Real Fighting: Adrenaline Stress Conditioning Through Scenario-Based Training

by Peyton Quinn

Techniques learned in the dojo rarely work in a real fight. Here the author of A Bouncer's Guide to Barroom Brawling offers a practical solution. Learn how to control the rush of adrenaline into your system and harness it effectively to shut down the bully's antics or pound him into the pavement when all else fails.

Genres: Martial Arts, Nonfiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1996

Reviews

[Connor]

Good straightforward stuff. A lot of what this book talks about reinforces and reiterates what I read in Rory Miller's Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training and Real World Violence and Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (not surprising, considering I found Quinn through the bibliographies of those two books). I don't think someone would be missing that much by just reading Miller and skipping Quinn. Essentially, both authors say that most martial arts and self-defense training is fundamentally flawed for two reasons. First, training without full contact ultimately means training to "pull your punches." In a real violent situation, this results in the student not connecting or not attacking with full force, because that's how they practiced. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, traditional training does not prepare the student for what Quinn terms the "adrenal stress" of an actual violent situation. Both authors note that, faced with real violence for the first time, practically everyone reacts with panic or fear as training and gross motor skills go out the window (side note: The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why by Amanda Ripley is an interesting summary of how people respond to dangerous or life-threatening events). There are a number of studies that back this up - Quinn mentions how the skill of police officers on the firing range is not at all correlated with their performance with their weapons in the line of duty.

In Real Fighting, Quinn describes the training system he has devised to try and resolve these issues. Students are put through a gauntlet of unpredictable scenarios against the Bulletmen, the heavily armored instructors who appear on the cover. The armor allows the students to fight without holding back, and the unexpected nature of the scenarios is supposed to result in the adrenaline stress conditioning of the title. Having not participated in the program myself and with a distinct lack of real world violent experience, I won't try to make any authoritative judgments regarding its efficacy. In his books and through personal correspondence, Miller has expressed his skepticism that any training system can truly prepare someone for the swiftness and unexpectedness of an actual violent assault, and I can see his point. As much as Quinn tries to catch his students with their guard down (e.g. attacking a trainee while they are watching another one's exhibition), everyone in the room still knows they are there to prepare for a violent encounter and are expecting it to some degree, even if they don't know the details beforehand. That being said, Quinn makes a convincing case that any form of training purporting to be for "self-defense" that doesn't allow for full contact and effort on the part of the students is more or less worthless as preparation for real world violence.

Side note: something interesting I did learn from Quinn is that most East Asian martial arts are just that - stylized art forms, only codified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taekwando in the modern conception is a particularly egregious offender - developed by a Korean general in the 1950's as a nationalist symbol, its unique showy kicks are purely artistic flourishes designed to distinguish it from the Japanese karate. This is not to say that these disciplines have no purpose - Quinn states that the truly complete fighters he knows all have at least a passing familiarity with one or more of the styles. It should, however, dispel the notion that those training in modern dojos are heirs to some battle-tested warrior tradition.

[Jpr_1970 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply put, THE most accurate and useful book on self defense, bar none. And I was fortunate enough to have an opportunity to meet the author and he's a top-notch guy. I recommend this to anyone wondering if they "have what it takes" to survive a confrontation in today's violent world. You'd be surprised to discover - you do!