I was lucky enough to receive an invitation to spend a day with Tony Blauer and his team as they delivered their seminar Be Your Own Body Guard. The day is an introduction to the S.P.E.A.R system.
http://liarcatchers.com/executive_protection.html
First off I need to declare early a couple of things. I have previous experience of martial arts and am an ABA coach along with 25 years of service in the police, 5 years as an officer safety instructor and 9 years on the Territorial Support Group. But that does not mean I know everything to know about self defence in fact my experience tells me you should be open minded about self defence systems and always look to learn from mistakes preferably other peoples!
The day started with an introduction from Tony and then continued into a morning of lectures. He introduces principles such as Detect, Defuse and Defend. A very succinct way of saying spot the danger early, try your best to avoid confrontation and when you cannot, deal with it, firmly. There were other principles about listening to that little voice in your head, it often knows best. Instinct plus intellect equals intelligence. All this is peppered with funny anecdotes that illustrate the points being made. You certainly feel Tony has done his research, the lecture on the fear loop is very revealing about how we can set ourselves up for failure.
The afternoon is devoted to being introduced to simple drills. The flinch reaction the “outside 90″ and how you develop your options from this. I can say I have seen some of this syllabus appearing in our officer safety classes and I know Tony has a growing following in law enforcement over here.
For me the biggest thing I can take away from today is when you have reached the point of defend, the system does not want you to block and retreat. It absolutely wants you to block and get close and stick to your attacker and hurt them. For me I struggled at first, years of conditioning wanted me to create reaction space. But once I over came this it really made sense. Who wants to go to round 2? You want to finish this in round 1! I will be feeding this back to my police instructors.
For people of martial art experience there will be a period of adjustment if you have had no self defence training then I can see you adopting the system very quickly. Tony is a very charismatic man and I feel he could sell ice cubes to the Inuit (that is a compliment) but the drills really impressed me and without pressure testing them in a dojo or for real I still believe they make a lot of common sense. I would recommend if you have been thinking about visiting one of the seminars then do so
