Flinch Response: History - How the Defiance Combat F.R.A.C.T System© evolved Click image to enlarge

How the Defiance Combat F.R.A.C.T System© evolved The Defiance Combat F.R.A.C.T System© sits along side a historical time line that shows how the thinking of the programme came together, through my own experiences and how these experiences were often a catalyst for me burying my head in a book, getting certified in something clever, sitting on the internet for hours etc..... What we have below are the primary stepping stones that contributed to be being able to create the Defiance Combat F.R.A.C.T System©, so this isn’t exhaustive but it gives you a sense of the process, and the depth of thinking that has gone into the programme. The history of something can sometimes be indicative of the quality of the end product and I think this is pretty well true for Defiance Combat, it is the sum parts of a great deal of thinking, experience, time, blood, sweat and dare I say it the proverbial tears. Defiance Combat is my brainchild and that's either a statement of great 'confidence and honesty' or one of huge 'arrogance and conceit', as in some respects when you go to launch an endeavour like this, it's like putting yourself out there on a reality show......You think you're great but then as the worlds interested parties view it, you find out the home truths; which either reinforce you in a positive manner or not! Catalyst Point 1: Table Tennis (circa:1988) I was playing table tennis, minding my own business, when a player on another table who was messing about did an overhand tennis like serve and tried to blast it at his opponent, he got it wrong and it curved round into my periphery vision. My left hand shot up and caught the ball, to a look of amazement from everyone, it looked great! The thing that REALLY stuck with me was that I am ‘left handed’ and ‘I hadn’t any conscious thoughts’ about catching it....I literally did it without thought, it was this unconscious act, this ‘flinch response’ that really motivated me. This got me thinking: “How did I do that?” I mean, how does a person, do something like that in order to protect themselves, without being prepared for it? As a reaction to this I started to investigate the biological and psychological reasons for this, but it was hard back then as the internet was in it’s infancy and it was really difficult to research like we can today.  Development at this time: I certified as a Practitioner and then Master NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) practitioner. Catalyst Point 2: School Fête (circa:1989) Like many people I started in the martial arts at a young age, for me it was Judo at school, so at the age of 7/8 I did a year of Judo once a week for an hour, learned a few moves and which if nothing else showed me how to fall down properly, which as it turns out is a very important skill in life. I was at this point a Wing Chun instructor, had been training solidly for years with Grandmaster Sam Kwok (who I am adamant is probably the most capable wing chun instructor on the planet right now, so if that's your thing....seek him out), I had my instructor status validated by Grandmaster Ip Chun who co-signed my instructor certificate and had travelled to Hong Kong to train with Ip Ching (Ip Chun's brother, both the son's of the late Bruce Lee's teacher Grandmaster Ip Man). So granted I wasn't one of the Gracie brothers but I knew my stuff. So 12 years later on from my 12 months of Judo, I was doing a Wing Chun demonstration at a school fête, one of my students at the time threw a punch when I was expecting a kick. I grabbed his arm and threw him (to great applause from the on lookers) with a hip throw, which looked great but wasn't part of the Wing Chun martial art I was training in or for that matter demonstrating....it "just happened". This got me to thinking: “What if all the training I was doing was worthless?”  I mean years of training and in a moment of being caught out at a demonstration, I did a move that I hadn't practised in years. This really got me thinking, “where did that hip throw come from”. I mean consider then that I was running 6 clubs was teaching nearly every day, so it wasn’t about simple repetition, there had to be more to it than that? Development at this time: I trained for 3 years as a Clinical Hypnotherapist. My study was all about how do I train myself to control my ‘flinch response’ at this time I was teaching Wing Chun and playing around with Thai Boxing whilst also studying Kali and attending courses, the words ‘flinch response’ were a common part of the training vocabulary back then, but the techniques didn’t look anything like they do today in the sense that some of it existed but they were in a very raw form. So I had the essence of Wing Chun, which is a very fluid trapping system, though I wanted to do something with it that meant it would work in a street scenario, I wanted to test it, what I found very quickly was that it was partly flawed, not as a system but in the fact that modern day combat isn't the same as the situation it was created for. The Chinese don't generally range from 8stone/112lbs at 5.5ft/1.67m to 18stone/252lbs at 6.2ft/1.82, they are a pretty generic weight and height and thus the system has it's issues (as all systems do). So I pressure tested it in some very real situations and found out that actually it was incredibly effective if you just thought about it in another way, so back then I called it Combat Wing Chun and taught it as such. This fundamentally altered the manner of the delivery of the Wing Chun I was teaching, I can best explain it as giving it a Western Boxing attitude in terms of weight distribution and power application. This was very much the era of Jeet Kune Do, I'd been down to the Bob Breen (The guru of JKD in Europe....seek him out) academy to attend a Dan Inosanto seminar and had listened to the 'absorb what is useful' mantra and totally bought into it, this helped to connect the two catalyst moments above and I started to question a lot of the things I was learning. Within that questioning and from seeing Bob Breen’s academy (not that he knows that), I gave myself the permission to learn other martial arts apart from Wing Chun. So I connected with Bob Spour (a great Muay Thai instructor....seek him out) who really saw the world in a 'well let's give it a go and see where it takes us' way, so we did. I qualified to teach Muay Thai and very quickly incorporated it into my knowledge and the system that I was creating in my personal training and teaching. Catalyst Point 3: Student Attacked (circa: 1994) Then something bad happened. A student of mine was attacked and got beaten up, nothing life threatening but bad news non the less, now I’d also had students attacked that had dealt with it really well, so this has to go into context, but it was the way it happened. Previously when involved in an altercation students had seen the precursor signs that said, ‘you are about to get attacked’ and had shifted themselves accordingly, back then we were using the OODA loop (Observe, Orientate, Decide & Act) and use it to this day. So people weren’t walking around dumb. But this student was really good, strong, fast and skilled. What happened? Well it was a toe to toe argument that ended with his statement, “I saw the punch out of the corner of my eye, I threw my hands up in front of my face, the punch hit my hands into my face and he just reigned punches onto me......I never even got the chance to get going” This got me thinking: This student is good, and he got completely caught off guard?! (So that’s a powerful statement and a big question?) One that I struggled with, as I started to put the previous two Catalyst Points together with this one. When push comes to shove a move comes out of no where to protect you (Table Tennis & School Fête), when push comes to shove a move is given to you that is the right one (Table Tennis & School Fête). But and this is a BIG but, it can also fail you, it can be that your human response, the thing that is actually trying its best to protect you might work against you when you need it the most. Development at this time: I certified as a licensed psychometric assessor with the British Psychological Association and certified as a coach with Behavioural Coaching Institute. Catalyst Point 4: What to teach his wife? (circa: 1996) A friend asked me to teach his wife some self defence and I said yes, no problem and then I started to think "If I only had 4 days to teach a person of no prior experience and of average height, weight and strength to survive an attack, what would I teach them?" Seemed like an easy question, until I really started to think about it and there was a lot to think about. What really struck me was how you'd teach someone to survive an attack in the absence of the complex motor skills that one acquires from sustained training in a martial art or dedicated self defence programme. I started to work through my Wing Chun, Thai Boxing, everything else I knew from Kali and a few other places. You’ll think I am mad, but I couldn’t think what to teach an 8stone/112lbs at 5.5ft/1.67m women. This got me thinking: I was most of the time teaching men to fight men and frankly most of the men I was teaching didn’t really need any help, they were all very capable lads, most of them Karate and Tae Kwon Do black belts in their own right. And I realised that I wasn’t really ‘coaching self defence’, ‘I was teaching fighting’. Out put at this time: I shut all my clubs and had a thermo-nuclear martial arts/self defence meltdown. Sounds excessive, but it was a low time for me martial arts/self defence wise, this wasn’t about skill or competence in the martial arts I was training, it was about an ever increasing sense that I was on the wrong track, this isn’t to say that what I was doing was wrong, but that it wasn’t answering the questions to the Catalyst Points I had encountered. Then I had a bit of a breakthrough, completely thanks to the internet, it wasn’t like it is now remember, I was on a 56K dial up at home and thought it was a revelation (more proof that just when you think that’s the best a thing can be), when I started work at a technology company who had ADSL and then broadband and was using Google years before most people had ever heard of it. I got interested in Hicks Law first, which seemed to indicate that with more decisions came a greater lag in ones ability to make a decision, which I have to admit really got me to think that I was on the right path with the single move principle that I was looking for.  Breakthrough Number: 1 (circa:1998/9) But I kept researching and then came across the work of Larish & Stelmach, Merkel and researchers such as Mowbray & Rhoades and Welford (Read more on this topic) I quickly came to realise that Hick’s Law didn’t really make sense to me, it was very appealing to connect this to the Flinch Response and say job done, but the reality is that I don’t believe they do connect. The breakthrough for me was that this research seemed to connect to my thinking around three circles of Capability, Competence & Core Competence and that the focus on the circle of Core Competence wasn’t wrong, but that more could go in it than I was at first thinking, it didn’t have to be a singular move. Output at this time: I also started to explore as much about human physiology as I could get my hands on, started to rip apart every technique I had ever learned and came up with the idea of applying the stuff I was learning in my day job about performance management to the this problem, so I started to work with the idea of: • Capability - What you can do • Competence - What you are good at • Core Competence - What you think you’ll do when it gets real I wanted to focus all my training on the area of Core Competence and still do to this day, helping coach others to understand where what they know and can do fits into this approach. What is now the Defiance Combat F.R.A.C.T System© is the absolute output of the focus on Core Competence. This is also when I expanded my thinking around the precursor techniques the ‘you are about to be attacked’ signals to a wider platform than the OODA loop mentioned earlier and moved to using: • Detect, Deter, Defuse, Disengage, Defend, Don’t Die (I added Don’t Die (circa:2005/6)) This gave me more room to coach a more holistic approach to self defence and also a wider platform for my own research. Some of my students had been law enforcement and they had some fascinating observations about stab victims having the bulk of their defensive wounds on their hands'. It turned out when someone comes at you with a knife and you're scared or caught unaware, you'll 'flinch' (there was that word again)with defensive hand gestures. I just thought, "well you would wouldn't you, I mean it's like if someone threw a hot drink at you, you wouldn't drop into a martial arts guard position". I mean your hands would come up in that way....wouldn't they? This is what my student had done, he’d ‘flinched’ and thus lost the initiative and thus lost the fight. Breakthrough Number: 2 (circa: 2000) In my career as an executive coach I was learning the craft of enabling people to recognize their set pattern responses and re-learn more valuable behaviours to enable them as effective leaders. It soon became clear that a persons behaviour and thus their reactions to stress or threat situations were identifiable at a route cause; it didn't seem to matter if this was in the training room, the pavement or the boardroom. In terms of how to coach/teach people a way of handling being ‘ambushed’ in the board room I was trying to understand ways of coaching senior leaders to react, without having to go through a Rolodex of possibilities and then select one as this was too slow, didn’t engender confidence in the individual in themselves or from others as the time lag for response was often too long and not always on the mark. So understanding learning methodology became key. (Read more on this topic): • Sequential Learning Using combinations that flow from one to the other will reduce the time it takes the brain to connect. • Conceptual Learning Here’s an example: “Birds have feathers and wings. Any thing with feathers and wings will be identified as ‘bird” This got me thinking: How to create a way of coaching that Conceptually and Sequentially linked technique and thinking into my coaching Output at this time: • Started to officially refer to what I was thinking about as The Flinch Response, had been saying it for a decade as a banner for my research, thinking and training, but now it became the catch all. • I created and tested it and when people are genuinely startled they react in a pretty uniform manner, this all started to fall into place with what I had been learning in the sciences, testing in training, what I had been finding in the learning from working as a coach and leadership developer. At this point it all started to form into a specific set of ideas and moves. In fact my thinking and research in the martial arts was directly aligning to my work as an executive coach and leadership development consultant it became abundantly clear that under extreme stress or in moments of surprise/shock we respond at a very basic level, a level that is not controllable in the moment, but one that is set in place prior to that moment and emerges as an unconscious act. So it was around this time that the Flinch Response and thus a little later in 2011 F.R.A.C.T (Flinch Response And Combat Training) was born focusing on the recognition and understanding of four factors: • The science of the Flinch Response • A blending of technique into a set hand movement that represented the shape of an Arrow Position • The associated psychology that enabled the Flinch Response and the Arrow Position to work in threat situations • A stripped down set of techniques that can sit in a persons Core Competence   These four things put together in conjunction with years of pressure testing become the Defiance Combat F.R.A.C.T System™ and went to form the Core Principles. In 2011 - • I officially launched the system at The Martial Arts Show Live, with a Stand and free Skills Session (See Photo’s) • Created the Defiance Combat F.R.A.C.T System™ brand, to distinguish ourselves from others Of course there's a lot more to it that I keep remembering along the way and as the system moves ahead then history continues to write itself, also I have tried to recall this retrospectively but I think the time line is pretty accurate. Be Well! Guy Bloom Creator of the Defiance Combat F.R.A.C.T System© home - contact - downloads - guarantee - photo’s - sponsors - step 1:  foundation - step 2: advanced - step 3: elite - book - vision - brand - the way next evolution - faq - texas - history - core principles - terminology - guy bloom - law - copyright - articles - termsofsupply - termsofuse - privacypolicy Copyright © 2010.Defiance Combat F.R.A.C.T Self Defence.2010. All rights reserved