Yesterday I had the pleasure of training with Richard 'The Shredder' Dimitri, doing his 'On the Cutting Edge' seminar. It was fantastic!!! Richard is not only extremely knowledgeable about self defense techniques and psychology, he is also a really humble, nice, down-to-earth guy who kept us laughing and learning all day.
A lot of reality based self defense instructors are stern and serious characters who portray a tough guy image like it's their personal armour, not so Richard, who is completely approachable and open to new ways of doing things if they are better than the existing methods. Not many people are so egoless that they can do this.
The 'On the cutting edge' seminar itself started with the verbal confrontation stage of a street fight with us attempting to AVOID the fight by verbal deescalation. If we could successfully do this or run away, this was encouraged. I was taught for the first time exact strategies, what to say and what not to say, to prevent the conflict going physical. Many martial arts and self defense programs pay lip service to escape and avoidance, but far fewer actually train it. They teach you to fight, and seeing as how you react like you train in real situations, this means that if you are verbally confronted there is a huge chance that you'll consciously or unconsciously escalate the confrontation to a situation of physical violence. You may naturally slide into an aggressive stance, cuing your assailant that you intend to get physical, which in turn turns on their adrenaline and makes them predisposed to a pre-emptive attack (see my earlier post on sucker punches).
Richard made a great point when he said you need to avoid contradicting or commanding the other person if you want to deescalate. For example if he says "you were looking at my girl friend" and you say "no I wasn't", you have contradicted him and given him an indication that this conversation isn't going to be resolved verbally. What happens next, he says "yes you did" BAM!! He's smashing you in the face with the sucker punch...
Or you command him, probably unintentionally, by saying "It's ok mate, just calm down" and BAM!!! Fist to your face...
So we practiced verbal deescalation drills. Then we practiced working out, on the fly, if the opponent could be verbally deescalated or if he was determined to attack us. So if he was, as Richard says, "a nice guy having a bad day or an arsehole". If we gave him a face saving way out and he didn't take it, he's an arsehole, so then knowing a fight was inevitable, we started transitioning into preemptive strikes. Richard employs timing and non-telegraphic movement to palm strike to the face as an entry method to move into Shredding. Even when he told us that he was going to hit us, we still couldn't see it coming or avoid the strike.
Just a note, this isn't designed for match fighting, it is a specialised tool for preemptive striking in a street style encounter only. It is as much about understanding the dynamics and psychology of this type of encouter, it is more than just 'a move' or 'secret technique'.
After getting this down, we moved into how to 'Shred' and having had Richard do this to me (to show me what I was doing wrong when attempting it), I can tell you it is frighteningly effective and just plain frightening. It is more akin to being mauled by a pit-bull than fighting a human being and this is what makes it so effective. You do not have a program for dealing with this. The close range ripping, tearing, gounging and striking is not what most people (even or especially trained fighters) expect. People expect kick, puch, trap or grapple, not a rabid lunatic, Hannibal the cannibal motherf*cker growling and biting your cheek off while gouging out you eye and tearing out your throat!!! This stuff is wild and feral and scary.
I didn't see a single person out of a room of training fighters who could stop the preemptive hit and no-one could manage any kind of defense against it. No Brazilian Jujutsu moves, striking or even reaching for a weapon occurred, just people falling into the fetal position and hoping this guy would stop soon.
After learning Shredding, we then applied this concept to static knife defense situations. We started with working out which way to move the knife through analysis of the knife's most dangerous angle of attack and then blocking that line and moving the knife in the opposite direction. Then we learned to anchor the knife and shred the opponent using the knife hand as our anchor.
Throughout the seminar Richard constantly emphasised the futility of violence and the possibility of it destroying your life even if you win. Covered were topics such as legal ramifications, revenge attacks and post-traumatic stress disorder.
This seminar was all about one thing, surviving real world violence. I would highly recommend this seminar to anyone serious about this topic.
Thanks to Richard Dimitri, Dom (for lending his body for research purposes) and Paul Johnstone of Defensive Measures International for making this seminar happen. And now I'm off to attend another day with Richard, who is offering his 'Walk the Talk' seminar for the first time ever. Should be interesting...
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