Immediate Action Combatives

A Critical Self-Preservation Skill

For quite literally years and years I have been telling people that one of the single best skills we can have if we are truly interested in real world self-preservation is the ability to breakfall. It is not sexy or tacti-cool, but it is far more likely to be used and more likely to save you from harm than a firearm or H2H fighting skills.
The simple fact is that everyone falls – whether that is because of slipping/tripping over something on the ground, or getting our feet tied up through bad, hasty, unthinking movement. We all have done this at some time, and some of us have done it a lot. Hopefully, the most negative thing we get afterwards is embarrassment or some broken skin, but all too often the consequences are much worse. For anyone who is unsure about that, look up how many times a senior citizen who falls and breaks their hip then passes away as a result.

At the beginning of my Immediate Action Combatives coursework, I tell people the seminar is NOT about teaching you to voluntarily go to the ground to fight. Instead, it is about "when you do not intend to go to the ground but find yourself there regardless". When I ask students if that is possible and how it would be, they universally answer "after falling", because anyone who is honest will admit that they have fallen at some point in their life. I point out that even if you do not want to, if you have not trained specifically to stay on your feet, finding yourself under sudden surprising violent assault is not the time when your brain is going to be able to do so easily.
Take this video as a case in point, as it is a perfect illustration of what I try to get across.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ2PGmUIAYo&feature=emb_logo

Does anyone think that the LEO wanted to go to the ground? Of course not. It is obvious that was unintended and totally accidental. And because it was accidental, and he was not prepared or trained for it, the single reason he did not suffer worse consequences was that the bad guy had the same reaction. If the bad guy had not fallen over the officer and had a bit more presence of mind, there is a pretty good chance the officer would have suffered major injuries from the bad guy’s knife, and perhaps even have died. The good guy was also extremely lucky that he did not suffer injuries from the fall itself such as hitting his head. Again, nothing good would have followed that.

The good guy in the above video was lucky, but I don’t really think counting on luck to save your life is the best plan. That is no different than making poor financial decisions over and over again in the hope that you will hit the lottery at some point. You need to prepare and practice for it the same exact way you practice drawing from concealment with your carry pistol.
If you are honestly interested in self-preservation, than you need to spend a solid amount of time on the things that are most likely to kill you. Having decent health (regular physical checkups, including dental since there is a direct link between poor dental hygiene and heart attacks), not being excessively fat, eating like an adult, being a good driver, knowing CPR and how to work an AED machine and recognize the signs of a stroke, and knowing how to survive a sudden fall. None of these are sexy or can be easily accomplished by buying gear, but they mean far more to your actual well-being.

In the next article, I will talk about how we go about learning and developing the ability to breakfall.

תיעוד הירי בראש העין הסרטון מכיל תיעוד של אלימות וכן של יריThe clip contains shooting and gun violence.The following video is a part of Haaretz news coverage. For the newspaper w...

If you are interested in truly cutting edge instruction in fi****ms training, check out this upcoming collaboration between Simon Golob and Jeff Gonzales on 8/29-30/2026 in Casa Grande, AZ.

The course is not "tactical" vs "gamer", but instead looking at how the two sides can work together and produce a superior student performance.

I will be there at the class, so come and watch me be the worst performer and join in on the mirth!

Everyday Carry: Cold Performance Meets Dynamic Shooting Near and Far: The Complete Handgun Fight is a 2-day course blending close-quarters gunfighting w/long-range handgun skills, from arm’s length to 50+ yards.

Just published the first of my new YouTube series that I am calling Mat Side Chats.

I will use these as informal quick discussions talking about important issues and needs that require a bit more nuance than can be covered by writing a post or article.

The first one gives the viewer tips on finding the right facility to train combatives. This has been one of the most frequently asked questions to men over the past 25 years, and it is crucial to make the right and informed choice.

I post it here, but I would really appreciate it if people would view it directly on YT to help my channel out, as well as hitting like or even subscribe. My channel is NOT monetized and this is completely free information, with no BS of me trying to get you to buy stuff from me or giving me money to get access to the real details. All of my videos will be exactly what I would tell you in a private lesson or in seminars. So if you could support me with likes/subscriptions, it would be super cool!

Mat Side Chat 1 - Finding the right Combatives Gym A short chat with some key guidelines to finding a good, functional, and safe Combatives facility to train at. Making the wrong choice can be costly not just...

The past is another country

We can read about it, study it, learn from it, but we can't live there. Or, at least, we shouldn’t.

It is important to learn from the past. Whether we have made mistakes or we have made good choices and done good things, It's always good and useful to touch base with those things to help us ensure that our future path is as good as we can possibly make it.

But we can't wallow in it. Whether it's a great decision or a poor decision. Whether we had a fantastic experience at some point in our past or we had a horrific one. Dwelling on any of it does no good. You cannot move forward while dwelling.To move forward we must live in the present and plan for the future.

For example: I had an opportunity in high school to follow quite literally the best strength and conditioning plan a person could follow. I had the book and the template. If I had followed that template I would have been in much better condition, far less injured, and had a base of health and vitality that would've followed me to this day at 61. Instead I followed trends and what was popular and what I thought was the cool thing. I wasted a good 15+ years. That mistake is certainly embarrassing to me and disappointing in what I missed out on. However, letting it guide me going forward is literally a waste. It would do me no good to beat myself up over and over and over again and cry about what if. Instead, I put my focus on building Health and Vitality the correct way and using that book and that old template to move forward. I'm not gonna waste any more time whining about the past because the future is too exciting.

Focus on where you're going and ensure that your path is as smooth and productive as possible. Learn from your past mistakes but leave them there in the past. They can be monuments, but they should not be an albatross around our necks.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for Self Defense

“Never go to the ground!” ….. hmmmmmmm…. “never”

I have a friend in law enforcement who has an excellent story of using bottom half guard to keep a guy between him and a group of dudes trying to kick his skull in with his back to the tires of a car while he waits for backup to arrive.

Or let’s say you’re at a holiday party, there’s family and friends all stuffed into a little kitchen while the food is coming out. Children are running around at ankle height. Just then the door comes in, and here comes your one friend’s baby daddy fresh from jail.
He’s screaming he wants his kid; he grabs a knife off the butcher block. Now I’ve seen plenty of systems where you NEVER get entangled with a guy, you NEVER go to the ground willingly, and I’m sure there are some “I’ll just shoot him” types… in a room full of people… in front of his child… that’s your choice to make.
Personally I think having a skill set that allows you to effectively control someone while your buddy calls the cops and lends a hand is probably a good choice given the totality of the circumstances.

On the one hand, yes, staying upright, mobile, and conscious are priorities. On the other hand is the “all fights go to the ground” mantra. Well, here we are as a student stuck with catch phrases and empty slogans in a rich, chaotic, messy tangle of limbs and uncertainty. What’s the answer? What if I told you, it depends? What if the capability to stay upright and keep someone off you is not independent of the ability to take someone down at will and control them? Or that those same take down skills translate directly into one’s ability to stay upright? And there’s the rub. The guy training BJJ isn’t just learning cool submission moves from bottom, he’s also defending them, and trying to stay on his feet while another grown man tries to throw him around and pull him down.

Here’s a performance driver: if I’m going to the ground I want it to be on my terms, because I’ve made a choice to do so based upon the circumstances. The one dimensional fighter doesn’t get to take the fight where he wants; he tries desperately to keep it wherever he is comfortable.

"A boxer is like a lion, the greatest predator on land. But you throw him in the shark tank and he's just another meal." - Renzo Gracie.

In Renzo Gracie’s book, Master Jiu Jitsu, he speaks at length about the early days of MMA and about all the ranges of the fight and why the BJJ fighter had such a dominant advantage in those days. The part that translates best for our discussion is simply that it is easier to take the fight to the ground than it is to keep it standing once the players have become entangled. Simple as that. You need to not just be better than your opponent, you need to be MUCH, MUCH better if you want to stay upright and he does not. Further, the number of fights we see where guys simply fall over one another, or a curb, slip on gravel or ice, ect. and wind up going down with no intention to do so is too large to ignore. Gravity is out to get you, it takes effort to stand even when you’re not being punched in the face.

Once we hit the ground, without some basic horizontal grappling skills we are in for trouble.

And then we could go down the rabbit hole of this discussion. What techniques or styles translate best to the Weapons Based Environment (WBE, as per Craig Douglas)? What about Gi vs no-gi ? What BJJ do we see in modern MMA where everyone has some sort of grappling? I'd like to talk about some of those points later, but for now I want to talk about why I believe in BJJ as a core foundational element for self-defense.

Pressure.

From day one the BJJ student will face a live adversary. There will be technique, and there will be drilling, there will be learning a new skill, and there will be some guy that’s bigger, stronger, younger, and more experienced than you attempting to force his will on you while you try to execute it. From the very first you’ll need to deal with suffocation, panic, making observations and decisions when you're gassed out tired and hit with adrenaline.
Over time, it will take more and more pressure to overwhelm the practitioner. We learn piece by piece to deal with stress and to become functional in the jumbled mess of limbs and be able to execute complex techniques based on intuition and feel.

This is where BJJ shines. Constant, relentless pressure.

It's not about under what circumstances the triangle choke is appropriate for self-defense, or whether breaking an arm will stop an attacker. It's about what you do when you're overwhelmed, when you can’t breathe, when your muscles give out and dizzy from exertion.

The BJJ practitioner knows this place. He goes there every day.

Revolver Epilogue Part 1 - The Entangled Fight

After wrapping up my Revolver Positives series, there are a few other things I wanted to address about the wonderful world of wheelguns, but were not appropriate for the series. There are some items that I would not categorize as “positives”, but are still relevant to the overall discussion.

These items are a) revolvers in an entangled fight, b) capacity concerns, and c) who can actually teach this material correctly and from experience? So let’s start the wrap up!

Today, I want to discuss in brief the idea of using revolvers - especially small short barreled snubs - in an entangled fight.
Many people advocate for just such a role for snubs. They talk about things like the small size of the gun making it easier to access and deploy in a grappling encounter, the shortness of it making it harder for the bad guy to grab onto and take away, and the surety of firing when in contact with a bad guy. All of those sound like positives, so why did I not include this in my overall series?

Because I am staunchly opposed to a hardware solution over a software one. All of the above “positives” can be a positive if the user has the skill set to enable the positives to matter. In other words, he has enough grappling skill to pull it off. If the software - the skill - does not exist, then it is a literal crapshoot if the above positives will even matter.

I have seen it countless times in training scenarios, and it is easy to find real world examples as well, where the person is carrying a snub, and it has no bearing on the fight because he was not able to access and deploy the gun. He did not have the skill to do so, and the bad guy kept him from being able to do what the good guy wished to do. The hardware will not solve the problem on its own, more times than not. Anything can happen in combat, and miracles do happen, but do you want to rely on the one in a million shot? Not really the best plan.

Years ago, on the old (and greatly cherished) Total Protection Interactive discussion forum, there was a student who had gone through ECQC with Craig Douglas and did not do well. He asked on TPI for ideas of how to do better the next time. He was inundated with posts about developing some grappling skill, training some striking systems, building his cardio, building strength and some muscle mass, etc. All ideas focused around the core concept of improving the software. After all of that, his solution was to ignore the advice and instead he would just carry a snub revolver AIWB. Flash forward a year and he took ECQC again (which was a tremendous thing, and he was commended for trying again) and does anyone want to guess the results? He got taken to the woodshed in the FoF evolutions again. And once again, he asked for advice, and of course got the same advice as the year before. And, just as the year before, he ignored and decided his new plan was to carry TWO snubs forward of the hips, one of each side of his belly button………..

So do I think the short barreled small revolver has some really good positives in an entangled fight? Absolutely, but only if it is supported by building the functional ability to utilize the positives to the fullest.