Home Security Safe Room, Part 2

Here is part two on suggestions for creating a safe room in the home.  These are pretty thoughtful ideas.  It’s always a smart idea to plan for worst case scenario.  Preparation does not equate to paranoia, which is what we have to convince folks sometimes.  We can find plenty of statistics to back up the “need” for preparation.  In addition, it never fails that we have more than one individual in a seminar that has successfully evaded or been touched in some way by violent crime.

http://letstalkhomesecurity.com/?p=2016

 

Great Ideas for Home Security Plan

I got some interesting ideas from this article on the Lets Talk Home Security website.  I like the idea of creating a safe room in the house, using the same things you would for your external doors, like reinforced frames, doors and deadbolts.  There is a lot of stuff in here that probably does not occur to most homeowners, myself included.  I hear more and more about home invasions, and certainly we all need to have some basic plan in place so we can do something useful if the you-know-what hits the fan while we are chilling out at the homestead!

http://letstalkhomesecurity.com/?p=2014

 

Post on “Hooded Box Drill”

Here is an interesting post on the things worth believing in weblog, with video, on training dynamic warriors.  I fully realize this is geared towards law enforcement and operators, but these concepts can be applied to civilian training/real-world self-protection because, in the end, a hostile environment that endangers our lives requires decisive action no matter who we are or what our mission is in life.

We’ve talked in class about hooded drills.  The hood comes off, and you have to deal with whatever threat presents itself. . .

http://tgace.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/reboot-your-ooda-loop/

 

Blog post on the concept of “aliveness”

This post brings up an interesting point about “aliveness” training.  We had arguments this summer about this, because in a seminar I attended, instructors overemphasized full-throttle training before students really had any skills to speak of–before they had truly been brought along so it was something they could handle, in my humble opinion.  There is reality training, and there is kicking the crap out of people who have no mental preparation, and who, frankly speaking, you may lose forever if that is their first experience. 

Without further blabbering on my part, here is the post on that great blog, TDA Training, and a video clip explaining aliveness :) :

http://tdatraining.blogspot.com/2009/11/is-aliveness-most-important-thing.html

Geoff Thompson and Fence Concepts

Conditioning Research is an informative, well-written website on all things related to health, nutrition and exercise.  Here is an excellent post and YouTube clips regarding fence concepts, as put forth by the great Geoff Thompson.  We have posted before on his protégé, Al Peasland, and his fence concepts.  Think of a fence as your protective barrier.  There is much more to it than that, and I am oversimplifying a bit, so definitely check out the clips and learn from one of the premiere real-world self-protection masters.  Great stuff! 

http://conditioningresearch.blogspot.com/2009/10/fence.html

Dennis Martin

We often talk about Dennis Martin on this blog.  We have drawn a lot valuable information on combatives from his forum, and we appreciate his perspective and attention to detail on real-world self-protection.  Check out his site, and read about his book, Working with Warriors (available through Amazon UK):

http://www.cqbservices.com/

 

 

Mark’s Daily Apple on Fitness and Survival

Here are some very interesting posts by Mark Sisson on his weblog, Mark’s Daily Apple: Primal Living in the Modern World.  It is a well-written four-part series, discussing the meaning of fitness, modern standards, and how fitness relates to issues of survival not only for the average person, but also for our special forces.  Mark gives a nod to Crossfit in the final post, and discusses his own thoughts on standards based on our primal roots.  You should also check out his book, The Primal Blueprint, which the other instructor is reading and highly recommends!  It is important to be fit for health and longevity as well as fit to fight (in case you ever have to assert your right to longevity!!).  Speaking of Crossfit, we are currently working on ourselves and some of our clients in an effort to meet the Crossfit benchmark standards.  We find them very comprehensive, and though some people do take the workouts to the absolute extreme, scaled properly and ramped up reasonably, they are very well-rounded standards, indeed.   Anyhoo, Check out these posts!

Post 1: What Does it Mean to Be Fit? 

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/what-does-it-mean-to-be-fit/#more-8879 

 

Post 2: Could You Save Your Own Life? 

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/could-you-save-your-own-life/ 

 

Post 3: Modern Fitness Standards: How Do You Measure Up? 

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/physical-fitness-standards/ 

 

Post 4: Primal Blueprint Fitness Standards 

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/primal-blueprint-fitness-standards/ 

 

Mark’s book: 

http://primalblueprint.com/

NLP and CQB

We are starting to delve more deeply into the concepts of Neuro Linguistic Programming so we can apply it to rapid learning in class.  Feels like I’ve just been reading a lot of metadata, now I am finally reading about the nuts and bolts.  If we can learn to use these techniques, students can absorb Combatives Concepts more quickly and be able to use them immediately.  Even beyond conceptual information, we want them to acquire skills more quickly.  I already know that some camps say NLP is a pseudoscience.  I am not so much worried about that because I keep reading about its application and find arguments quite compelling in light of other material I have read about the brain. 

Here is an interesting article by Lee Morrison (Urban Combatives) on his experience training with Marcus Wynne and applying NLP to CQB.  He was not able to go into a lot of the specifics because Marcus has developed his own approach.  If only we knew what that man knows! 

http://www.urbancombatives.com/marcus.htm 

I am currently reading a book that lays out the NLP concepts.  It applies them to maintaining health, but one should be able to apply them to anything in life.  I remember Marcus mentioning the book in another article, so I went digging for it.  All of this reminds me of another book I have that I didn’t get to reading yet.  It is entitled Sources of Power, and it is about how people make decisions, under duress, that save lives.  Do you ever feel like you have all the pieces of a puzzle, to unlock your understanding and take what you do to the next level, but you just haven’t figured out how to arrange everything yet?  Of course, there is always more to learn, even if you finally do put one of the puzzles together.

Imagine versus Visualize

In my last post I talked briefly about helping students to imagine all aspects of a scenario through imagination, using language that speaks to all the senses, not just visual.  Some people really struggle with mental pictures, or have none at all.  For me, it simply became a habit not to visualize.  I once had the ability to vividly create mental pictures, but I was told as a kid to “stop daydreaming!”  Now, I was not able to hold onto the images for long stretches at a time, but I could nevertheless create them.  This could be true for you, as well; maybe you are just rusty!  OR, maybe you need to imagine things with other sensory information.  It is an individual thing.

Brian Willis talks about this very dilemma of visualization in his blog post.  Interesting reading:

http://excellenceintraining.typepad.com/excellence_in_training/2009/10/imagine-vs-visualize.html

Gutterfighting.org

You may have already checked out their website, but I wanted to direct you to another group of Gutterfighters here in the states.  There is a lot of great information here about World War II Combatives, and if you read this blog regularly, you know we like to give credit where credit is due:

http://gutterfighting.org/Main.html