The Body's Natural Reactions

Here's another important video from the personal defense network. When you're startled, when you're scared, when someone tries to hurt you, threatens you with lethal force, we know that certain things are incredibly likely to happen and we're going to watch those things actually play out in a high level, reality-based simulation. As we watch this close quarters, critical incident play out at full speed you can see how a lot of things are happening almost at once. It's important to go back and slow things down and we're actually going to freeze frame on the important learning points of this critical incident so we can understand the body's natural reactions when someone is startled. Even though this highly trained student, who has a background in military special operations, comes into this simulation knowing that they are going to, or at least very likely to, be the victim of a simulated close quarters ambush.

One of the first things we see is a lowering of the center of gravity. And of course that's a natural reaction we have for survival lowering our center of gravity allows us to move or prepares us to move by bending the knees, by getting our shoulders forward of the hips in one direction or another. And that's one of the first and most dramatic things that we see consistently when someone is attacked or startled is a dramatic lowering in the center of gravity. And this example, in fact, that lowering the center of gravity is then combined with lateral movement to put this person into a full crouch. See how their arms will come up as they are startled.

And of course that we see from a straight arm to a bent arm. What we're seeing is the hands coming up to protect the face, to protect the throat, to protect the airway, to protect the eyes, protect the visual system. That's a very natural survival instinct we have, to bring the hands to protect to our line of sight relative to the threat. Now, at this point we see what is a textbook perfect, natural, neutral shooting stance. The kind of thing that we look for and that we teach in the combat focus shooting program.

That is a way that we can shoot very efficiently when under critical incident stress. And as you can see here, the arms are at full extension, the firearm is in the line of sight and parallel with it to the threat, that your shoulders are in front of the hips relative to the threat, to get the weight behind the gun and also to remain in a more athletic position. And the knees are bent slightly to be able to facilitate any movement that we might need to do and to work with that body's natural reaction of lowering our center of gravity. But again, if we look, it took almost three seconds to get into this shooting position. And of course, again, on that square range in a controlled environment this student would probably be able to present a firearm into a shooting position in around one second.

And understanding that there is going to be a significant delay, understanding that there's going to be more cognitive processing and it's going to take more time to react from the body's natural reactions or work with the body's natural reactions in order to get into a position where we can use the firearm to defend ourselves is very important. Understanding that the context of our controlled range training should be as much like the context of our fight is vital if we're going to be training realistically and training in context. Check out more videos just like this one at the personal defense network.