There is a story of a band of muggers who waited until someone was sitting on a toilet in a public location and then when the mark was with his pants down. They would pull his legs from under the stall door and rob them.

This is a sad but logical example of the laws of nature. Predators target the most vulnerable and stagnant parts of their pray society. The young and the old and the ones who cannot react to surprises.

Training comes to prepare all our facets for the times to come and a segment should always be allocated to caged chaos. In simple terms we address the element of surprise by using it on ourselves but with some controls for safety and for a better learning effect.

The story tells itself:

We enter the training room knowing there will be a surprise but not knowing someone on the team will start the engagement by pulling your pants down and another will throw water in their face. Surprise is an element that must be trained so that the mind and heart are able to keep going instead of drowning in pattern recognition where there is no apparent pattern.

Another example of this type of training is using the low high shift. We start an engagement softly with open body language and a relaxed face and tone as the target does not know who will attack them and another approaches them with angry forward leaning pose and harsh words and then Mr soft commits the attack. This is a good drill to de-condition the social norm from the student as this is one of the main attack vectors of a predator.

One last example of this type of training is the wait. We expect things to change and we expect things in a bracket of time we decide on ourselves and it is important to change this concept through different initiation windows and false starts that allow the student to get that rush of “here we go” go past it and then get hit for real as they deal with it.

All this must be done in good nature unless you want to create bad faith between the students themselves and the teacher. We are all walking the same road. Some of us just walk a bit strange….