How To Make Your Self Defense Training More Effective

You take with you in combat all the good and bad habits that you learned in your training routine. If your tactics in your training consist of high fancy kicks, and wide movements, which require you to have a lot of room you will instinctively do the same when your adrenaline kicks in a street confrontation. That will seriously hinder you if you are fighting for survival in a confined area with furniture around such as a living room or bedroom. Your training should focus on the mind/spirit as well. Self-defense is 90% mental it does not matter how effective your tactics are, if you do not train your mind for combat you will freeze.

Condition stimulus training is about making your training as real as possible so when your instincts take over in high adrenaline stressed situation you are ready to use your environment to your advantage and not be hindered by it. Your mind will also be familiar with the stimulus, and you will not freeze. Many martial artists and practitioners of self-defense programs become overwhelmed when their environment changes from a dojo setting to a small, confined area. Being in a room filled with furniture gives a martial artists the feeling of being closed in on and makes them feel that they cannot move, so they stiffen. Being in this type of environment changes the way you are going to move or perform a tactic. It is completely different from movement in a dojo where you have a vast amount of space.

When you are threatened and your adrenaline kicks in you now unknowingly give 100% faith and trust to your self-defense system that it will get you out of harm’s way. Remember you fight like how you trained if you have trained in traditional systems, you will most likely not use your environment to your advantage to defend yourself instead you will be hindered. You will focus on how you cannot move and get tied up with objects in a room such as furniture because your training has not prepared you for that type of stimulus. What you wear while training is also a big factor when it comes to being prepared to move in the streets. Many self-defense training systems get practitioners to wear loose-fitting clothing when they practice tactics for the obvious reason of being able to move freely. The downside of this is that when you move on the street wearing boots, jeans, and form-fitting clothing your range of motion is restricted. You will move much slower and if you are a female wearing heels will be off-balance performing tactics because you have not trained yourself to move with heels on

The benefit of training this way is obvious, you give yourself more options, weapons, and exits. Your mind is prepared and conditioned for the stimulus that comes its way when violence is presented to it. The more the mind is shown a stimulus the more it is accustomed to it and unfazed it becomes normal; just like any other everyday event, it has experienced.