A Review of the October 31st Workshop

Over the Halloween weekend, Lee Morrison was kind enough to pop over to hold a workshop and grading event for Urban Combatives Kildare. The whole weekend was thoroughly enjoyed by everyone, and, as with all of Lee’s work, I had tremendous feedback from everyone that attended the workshop.

Before I go into some of the topics that were covered on the Saturday 31st, I’d like to congratulate my students—Niall Murphy, Brendan Murphy, John Clarke and Shay Barry—who successfully graded in the first Level of the Urban Combatives curriculum. The lads had put in a great deal of effort for their grading, and showed great dedication and commitment over the last six months. It was also great to hear Lee’s feedback after their performance.

After the grading, we started with a three and a half hour workshop which covered a variety of “cutting edge” combative concepts.

For the first module, we covered “pre-conflict dynamics”. As Lee always points out, the brain is a questioning answering machine, so first we must ask the right question: “What is the problem?” Here, Lee covered the anatomy of a violent street confrontation, and expanded upon this by looking at the full spectrum of a violent encounter.

Lee also makes the point that if you’re not training for multiple opponents and weapons, you’re not training for reality and that conditions will more likely favour the criminal.

We looked at what happens before the event, during the event and after the event. Lee points out that it’s not all just about the physical “crash and bash”—there is very little you can do about a “physical confrontation” if you don’t see it coming in the first place. So, in order to be ready, we must first have a good grasp of threat recognition skills or pre-incident indicators. We studied some of the tactics that are often employed by the common criminal, such as the ‘deceptive interview’ followed by distance close-down, or behaviour that could be construed as suspicious. Lee went into the subject in depth, and there were many “light bulb” moments for everyone who attended.

Lee makes the point that even a minor altercation can turn into a potentially fatal encounter. So having a greater understanding of these “pre-conflict dynamics” will give you a much greater chance of seeing trouble well before it develops and thus giving you a much better chance of extracting yourself before any confrontation has a chance to even occur.

After the soft skills introduction we looked at “In fight Dynamics”. In this section we assumed that we have not been able to avoid or escape the potential confrontation, and therefore must assume we have no other choice but to engage the hostile subject. In order to have the highest probability of success in any confrontation we must strive to “hit first” and continue the assault until the threat subsides (if, of course, we have the honest belief that we are in imminent danger) . Lee points out the folly of hitting someone, and then not following up. This can lead to a re-engagement with the subject.

In order to make these tactics work, after the initial strike we must then “attach” to the subject. This will give us a high level of tactile control, and it will also allow us to control the subject’s descent in order to prevent unnecessary injury.

The first set of physical drills trained the lads to strike the pads with maximum aggression while still maintaining an attachment—this enables them to best perform a continuous attack, whilst maintaining forward pressure at the same time. Lee points out that we must “manage state” during any of these physical drills, as mindless aggression is not constructive. We should be able to switch it off so we can then assess the situation, and make tactile decisions during and after any altercation. As with all of Lee’s material, “mindset” is the rocket fuel that will power the vehicle.

Here the lads are smashing the pads and following up with continuous strikes.

One of the core concepts for winning or avoiding any confrontation is the concept of ‘re-framing’ the criminal’s perspective of you. There are many different way of doing this, as Lee points out. We looked at several of these options which you could use depending on the particular subject, from deception to ego stroking. Lee has a vast array of cutting-edge NLP psychological aspects that are incorporated in all areas of the UC curriculum.

The second set of physical drills involved the “stop hit”. While it’s always ideal to strike the subject first, there’s always a possibility of something going wrong, or not quite as you had planned it. Basically, this drill assumes we are the back foot but need to regain the initiate as soon as possible. One great aspect to the drill is that we had an unknown threat. This consisted of a pad man moving around the room, and that would engage as a secondary threat at random. This made sure the students were highly aware and constantly watching—even under the duress of the drill.

Here Lee is showing how the “stop hit” should be performed.

Lee impressed the importance of increasing our awareness skills. He reiterates the point that most peopled in the RBSD community give it “lip service”, but do not give it the full attention it deserves. However, he gave us several drills that we could incorporate into our daily lives and training in order for the concept to become fully functional. These drills are essential for any type of threat recognition training to be successful—the X & O drill is one example.

Here are the lads and Lee “covering” in a default position before exploding forward with multiple strikes to put the would-be attacker on the back foot.

Lee points out that that things can easily go to pieces in a live altercation, so we must have an emergency contingency plan. One of the tactics that we covered is better known as the “default response”, which is basically a non-diagnostic response which will stop you getting knocked out and keep you on your feet. The drills then progressed by forcing the student to act under a more stressful state. This was induced by adding fatigue and disorientation.

The final aspect of the workshop involved a small portion of Lee’s Counter knife concepts. Lee first talked about the properties of an edged weapon and “the intention” behind their use. Lee states that no ‘one’ system has all the answers when dealing with a knife threat—at best, you are looking at damage limitation so you can motor through the threat (if you can’t escape, which is the preferable option). When dealing with any kind of knife “hold up” threat, we must assume that our awareness has not been in play for a variety of reasons. While this is not the ideal, we must have a contingency plan for when things go wrong.

The first set of drills dealt with a knife hold-up from various positions. Again, these hard skills are not merely ‘by rote’ combinations, but a set of sound principals that you can employ in order to give you the highest probability of success. In order to make the drills more stressful and to add more realism, they were conducted when the student least expected it.

Lee showed us the various ways in which the criminal can assault. One of the most difficult to deal with is the “grab and stab”.

The sequence above deals with the infamous grab and stab assault.

All in all we had a great day of training, and I had tremendous feedback all-round. So a big thanks to Lee for popping over and the lads for coming along. We are all looking forward to Lee’s next Irish seminar which should be fairly soon!