I just ran across this piece of news.

Long story short, a guy gets shot 21 times and still survives… Just stop and imagine that for a second: 21 bullets enter your body and you don’t die. Talk about being lucky!

Granted, no vital organs were hit but the guy got shot in the arms, legs, abdomen and jaw. Even though these aren’t vital organs, there are still plenty of arteries there. So despite having no organ damage, he could have bled out and died anyway. But he didn’t.

So what?

Well, this just goes to show that you can’t always predict what’s going to happen when you use force, deadly or otherwise. Because let’s be honest: if somebody says a couple cops are going to fire 46 shots at you, hitting you with 21, would you really think you’d survive? Nope. And in most cases you’d be right. But as this story here proves, there are exceptions.

To be clear: I’m not saying you should go out and make a LEO draw on you because you might just get lucky and survive. What I’m saying is: you never know what’s going to happen when the feces hits the rotating blades.

Now you might be thinking “Duh!” and that’s your prerogative but my point is this: even if you accept that  the most unlikely things can and will happen in a fight, that won’t stop you from making assumptions about fighting and combat.  Making assumptions is just human nature and we all fall prey to this bad habit. To make matter worse, we usually don’t realize we make these assumptions. But we sure do train according to them.  And there’s the problem…

I train in both combat sports and traditional martial arts because I believe they both have value.  In fact, they compliment each other very well, providing you distinguish between the different environments they operate in. To do that, you make up an intellectual image of what each of these two categories of disciplines looks like. You make this image by drawing from your own experience, reading, watching videos of actual fights, talking to others who share their experience, etc. All these things combine into some big-ass assumptions about what a fight looks like in a MMA or similar competition and how things are on the street and in self defense scenarios.

Chances are good you’re right on the money for some and totally wrong for others (Unless, of course, you’re so totally awesome you’re never, ever, EVER, wrong about anything.)

But you won’t know that until you start fighting for real, regardless in which environment.

Dude, shoot me 45 times more! I can take it!

Get to the point already! Shees…

Here’s the rub: Read More→

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