there’s a lot of alcohol involved, which was the case here. Simply because there’s such a high potential for violence in these circumstances. It usually goes something like:

  • One drunk spills his beer over another and the fight is on.
  • Somebody eyes another guy’s woman (or the guy thinks she’s being eyeballed) and fists start flying.
  • You’re having way too much fun for some people so they decide to fuck up your day by picking a fight.

And I’m not even mentioning pickpockets, gangs or other criminals. Go to any big public gathering and they’re bound to be there too.

But at this wedding, it was invitation only and there were no assholes among the guests. Even the wildest drunk didn’t come close to needing to be calmed down. And party-crashers couldn’t sneak up on us; I’d have spotted them long before they even came close to me. So I got to relax, let down my guard and just have a blazing good time.  A rare occasion for me.

For the record, when we left and went to the parking lot, I cranked up the awareness and prepared for trouble. I know when it’s time to have fun bit also when that time has passed… :-)

What’s the point, dude?

The point is: every now and then, you need to do a reality check.

In my opinion, and also my experience, people in the martial arts and self defense community are very bad at this. In fact, I’ll raise my hand right now and confess to be a big sinner in this regard. I’m so involved and fascinated by everything concerning  martial arts, self defense and training for these two that I sometimes lose perspective.

The correct perspective is that, as far as I know, nobody is actively trying to kill me. This means I’m not in danger of a violent death while I’m typing this blog post. Following this logic, the only danger for violence is random violence. Random violence means: [Read more…]

Pickpockets, awareness and self defense

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Here’s something that happened today:

I went to the supermarket to buy some groceries. The store isn’t located in the best part of the city but not the worst either. It’s not the kind of place I’d linger after dark but during the day time, it’s fine. I’d been to the store numerous times already and the customers are usually locals, it’s that kind of place.

As I walk up to the condiments section, I spot a guy who gives off the wrong vibe. Not violence, but something else, so I tag him mentally. He’s walking towards the same spot I’m going but there’s a big, older gentleman between us. I remember because the older man is blocking the aisle by placing his shopping cart diagonally across and standing on the other side so I can’t pass.

I stand there for at least five seconds and he still doesn’t notice me, despite turning his head towards me twice. He just continues talking to his wife. I opted for the fastest solution and leaned over to grab what I needed. Then I left to pay at the cash register.

The guy who gave me the bad vibe remained where he was the whole time, seemingly looking at products.

After two minutes of waiting in line, that same guy walks out the store without a purchase. He’s not in a hurry, but he makes no eye contact with anybody and doesn’t waste time hanging around either. 30 seconds later, the older man comes bustling over and tells the woman at the register he’s been robbed by a pickpocket. He describes him and the employee says the man just walked out. Cussing like a sailor, the victim gives chase but is back after a minute. Obviously, the pickpocket has vanished.

The gentleman cusses some more and – get this- starts blaming the employee. I shook my head in disgust.

Some thoughts:

  • He knew he wasn’t in the best part of town. You don’t see any Beemers or Jaguar’s in the parking lot of that store…
  • He was oblivious to anything and anyone around him. As demonstrated by not spotting me when he was clearly in my way.
  • He was oblivious to his exaggerated sense of personal space. He blocked an entire aisle by his lonesome self. If you’re even a half-decent person, you don’t take up more space than you need.
  • He totally disregarded the pickpocket who was standing right next to him the entire time.

In short, he had no awareness of his surroundings at all. None. He lived in his own little world and everybody else was not even a blip on his radar. Just background noise. To make it worse, when he messed up, he started blaming others for his own faults. Not that he deserved to be robbed but he did make it hard to feel any pity for him.

I may not be the sharpest person there is but I spotted the thief right away. The only reason I did so was years of constantly trying to be aware of what was going on around me, trying to spot problems or dangers before they came close. Awareness is the very first thing you need for effective self-defense, so you need to work on it especially hard. After a while, it becomes a habit and you don’t have to think much about it anymore

Mind you, I’m deaf, dumb, and blind compared to some of my friends. Their awareness is like a finely tuned self-defense radar, spotting trouble long before my radar even says “beep.” But here, I picked up on the vibe the guy sent off and immediately knew something was wrong. So I kept track of where he was at all times, noticed him again before he left the store, and made a mental note to look for him in the parking lot, just in case. Turned out I didn’t need that last part.

Awareness isn’t a one-time thing. It’s a skill you constantly practice, also when you’re going shopping. In this case, my self-defense training perhaps saved me from losing my wallet.

For some more information about awareness and self-defense against pickpockets, try this book:

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MMA against multiple opponents, Part Three

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In a previous post, I wrote about MMA against multiple opponents, also in the second part. Before you post comments, please read those two posts and especially this one here.

I hadn’t really planned on taking up the subject again though. That is, until I came across this video. It illustrates perfectly what I wrote, take a look.

Now we can go on and on about:

  • How this guy obviously wasn’t an MMA fighter and should have done technique X,Y or Z.
  • You, your teacher, GSP, Randy Couture, or whoever you want to bring in as an example, would have destroyed both opponents with Mixed Martial Arts techniques.
  • I suck because I bring this up again and it takes you out of your comfort zone where you can feel MMA is the ULTIMATE-MEGA–FIGHTING-SYSTEM of not only the world but also the entire universe! Roar!!!!!

But these are pretty lame arguments and we all know it. :-)

The facts are clear and cannot be refudiated (Thank you Sarah Palin!) ;-):

  • There’s an argument between two men, a woman tries to negotiate a peace.
  • They start fighting and quickly close in a clinch.
  • The fight remains standing until one fighter trips the other by tripping him over a railing.
  • A wrestling match ensues, mostly on the ground. Neither man is really winning.
  • A third party shows up and starts kicking the crap out of one opponent. This causes him to freeze and take a lot of damage.
  • We don’t know how the fight ends but it’s not looking well…
Looking for self defense against multiple opponents? Try this video here.

Some thoughts:

  • Neither men looked like a particularly experienced or trained fighter.
  • The situation could probably have been resolved easily with the GUMP-doctrine: “RUN Forrest! RUUUUUN!”
  • Once the third man came up, the fight is a one-way street. The lonesome defender freezes up and takes the beating. I hope he made it out of there alright because these kind of beatings can do permanent or terminal damage.
  • He’s exceedingly lucky the third guy didn’t pull a knife or look for an environmental weapon.
  • Speaking of environment, tripping over the railing pretty much turned it into a ground fight (they only got up once afterwards, and not for long). There is nothing to trip over in the Octagon but there’s plenty in the real world. As you can see, it makes a difference…

Like I said again and again: MMA is not useless for self-defense, nor is it useless against multiple attackers.

But, and it’s a big but, (Ooooh, I crack myself up!) there are huge differences between the Octagon and the street.  And as Randy said, the differences are just as important as the similarities. You disregard these differences at your own risk…

If you’d like to read some of my thoughts of how to use MMA techniques for self defense, try this series called From the Octagon to the Street.

As always, that’s just my take on things. If you disagree, no worries. If you like it and can use it in your training, then that’s great. In the end, you make your own choices about how you train and have to live with the results. My point is, choose wisely after considering the pro’s and con’s. Instead of choosing because it feels more comfortable not to consider issues you don’t like to hear about. Or because somebody else said so.

UPDATE: The video was unavailable for a while because Youtube decided it violated their terms of service. Which is pretty funny because I took it from another youtube account and copied it on mine.  So now I’m linking to the same video, also on Youtube…

UPDATE 2: Here’s part Four…

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