Drills and Skills

When people first start training, they are often in a rush to learn, and collect the techniques that they believe they will need, to survive a real-life altercation. They want to know what to do if somebody catches them in a guillotine, a head-lock or similar. Often, these escapes are seen as the essence of what self-defense is, rather than being recognized as an “interruption” in the fight, which should be avoided. Your first task, when engaged in most violent confrontations, will be to deliver as much repetitive, concussive force as you can. If your assailant catches you in a guillotine as you do this, then this is an interruption to that process, one which must be dealt with, before you can carry on with the task of continuously striking them. Escaping such holds and controls, is an “inconvenience” that you have to deal with in order to continue your fight. The idea is therefore not to get caught with these things in the first place, and it is your fighting skills, rather than techniques that enable you to do this. It will also be your fighting skills which will get your techniques, such as the guillotine release, to work. Unfortunately, skill development is often looked on as something that MMA practitioners, or martial artists work on, and that those practicing reality-based self-defense systems can bypass by using aggression.

Skills are developed through drills – and it is worth noting that drills are not scenarios. There are two basic types of drills in Krav Maga training: open and closed. A closed drill is one where the outcome of the drill is defined, and an open drill is one where there is no pre-defined outcome, and those participants involved in the drill create the outcome based on their actions and responses to each other. An example of a closed drill, would be one in which a pad holder with a focus mitt, starts out of range, and then moves into range, with somebody striking the pad when this happens. The goal of the drill being to train threat recognition, reaction/response time, range appreciation and power generation, amongst other things. The drill could be “opened” up to have more outcomes, so that the person striking the pad trains their decision-making abilities as well. Before all this happens though, the person involved in the striking portion of the drill, needs to have the appropriate striking skills, and this may be best trained with a non-moving partner, whose role it is to simply hold the focus mitts whilst they strike, so they develop the body mechanics, to punch/strike with power.

At some point, the student will need to take the skills they have learnt in these closed drills, and apply them in open drills, where there are no pre-defined outcomes. A good example of an open drill is sparring. There are rules and restrictions, as far as what can and can’t be done, and there is a format that participants adhere to, but when somebody is responding to a punch or other attack, they don’t have to do so in a pre-defined way; they are “open” to responding how they want to, and the person they are sparring with, doesn’t know beforehand what that might be. I have met a lot of people in the reality-based self-defense world, who don’t believe in sparring, because it doesn’t replicate what a real fight looks like. This is, once again, to confuse drilling with scenarios. Sparring doesn’t replicate real-life violence in a number of ways: it’s consensual, both participants know when the “fight” will start, they know when it will stop e.g. how long the round is, and what will end it, etc. But sparring, as an open drill, also develops a lot of fighting skills, such as an appreciation of range, how to effectively move relative to someone else’s movement, how/when to recognize that someone is vulnerable to a particular type of attack, etc. Sparring doesn’t reflect a real-life fight – it’s not intended to – but it’s a great way to develop fighting skills, which can be applied to scenarios.

In scenario training, we bring the “reality” element into our training. There are story-lines and motivations, that different participants in the scenario have. Time and distance are commodities that are in short supply, and some of the skills developed through open and closed drills can be applied, such as controlling range, where to position yourself and stand so that you can make an effective defense and counter-attack if necessary (not all scenarios may have a physical outcome to them), etc. This is where a partner doesn’t comply to the rules and format of a drill, but works according to the script that they have been given as part of the scenario e.g. a drunk in a bar who has had their drink spilt over them, and isn’t going to respond to any attempts at de-escalation, etc. Drills too, can have elements of “non-compliance” e.g. working against a pad-holder who doesn’t allow you to control range, and keeps closing you down, etc., but they are still drills, intended to build skills. It is in scenarios, where all of these skills may be tested in a way that reflects reality.

In creating effective scenarios, an appreciation of what real-life violence looks like, and how people actually respond in these situations, needs to be replicated. Not everybody will back off, after you disarm them of a weapon, not all people will move back, as you deliver continuous strikes and punches, there are those people who will fight back after you’ve applied an armbar, etc. All of these responses need to be trained for. Things that might be successful in a drill, such as applying an armbar when drilling groundwork, may not end a scenario – a participant may “tap out”, but the scenario restarted, recognizing that they are still able to fight on.

Self-Defense/Fighting is not just about techniques, it is also about skills development, and this means using drills to develop these things. A drill might train a skill that is just one precise piece of the overall Jigsaw, or it might train many skills at once, but in either case it’s not a scenario, and shouldn’t be confused as such. If you’ve ever worked a heavy bag, you are drilling a set of skills. The swinging motion of the bag doesn’t accurately reflect an individual’s movement – the bottom swings more than the top – but it is still a great tool for drilling movement skills, power generation, against a moving target/object, etc. To be effective in our training, we need to drill and train skills, learn to apply those skills in dynamic and open settings, and then transfer them to realistic scenarios.