Condition Stimulus Training

How you train is how you will react in the real thing, so make your training as real as possible. You take with you to fight all the good and bad habits you learned in your training routine. If your tactics in your training consists of beautiful high kicks, big movements, which requires that you have a lot of space, you will instinctively do the same when your adrenaline kicks in a street confrontation. This will hinder you if you are struggling for survival in a confined area with furniture around like a living room or bedroom. Their training should also focus on the mind / spirit as well. Fighting / self defense is 90% mental it does not matter how effective your tactics are, if you do not train your mind to fight you will freeze.

Conditional stimulus training is about making your training as real as possible, so when your instincts take over in a high adrenaline stressed situation you are ready to use your surroundings to your advantage and not be hindered by it. Your mind will also be familiar with the stimulus and you will not freeze. Many martial artists and practitioners of self-defense programs become overwhelmed when their environment changes from a dojo setting for a small confined area. Being in a room filled with furniture gives a martial artist the feeling of being closed in and makes them feel that they can not move, so they stiffen. Being in this type of environment changes the way you move or perform a tactic. It is quite different from movement in a dojo, where you have a huge amount of space.

When you are threatened and your adrenaline kicks in you now unknowingly give 100% faith and trust in the system to combat that it will get you out of harm way. Remember you are fighting like how you trained if you have trained in traditional systems, you will most likely not use your surroundings to your advantage to defend yourself instead you will be prevented. You will focus on how you can not move and become bound up with objects in a room such as furniture, because your education has prepared you for this kind of stimulus. As you carry on, while education is also a big factor when it comes to be ready to go in the streets. Many systems get practitioners to wear loose fitting clothing when they practice tactics for the obvious reason to move freely. The disadvantage of this is that when you move into the street wearing boots, jeans and form fitting clothing your range of proposals is limited. You will go much slower, and if you are a woman wearing heels would be out of balance performing tactics because you have not trained you to walk with heels on.

The benefit of training in this way is obvious, you give yourself more options, weapons and outputs. Their minds are prepared and conditioned to the stimulus that comes its way when violence is presented to it. The more the mind is shown a stimulus that is more accustomed to it, and unconcerned it becomes "normal" like everyone else, everyday event it has experienced. Train smarter not harder.