Close Quarter Combat training is not about an even playing field, It is about making sure that the situation you’re involved in is a completely uneven playing field and the scales are tipped in your favour. Consequently, you must always make a thorough threat assessment of the person you are about to engage in conflict with.
Our objective is survival. It is to teach you how to walk away and survive each particular life threatening situation, even if the threat you’re involved in is twice as big as you, massively muscular, and wants to fight. The objective is to look at using an improvised weapon to defend yourself because we know the scales are not tipped in our favour. Smart people tip the scales in their favour when street fighting. When making threat assessments, we are looking for common ‘carry signs’ such as - is this person carrying a weapon, is there an imprint of a weapon, is there a clip of a tactical folder present or is there and imprint of a hand gun? Being aware of a weapon threat makes us aware of the dangers that might be involved in engaging with this person.
We also need to consider if the threat has any friends present., is he by himself or does he have back-up? All of these things will determine the sort of tactics that we may need to use. For example, the presence of friends indicate it would not be the smartest tactics to get in there and try and take the opponent down to the ground, holding them there till the police come. Why? We know that it is very likely that our opponent’s mates are going to come straight in and engage us. A logical assessment of a situation like this would be to consider using a very heavy striking-orientated module. More importantly, the striking module used should immediately knock down the opponent, inflicting severe damage. The aim is to maximize the psychological impact and prevent the others engaging, because in group situations people tend to adopt a ‘pack mentality’.
If you begin striking someone, and strike them again and again, with the conflict going on for a while, what starts out as a one-on-one encounter quickly leaves you outnumbered. The pack will start to move in because they see that there is very minimal risk of them getting injured. However, if you get in there and use very heavy striking blows targeted at weaknesses of the human anatomy to quickly knock people down, the pack will tend not to engage. They logically asses the risk to their own safety should they join the fray. Threat assessment is something you need to do in a few seconds, and you should practice all the time to ensure you will have the right survival instincts and skills to defend yourself in life threatening situations.
Glenn Zwiers is a world renowned expert in reality based self defence and teaches courses worldwide. He can be contacted at www.learncombat.com
