Immediate Action Combatives

A Critical Self-Preservation Skill

For quite literally years and years I have been telling people that one of the single best skills we can have if we are truly interested in real world self-preservation is the ability to breakfall. It is not sexy or tacti-cool, but it is far more likely to be used and more likely to save you from harm than a firearm or H2H fighting skills.
The simple fact is that everyone falls – whether that is because of slipping/tripping over something on the ground, or getting our feet tied up through bad, hasty, unthinking movement. We all have done this at some time, and some of us have done it a lot. Hopefully, the most negative thing we get afterwards is embarrassment or some broken skin, but all too often the consequences are much worse. For anyone who is unsure about that, look up how many times a senior citizen who falls and breaks their hip then passes away as a result.

At the beginning of my Immediate Action Combatives coursework, I tell people the seminar is NOT about teaching you to voluntarily go to the ground to fight. Instead, it is about "when you do not intend to go to the ground but find yourself there regardless". When I ask students if that is possible and how it would be, they universally answer "after falling", because anyone who is honest will admit that they have fallen at some point in their life. I point out that even if you do not want to, if you have not trained specifically to stay on your feet, finding yourself under sudden surprising violent assault is not the time when your brain is going to be able to do so easily.
Take this video as a case in point, as it is a perfect illustration of what I try to get across.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ2PGmUIAYo&feature=emb_logo

Does anyone think that the LEO wanted to go to the ground? Of course not. It is obvious that was unintended and totally accidental. And because it was accidental, and he was not prepared or trained for it, the single reason he did not suffer worse consequences was that the bad guy had the same reaction. If the bad guy had not fallen over the officer and had a bit more presence of mind, there is a pretty good chance the officer would have suffered major injuries from the bad guy’s knife, and perhaps even have died. The good guy was also extremely lucky that he did not suffer injuries from the fall itself such as hitting his head. Again, nothing good would have followed that.

The good guy in the above video was lucky, but I don’t really think counting on luck to save your life is the best plan. That is no different than making poor financial decisions over and over again in the hope that you will hit the lottery at some point. You need to prepare and practice for it the same exact way you practice drawing from concealment with your carry pistol.
If you are honestly interested in self-preservation, than you need to spend a solid amount of time on the things that are most likely to kill you. Having decent health (regular physical checkups, including dental since there is a direct link between poor dental hygiene and heart attacks), not being excessively fat, eating like an adult, being a good driver, knowing CPR and how to work an AED machine and recognize the signs of a stroke, and knowing how to survive a sudden fall. None of these are sexy or can be easily accomplished by buying gear, but they mean far more to your actual well-being.

In the next article, I will talk about how we go about learning and developing the ability to breakfall.

תיעוד הירי בראש העין הסרטון מכיל תיעוד של אלימות וכן של יריThe clip contains shooting and gun violence.The following video is a part of Haaretz news coverage. For the newspaper w...

If you are interested in truly cutting edge instruction in fi****ms training, check out this upcoming collaboration between Simon Golob and Jeff Gonzales on 8/29-30/2026 in Casa Grande, AZ.

The course is not "tactical" vs "gamer", but instead looking at how the two sides can work together and produce a superior student performance.

I will be there at the class, so come and watch me be the worst performer and join in on the mirth!

Everyday Carry: Cold Performance Meets Dynamic Shooting Near and Far: The Complete Handgun Fight is a 2-day course blending close-quarters gunfighting w/long-range handgun skills, from arm’s length to 50+ yards.

Striking vs Grappling in the Real World

This is an interesting video. I'm not gonna comment on the law-enforcement Context, I'm not gonna comment on how they arrived in the situation that they're in, and I am not actually going to make any points about what I think as an inexperienced non-law-enforcement professional what these officers should've done. But I am going to point out an issue that often gets overlooked in the self preservation training community.

Watch the video and notice what the female officer does while her partner is wrestling with the suspect over the gun. She is frantically hitting the bad guy as hard as she possibly can. And we clearly see the results. And said results add up to Zero. .

Further, that Female officer looked to be pretty good shape. She looks to be fit and looks to be the kind of officer that you would hope would show up to deal with stuff. Certainly you could make comments about how her striking could be better directed and the mechanics might be improved, but what she was doing was not really wrong.

What was wrong was that it was completely useless. And here is why. The female officer is not that big. Hard to tell from the video but she looks fairly average size for a female of her age. Again, obviously seems to be in pretty decent shape, but not super muscular nor super large. And that is the major issue with striking that far too many subject matter experts overlook when they bleat endlessly about how grappling will get you killed and what you have to do instead is hit the other person.

That sounds really great if you are a 200 pound person hitting somebody your size or smaller. Probably a decent and effective strategy. .However what is overlooked - whether through willful ignorance or flat out stupidity - Is that physics matters.There is a reason that every striking combat sport has weight classes.You can be the best 135 pound Striker on the planet, but if you go to punch somebody who outweighs you by 100 pounds, it's not going to do a whole lot. Roberto Duran was one of the greatest boxers of all time and his nickname was Hands of Stone, so that lets us know that he could hit really hard. He was lightweight through middleweight champion in the 70s and early 80s. But you know what title he never won, what title he never fought for? Heavyweight. Why is that? Because the worst top 20 heavyweight boxer on the planet would have destroyed him and maybe even killed him. There's almost no boxing commission in the world that would've sanctioned a fight between Roberto Duran and some heavyweight. Because physics matters. So if someone like a Duran would have a hard time hurting someone 80 pounds heavier, what chance does that middle age guy, who has never fought or trained H2H before, and has a short weekend course on it going to be able to accomplish?

You can have all the technical skill on your side. You can be an abnormally proficient striker. But hitting somebody 50, 80 or 100 pounds heavier than you negates most of that and anybody who tries to argue that is lying or they're an idiot. And anyone who tries to say “well, that's why you strike to specific points” has never fought anybody for real. The best we can do is hit general targets as often and as fast and as hard as we possibly can. And if you are substantially smaller than somebody else, that is not going to be super effective as the video here so ably illustrates.

What we know does work from decades and decades of jujutsu and MMA is that you can be a smaller person and win at grappling against a bigger person. That is not a debatable point. I can point out an incredibly dense amount of empirical data to prove that. It's easier for a smaller person to win through grappling than it is through striking.

Am I saying that striking sucks? Obviously not. I have spent an inordinate amount of my own personal training time working striking. But we have to be conscious of the limitations of striking. It absolutely has its place, but it is almost never a more superior tactic than grappling in the real world.

PoliceActivity 18K likes, 8.9K comments. "Suspect Tries to Take Officer’s Gun During Struggle in Portland"

Another “Rare” Entangled Fight with a Private Citizen and Weapons 4/7/2026

While many online commentators keep bleating about how these things are rare, we have another one that just happened in Oklahoma. Take a look : A high school principal tackles an attempted school shooter with a gun. Not only was it entangled, but it went to the ground, where the fight was ended successfully.

‘Saved lives’: Video shows principal tackling gunman at Oklahoma high school Surveillance footage from a high school in Oklahoma appears to show a gunman getting tackled by the school’s principal.

Just published the first of my new YouTube series that I am calling Mat Side Chats.

I will use these as informal quick discussions talking about important issues and needs that require a bit more nuance than can be covered by writing a post or article.

The first one gives the viewer tips on finding the right facility to train combatives. This has been one of the most frequently asked questions to men over the past 25 years, and it is crucial to make the right and informed choice.

I post it here, but I would really appreciate it if people would view it directly on YT to help my channel out, as well as hitting like or even subscribe. My channel is NOT monetized and this is completely free information, with no BS of me trying to get you to buy stuff from me or giving me money to get access to the real details. All of my videos will be exactly what I would tell you in a private lesson or in seminars. So if you could support me with likes/subscriptions, it would be super cool!

Mat Side Chat 1 - Finding the right Combatives Gym A short chat with some key guidelines to finding a good, functional, and safe Combatives facility to train at. Making the wrong choice can be costly not just...

It continues to amuse me that people in the fi****ms training community still try to deny obvious evidence. I posted yet another “rare” entangled fight with weapons and private citizens, and even wrote how that the Flat Earthers use ambiguous language and terms, and I even had commentators on my post still use that language without even a bit of self-awareness.

So I am going to do it again. The following incident just happened and it was reported by a major news source, the New York Times on March 15th. A private citizen stopping a potential mass shooting by not only going to an entanglement, but actually and purposefully taking the bad guy to the ground. No lives lost, good guy wins by using grappling against a handgun. I must be living in Princess Bride land when I hear certain people use the term “rare”.

“"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Armed Man with 100 Rounds of Ammo Tackled in Texas Church The New York Post is reporting new details on a March 15, 2026, incident in which an armed man was tackled in Eden Church in Houston, Texas.

The past is another country

We can read about it, study it, learn from it, but we can't live there. Or, at least, we shouldn’t.

It is important to learn from the past. Whether we have made mistakes or we have made good choices and done good things, It's always good and useful to touch base with those things to help us ensure that our future path is as good as we can possibly make it.

But we can't wallow in it. Whether it's a great decision or a poor decision. Whether we had a fantastic experience at some point in our past or we had a horrific one. Dwelling on any of it does no good. You cannot move forward while dwelling.To move forward we must live in the present and plan for the future.

For example: I had an opportunity in high school to follow quite literally the best strength and conditioning plan a person could follow. I had the book and the template. If I had followed that template I would have been in much better condition, far less injured, and had a base of health and vitality that would've followed me to this day at 61. Instead I followed trends and what was popular and what I thought was the cool thing. I wasted a good 15+ years. That mistake is certainly embarrassing to me and disappointing in what I missed out on. However, letting it guide me going forward is literally a waste. It would do me no good to beat myself up over and over and over again and cry about what if. Instead, I put my focus on building Health and Vitality the correct way and using that book and that old template to move forward. I'm not gonna waste any more time whining about the past because the future is too exciting.

Focus on where you're going and ensure that your path is as smooth and productive as possible. Learn from your past mistakes but leave them there in the past. They can be monuments, but they should not be an albatross around our necks.

When Your Personal Narrative is Based on What You want, Not What is True

Many commentators in the gun community like to pontificate on "reality". They will use small, self-selected data, or anecdotes, cool lingo, or when that fails, insults that they try to wrap in "joking".

Two of the most popular things these folks will desperately try to push is 1) that entangled fights with private citizens and weapons are "rare", and 2) that a private citizen using a knife to defend themselves are a "unicorn".

Take note of the language they use. They use ill-defined terms with nebulous boundaries so they can move the goal post anytime someone points out when their attempts to make definitive statements are empirically proven wrong. Because they are not willing to use real science and the established Scientific Method to analyze the data they cherry pick, they know their only escape is to gaslight people.

The problem is that those kind of moves fall apart spectacularly when reality intrudes again and again. Here is yet another massive case in point, and every single person reading this has heard of this event that shows the naysayers foolishness : the Old Dominion ROTC attack.

Not only was it an entangled fight with private citizens defending themselves using H2H methods including GRAPPLING, it also involves one of the citizens using a folding knife to help end the attack.

It is clear and defined, and is real that cannot be ignored. And watch them try to use poorly defined language as they vainly attempt to prop up their preferred narrative. But, as always, it only takes a bit of critical thinking to see that the emperor has no clothes

ROTC students at Old Dominion University subdued and killed shooter who left 1 dead, 2 hurt The FBI says the suspect has been identified as Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, who pleaded guilty in 2016 to attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for Self Defense

“Never go to the ground!” ….. hmmmmmmm…. “never”

I have a friend in law enforcement who has an excellent story of using bottom half guard to keep a guy between him and a group of dudes trying to kick his skull in with his back to the tires of a car while he waits for backup to arrive.

Or let’s say you’re at a holiday party, there’s family and friends all stuffed into a little kitchen while the food is coming out. Children are running around at ankle height. Just then the door comes in, and here comes your one friend’s baby daddy fresh from jail.
He’s screaming he wants his kid; he grabs a knife off the butcher block. Now I’ve seen plenty of systems where you NEVER get entangled with a guy, you NEVER go to the ground willingly, and I’m sure there are some “I’ll just shoot him” types… in a room full of people… in front of his child… that’s your choice to make.
Personally I think having a skill set that allows you to effectively control someone while your buddy calls the cops and lends a hand is probably a good choice given the totality of the circumstances.

On the one hand, yes, staying upright, mobile, and conscious are priorities. On the other hand is the “all fights go to the ground” mantra. Well, here we are as a student stuck with catch phrases and empty slogans in a rich, chaotic, messy tangle of limbs and uncertainty. What’s the answer? What if I told you, it depends? What if the capability to stay upright and keep someone off you is not independent of the ability to take someone down at will and control them? Or that those same take down skills translate directly into one’s ability to stay upright? And there’s the rub. The guy training BJJ isn’t just learning cool submission moves from bottom, he’s also defending them, and trying to stay on his feet while another grown man tries to throw him around and pull him down.

Here’s a performance driver: if I’m going to the ground I want it to be on my terms, because I’ve made a choice to do so based upon the circumstances. The one dimensional fighter doesn’t get to take the fight where he wants; he tries desperately to keep it wherever he is comfortable.

"A boxer is like a lion, the greatest predator on land. But you throw him in the shark tank and he's just another meal." - Renzo Gracie.

In Renzo Gracie’s book, Master Jiu Jitsu, he speaks at length about the early days of MMA and about all the ranges of the fight and why the BJJ fighter had such a dominant advantage in those days. The part that translates best for our discussion is simply that it is easier to take the fight to the ground than it is to keep it standing once the players have become entangled. Simple as that. You need to not just be better than your opponent, you need to be MUCH, MUCH better if you want to stay upright and he does not. Further, the number of fights we see where guys simply fall over one another, or a curb, slip on gravel or ice, ect. and wind up going down with no intention to do so is too large to ignore. Gravity is out to get you, it takes effort to stand even when you’re not being punched in the face.

Once we hit the ground, without some basic horizontal grappling skills we are in for trouble.

And then we could go down the rabbit hole of this discussion. What techniques or styles translate best to the Weapons Based Environment (WBE, as per Craig Douglas)? What about Gi vs no-gi ? What BJJ do we see in modern MMA where everyone has some sort of grappling? I'd like to talk about some of those points later, but for now I want to talk about why I believe in BJJ as a core foundational element for self-defense.

Pressure.

From day one the BJJ student will face a live adversary. There will be technique, and there will be drilling, there will be learning a new skill, and there will be some guy that’s bigger, stronger, younger, and more experienced than you attempting to force his will on you while you try to execute it. From the very first you’ll need to deal with suffocation, panic, making observations and decisions when you're gassed out tired and hit with adrenaline.
Over time, it will take more and more pressure to overwhelm the practitioner. We learn piece by piece to deal with stress and to become functional in the jumbled mess of limbs and be able to execute complex techniques based on intuition and feel.

This is where BJJ shines. Constant, relentless pressure.

It's not about under what circumstances the triangle choke is appropriate for self-defense, or whether breaking an arm will stop an attacker. It's about what you do when you're overwhelmed, when you can’t breathe, when your muscles give out and dizzy from exertion.

The BJJ practitioner knows this place. He goes there every day.

Recently, I posted a video showing clearly how having a reasonable level of fitness is a great aid in any self-defense encounter. It was a compilation video that showed multiple instances of that very concept. And apparently, some commentators in the training community got butthurt. And of course, they did not try to debate me directly. No, they just talked offline behind my back about how mean I am, and how I don’t know what I am talking about.

For most anyone with the slightest ounce of critical thinking, writing that some positive fitness would fall under the general heading of “a good idea”. Unfortunately, for some people in the self-preservation training community, that very idea is anathema. They spend a great deal of time arguing against it. Mostly because they themselves cannot exhibit that level of health and vitality. The problem with their argument is that it is incredibly evident that their position is moronic. And the reason you know they recognize that fact, is because they all delve deep into creating a Straw Man that does not exhibit.

Samuel Johnson was wrong. Patriotism is not the last refuge of a scoundrel. Creating a Straw Man and arguing against that, is.

These self-appointed internet experts try to dismiss the fitness argument by relating continuously that “we see lots of videos where people without good fitness prevail”. Well no duh Sherlock. Their straw man is that those of us who advocate for some fitness are saying that only people with fitness will prevail in a violent encounter. Which if any of us made that statement, then we should be ridiculed, because it is foolish. That is why none of us have ever said that. Our point has always been it makes your task easier the better the level of health and vitality one has. But that is not a debatable point, and they need to rationalize their own personal failure.

So it is a Straw Man argument. But even worse is that in making it, they don’t even realize what a colossal logical fallacy they fall into. So let’s take a moment to look into that.

They argue that many people who are not in good shape survive or even win a violent encounter. And that is a correct point. However, what is also a correct point is that literally MILLIONS of people every year survive violent encounters without a gun. So, if we use the above insipid argument that certain people use to justify not pursuing fitness, then we can say just as solid that there is no reason to have a gun! If we don’t need fitness, then we don’t need a gun because millions get by without it. So the gun experts destroy their own personal narrative of having a gun, training with a gun, etc. any time they use the anti-fitness logic.

Let’s take it away from the self-defense realm and examine it’s application somewhere else.

Every year, multiple tens of thousands of people survive car crashes when they don’t have a seatbelt on. So, using the anti-fitness argument, then the same people should advocate that no one needs to wear a seat belt at all.

That is how logic works. When you make a argument using certain standards, those same standards can be applied to any other point.

And it becomes easy to see how foolish it is to make that argument. We don’t use luck as the basis for good tactics and procedures. Just as we should wear a seatbelt, and just as we should carry a gun as much as possible, we should try to have some level of fitness. Ignoring any of the above statements, means you are playing roulette with your life. Be an adult and try to be better and more capable as much as we can based on our personal circumstances.

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Revolver Epilogue Part 1 - The Entangled Fight

After wrapping up my Revolver Positives series, there are a few other things I wanted to address about the wonderful world of wheelguns, but were not appropriate for the series. There are some items that I would not categorize as “positives”, but are still relevant to the overall discussion.

These items are a) revolvers in an entangled fight, b) capacity concerns, and c) who can actually teach this material correctly and from experience? So let’s start the wrap up!

Today, I want to discuss in brief the idea of using revolvers - especially small short barreled snubs - in an entangled fight.
Many people advocate for just such a role for snubs. They talk about things like the small size of the gun making it easier to access and deploy in a grappling encounter, the shortness of it making it harder for the bad guy to grab onto and take away, and the surety of firing when in contact with a bad guy. All of those sound like positives, so why did I not include this in my overall series?

Because I am staunchly opposed to a hardware solution over a software one. All of the above “positives” can be a positive if the user has the skill set to enable the positives to matter. In other words, he has enough grappling skill to pull it off. If the software - the skill - does not exist, then it is a literal crapshoot if the above positives will even matter.

I have seen it countless times in training scenarios, and it is easy to find real world examples as well, where the person is carrying a snub, and it has no bearing on the fight because he was not able to access and deploy the gun. He did not have the skill to do so, and the bad guy kept him from being able to do what the good guy wished to do. The hardware will not solve the problem on its own, more times than not. Anything can happen in combat, and miracles do happen, but do you want to rely on the one in a million shot? Not really the best plan.

Years ago, on the old (and greatly cherished) Total Protection Interactive discussion forum, there was a student who had gone through ECQC with Craig Douglas and did not do well. He asked on TPI for ideas of how to do better the next time. He was inundated with posts about developing some grappling skill, training some striking systems, building his cardio, building strength and some muscle mass, etc. All ideas focused around the core concept of improving the software. After all of that, his solution was to ignore the advice and instead he would just carry a snub revolver AIWB. Flash forward a year and he took ECQC again (which was a tremendous thing, and he was commended for trying again) and does anyone want to guess the results? He got taken to the woodshed in the FoF evolutions again. And once again, he asked for advice, and of course got the same advice as the year before. And, just as the year before, he ignored and decided his new plan was to carry TWO snubs forward of the hips, one of each side of his belly button………..

So do I think the short barreled small revolver has some really good positives in an entangled fight? Absolutely, but only if it is supported by building the functional ability to utilize the positives to the fullest.