How Covid changed Self Protection

Hi, some more insight into my development of strike3defence program, grab a coffee and enjoy the read.

I teach my programs using the principles of must know, should know and could know. This has allowed me to deliver what you need as a minimum to effectively survive a potential or imminent violent encounter. With skills transference and multitasking, I teach you to learn to utilise each moment of your day as a positive productive training development exercise. Even a simple thing such as turning a door knob. This creates hand strength and dexterity while reinforcing muscle pinch and tear techniques.

I found the use of metaphors as a highly effective delivery platform to easily teach, learn and assimilate SSPDT skills. The use of metaphors and fables have been successfully used for many generations to teach our kids valuable life lessons, such as telling the truth and stranger danger.

I identified that many people were anxious when learning or even discussing personal safety. When participants were asked to block a strike to their head after a demonstration and instruction, many actually “froze” and become immobilised, unable to execute a simple action.

My solution to circumvent this was to create teaching metaphors, utilising current already established skillsets and neuromuscular synapse transference. In doing so I was able to reduce and often remove the anxiety. The introduction of metaphors made the program easy to learn and recall under stress stimuli.

It is essential to protect your head. Most people brush, comb or preen their hair each day with hair product. Once I identified this common routine, I used this as a platform to build upon and created a metaphor around this. I now instruct participants to “brush their hair” they do this a couple of times and then I strike towards their head without any indication of my intent. Since introduction of this methodology, I have witnessed a 100% success rate. All participants instinctively and successfully block the strike. 

S3D has further refined elements of already self-learnt and programmed movements in other techniques and tactics. Your acceptance and familiarity with fire and earthquake evacuation drills allow for an extension of that mindset to include personal safety and security.

Another technique is to imagine you are a vampire, covering your face with a large cape. As participants do this, they angle their elbow to protect their jaw, I then strike towards them and YES, they defeat the attack. Always looking at how to improve S3D, and like most of us adapting and changing to the challenges of the covid environment we operate in.

The global pandemic has had a positive unintended consequence. We have learnt more about personal safety and risk management. To capitalise on this, I found parallels that can be utilised in your personal security program. The “cape” move is now re-termed the “covid elbow sneeze”. This is a highly effective movement to protect your vulnerable head.