Jay wrote a good piece on the importance of scenario-based training.

I can somewhat understand why people don’t want to do Force-on-Force (FoF) training: the prospect is intimidating. Most of us want to avoid the fight. We want to avoid getting hurt. We really don’t want to deal with it. So why would we go and pretend to do it? I don’t want to get hurt. I don’t want the pain and the stress.

I totally understand.

There was a point in time where I didn’t want to do that stuff.

I got over it.

Let’s look at empty hand martial arts. Any martial art that just has you memorize a bunch of moves and “dance” with a partner? Well, there’s something to that yes, but if your goal is to learn how to defend yourself, you’ll never learn how. Having a partner that cooperates isn’t realistic, because your attacker certainly will not cooperate with you. That dojo isn’t going to have the pressure. It isn’t going to bring the pain. There won’t be the stress of time, the need to prevail, and yes… the lumps that will teach you lessons that no other means of teaching will make. And if you can participate in sport-based variants of the event? All the better.

Does a basketball player learn to play basketball by sitting on the court alone calmly shooting hoops? No, they have to get out there in the pressure of a game, with other people, and play.

So can you really learn self-defense by dancing in the air? Nope. It’s one reason I stopped my Kuk Sool training, because it was just cooperative dance and the organization perpetuated that notion (tho there were some within the org that wanted to do more realistic training). Can you learn how to use a gun in a pressure-filled situation of an attack by just sitting at the range and calmly and slowly shooting your gun at a paper target? Nope.

There’s something to these activities, and of course they are better than nothing. But they are close to nothing. If you want to learn how to do X, you have to do X. Yes you may have to work your way up to X, but so long as you work towards X then you’re good.

I understand that scenario training can be a scary notion at first, but there will be nothing more eye-opening and sobering, and nothing that will change your mindset and improve your chances of survival.