I think that while important, those who are seeking to improve their self-defense capabilities should first focus on improving their overall fitness.
I'm not saying this as someone on a high-horse...rather, I'm saying this as someone who needs to be on that train, myself
- years (decades, really) of a rather sedentary lifestyle brought about by the perils of a white-collar career and the need to shuttle a school-aged child from one activity to another have led to a shocking BMI, a decrease in muscular strength, and also decrease in cardiovascular health and capacity - none of which are compatible with not only general-health/longevity, to say the least of self-defense.
Prioritizing, I would put both raw strength and cardiovascular capability above combatives training.
Both strength and cardiovascular health are of tremendous importance to aging well, and what's more, improving capabilities in these areas simply raises our baseline survivability. Pat McNamara calls our bodies the "combat chassis," and I think he's really on-point in this description. While none of us have a chassis as enduring as, say, the T-800:
View attachment 625
- a stronger, more fit body nevertheless makes us less vulnerable to injury overall and enables quicker recovery, regardless of the cause or circumstance.
To me, this difference is plainly seen in how my father-in-law is aging, versus my stepfather, versus my biological father.
My FIL has led the life of an academic/white-collar upper-middle-class individual all his life, from childhood to present-day, and he also was never very physically active. My stepfather, also a white-collar worker for most of his life, maintained a much more active lifestyle. My biological father, on the other hand, was active/sporting in his youth, and as an immigrant, worked hard physical labor during mid-life and continued in a blended blue/white-collar work environment - interspersing clerical work with the need to fill-in physical labor - throughout. Not unexpectedly, my FIL is the most frail of all, while my stepfather enjoy a very active retirement, and my father was able to recover very rapidly from major surgery last year.
Additionally, it is said from the likes of Dr. William Aprill (
https://aprillriskconsulting.com/ ) that the predators in our midst makes initial calculations of their potential targets by observing - perhaps even at the subconscious level - the physical capabilities of those prey: i.e. even something as simple as our way of walking and self-carriage. If this is true, then my FIL certainly presents as a much more appealing target versus either my stepfather or biological father.
Being able to simply last longer in the physical fight as well as being able to avoid/escape the fight ("Run-fu") are both also inexorably tied to simple physical fitness.
And that brings us, of-course, to fighting.
I think that for those who are looking at fighting for self-defense, the best medium to pursue would be integrated combatives specifically tailored towards the concealed carrier. Since many of us come to the legal concealed-carry at differing stages of life, integrated combatives teaches the skills and techniques to increase survivability specifically with defensive tools (be it OC, knife, gun, or even improvised weapons), along with some basic - but widely cross-applicable - empty-hand skills, including ground-fighting. Most of these integrated combatives instructors are very cognizant of the physical limitations that their clientele may present with (whether it be due to age or injury), and furthermore, will frame these skills in terms of the likely scenarios that their students will face in real-life.
That said, a deeper dive into the martial arts - particularly those which provide contact in the form of sparring or other pressure-cooked contexts - will serve to both harden the individual to take that first hit (Mike Tyson's amazingly incisive "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face" rewording of the age-old axiom) as well as vet techniques for real-world applicability. Furthermore, most martial arts will also help develop stamina, strength, and flexibility, which are all "chassis hardening" characteristics.
For me, I'd like to get back into Krav because of the simple physicality of the program.
Aside from that, I'd really like to get back into the integrated-combatives side of the equation: to take on a program at a regular schedule (i.e. both conditioning as well as skills). From a lifetime ago, I had a basic understanding of grappling and full-contact sparring through Combat Shuai-Chiao, but I found with what little I was able to get from a few seminars' worth of integrated combatives that those skills needed some real-world framing, and that I needed a regular diet of being able to practice/test those skills, in order to truly retain them.
Regardless, I do believe strongly that we as legal concealed-carry citizens tend to place too much weight on "the gun" - and that for the worse, we start viewing the world's problems as nails simply because we're carrying a hammer. Even with what little integrated combatives and force-on-force I've done, I can tell you without a shadow of doubt that every time I did something wrong and had my ass handed to me, it was because I tried to solve the problem with a tool (be it the knife or the gun, or an improvised weapon), rather than having realized that I just needed to solve the problem.
And towards this end, I also think that myself - and pretty much the entire concealed-carry/defensive-shooting community - would benefit from more time in force-on-force training. Decision-making is more than half the game, and knowing not only how to fight, but when to fight or even if to fight, is truly the way to win.
