Why you froze even though you trained

A common thing I hear from people telling their stories is about a time they froze when faced with some kind of a perceived threat. I hear it, I look at Reddit to see other similar experiences, and I'm not sure if it's the stories themselves or if it's some of the advice people are given that are more entertaining.

"Get a gun." "Train more." "You're a brown belt; you should know how to fight." "Learn boxing."

Those are all things that increase capabilities, but they don't address the common failure that actually occurred – the person in the stories already possessed capabilities and didn't access them when the event demanded them.

So my thesis (I mean, I did sort of write a book on it) is that training may be able to answer "Can you do this?" without ever answering "Will you recognize when to do it and be able to initiate it when nobody tells you the drill has started?"

And I'm pretty certain that can be answered without gunpowder (no fun, I know) or mystical lizard brain explanations.

A brown belt can know perfectly well how to fight. That's almost irrelevent to whether he freezes under stress. If somebody puts gloves on, squares up, and then starts a round when somebody else says "Go," then those recognition and initiation decisions were already made for them.

That "training" environment has told them:

• something is happening,
• this is a problem/threat,
• they are expected to act,
• acting physically is now appropriate,
• begin now.

A lot of the decision making disappears because the student never has to perform it. This is a particular poison of the "scenario training" that so damn many of the "self-defense" gyms seem to love. When an attack comes from outside those exact contexts, the student's brain has questions that didn't exist before: Is this actually happening? Is he really going to hit me? Can I hit back? Should I leave? Am I overreacting? What's everyone else doing?

Meanwhile, the event continues, and those precious 3-12 seconds that I preach are ticking away.

Simply having more options won't fix that. Nor will memorizing more techniques, or carrying more tools.

I don't need to explain the birth and evolution of Walter Cannon's observations, or the whole concept of adrenaline dumps. I don't feel like going into another explanation of true pressure testing and drilling.

I just want to make one point – Training conditions can accidentally remove precisely the decisions that matter most outside training.

At least... when the goal for students is to be able to protect and defend themselves outside of the gym. The genuinely useful question those types of instructors should be asking isn't “What should this person have learned?”

It's “What part of the response process failed?” Training should progress to the point where that question is able to be answered in the gym.

If the student is recognizing the drilled attack, of an unknown type and from an unknown angle, trying to fight, and just getting physically overwhelmed, they have a capability problem. Nothing wrong with that, they know exactly where to improve for the next drill.

If they selected an ineffective response, that might be a training problem. My guess? Too much time spent on memorizing techniques, ignoring principles, and causing a mental overload.

If they recognized the attack but couldn't initiate action, that's another problem. They weren't ready yet for that kind of pressure.

And if they struggle with this in the gym, they're absolutely going to struggle in the world. To be honest, an instructor can have students who always "win" at this in the gym who will still absolutely struggle in the real world. See that bolded line above about training conditions.

Anyway, if you're the student with one of those "realized you weren't as prepared as you thought" stories, it's not your fault. You're still here, you learned something, and your only mistake would be to keep going back to the same instructor who didn't really have you ready.