This is a longer one, so here is the gist:

• When you think about a self-defense tool to carry, you must consider
  • Legal ramifications
  • Financing the tool and the training to use that specific tool
  • How are you planning to carry and deploy the tool when needed
  • Finally, after you considered all the previous, what is that best self-defense tool for you?

For some reason people look at me as some sort of cold-weapons-expert; as such two questions I’m often asked are “what do you carry?” and “what do you recommend to carry?”
Let us start with the second question, since that is the more important and interesting one. The choice of tool to carry requires you to consider several issues, the least important of them, surprisingly, and the last one to consider is “what is the best tool for self-defense?”
The first to consider is the legal issue:

1. “What can you legally carry?”

Laws change between countries and between states. If you travel a lot out of state, your answer is going to be very
different then someone whom tends to travel little or not at all.
Can you carry a firearm? Under what rules and stipulations? What kind of ammunition is legal?
Can you legally carry a blade? What kind of a blade? Is a fixed blade legal? What length? Are folders legal? Is the
locking mechanism for the folder legal? Is the opening mechanism for the folder legal? For good or for bad, legislators at
various places have a response to those questions and more set by various legislation that change across state and
country lines. Here what you are carrying is legal, 5 miles from here you will spend the night in jail for the same tool and
see a judge in the morning.

2. Do you have a viable excuse for carrying this tool?
A gun has one purpose when used – to put holes in the bad guy. You need to be justified and act according to the laws,
and, use legal ammunition. You must also train to tell the legal authorities, which will reach you soon after the shooting,
clearly and concisely, exactly why you made holes in that other person. If you do not know how to do so, or what exactly
are the laws governing justified shooting, do not get that tool until you get that training. It is not enough to point and shoot at paper targets and recite the safety procedure for handling a gun.
Do you have a justified cause for carrying a fixed blade? A folder? Assuming that tool is legal, some countries require a
reason for carrying a legal size blade. In some of those places if your reason is “self-defense”, your tool will be taken from you and you will spend the night in jail and await prosecution. I’m referring here to western, democratic countries, so
something to think about. Again, if you made cuts and holes in a bad person, you need to explain that concisely and
clearly to the authorities when they reach you. You can have a justified self-defense cause to kill a man, and in some
places, if you used an illegal tool to defend yourself, you will go to jail.

Now that you cleared the legal issue, the second issue to consider is financial – more precisely, how much money (and
time) can you reasonably spend on the tool itself and on training?

1. As for the tool, if it is a gun, find a self-defense shooting instructor, actually I take that back, find at least three self-defense shooting instructors and ask them what tool based on their expertise best suits YOU. If you can (afford to) reach an expert instructor and ask same question. If you don’t have the means, google it. Some of the best instructors out there write blogs and have free online videos on the topic. You need to find a tool that fits the size of your hands, a size you can carry comfortably and a caliber you can handle and do enough damage with, in case you need to protect your loved ones. This may be expensive but when it comes to a gun put the money in or do not get it. You need to spend money on quality training, spend money on regular training and spend money on quality ammunition for carry. You also need to learn how to keep your gun clean and ready to use.

As for knives – get something cheap. Spend your money on collectables you keep at home, a good camping knife if
you like camping and going to the woods. If you need a self-defense carry tool, get something cheap. Make sure it is
sharp. That is it. If you are not SF, if you do not wear fatigues due to your occupation, you are not SWAT, have a bunch of letters on the back of your jacket etc., you don’t need to carry a blade that cost more than double digits at most.

2. Training is both time consuming and very costly. If you do not have the time and money to train, do NOT carry a gun! Do NOT handle a gun. Better yet, stay away from guns. Cold weapons’ training is cheaper but you still need to spend time
and money on training.

Next issues to consider is how are you going to carry and how are you going to deploy?

1. Do you have a carry system? Did you spend extra $ to get the most appropriate carry rig to fit you and the tool you are carrying? What happens when you change the type of clothing you are wearing? Does it still fit? Can you carry it wearing jeans? Elegant wear? Khakis? Sport attire? T-shirt? Suit? Dress? Button up shirt? Etc. if you wear the same type of cloths every day both day and night, your problem is what happen that once in a while something forces you to change (which also means you are going to be more vulnerable than usual). If you wear a suit during the day and jeans and a t-shirt at the evening going downtown, that means you need to consider that on a regular base.
2. Do you and can you train deployment with your attire?

Finally, after considering the legal issue, the financial considerations, and what can you carry based on your regular attire; it is time to consider what kind of tool is best suitable under all these stipulations. The answer will vary based on the law, finance, habits, physical size, attire and training. There is no “one size fits all” for this question.

BTW, as for the first question people usually ask me; I travel a lot on regular bases, so the answer is: depends where I’m at, the general alert for that area, and where I’m going next.

OK, I’ll join the bandwagon/parade

Here is the gist:
I. The reality of a knife attack:
If you are attacked with a sharp/pointy object:

1. You will get cut/stabbed/slashed.
2. You will bleed. Probably a lot.

II. What can you do to prevent:

1. Be ALERT. Pay ATTENTION to what is going on around you. That in itself drastically reduces the chances of you being the target.

• You CANNOT be alert if you are using your smartphone.
• Any time you go to your smartphone you are CLUELESS.

III. What can you do if you are a target:

• Hit the attacker’s head as hard as you can until you can run away or until they drop.
• If you have anything hard/strong/heavy use it to hit their head.

IV. What you should NOT do:

1. If you are untrained/unarmed do NOT engage the attacker
2. Do NOT try to disarm them

Ok here are a few more details (and with slightly different order):

I. If you ARE alert, if you notice what is going on around you, if you LOOK aware (and preferably ready) you WILL drastically reduce the chances of being attacked - Yes, that simple.

• The attacker goal is not to fight with the biggest, strongest, most able and ready -guy, rather to hit/injure/kill as many guys as possible. It is easier, hence more attractive, to attack people that are obviously clueless. Easier target= better success rate= more people hurt. So get your head out of your smartphone and pay attention to F#@king life.
• By doing that (i.e., paying attention) if something will happen you will be able to do something – scream so everyone else will notice, throw something at him, call LE/security for help….something…
  

II. Since you probably are not going to keep your cellphone in your pocket and start paying attention, here are a few realty bits:

If you are attacked with a sharp/pointy object:

1. You will be stabbed/slashed
2. You will bleed; probably a lot

• How badly you get hurt depends on three things:

1. Where you got stabbed
2. How many times you got stabbed
3. Do you have adrenaline running in your system OR were you hit unaware

• You can’t do much about any of these factors if you are unaware. So pay attention to life (facebook has history, WhatsApp massages are not self-deleting….)

III. You got hit and you are untrained (watching short vids/reading a couple of internet advises (like this one) attending an hour seminar about knife defense means you are untrained and unready. BTW It’s a good time to start training). What should you try to do?

1. Hit the attacker’s head as hard as you can until you can run away or until he/she drop (If you can use something strong/heavy to hit his/her head even better)
2. Hit their head. Hard. As many times as you can. Don’t kick them. Don’t wrestle. If you are not running you should be hitting their head
3. So should I repeat hit their head hard, many times or run away one more time?

IV. What you should absolutely NOT do:

1. DO NOT try to disarm them. Their goal is you injured/dead. Trying to disarm them, you are most likely to get injured/dead. If so, they win. Your goal is to stop them. You may get hurt trying to do so, so minimize your risk. if you want to disarm them, once they are lying unconscious on the ground kick the blade out of their hand.
2. If you are untrained – do not engage a knife-wielding attacker.
   1. If you do not understand that by engaging you WILL get cut/die, if you are not scared from the concept of a knife attack, if you never trained against a knife under stress, if you think you will not danger your life if you engage, then you are untrained.
   2. If you are trained OR if you must protect your loved ones - hit them hard in the head, preferably find something to hit them with. If you can – shoot them. Center mass, until they drop.

The world is relatively a very safe place. Most likely, you will get home tonight and you will wake up tomorrow just fine. However, there are bad people in this nice safe world. Some of which will hurt you to get tradeable commodity from your dead body. Some bad people will hurt you because your skin color is different/your social status. Some of which will hurt you because you don’t worship the god they do – or you don’t worship in the manner they do. Few are not even bad people; they have serious mental health issues and if not treated they may hurt you. There are sex offenders and child molesters out there. There are quite a few bad people in this safe world. It is a good time to start training how to defend your loved ones and yourself from the bad people that live in our safe world. And, if you are training – good for you. Train harder.

This is a longer one so here is the gist of it:

• Intuition is a skill you can (and should) train
• It is based on subconscious brain mechanisms
• Train with people that can enhance this skill
• Train your brain to pay attention to kinesics, biometrics and intent cues to enhance your ability to recognize danger to a subconscious level and hone your intuition skills.

 
Take experienced LE professionals with several years’ experience working the streets. Many times, they can “feel” a suspect just by looking at him or her. They can feel when one is posing a threat. Experienced military personal can “feel” when a room they about to enter is dangers, and sometimes even from which direction the threat is. It is a combination of knowing how to look, what to look for and “sensing” the environment. The trick is – how do you get novices a head start on these skills so they won’t need 5 years on the street or numerous CQB entries.

My dear friend Marcus Wynne teaches these skills. In some countries and cultures, it seems like what he does is black magic. How can you “install” intuition? Is it new age/black magic? We are not sure about all the science behind it but there are some clues. A good starting point is the RAS (reticular activation system) in your brain. Part of what the RAS does is control what you pay attention to and your arousal level. Almost all information that enter the brain goes through the RAS (accept for smell which goes straight to the emotional/memory regions of the brain). The thing is, YOU teach the RAS what to bring to your attention and what not to.  

The RAS is the system that makes you pay attention when your name is being called, even if you are in a different conversation. It allows you to find Waldo quickly in a crowded picture. It allows you to notice the anomaly in a group of people.  If you train it, it will notice things we “forgot” such as people’s state and states changes, a person’s hostile intent and various dangers. When an SF enters a room and “feels” something is wrong he literally “feels” it. The heart and brain emit an EMP (just like your microwave or any other electrical operated tech). Changes in state and hostile intent change these EMPs. Remember seeing a national geographic film of the Zebras drinking from a water reservoir and the lionesses stalking them from a far and then a brief second before they attack suddenly a zebra raise its head and look toward the lionesses hiding. The lionesses are still in ambush mode and yet the zebra could tell there is a danger in that direction. Only then, the chase begins. Well, that EMP change is part of the “how that happens”. That change in EMP goes through to the zebra RAS and gets its attention. We have that same mechanism. When someone has “intent” towards you, you can sense that EMP. If you “teach”, your RAS this is important – it will bring it to your awareness (probably via “gut feeling”). How many times you “felt” someone is looking at you and raised your head to notice exactly that? It is just that unless we are exposed to danger on regular bases – like LE or military – we tend to let this skill atrophy. There is also political correctness to blame but that is another issue. So you need to teach your RAS what to bring to your attention.

During a female only situational awareness/safety class, we had the girls trained in basic enhanced visual skills (which also helps get the brain more alert) and recognizing “the feeling” of when someone has hostile intent towards them. At the end of the class, we had each lady (age ranged from late teens to early 50’s) walk by herself either through a hallway or up/down a stairwell. There was a “bad guy” that did not participate in the class, hidden from sight and at a certain point of their walk focused his malintent on the lady walking. Not only that all the ladies could tell the moment that happened, pretty much all of them could point to the direction the “bad guy” was hiding. It does sound like black magic…

One night I was having a drink in local bar. There were only two female bartenders working that night. Late in the evening, a man entered the bar and caught my attention. After observing him for a couple of minutes, I asked the bartender if the guy is a regular or does she know him. The answer was no. I proceeded to tell her he is going to stay last, that he is not going to want to leave and that they should not stay by themselves with him, and offered a couple of suggestion regarding what to do. As she knew me, she took notice. The bar closes in the early am and it got pretty late, and since that bartender is a very sharp girl and the man did not do anything wrong, I left. Around 4am I got a phone call from the bartender – the man stayed last, he did not want to leave and they managed to trick him out of the place and lock the door behind him. They then stayed for a very long “closing” time before leaving themselves.

Another way to hone intuition is by paying attention to smell. Before an attack, there is an “adrenalin dump”. Such secretion of hormones results in a distinct scent. It takes training to notice it. That is another part of “intuition”.

So how do you train your intuition skills? Most importantly, you should train with people like Marcus Wynne, Dennis Martin, Nick Hughes and people they coached to train these skills. It is a practiced based skill, not one to get picked up by reading theory. What you can do by yourself is hone your ability to read non-verbal communication. Especially kinesics (e.g., gestures), biometrics (e.g., muscle tension, blood pressure) and intent cues (transmitting what one is about to do before he does it, that we all subconsciously transmit). The more consciously you train to notice these things on a regular bases, the more your RAS will pay attention to them in the subconscious level and the sharper “intuition” you will have.      

originally published August 18th 2015 https://www.facebook.com/notes/fcs-israel/soft-skills-101-situational-awareness-basics/1194897193870689

     A basic soft skills/situational awareness class I teach usually runs about 3-4 hours. That is the minimum amount of time to give someone the most basic applicable skill set (tools) he/she can immediately go outside to the real world and use from that moment on. However, sometimes I only get 30-45 minutes to work with LE or military personal. How do you give them a useful tool they can use and develop in such a short amount of time…? So… here is how you can condense it all to a single valuable tool, which is a single question you can play as a game, with two precursor (a mental state and a helping question): What is different here?
(In operational terms: what is the anomaly here? and, it also can be phrased as: what is out of the ordinary here? or, what is unusual here?)  
The precursor mindset is “situational awareness active”
The helping precursor question is: what should “this” look like? (or, what is normal for this situation?)

     For every situation there is a baseline = how should the environment look like/how should people behave in this environment/situation. We look for anomalies. We look for what is different. This helps cut down the clutter and bring about the important things. What should you do about the anomaly? It depends on your training, skill set, how the situation develops and your obligations (LE, BG, walking around with your little kid etc.). If nothing else, keep monitoring the anomaly and be ready for the situation to develop.

    In his book “How to be your own bodyguard” (http://amzn.com/B005Z8L6YG) Nick Hughes talks about a situation in an African country were a FFL personal used to go clubbing after hours. One night there were no taxi cubs around the clubs area – there were always many taxis around that area…. That night there was a bombing intendent for those FFL personal.
In my security days, I was once working a party venue and we were monitoring a person we knew was trouble. Scanning the venue I suddenly grabbed my partner and told him to do a fast approach with me to a different location – he didn’t get why since “trouble” was to the other side and the venue was very uneventful. He still followed me and we got just in time to stop a different guy mid punch. When I called it, he was about 20ft from the guy he was planning to punch. It wasn’t magic and it wasn’t mind reading. His behavior was an anomaly and adding my knowledge of non-verbal communication and training in recognizing pre-activation-intent-cues, we were able to get there to break the fight in the nick of time.  

     With the mindset of always looking for the anomaly, (playing the game of what is different here?) you are a. developing a lifesaving tool that can always be there for you, and b. can better use the other tools in your skill box. For example, if you are traditionally trained as BG, the eyes-hands cycle can be highly cognitive taxing, and very time costly when you have a big crowd; especially when you have a high-value principal walking in a large crowd. Looking for anomalies allows you to focus the eyes-hands cycle and not lose track of “the big picture”.
When you understand the concept of cognitive uptime/downtime, continuously running a “what is different here subroutine” in the back of your mind will allow you to have a “danger alert signal” even when you are experiencing cognitive downtime. This can be valuable if you work long hours security post/crowd control, or, if you are coming home after a very long day at work or after a very tough workout at the gym. It can literally save your life crossing the street after a long tiring day.

    How do you develop this subroutine? Keep playing the “what is different here” game as often as possible – heck, you can play it any time your outside or even watching TV, a movie or YouTube. The more often you play this game the better your situational awareness will get. Then, adding other tools to your skillset box (pre-activation-intent cues, enhanced visual skill, state access/management and non-verbal communication skills, to name a few) will be easier and faster.

    Oh yes, one last thing about situational awareness basics: get your head out of your G@dd@mn smartphone.

originally published July 22nd 2015  https://www.facebook.com/notes/fcs-israel/fighting-and-footwork-in-short-go-learn-to-dance/1179025955457813

The most important thing in fighting is movement, aka footwork.

    Standing up, you need three fighting stances:

                Largo (long range)

                Medio (medium range)

                Corto (short range)
 
    You need to move fluently in each, and fluently moving from one to the other. Short weapon, long weapon, blade, blunt, improvised…. You need fluidity in three stances, moving in each and moving fluently from one to another. As every decent entry level BJJ student can tell you – it is not the positions but moving from one to the other that gives dominance.

    What kind of footwork? What kind of stances? Those that fits you, fits your body and fits your mechanics and balance. You need to have balance. You need to move easily 360°. It has to correspond with the weapon/range you are fighting in and you need to move within and from one to the other as easy as you leisurely stride down a street. And… you need to train the shit out of it. If your arms move so fast, your feet cannot keep up, you may look impressive, but…. you are not good. Train the shit out of your footwork – and try to make it fun… hint: there is a reason why there is dance in all ancient fighting cultures. Bye the way if you cannot dance (i.e., move fluently with/to a bit)…then your footwork sucks….well I’ll put it nicer: “needs more work”. Salsa, hip hop, break-dance, ballroom, jazz, whatever, if you don't dance learn how to. It'll do wonders to your combatives footwork

    However much theory about fighting ranges (3 ranges, 4 ranges, 5, 7, 9 ranges and if you add drone attacks and ballistic missiles then 11 or 12 range) – you need 3 fighting stances – largo – medio – corto. Everything else is a small variation of each or transitioning from one to the other (e.g., your pistol stance should correspond with your corto stance….). If it is not simple, it simply will not happen; if you have 17 fighting stances – cool. It is just not going to work, not in a rink, not on the street. However, you will look very cool in a demo. 
 

Oh and in case I forgot to mention – train the shit out of your footwork. And do try make it fun.