Frequently Asked Questions

Are you a martial arts school?
In a word: no. While the terms martial arts and self-defense may be interchangeable in many people’s minds, there are significant differences between the two. And while the physical part of all modern self-defense systems are inescapably derived from traditional martial arts (weather Eastern or Western), the two are nowhere near identical. Martial arts focus on the mastery of a traditional or esoteric art, or on sports, sparring, competition, etc. Our focus is real-world self-defense, as part of a 360-degree personal safety paradigm. In short, our mandate is very different from that of a martial arts school. We are here to keep you safe in the real world. In practice, this means both going well beyond the physical skills, and significantly altering what physical skills are taught and how they are taught.

Will you teach me how to fight?
We will teach you how to survive if you’re attacked, and we will teach you how to use force most effectively when faced with violence. The training will make a fighter out of you by teaching you how to manage fear and by bringing out the innate ability that exists in every living being to defend itself when threatened with extinction. Most people experience this learning as a major awakening, and training the true fighting instinct has marked positive effects in other areas of life where what we often fight are not physical attackers but ideas, habits, addictions, fears and doubts. “Fighting” on the street, however, implies mutual consent. We maintain that you must never willfully decide to fight, nor consent to fighting, but only defend yourself (or a third party) physically as a last resort if the fight is forced upon you. Why? Among other things, fighting is illegal in all 50 states. Most of the time, effectively applied self-defense skills will enable you to foresee, side-step, and/or de-escalate a situation without ever having to get physical. Please see our Getting Physical: Last Resort page to find out what you might be learning to keep out of physical confrontations.

Can I join an ongoing class or do I have to wait until the next program starts?
You can join an ongoing class anytime. After an introduction, you get teamed up with one or more persons of similar ability in a group for reality-based training and opportunity to test/develop skills on different people. Classes are small and allow you to enjoy the benefits of near-private instruction and of the most effective, professional-grade training out there without the inaccessible price tag normally associated with it. In fact, it is as affordable as any standard physical/personal development activity such as martial arts schools, gyms, yoga, etc. Ongoing classes also feature frequent reviews and a cyclical curriculum that gives you plenty of opportunity to catch up or digest what you haven’t before, while building upon what you have learned.

How long does it take to learn self-defense / personal safety?
This is a bit like asking “How long does it take to learn to play the piano?” Or “How long does it take to learn how to play soccer”? While the basics can be acquired in a matter of days or even hours with a hard-hitting program – already putting you ahead of most people in the world – any real proficiency will take much longer to develop. It is not possible to “upload” neuromuscular conditioning into your system, nor is it possible to “exam cram” sound legal information or to impart street smarts overnight. As with everything else in life, you get out of it what you put into it. Having said that, we routinely meet people with years of previous training who go farther with us in months – sometimes days – than they did in the previous decade. This leapfrog effect is common and is experienced by beginners as being able to do things they never thought possible. Students / clients who make very modest yet consistent efforts go farther faster than those who make sporadic bursts of heroic effort. We have seen countless instances where people with absolutely no prior experience developed convincing skills significantly faster than many black belts, ring fighters, and security professionals.

Do you teach MMA (Mixed Martial Arts)?
We do not. MMA or mixed martial arts under any other name is a sport, and we do not teach sports martial arts. Our focus is self-defense, and more broadly speaking, personal safety. While MMA training can be greatly useful in the honing of physical skills as well as the development of mental toughness, there remains a vast distance between training for real life and training for fighting in the ring with rules. Even if the sport has words such as “ultimate” and “no-holds-barred” in the name, there are always rules. Competing in the ring in your venue and sport of choice and being targeted by a predatory criminal in a dark alley are a world apart. In the former, get a good night sleep, eat your carbs, meditate, and fight in the agreed upon way at the agreed upon time, pitting skill against similar skill. In the latter, the fight may be forced upon you while you’re tired, sick, dehydrated and down from there – and with no rules. But that is just the beginning. The criminal is most often not interested in a fair fight at all, but in a hit-and-run or an execution, using the elements of surprise and fear. If these two scenarios are a world apart, then you must understand what logically follows: training for one will not prepare you for the other.

Can I get certified in your style / system?
We do not have a style, so the answer would have to be no. The only certification we provide is in certain corporate seminars, where in order to have proof of successful completion, students may have to demonstrate skills in a formal test. Outside of that context, we do not certify, franchise or appoint representatives.

Do I have to worry about getting injured in training? Does reality-based mean I will have to endure full-contact? If not, how do I ever realistically develop the skills?
Training for real life is a complex science. We do not train full contact even with gear on. So you don’t ever have to worry about being injured. In training, safety comes first, and we have well-established protocols to make sure everyone can train to their maximum capacity without getting hurt. You are in a controlled environment that only administers what you can handle at that moment, and gently steps it up over time. Using the right gear for the right occasion and employing scientific training methods based on escalating force-on-force drills can get you 100% of the way there.

Do you wear padding / training gear and if so, what do you use and recommend?
Yes, we do. Padding on students and padded assailants come out at the appropriate time in most programs. The only tactical gear with which full contact is safe are bulletman suits – which have evolved from the original padded assailant – and even bulletman suits have their limitations in terms of protection (such as kicks to the head while the head is making solid contact with the ground). Training gear is always a trade-off between speed / mobility / realistic nervous system response and protection. The problem to be solved is how to keep the person in the attacker role honest – both in terms of what their life-like speed and mobility and their involuntary reaction to your defense – while giving you the opportunity to get the right sense of range, impact and autonomous nervous system responses. You can wear tactical gear that will withstand full-force blows with real police weapons such as the ASP or PR-24 batons, and you won’t feel much, but you will be moving like a turtle. You can wear gear that gives you street-like speed and mobility in the joints, but elbowing that helmet will likely result in a concussion. The short answer is, we use the right gear for the right purpose. In practice, this always ends up being mixed and matched and involves everything from specialized tactical training gear to motorcycle helmets, SWAT suits, baseball catcher’s guards and bullfighter’s vests.

What is the role of scenarios and adrenal stress conditioning in your training?
Scenarios and adrenal stress conditioning are essential after a basic understanding is formed and building block skills are internalized. Extensive use of scenarios and adrenal stress work ensures that the skills stay with you forever and come out in danger because (1) they work off of your body's hard-wiring (2) we use operant conditioning methods and neuromuscular isolation drills to make sure what you know becomes like riding a bike. The scenarios are where the individual building blocks come together in a real world context. Scientifically proven and field-tested force-on-force training “burns” new information into your system by creating adaptive neural pathways and selecting them until they are habitually and automatically favored, which is known as “greasing the groove”. Stress inoculation techniques which involve gradually increasing adrenal stress help you manage fear and use it to your advantage to survive the encounter instead of shutting down. In the beginning, any sensory stressor – even a loud whistle – will cause you to fall apart. Your confidence and real-life capability builds up over time, making sure you don't freeze up during an altercation due to the civilized person's normal adrenal response to a violent threat. Without this conditioning, experience conclusively proves that all flashy techniques are useless, because for most people, they are simply not accessible at heart rates in access of 145bpm. Even your gross motor skills will need to be trained under stress inoculation scenarios in order to be accessible when called for. Most people with many years of martial arts training and advanced ranks (black belt and beyond) in any style find their hard-earned skills to be inaccessible during a real fight, and are reduced to flailing. Most people who are attacked and didn’t or couldn’t fight back share feelings of powerlessness, frustration and guilt. Pretending the emperor has clothes will not restore us to the peace we seek as law-abiding citizens. We are here to solve this problem – so that you can walk the streets without fear – and to give you confidence based on substance that translates into all areas of your life.

What martial arts are incorporated as part of your programs?
We do not teach any specific traditional martial art, as true mastery of any art would take many years if not decades, and requires a different objective than internalizing self-defense or personal safety. Nor do we claim lofty titles in any traditional art. However, all underlying principles of personal physical defense and their numerous manifestations come from the same sources. The principles we teach can be traced without a stretch to at least the following arts: AikiJutsu, JuJitsu, Muay Thai, JeetKuneDo, (Pentjak) Silat, Kuntao, WingChun KungFu, Western Boxing, Kenpo, and NinJutsu / TaiJutsu. You will also find a great deal of material incorporated from hybrid systems such as Krav Maga / KAPAP, USMC LINE, US Army CQB and more.

Whose thought and work has influenced what you offer and how you offer it?
We enthusiastically give credit where credit is due. We have been taught, influenced and challenged by many whose work we continue to learn from every day. We are deeply ndebted to many who have contributed significant innovations to the fields of self-defense and personal safety and continue to do so. In no particular order, a necessarily incomplete list would have to include Loren Christensen, Tony Blauer, Peyton Quinn, Mark MacYoung, Moni Aizik, Charles Nelson, Bob Orlando, Rhon Mizrachi, James Berkley, Bill Kipp, Paul Vunak, Massad Ayoob, Melissa Soalt, Chuck Habernehl, Dave Grossman, Ken Murray, Gavin de Becker, Alain Buresse, Mark Hatmaker and Jim Grover.

What if I have a little / a lot of martial marts training from before? Is it all wasted when I come to you?
Not at all. We are not here to tear down what you’ve learned before, but to direct it into the proper channels and to build upon it. In fact, one of our specialties is taking any serious martial arts training you may have had and to give it “legs” for real-life self-defense purposes. We “field-strip” what you’ve learned, which involves not only an adjustment of physical skills but also their empowerment through understanding of real-world context – legal, logistical and tactical. Many experienced martial artists find that this building can be done without having to substantially retrain their nervous system. So, whether you have just dabbled in one art or have black belts in several, we can free your previous training for real world purposes, and we will do so without in any way making you feel bad about what you’re learned before.

Why do you have such a strong emphasis on principles?
The adaptive response to a real-world threat always involves a principal, not a technique. If you’ve ever been attacked by someone dedicated and serious past age 14, you know that the “if the other guy does this, then you do that” approach to self-defense never works on the street. You may also know that under high levels of adrenal stress, you are likely to not be able to access physical skills you may have, freeze, and down from there. Internalizing overarching principles is the only way to (a) analyze your own efforts, identify what doesn’t work and correct it, (b) access your training during a real-life altercation, and, (c) improvise and adapt under very imperfect circumstances, making whatever is available work for you.

What are the fees associated with training?
There is a flat monthly membership fee for the Real-Life Self-Defense (RLSD) course, which is the default class recommended to most adults with no prior experience. Women take the women’s version of the same course. Fees are either charged for the month in advance, or in the case of short-term crash courses or seminars, before the program. There are no long-term contracts – payments are made either month-to-month, or applied to cover a short-term course or seminar. There are no uniform fees, no belt testing fees, no equipment fees, or any hidden charges. For clients with legitimate high-risk circumstances, payment plans are considered on a case-by-case basis. We have also conducted pro bono training in the past both in form of free one-time seminars open to the community as well as in emergency / imminent threat cases such as women with 209As (Massachusetts restraining order). Fees for business and corporate team offerings, executive training and custom seminars are calculated based on specifics of the training. Please email or call for details.

Do you offer private instruction?
Since our classes are small (no more than 6-8 people per class in ongoing classes and no more than 10-15 people per seminar that features 2 instructors) and you meet with the same group each time, everyone gets a close-to-ideal training environment and generous amounts of personal attention. Hence, private instruction is not necessary for most people. A limited number of private lessons are available however – subject to scheduling demands. One-on-one instruction is available in our corporate / executive security programs for VIPs, celebrities and political figures whose schedules preclude them from traveling to us.