Friday, 17 January 2014

Overcoming Fear and building Aggression in women’s self defence


I’ve had the pleasure of teaching one or two ladies over the years and the one common problem they did have was building aggression. While it’s not always the case, most women live a reasonably calm life and rarely show aggression Everybody’s got the ability to be angry and fearful , and I think it’s important to understand fear, I tend to look at it like a useful tool, fear is there to tell you when you’re in danger, and it also releases chemicals that can help your body work faster and stronger to overcome dangerous situations, I’ve trained myself to see fear as a good thing rather than the definition, just like the physical training to land a harder punch on a bag, you can train your emotions  as well as a response to fear or danger. When you don’t understand the physical effects of fear e.g. fight, flight or freeze and adrenalin. These can be totally debilitating when not understood. And completely shut down your offence. But when fully understood they can help you massively.
Now when you look at aggression, if your aggressive when you strike a bag or target and visualise trying to inflicted harm on your attacker, and with training the body will respond to this with adrenalin as if you’re in a fight to a certain extent, because when you’re throwing strikes on a pad, in your mind your visualising a dangerous situation and the body responds, you will start to be able to switch the aggression on and off when needed. The problem some people have, not just women, is just being aggressive to start with, because generally from an early age your told not to show aggression or get angry, you could even be embarrassed to show such a raw emotion, and it can take time to bring out the lioness or Amazonian, so to speak.
One way I've found particularly useful is using thoughts to trigger aggression. most people have a thing or person that makes them particularly angry and all that your doing is taking that feeling and placing that on the end of every offensive strike, like cruelty to an innocent animal or thinking about someone causing harm to an innocent child or animal, possibly your child or a close friends child, visualise yourself in between the child and the attacker, it’s not about you it’s about the child, you’re the Childs only chance for safety, at this point you have no choice you have to fight back to protect the innocent, take all that anger at the thought of them harming the chid, and use that in an aggressive attack to overwhelm the attack and get the child to safety. just be aware that to much uncontrolled aggression can be just as ineffective as none at all, your focusing on a goal not going into a red mist, while aggression, intent and determination alone can be enough to come out the other side safely, add that to a trained skill set of explosive strikes and you’ve got some seriously effective self defence.
Here’s a clip of Jane one of the first students of mine, looking at her progression over a couple of years, she was very shy at first but as her confidence built with her training, it was like she became a different person, much more confident. The energy she was giving off went from fearful victim female to confident alpha female. For example if a lion was looking for some diner then it would study the herd for the weaker animals not just a limp or a little bit skinny. But the energy they are giving of, if there head is down and little or no eye contact, walking sheepishly this is very submissive, that spells diner to any lioness!
This is no different to a mugger looking for a victim.  if they were lying in wait to attack someone and they had a choice of the Jane before training and Jane after and they didn’t know, The Jane before training was thinking about becoming a victim, seriously lacking confidence in a violent situation so that was the energy she was giving off. You can pick this up from the way some people walk, the victims gate, A bit like a little scared mouse shuffling along and say if an attacker made eye contact with her and she quickly looked away head down he would instantly pick up on this weakness instantly. And you would only react like this if you were fearful.
Once she had trained to a certain extent, reasonably close to the situations she was fearful of, a lot of the fears got answered, she got a much better understanding of not only all of her fears and the situations she could be in not, but learning how to get out of the situations an dangers and how the body reacts to fear, with time that response becomes a trained reaction.

Once she got to the point at the end of the clip, rather than thinking victim and what if this or that happened. All her questions and fears had been answered an tested under pressure, in training. so rather than giving of the victim mentality pre-training. After training she was walking much more upright, head up and confident, she would be switched on looking for danger, she would look any dodgy looking fellow straight in the face and make eye contact with confidence. So a person may look the same but the energy they give off is completely different, and can directly affect an attacker’s choice of victim, DONT BE A VICTIM!



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