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It's Friday and time for this week's Legends newsletter;
on to today's contents...
- First--you'll find info on our newest RAW DVD AURELIUS BOXING: FUNDAMENTAL BAG DRILLS, our 1st street-defense only RAW.
- Today's article discusses one of the Three Core Concepts of Aurelius Boxing and how we must allow it to inform our reality training.
- In our Video Clip of the Week I introduce and explain The Clock Drill that will allow you to take the 90+ Drills on Aurelius Boxing and add 6 more layers of drilling to cover all of our "Squaring on the Predator" contingencies.
- FLASH SALE: November 8th-11th (Veteran's Day & my late Father's B-day) we will offer one free copy of AURELIUS BOXING for every order of $100 or more placed within the time-frame. (RAW Crew members can choose this title or any other RAW volume). [This offer is not to be combined with any other offer or discounts.]
- November Special we offer our street-manual NO SECOND CHANCE to augment the AURELIUS BOXING material. Details at the end of this newsletter.
And last, but not least, check out the ESP RAW Subscription service info to your left. You can save yourself some money on this volume of RAW ($5.50 to be exact) and pick up 3 more volumes of RAW absolutely free.
Thanks everyone and have a great week!
Sincerely,
Mark Hatmaker Extreme Self Protection |
ESP RAW 133: AURELIUS BOXING Fundamental Bag Drills
This is the 11th volume in our Combination Man Curriculum which seeks to give you the bottom-up-to-the-top skills and drills to make you the best Pugilist & Combat Wrestler you can be.
So far in the series we have emphasized the controlled aspects of the game, that is, the sportive aspects. On this volume we lay out a sequence of drills to make what we learn in the gym less sterile, less controlled, more chaotic and therefore more functional for the street/reality environment.
This DVD will take one Combination Ladder and put it through its paces in 90+ drills. The idea behind taking only a single Combination or Offensive/Defensive Response and then running through multiple scenarios is twofold:
ONE-We must lose the fiction that it is the depth or breadth of our technical vocabulary that will save our posteriors in times of need. This thinking leads one to assume "If I only had 'X' tactic this would never have happened", this thinking assumes that confrontation is conquered by having one more "trick" than the enemy possesses and whoever runs out of tricks/tactics first loses.
Nothing could be further from the truth. What wins in the ring, in the cage, in the streets, and on the battlefield, more often than not are two handfuls of basics. What spells the difference (aside from chance in some cases) is superior fitness (whether this be stamina or strength of both the mental and physical variety) and superior application of these basics.
What defines superior application?
The ability to break domain specificity, that is, the ability to take your rock solid go-to basics and apply them across widely divergent conflict domains both familiar and unfamiliar.
TWO-We also demo the Aurelius Bag Drills with but a single tactical response to show how we want you to take ANY & ALL tactical responses and test them or temper them for street-reality readiness. I want you to focus on the drill and the results of the drill and not the individual tactic.
In other words, don't stay married to the Combination Ladder used on this DVD, in fact, I urge you not to. Take all of your cognitively chosen tactical responses and run them through this Bag Drill template top to bottom. The Aurelius Drills will reveal the relative strengths and weaknesses of your chosen response.
If it proves effective in execution more often than not it's a keeper.
If it meets with less than 80% utility kill it. (Yes 80%, we're talking your life here, shoot for superior odds). No matter how cool a tactic is, how fun it is to drill in sterile gym conditions, how awed some folks are who get to witness it when you "show off" under optimum conditions, if it fails the Aurelius Drills it will fail you when you need it most.
As for the name AURELIUS BOXING, we have allowed three concepts from Marcus Aurelius' MEDITATIONS to inform our approach. The quotes are:
"How ridiculous and strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life!"
"In the application of your principles you must be like the pancratiast (boxer/wrestler, i.e. the first Mixed Martial Artist), not like the gladiator; for the gladiator lets fall the sword which he uses and is killed; but the other always has his hand, and needs to do nothing else than use it."
"Practice even at the things which you despair of accomplishing. For even the left hand, which is ineffectual for all other things for want of practice, holds the bridle more vigorously than the right hand; for it has been practiced in this."
We re-state the quotes for the AURELIUS DRILLS as follows:
- If it has happened in a combat environment it can happen to you; we must drill for unusual contingencies.
- We will assume an absence of weapons (X-Weapon or otherwise) and or a failure of weapon technology. We must respond with the only weapon we always have at our disposal-Ourselves.
- All positions, postures, handicaps, environments must be experienced-not merely considered. Never do anything in combat for the first time, don't assume your lead hook works just as well from a seated position without ever having drilled it from there.
We will address each of the above quotes and the lengths to which we must drive their pragmatic logic in a series of Legends posts throughout the month of November. These posts will augment this RAW volume.
- These volume gives you the 19 Base Drills (38 once you run them for the mandatory ambidextrous rounds).
- The Base Drills cover how to use Jolt Footworkto Power your initial strike and prime the system to go.
- We also cover how to utilize elastic load to increase starting speed.
- The Base Drills cover Six Natural Postures Standing, Five Natural Seated Postures and how to fire into position from here, plus moving from the ground to standing striking.
- We then use 5 Handicapping Drills to mimic three versions of vision impairment, how to mock injuries that will steal power and mobility, and how to mimic recovering from a shot without getting hit (you will be uncomfortable but you won't be injured).
- All Base drills are then re-started through the Handicapped Drills taking your Drill total to 90+ Drills.
This is volume, as with all RAW Volumes comes with a printed syllabus for easy inclusion in your training notebook.
(Hang on to these syllabi because at some point in the Combination Man Curriculum run we will supplement and key these syllabi to a Master Text for easy Drill & Technique search).
ESP RAW 133 can be had this month for only $32 (S & H included--Domestic & International) at the end of the month the price goes to $42 Domestic/$52 International. [Of course, it's only $26.50 for the RAW Crew.]
To order:  To pay only $26.50 for this DVD + receive 3 other RAW DVDs for free, subscribe to our ESP RAW DVD Service.
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STERILE VS. "INFECTED" DRILLING
Mark Hatmaker
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Let's start with a quote from the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius:
"How ridiculous and strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life!"
The quote is culled from Aurelius' Meditations a series of loose but connected notes to himself as he struggled to stay the stoic course while conducting a long military campaign to resist German invaders who had penetrated into Italy over the Alps.
In context, Aurelius' notes to himself cover both the mundane (court matters and human interaction) and the crushing expediencies of the battlefield; we must keep in mind that the battlefield of 2nd Century A.D. more than likely involved a bit more hardships than we encounter today.
Today let's use these 13 words of wisdom to inform how we approach our real-world self-protection training and allow it's pragmatism to adjust and direct our course where we may come up lacking.
More often than not, when one conducts, engages in, observes real-world drilling we see it in sterile pristine conditions. That is, inside a gym/dojo/training facility at pre-arranged designated times. This is a given and it's hard to get around this portion of drilling sterility, but...
We often see sterility intrude into other aspects of our drilling which are most definitely under our control. If any portion of the below short-list is a part of your real-world drilling method then your drills just may be a bit sterile.
- You know the tactic you are defending against 80% or more of the time.
- You have a pre-selected/ chosen/assigned defensive tactic more than 80% of the time.
- Your training remains in the gym 80% or more of the time.
- You train in designated clothing (that is, workout clothes as your system/art defines them) 80% or more of the time.
- You train/respond with your dominant lead 80% or more of the time.
- Your train minus handicaps (physical, sensory, equilibrium, et cetera) 80% or more of the time.
You get the idea, spending the majority of your time dealing with the known while purportedly training for the unknown seems a bit contradictory. Real life is far messier and chaotic than a drill. Yes, we must use drills to train and groove neural nets but drilling with smoothness or sterility does not accurately reflect the nature of the battlefield.
As any student of real world conflict knows (or at least should know) that even a cursory study of security/battlefield/surveillance camera footage or even self-posted video of assaults by malignant scum reveals that seldom, if ever, do any of these encounters follow sterile protocols.
Yes, you can see common attacks or scenarios (punches, tackles, knives, guns, street-grappling, et cetera) but how often does the real world right-in-front-of-your-very-own-eyeballs evidence of actual assault or violent encounters accurately reflect the drills or environmental conditions of your gym?
We as law-abiding citizens will always be surprised and immersed in chaotic conditions when violence strikes as we never get to choose our time and place of encounter with evil, so in that aspect we are always (ALWAYS) disadvantaged.
But...
We can allow our training to become "infected", informed by what we do see occurring in the real-world. By including more of the chaos, more of the random variables, more of the never-planned-for aspects of violent assault that we can readily see as evidenced by video or 1st-hand accounts we go a longer way towards safety by inoculating ourselves with the truth and kill a bit of the sterility that just may be doing a disservice to our end results.
No, we will never be able to (nor would we want to) completely mock or mimic evil, but training for reality as if it were the smooth world of a combat sport is denying reality.
One more time, the Emperor:
"How ridiculous and strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life!"
In a clumsy re-phrasing, if it has happened to others in your demographic, it can happen to you. It does not mean that it will happen to you only that it can.
With that in mind do you allow any of your training to reflect any of the following "infections":
- Mall or workplace shooting?
- Responses with full-on dress clothes (shoes included) whatever dress clothes means to you?
- Physical incapacitation-predators prey on the weak. We are all weak at times (injured, dead asleep, sick, et cetera)?
- You have young, elderly, or infirm dependents to protect.
- Seated?
- Cramped quarters?
- Cold-I'm talking numb non-responsive grip, folks.
- Blurred vision?
- Blinded?
- Dizzy/nauseated?
This list can go on and on, but you will readily see that many people not too different ourselves have had to face just such situations and we choosing not to place ourselves into drilling simulacra are being a bit blind to reality; and a decision to ignore what has and can happen in life and to stick with sterile drilling might be a bit less than intellectually honest, and perhaps morally questionable if you are training others who are depending on you for honest guidance.
If we are training to survive the realities of the street, then we must allow reality to inform what and how we train.
And reality, unlike sports or games, is always more than a little messy.
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NO SECOND CHANCE:
A Reality Based Guide to Self-Defense
(192 pages) Our ground floor plunge into unarmed survival skills. Chapters include: Duds & Thugs: Street Fight vs. Street Survival, It's Not a Fire Drill if the House is on Fire, The Truth As Blunt Object, You'll Never Be Ready, Animal Planet, 'Cause They Wanna, Predator-Prey is Not An Analogy, You Are the Offspring of Survivors, There's No Middle Ground in Fight or Flight, Survive Now, Resistance is Never Futile, Crime is a Product of Opportunity, Know the Lay of the Land, Life Over Property, You Can't Run From a Gun, Back To School, Save Others by Showing Them How to Save Themselves, Crime Scene #2, Daydream Your Nightmares, Opposable Thumbs, The Neo-Cortex, and Padded Rooms, The Myths of Patterned Responses, Women's Self-Defense & Martial Arts, Survival of the Fittest, No Weapons, Natural Weapons, Palm Strikes, Fist Strikes, Lower Body Weapons, The Tasmanian Devil & Sam Spayed, On Pressure Points & Death Touches, Targets, Grappling, Static vs. Fluid Assaults, Standing Static Assaults from the Front, Standing Static Assaults from Behind, Standing Static Assaults from the Side, Standing Static Assaults Against a Horizontal Barrier, Seated Static Assaults, Ground Static Assaults, Standing Postures to Fluid Readiness, Seated Postures to Fluid Readiness, Ground Posture to Fluid Readiness, Drills for Readiness Simulation, and much more.
To snag an autographed copy for $12.95 (S&H Included) or $22.95 International hit the button.
No Second Chance with Standard Shipping:
No Second Chance with International Shipping: |
 | | The Clock Drill |
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Pick An Adventure
Seminars
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Some of us are old-enough to remember a series of interactive books where readers were asked to make a decision and then go to a corresponding page to see what sort of mess you got yourself into. You never quite knew where you were going to wind up with these books--pre-video game era, these were a novel idea.
Here's where you come in, if you'd like to host a seminar and save yourself some bucks off of the standard fees in the process--if you've got an Adventure Race in your area, a rock you think I'd like to climb, a river you think I want to raft, a hike you think I just need to take, a desert I've not run on, you get the idea--pitch your adventure and school location. If the adventure appeals and the logistics are right we offer greatly reduced fees to come to your school and play with your crew before we go play at your Adventure Pitch.
BTW--You and your crew are welcome to attend the adventure, as a matter of fact, we'll knock off even more bucks for this sort of hands-on guiding.
So, you got some adrenaline in your neck-of-the-woods and want to train? Feel free to make your pitch and we'll see what happens.
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Mark Hatmaker
(865) 679-1223
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