Loren W. Christensen’s biography appears in the “About the Author” page at the back of the book.
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, U.S. Army (Ret.) is an internationally recognized scholar, author, soldier, speaker, and one of the world’s foremost experts in the field of human aggression and the roots of violence and violent crime. He is a West Point psychology professor, Professor of Military Science, and an Army Ranger who has combined his experiences to become the founder of a new field of scientific endeavor, which has been termed “Killology.”
In this new field, Col. Grossman has made revolutionary new contributions to our understanding of killing in war, the psychological costs of war, the root causes of the current “virus” of violent crime that is raging around the world, and the process of healing the victims of violence, in war and peace.
He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book On Killing, which has been translated into several languages. The book is on the US Marine Corps’ recommended reading list, it’s required reading at the FBI academy, and at numerous other academies and colleges.
Col. Grossman’s most recent book, On Combat, co-authored with Loren W. Christensen, is the highly acclaimed and bestselling sequel to On Killing.
Col. Grossman has been called upon to write the entry on “Aggression and Violence” in the Oxford Companion to American Military History, three entries in the Academic Press Encyclopedia of Violence and numerous entries in scholarly journals, to include the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.
Col. Grossman is an Airborne Ranger infantry officer, and a prior-service sergeant and paratrooper, with a total of over 23 years experience in leading U.S. soldiers worldwide. He retired from the Army in February 1998 and has devoted himself full-time to teaching, writing, speaking, and research. Today, he is the director of the Killology Research Group and, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he is on the road almost 300 days a year, training elite military and law enforcement organizations worldwide about the reality of combat.
To read more about Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, visit his website at www.killology.com
10 Ways to Make Your Sparring Street Smart
By Iain Abernethy
Almost all martial artists include sparring in their training. However, there are many different types of sparring and there is some debate as to what types are most realistic. It’s even fair to say that some question if sparring has any relevance to self-protection situations. To my mind, the amount of relevance that it has to the street is determined by how that sparring is structured. With that in mind, I’d like to raise some of the key issues to consider when structuring your sparring and share 10 ways to help make yours street smart.
A word on awareness and avoidance
From the onset it’s vital that you understand that fighting is what happens when self-protection has gone bad. If you are truly serious about keeping yourself safe on the streets, it’s not fighting you should be focusing on, but awareness and avoidance.
The way I break down self-protection for my students is as follows: 95 percent of self-protection is awareness and avoidance skills coupled with a healthy attitude to personal safety. If you are unable to avoid a situation, you need to be able to control the dialogue and distance, strike preemptively, and use the opportunity to escape. This ability to control a situation before it becomes a fight makes up 4 percent of self-protection. The remaining 1 percent is the fighting skills you fall back on when all else fails. In my experience, it is common for martial artists to overly fixate on fighting (the last 1 percent) and hence they are not effectively addressing the issue of self-protection.
The point I’m making here is that you can be one hell of a kick-ass fighter, and yet still be incapable of keeping yourself safe. If your awareness skills are poor, you’ll be taken out before you are even aware there is a threat. You simply won’t get the opportunity to use your fighting skills. Consider that no matter how good a fighter you are, there will be people who are better. The way to keep yourself safe from more skilled fighters is very simple: don’t fight them! Avoid the situation entirely, and if you can’t, control distance through talking with your hands (keep them between the assailant and you), use dialogue and deception to facilitate a first strike, and then use the moment of confusion to flee. In this way, it can be possible to protect yourself from people you may not be able to out fight. However, if all that fails then you have no option but to fight.
As we’ve established, in this section we are looking at training for that last 1 percent should all your other skills fail; it is therefore not appropriate to discuss in detail awareness and pre-emption. The reason I mention them is that it is vitally important that the sparring methods we are going to examine are viewed from the correct perspective. Remember, fighting skills aren’t the key to self-protection: fighting is what happens when self-protection goes bad.
Sparring and the nature of a street fight
Having established where sparring and fighting fit into the grand scheme of things, the next thing we need to cover briefly is the nature of the environment we are training for. In this book we are talking about the street and therefore the nature of the street will determine how we should spar to prepare for it. If we look at the sparring used in the various combat sports, it is immediately apparent that many differing methods of sparring exist. They vary because what is needed to win varies. What is needed to win is determined by the rules, and hence people sometimes assume that seeing as there are no rules in the street, getting rid of the rules will make sparring like a street situation. However, it’s not that straight forward. Aside from the lack of rules, there are many other things that make a street situation what it is.
A fight is what happens when self-protection goes wrong.
The reality of street fights
A detailed discussion on the nature of street fights is beyond the scope of this look at sparring; however, here are a few key points that need to be considered:
The vast majority take place at close-range.Real fights often involve multiple assailants and weapons.Real fights are fast, frantic and chaotic.Real fights do not resemble a skilled exchange between two martial artists.In a real situation, you need to keep things really simple.The fight might begin without warning (awareness being the key to ensuring it doesn’t).Deceptive or aggressive dialogue will frequently precede any physical exchange.Real fights are terrifying and wholly unpleasant (assuming you’re not a psychopath).
To make our sparring relevant to real situations, we need to consider all the things listed