On the knife scenario thread, Roy wrote
So here is a good glimpse into the ugliness of combat. No pre-arranged movements, no pre-arranged responses. Only a sudden primal survival reaction that leaves the attacked cut in almost every case.
This is the concept introduced by many combat specialists and is so poignantly described in Gladwell's book BLINK. It is also the theory of the Chess game that I posted on this forum. If you want to engineer a strategy you first study the innate response. You figure out what happens in the blink of an eye. You do these tests a bunch of times and come to understand what your hands do, your body does, and your mind does when suddenly and brutally attacked. Then you train to it. You see, you cannot train a first response, so you have to learn to train to the first response.
Looking at these videos you see a few episodes where these guys try to make something happen. They get lost in a technique that isn't working. They get stabbed and slashed and still they work that single technique ad nauseum.
This is what happens when we over-engineer a response in the dojo. We cloud the issue by suggesting that there is one better solution to the problem than any other. We suggest that there is one right solution and we drill it.
What we discover by testing the trained response is that the law of specificity almost always turns the fight to the favor of the assailant. In our business we have to learn how to reverse engineer our tactics. Let the BLINK factor speak for itself.
So what to do about these types of attacks as a teacher? How do you get students to prepare for them? How do you teach to survive them?
Pretty sobering, especially when we think of what we do in a dojo during a typical workout. As Roy points out _ we can do what we do, but be careful how you sell it.