Let stress test your techniques to see if they can tackle the physical and psychological pressure under stress. Does your arsenal of techniques meet the demand of real life, If not then let’s make the adjustments that are acquired to function under extreme pressure, like a real life attack.

Physical pressure is based on different parameters like mass, speed and pain. Mass in movement is a basis force; how much bodymass you transfer to the other person when attacking or counter attacking. When working with realistic mass /force you will feel that the weight of the attack can move you, forcing you to shift balance and move so you are not caught by your opponents mass/force. Speed is another element, which  will challenge your reaction time and the timing in your techniques. High velocity attacks will eliminate some possibilities of counter movements, especially if it’s a range of combinations attacks. It is possible to work with both mass and speed separately, but if you combine them you get closer to the realistic real life situations.  Newtons’s law Force = mass x acceleration (speed).  The typical result of used force is pain(physical feedback); attacks and the counter attacks are felt at many different levels. It is necessary too fell pain during your training, as you cannot expect to that a real life threatening situation will be without pain. Of course the fight/flight response(and the heighten adrenaline boost) will reduce the experience of pain, but it is in your advantage to able to recognize the pain so this will not come as a surprise in a real life threatening situation.

It can be hard to find the balance between going too hard and going too soft, when pressure testing your techniques, but the main thing is to avoid injuries during these exercises while pulling it to towards max – our tools  are caution, brains and safety equipment like HighGear and no lie blades.

Psychological pressure can basically be divided into three groups, audio stress, visual stress and expectations/rules. The audio stress can be a verbal threat, a person saying/screaming  things that you have to respond too;  it could be loud noise or losing the ability to hear any sounds thus you have to rely on your other senses. Visual stress can be flashing light, something gets in your eyes – in real life it could be blood from a wound, the other persons threatening body language or the light goes out – you’ll  have to fight in the dark. Some studies claim that 80 % of our orientation comes from our sight. Expectations/rules can consist of different elements; you cannot leave someone behind, you are at work and represent certain rules of conflict engagement, you can’t use one arm – it’s broken, more than one attacker or limited space and maybe no way to escape.

All these elements can be trained separately or combined to measure you skills and ability to overview a confrontation in real life situations.