The Law of 3

I learned the law of 3 in the middle of the desert in Utah. I had been in the desert for 14 days when my teachers called the students into a circle. We had been constantly hungry, thirsty, cold, hot, rained upon, sick, and 2 had twisted their ankle. We were also 100 miles from paved roads, so their words carried more weight.

Your body has many needs, but some have higher priority than others. When the shit hits the fan and an all-out crisis happens, it is important to know what the priorities are. The Law of 3 helps you to remember them.

Calmness is the first priority. No how bad an accident is - whether it's losing your backpack down a cliff, breaking your leg, feeling an earthquake, or even something as mundane as a computer problem - it will get MUCH WORSE in the first 3 seconds if you allow panic to take a hold of you. You'll slide down that unstable ledge after your pack; you'll stand up and turn that hairline fracture into a compound fracture; you'll freeze where you stand instead of seeking safer cover; you'll hit the power button without saving your data - and POOF. The situation just got much worse. Awareness of your state and control of your breathing are the two biggest factors in controlling this panic.
 
August 23, 2011 was an eye-opening example - the east coast of the United States (where I live) experienced a 5.9 earthquake. As soon as I realized the slight rumbling was not a nearby truck, I got up, quickly walked away from the large glass windows to my back and into a doorframe. I called out to my coworkers loudly and calmly to GET IN A DOORWAY. Yet by the time the quake ended, only 1 person (out of roughly 20 within earshot) had even started to approach any doorway. The rest were frozen, asking "Is this an Earthquake?". While they would not identify that as panic, that is exactly what that freezing in place is. They also were not able to hear my clear instructions - this is called "auditory exclusion", and is a common trait of panic. Trauma survivors frequently report auditory exclusion when recounting the ordeal.
 
Air is the second priority. You can go roughly 3 minutes without taking in air before serious and permanent damage or death takes place. If your (or someone you love's) airway is blocked, whether its from swelling from an allergic reaction, choking on food, or being trapped in an airtight space once the air has run out, you have 3 minutes to remedy the problem. Whatever the answer is - Epinepherine, Heimlich maneuver, tracheotomy, etc - you have 3 minutes to fix whatever has gone wrong. The time goes down if there is panic, as you will be expending much more air than is necessary. (blood chokes, which occur in martial arts where the carotid artery is blocked via external pressure, preventing oxygen from reaching the brain, are a special case. These cause unconsciousness in much less than 3 minutes - in seconds if the choke is well-executed. But for the Law of 3, we're dealing with situations where vascular blood flow is not restricted.)
 
Shelter is the third priority. If you are cold or wet to the point of hypothermia, you will succumb to exposure in about 3 hours unless you are able to find a place to dry out. Having a change of clothing, knowing how to make a weatherproof shelter - even fabricating cover out of garbage bags (I have done this) is something you need to recognize and know how to do if help is more than 3 hours away. I have a friend who almost died (she lost 4 toes instead) when a 3 mile snow hike went very badly wrong and lasted 12 hours. Obviously, this is less of a problem if it is 72 degrees and dry, but the point is to prepare for all situations - not just best case scenarios.
 
Water is the fourth priority. The human body can generally go 3 days without water. Environmental factors such as temperature and humidity, as well as exertion of the individual, can make this number go down. Knowing how to locate, store, sterilize, or filter water is vital. Knowing how to treat diarrhea is just as important. (Did you know that you can make a tea out of pine needles that will help with that? It's not as good as Immodium, and it tastes like shit, but it was helped me out before)

Food is the fifth priority, and is way further down the list than most people think. Your body can go about 3 weeks without food before lasting and irreversible damage to organs and tissues takes place. I have personally gone 5 days with zero food, hiking 10-15 miles per day with severe elevation changes, with no ill effects (other than I was grumpy and had a headache for the first 2 days). The rule of thumb is that if you are surviving long enough to get hungry, you're doing alright.

Companionship is the sixth and last priority. If you go longer than 3 months without human contact, it can be psychologically harmful. The instructors who took me into the desert to learn how to survive like an Anasazi Indian from 1500 years ago are a unique and interesting bunch. Many of them live year-round in tents (yurts) that they have made themselves. Several of them have not had indoor plumbing or a traditional roof over their heads in years. But it is a close-knit community, and even when one of them is soujourning many miles away from civilization for weeks at a time, their friends will make sure to do sanity visits and check in on them every few weeks. People need other people. It's what keeps us from having conversations with bloody handprints on Wilson volleyballs.

Spotting the Lie

Last night was a beautiful night, and on all beautiful nights, Virginia Systema trains outdoors. There's a nice lush strip of grass perfect for a small group to roll around a punch each other on, and that's exactly what we did for an hour and a half. After checking the area for any sharp rocks or debris, we started rolling. Just walking at a slow and leisurely pace, tucking into a forward roll, and returning to standing and walking. The rolls happened whenever the students wanted them at first. No pressure.

The students there had each done hundreds of rolls before on mats. The lush grass and soft earth was almost as soft as a mat, and once their bodies realized that, the rolls came easier. Those first few rolls where the ground was an unknown were hesitant, but quickly smoothed out. The ground was bumpy and uneven, which added an interesting dynamic, but it was nothing people couldn't overcome.

But then I changed the rules. You couldn't roll whenever you liked anymore. You had to do it only when I clapped.

Fear. Tension. Stutter steps to get to that favorite leg (I was guilty of this one a few times when I had one of the students clap). Held breath. All just from losing the control over when the roll happened.

I continued to change rules. Now you had to walk backwards and roll. This caused a different, new tension, since now you couldn't see what was in your path. (ah, but you COULD once you realized you could watch the shadows of the setting sun... then you could at least be sure you weren't about to collide with another person. There are all kinds of clues about your surroundings you can find, but you'll have to try these drills on your own to discover them). Things got REALLY interesting once I took the group away from the soft grass and onto asphalt. Suddenly no one could roll anymore! Everyone had visions of their heads being dashed in by the hard, unyielding pavement and froze with both hands on the ground and their butts in the air. Norman Rockwell would have totally ran and grabbed his easel.

I circled my guys up and we talked about what had just happened. The point I made was that when you train, there is always a lie. Maybe lie is too strong of a word? It's a deviation from what would actually happen in reality. A technique - in this case, a forward roll - isn't the same when practiced in isolation as it is in the real world. We roll so that if we are tripped or knocked down, we can get up quickly without damaging ourselves. But in order for this to happen, we have to be able to do it from either leg. Without warning. Without maybe even knowing that a roll is coming up until our balance is already taken. That perfect, tactical, lifesaving roll is practiced slowly, in calm and sterile environments, and that is a lie. Or maybe it's a white lie - that slow, sterile roll is perfectly valid, but it is the practitioner's belief that he "has it down" that is the lie. "Aikido works fine; your Aikido doesn't."

It's a lie that people have to know and be able to spot on their own, so that they can adjust their training so that there's less of a lie. You'll never completely remove the lie - a sane and reasonable person will never train rolls by having people jump out of alley ways and slug them in the jaw so that they trip over a concrete curb - but it's important to know where your technique fails. And then to fix it.

Fighting Back

On 22 July 2011, a gunman in Utøya, Norway disguised himself as a police officer, called together members of a youth summer camp, and began shooting at them. The latest figure is 86 dead, 20 injured. The gunman's shooting spree lasted for over an hour, in which time he was able to reload multiple times and hunt down his victims. Most of the survivors escaped by hiding or pretending to be dead.

This murderer's spree lasted over 90 minutes.

Compare this to another horrifying attack that happened recently. On 8 January 2011, at a political assembly in Tucson, Arizona (United States), a gunman opened fire specifically at Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her entourage, then indiscriminately into the crowd. 6 killed, 14 injured.

His rampage only lasted 1 minute due to aggressive civilians fighting back.

The Tucson gunman had 33-round clips on his person, and the deathcount could have been much higher. instead, he was stopped by a 61 year old houswife, a 74 year old retired vet, and a 2 other civilians, all unarmed. They hit him with chairs, they wrestled him to the ground, they interfered with his hands as he tried to reload. They saved lives - their own, and countless others around them.

Arizona is a very gun-friendly state. Anyone over the age of 21 without a felony can carry a concealed handgun without a permit. But the only person who was carrying a weapon who had anything to do with resisting and subduing the gunman didn't even draw his weapon - he (wisely) kept it holstered since by the time he arrived on the scene, the gunman was already on his face and largely under control. It's laudable that this citizen was prepared, but in this case it wasn't necessary. The aggressive instinct of the 3 heroes was what saved the day.

Airline industry shows the same trend: the increase in x-ray machines, ID checks, TSA employees, and other measures are not what is saving lives. The only things that have saved lives on airplanes since 9-11 has been arming cockpit doors and teaching passengers to fight back.

At the end of the day, it's far more important to fight back with what you have, immediately. When I was in the kidnapping captial of the world (Bogota Colombia) in 1999 working against drug traffickers, the advice was the same: "Fight back. No matter what - even if they have a gun, even if there's a dozen of them. Don't let them put you in a vehicle. The situation never improves at the second crime scene."

Here at Virginia Systema, we train to overcome our natural hesitancy and tendency to freeze. We train with and against weapons, from a conflict's start to its finish. So from the instant when someone draws a weapon from a hidden pocket to the moment you've escaped to a safe zone and are searching yourself for wounds (many people don't realize they've been seriously injured because of the adrenaline dump), it will feel familiar because you've already seen it and practiced it a hundred times.

Continuous motion. Breathing. Forward aggression. Using everything in your aresnal. Pocket change flung at their eyes. Your Starbucks coffee. Your pocket knife. Your hands. Your feet. Your whole body.

It's up to you. When seconds count, the police are minutes away.

Good luck, and safe training!



















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Side Channels in Fighting

"From one thing, know ten thousand things." -Miyamoto Musashi, 17th century Japanese swordsman

I'd like to start my inaugural post by asking you to look at the following picture and tell me what you see.

It's a simple picture, with simple answers. It's a rabbit. Probably wild. Definitely a boy. It's in some grass. A man or woman named B. Katzung placed a watermark on the picture, apparently in 2005.

But there's more to the picture than just that. Much more. For instance, from this picture alone (not using Google or any other webpage), I can tell you that it was taken with a Canon EOS-1D Mark II camera. I can tell you that the picture was taken June 12, 2005, at 1:22 PM local time. I can tell you that a person named Bert Katzung (so it was a man!) edited the picture several times using Adobe Photoshop CS2 on a Windows machine. I can tell you that the picture was taken in the Marin-Sonoma area of California. In fact, if I wanted to track down the person who took this shot, I'd have a pretty good head start just from this picture alone.

So how do I know these things, just from this one file?

Simple. This picture of a bunny contains hidden information. Tons of it.

The camera that took this photograph saved the picture, and along with it, saved inside the file information about the camera itself. Shutter speed, model type, whether the flash went off, the time taken - all kinds of information (called "metadata"). The photographer's image editing software added more, such as who has registered the software (Bert), what kind of computer he was using (Windows), and where the picture was saved from (a folder called ...\California\Marin-Sonoma).

You can see this information (and much more) by using a simple and free tool called EXIFTOOL (available here ), which will allow you to see hidden information in many different kinds of files (not just pictures).

Bert probably had no idea that the bunny picture had all of that information in it - to him it was just a picture of a rabbit. But if you know what to look for and how to look for it, there's a wealth of information to discover.

So what does this have to do with fighting?

Simple. Your punches, kicks, and the rest of your movements also contain hidden information. Lots of it.


In a real world confrontation, before the first punch is thrown, there is a lead up to it: words are exchanged, distance is crossed by the aggressor to the defender, and body positions are shifted to cut off exits, to protect vital regions, or to give better access to strong sides or weapons. This is true whether the encounter is a fight at a bar or a mugging in a parking lot. One person makes the decision that it is going to get physical, prepares their body for violence, and the other must react.


Knowing how to spot the hidden information in these pre-fight movements - knowing how to see more than just "the rabbit" - is the difference between learning that the Fight Is On while the guy is still 2 steps away from you, or making that same realization after his fist has already connected with your face.

If I'm the defender, there are several pieces of hidden information that I'm looking for which we'll go over in future posts. For now, the most important, is "is this guy about to attack me?"

The best way to learn to find and read these hidden cues is through continuous mindful practice with honest partners. In the Combat Systema classes that I teach, we use drills where one person is the defender and the rest of the class walks around that person like they were a crowd walking past a pedestrian in Times Square. No one pays attention to the defender at all... except for the one person chosen at random to be the attacker. Sometimes the attacker will come at them with fists. Sometimes he'll reach into his pocket or into his waistband and pull out a knife. Sometimes it'll be from the front. Sometimes from behind. The point is to train the defender's eyes to recognize the directed aggressive attention, to see the break in the pattern of people around him, to pick up on the hidden body language clues. Distance, cadence of walk, choppiness of breath, body angle, hand and eye positions - all of these things contain hidden information that you can pick up on to reveal the person's intent.

Reading this hidden information won't stop the fight from happening, but will give you more time to react and prepare.

                                         Response time = reaction time + movement time

The middle of a fight is a bad time to be thinking about mathematics, but here is one equation that governs the reality of combat.  Your response time equals your reaction time plus your movement time. If I have any hope of blocking your incoming punch, I have to:

• realize you are punching me (reaction time)
• decide upon a course of action (also reaction time)
• move my arm to deflect your incoming attack (movement time)

 Together, those make up my response time. If the time it takes for your fist to reach my nose is less than my response time, I lose.

This equation works both ways. As a defender, I want to minimize my reaction time by identifying an attack as early as possible. And as an attacker, I want to not telegraph my attack so that I delay my opponent's reaction time (ie cause him to not realize my attack is happening until it's too late for him to stop it). Michael Jai White brilliantly shows this in the following clip:






 By taking away movement cues, White is able to land more punches without speeding his fists up at all. What White says about brake lights at 3:50 is a perfect explanation of what is going on.

You can work on removing this hidden information on your own through slow and mindful work in front of a mirror, but it should also be tested with a partner. When you are by yourself, throw punches slowly while watching your body in a full-length mirror. Are you telegraphing when you punch? When I started doing this seriously, I began to notice that I kept my hands loose, but clenched into a fist right before my punches. This hand movement alone was enough to give an opponent a few hundredths of a second of heads up notice that an attack is incoming.Other common tells are breaking breath (either by holding breath or loudly exhaling), visible shoulder and neck tension, and breaking of rhythmic patterns of hand and arm movement prior to throwing the punch.

Partner drills are simple - have them hold a hitting target still while you warm up striking slowly with a simple jab. Remember, start slowly at first. After a few dozen reps, have the partner call out when they see your attack begin. See if you can get your hand closer to that stationary pad before their voice each time. It is important not to throw fakes at this time; each movement should be thrown genuinely and with awareness. As you gradually speed up, continue trying to get your hand closer to the stationary pad before you hear your partner's voice. Once you get to full speed, you can have them pull their target away or avoid your strike instead of calling out (it is good to have another stationary pad behind this so you aren't damaging your arm when you go full speed). This drill can be done at all distances, from clinching distance (where less power will be generated but the technique will be faster) to full extension.

Remember, training solo is good, but live feedback is best. And there's no better live feedback then sparring against a non-compliant partner. Find an open mat in your area, grab a training partner, and put what you practice to the test!

Good luck, and safe training!