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June 14, 2019 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
11:59
The SMART way to learn self-defense skills at any age
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Today's podcast is about efficiency in using your time to learn self-defense and survival skills.
And this is not going to give you any specific skills.
Rather, this is about how to use your time efficiently in deciding what to learn, what to study, and how to get your skills maximized.
And I came to this realization after going through many, many years of training in different skill sets.
I'm trained in pistol combat, carbine rifle combat, edge weapons combat skills, hand-to-hand fighting combat skills.
But what I've learned in pursuing all these different skills through years of martial arts training and, you know, gun range training and training from former military operators and so on, is that you can acquire about 80% of the skills you need in about 20% of the time.
So it's the 80-20 rule.
Now, let me explain.
I've met people who are experts in each of these areas.
And in most cases, They are very, very weak in the other areas that I mentioned here.
So, for example, I've met people who are expert pistol marksmen.
They win pistol competitions.
They're like master geniuses with a pistol.
But can they block a punch?
Can they block a kick?
Can they resist an arm bar on the ground?
You know, Brazilian jiu-jitsu type stuff.
Do they know anything about MMA? Do they know what to do if someone attacks them with a knife?
So, there are a lot of people who are pistol competition experts and they're very, very good.
Much better at shooting pistols than I am.
But they wouldn't know what to do if they were attacked on the street.
This is true.
At the same time, There are people who are expert Brazilian jiu-jitsu masters.
BJJ, it's called.
And they win competitions and they have gold medals and they're in the Olympics, man.
There are BJJ experts that can tie you into knots using your own arms and legs on the ground where you don't even know what happened.
Some of these people are so good, it seems like they have four legs and three arms themselves.
They're Again, they're geniuses at BJJ. But what happens in BJJ, you're not allowed to punch your opponent.
So if you start striking a person who is an expert in BJJ, they're out of their domain.
You start punching and kicking and kneeing them and smacking them in the temple with your elbow.
Then suddenly that's not BJJ and they don't know what to do.
Well, many of them don't.
Some have had cross training.
And that's really what I'm getting to here.
I'm advocating cross training.
And I'll get to that in a second.
I just want to give you some important examples.
So there are also people who are very good at striking.
And they've learned MMA and they compete in MMA. And they're good at punching and kicking and doing knees and things like that.
But, they wouldn't know what to do if someone draws a gun on them.
Because they've never faced a gun.
And I don't care how good your wrestling is, I don't care how good your base is, I don't care how good your escapes are, how good your mount position is, whatever.
If someone fires a 9mm round into your torso, all your skills are basically out the window at that point.
So the answer to this is in terms of the context is self-defense on the streets, self-defense in the real world.
Things happen to you, you're attacked, and the typical attack scenario is a dark parking lot.
So you're trying to get into your car and somebody's Attacking you or puts a gun, points a gun at you or threatens you with a knife.
Now, what skill set do you need in the real world?
And the answer is, you need to be competent in all of these areas that I've mentioned.
Striking, ground game, pistol, edge weapons, and defenses against all of those.
And the good news is that you can gain competency or proficiency, as I say, in all these areas, including rifle, in a fraction of the time that it takes to become a master of those areas.
So if you want to become a master of BJJ, you could spend easily 10 years.
And if you're good and you're dedicated, you could be Very competent.
You could be one of the best potentially, you know, in your weight class in 10 years.
Maybe in 15 or 20 years, you might be a true master.
And you could also, you could be a master if you didn't do BJJ, but you just became a competition pistol shooter.
You could be a master pistol shooter in 10 years.
And so on and so forth.
You could master, you know, sword play in 10 years.
If you dedicated 10 years to one thing, you'd be really, really good at it, whatever it is.
But what if you took, what if you did two years of BJJ and two years of pistol training and two years of edge weapons defenses and two years, you know what I'm saying?
You break it up and you spread your skills around.
What you end up with is that 80% proficiency level in many different areas.
And that's actually what I've done.
I didn't necessarily realize I was doing it this way.
I didn't set out to do it this way from the start.
But I do tend to get bored easily and I like to learn new things.
So it kind of just naturally became this way for me where I ended up gaining very good proficiency in one area and then I moved on to a different area.
Learn those skills and then move to another area.
Learn those skills.
For example, I'm also a long-range target shooter.
So I understand long-range ballistics.
And I have a fair amount of experience doing that.
And for me, you know, hitting a steel target at a thousand yards is not a complicated thing.
It's actually just math.
Well, I guess consistency in math.
But so...
I'm the kind of guy who, because of this approach, which is what I'm advocating, you might want to think about how you're spending your time.
Instead of becoming the super master expert in one area, but being completely without skills in the other areas, wouldn't it be great to have proficiency in all these things?
So no matter what your situation is, maybe you're in a gun-free zone.
You know, that's actually a kill zone, by the way.
If you're in a gun-free zone, you better hope you have knife skills.
You better hope you have hand-to-hand combat skills.
Not that those would necessarily defend you against somebody, you know, with an AR, because they tend to target gun-free zones, of course.
But having some skills to evade or to attack the shooter, having some skills is better than none.
If you know how to take away a rifle from someone or take away a pistol from someone, which is, that's taught in Krav Maga, by the way, kind of mid-level Krav Maga teaches that stuff all day long.
You can stop a shooter.
In fact, I've often said, I am way more afraid of a bad guy with a knife than a bad guy with a pistol.
And if you've done any self-defense training at all, you would agree with that assessment.
It's simple.
It's simple to understand why.
Because a gun can only shoot in one direction.
Imagine a laser beam coming out of the barrel of the gun.
That's it.
That's the only dangerous area.
A knife is dangerous across an entire imaginary plane that can be shifting at any moment.
You try to take away a knife from someone, you're going to get cut.
You try to take away a gun from someone, you can usually stop.
The gun from cycling.
You can point the gun away from you.
You can often torque the gun and break the person's finger if they left it on the trigger, in the trigger guard.
You can break their finger off right there.
There's a lot of things.
I would much rather face somebody with a pistol than face somebody with a knife.
I'm talking close range.
Now, medium range, I don't want to face somebody with a rifle.
Because rifles are very accurate.
Rifles are way more accurate than pistols.
In any case, I hope I'm underscoring the important point here.
So spread your time around.
Learn different things that might help you.
And also, as you're doing this, it'll take care of all your fitness needs at the same time.
You'll be fit.
If you do Krav Maga or you do BJJ or you do, I don't know, kickboxing, mixed martial arts, any of that stuff, you're going to be fit.
And that fitness is going to help you in every area that you pursue as it relates to self-defense and survival skills.
Because if you want to run a rifle and do it accurately and be able to handle it, if you're fit, all the better.
I've been to a lot of classes where there's really overweight, obese kind of fat dudes with pistols.
And those classes, I mean, they get gassed very quickly.
And in reality, you're going to need some stamina probably to deal with some kind of a situation.
You might have to move.
You're not going to be standing in one place probably in the real world.
So keep your fitness.
Stay fit.
And you'll be fine.
So thanks for listening.
This is Mike Adams here, the Health Ranger.
You can read my website, of course, naturalnews.com.
I also have some specialty sites about survival.
One of them is survival.news.
So check that out.
And you can hear more of my podcasts and see my gear review videos, which I've been doing a lot more recently, on the right column of the homepage of naturalnews.com.
Check out the videos there.
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Thank you for listening and be safe out there, okay?
Get good training.
Be smart.
Be alert.
Because it's a dangerous world.
But if you're aware and alert and have some basic skills, you can be safe.
It's doable.
You can achieve it.
Thanks for listening.
Thank you for watching CounterThink.
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