SalePage : Lee Morrison -The Shredder
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One of the greatest contemporary combative workshops I’ve seen in a long time was held at the Tokei martial arts center on Tooley Street in London. Richard Dimitri, a Canadian teacher, offered an amazing demonstration of the Shredder, a close quarter conceptual tool that would be a helpful addition to anyone’s combative armory. This seminar was part of Senshido’s UK tour, and it drew a large number of experienced teachers and students. The conference began at 11 a.m., and we were treated to a treasure of practical knowledge and functional drills over the following five hours. The Shredder is a concept instrument meant to bypass the startle/flinch mechanism, which is the body’s hardwired natural response to a physical attack. This flinch reaction is an instant reflex to any hint of a physical assault and is activated by the Amygdala, an almond-shaped danger detector found in the brain. (For additional information, see our assessment of Dennis Martin’s 2nd International seminar.) The Shredder avoids this process by deploying a spontaneous onslaught of gross motor motions that, according to Richard, are launched on a quarter beat, striking key parts of the face and throat, making the attack extremely impossible to halt or intercept. This style of assault is particularly intrusive in nature and psychologically disruptive, instilling primitive dread in the recipient by transforming the prospective aggressor from predator to prey. This notion is also consistent with Senshido’s five physical retribution principles, which are, in no particular sequence, as follows: economy of motion, non-telegraphic movement, opportunity striking, tactile sensitivity, and primary target acquisition. Richard went on to discuss the fundamentals of de-escalation from a natural posture in full. He exhibited this with some of the finest role-playing I’ve ever witnessed. Emphasizing essential elements of non-static usage of the hands as you manage space, as well as body shifting and movement, allowing you to actively survey your environment while interfering with the position of your prospective adversary. As a result, he is unable to prepare for his attack. At this point, I must remark that Richard’s ability to present material was simply outstanding. Richard is a witty man who teaches with obvious enthusiasm, making you want to listen. This is a critical component of teaching and is mostly based on NLP. A skilled instructor must be able to vary voice intonation as well as offer demonstrative visual demonstrations in order to appeal to everyone’s learning curve.
Assuming that calming the issue down had failed, we moved on to the Shredder’s dynamics. Those of us whose game plan includes for ballistic pre-emptive strikes may find the thought of just closing and grasping the face and head jarring. However, after you realize how successful this can be, you will see how the Shredder may complement your game. You can shred ahead of time and then strike off that as a follow-up with no draw back or time delay; this is known as worming. Alternatively, you may strike first, then clinch and rip from there. You might just continue to combine shredding and hitting whenever the chance presented itself, using tactile awareness as you rip, tear, and gouge at the eyes, nose, ears, and neck.
Demonstration:
Our first physical encounter with the Shredder came in the form of a partner drill in which you turn to the person next to you and grab their head with one hand while vigorously rubbing all over their face with an abrupt move of your open free hand. You’re keeping your palm flat and getting a sense of how invasive and terrible it is for someone to latch onto your head and mess with your face. Imagine how much more vicious the attack would be if it was accompanied by clawed fingers and a ripping and tearing action.
Drill number one:
We partnered up for our first practice, with one person acting as an aggressor by utilizing aggressive role play, while the other tries to calm him down and control space with the fence. You seize hold of your partner’s face/head in one explosive action from a very near position at the earliest opportunity, with no hint of movement until the hands are on the target. (Closest weapon to nearest target) The shred is instantaneous from here. There is no technically proper technique to shred; simply take the head and face and replicate by forcing the nose over the face while ripping at the throat/ears, gouging and thumbing the eyeballs, and pound into the vitals in a continual and continuous action. Consider the blades of a blender to grasp the idea. This is a genuine gross motor movement that has existed from the beginning of time. Just look at two women fighting in a clip from one of Jerry Springer’s earlier shows. This was often a ballistic confrontation followed by two warriors scratching at each other’s eyes and faces while ripping each other’s hair out, giving you a sense of this primordial impulse. The Shredder has developed this principle into a non-reciprocal functional combative approach. The clawed figuration of the hands distinguishes it from how it should be utilized in real life and this reproduction exercise. Which, when possible, we all attempted to avoid, albeit there were still plenty of scratch scars visible thereafter despite this precaution.
CQC
Joe Hubbard, the teacher, hops on board.
The Shredder, as a tool, is capable of causing significant damage in a short period of time. Wherever feasible, the amount of force used should be proportional to the danger. Understand that if you knock out your opponent early in the fight, you may have great success with striking, as most of you reading this will already know from similar experience. However, I tend to agree with Richard when he states that grounding, torque, and distance are required for punching or hitting to operate. If we find up in a vertical clinch with an aggressor, we lose access to all three of these characteristics. Personally, I practice and teach to make striking with our most close quarter weapons from the clinch as functional as feasible. Controlling and dominating from the clinch will make you more proficient in this range and, to some extent, help you to retain the three previously described criteria. So I’ll always workout that way for myself, but the Shredder is also quite effective. In fact, I believe that tearing the opponent up from a vertical clinch is the finest option available, especially if the grapple falls to the ground.
Here
We can show how the Shredder may be used on the ground by just maintaining
apply pressure to the target and continue shredding until the
opportunity to flee.
Drill number two:
The following practice required both parties to engage in a mutual clinch. This time, one guy shreds while the other tries to stop him. This was my favorite aspect of this training method: all of the drills were alive. Under the strain of the acid test, you strive from the outset to apply the shred on a non-compliant partner. This practice developed to both teams attacking and defending simultaneously. The goal is to shred without being shredded. This enables you to build the appropriate traits through tactile awareness in order to evade his assault while delivering your own. It’s the same thing as simulating biting and gouging during scenario work. If you don’t train it, it will beat you.
Drill number three:
The progression now was for your partner to attack you with anything they wanted, kicking, striking/punching, and grappling were all OK, while your goal was to try to read your partner’s assault cue and respond by getting the head and ripping him up. This allowed us to merge the shred with hitting, grappling, and whatever else came out under the strain of scenario replication, and to be honest, this approach worked extremely well in the domain of noncompliance.
The way Dimitri presented his instruction and then put it under pressure by calling out one of the biggest and strongest looking guys in the crowd, who was in this case a very capable striker and grappler, and telling him to attack him with anything he wanted as hard as he could impressed me the most. How many teachers have you seen do that? This will give you an idea of Dimitri’s talent and belief in himself and his content. Needless to say, his opponent was killed quickly with his shred, and despite the fact that it fell to the ground, Richard was dominating throughout.
I also enjoy how the physical training were intermingled with a lot of education about all areas of battle in general. Richard lectured using personal experiences and real-life documented situations. He discussed how a variety of factors may influence how you respond in a real confrontation. The time of day, the conditions of your surroundings, and how you physically feel are all aspects to consider. How you react to a problem after you’ve just left the gym after a good training session that has left you feeling alive, confident, and ready for anything is vastly different from how you react at 5 a.m. when someone has kicked your door in and attacked you in your bed as you’re wiping the sleep from your eyes. He also discussed the effects of violence. Too many individuals are all too willing to respond physically without considering the consequences of their actions. Again, Richard provided real-life instances, such as the Russian martial arts master who was strolling with his wife in New York City when they were accosted at gunpoint by two youngsters, a 19-year-old guy and an 18-year-old girl. Instead of analyzing the circumstances and threat, the Russian so-called expert employed a flashy tactic of kicking the pistol out of the boy’s hand, which worked by all accounts, and then proceeded to beat the snot out of him. Ignoring the girl, she drew out her own gun and blasted the guy’s brains out. This is a classic case of underestimating the threat. Another example was the football jock who beat up a little Filipino guy with the help of his friends, only to come out of the cinema hand in hand with his girl friend, completely oblivious to the fact that the same Filipino guy had just clocked him and proceeded to creep up behind the pair of them with a knife in his hand before stabbing both of them rapidly and repeatedly in an act of vengeance. The jock lived, but his girlfriend died as a result of something he did 7 months before.
Of course, when there are no choices and we must now get physical in order to enhance our chances of survival, we must rip our assailant apart as fast and clinically as possible. Understand, however, that there is no satisfaction in aggression. At best, you will stun and flee, but in the worst-case scenario, you will have to deal with the victim of your justified assault, or what’s left of him, assuming you are not the one who has been victimized, as well as the aftermath of adrenaline, witnesses, possible police involvement, not to mention the courts and any guilt that you may have. The bottom line is that the repercussions of violence are always bad, they are ugly and dreadful, but they are better than the alternative of finding oneself in a hospital with a drip in your arm or worse, in an open casket at the local funeral parlor. If it’s you or them, make it them, but wherever feasible, seek avoidance and flight.
Drill number four:
We then tackled the knife issue. Richard said, as I have on several occasions, that there is no sure strategy for dealing with an edged weapon attack while unarmed. So we looked at what alternatives we had and how we could use the Shredder in this case. We began in a mutual clinch, with one of us concealing a training knife somewhere on his body. The agreement was simple: check for any indication that your partner is attempting to obtain the weapon and work to prevent him from doing so. In certain circumstances, you’ll capture the weapon-wielding limb with your free hand and shred him with whatever comes out. In another case, the knife is coming at you too fast for you to grab the arm; in this case, you’ll just have to try to move away from the bearer’s weapon side and drag him into a position from where you can shred. This ultimately resulted in both of you collapsing (not ideal) and making the most of a poor situation. Here, the success rate for me and my buddy Simon was approximately fifty-fifty, so we went for damage limitation, and as you can see, my training partner Simon Alpin caught one in the struggle from the training folder we were using. I thought I was doing well until I grabbed my partner’s knife hand, shredded with the other, and dragged him to the ground, only to glance down and find Simon slicing and dicing the back of my knee and Achilles tendon, terrible, go figure. There are no assurances, as he stated.
Simon’s combat wound
Drill number five:
The final practice of the day was the first in a series of drills for dealing with multiple attackers, in this case three persons joined together to mimic a two-on-one scenario. The key issue here is placement, with the goal of keeping both opponents in a line by controlling the nearest to you by shredding his clenched head while you zone to move position in order to avoid the other man. Then, when the second opponent approaches, throw his mate into him and flee or confront. Everything is fairly easy, with plenty of opportunity for advancement.
The day came to a close with a Q&A session with Richard and a picture opportunity. This was a fitting finale to a fantastic day. There were a lot of nice individuals there, so it was a fantastic chance to network and exchange. In terms of the Shredder’s validity, I believe it is a wonderful idea that is simple to learn and keep. It works well under duress and is especially beneficial to ladies and in a horizontal grappling position. It works well with heavy skill hitting and would be a great addition to anyone’s support system. For those of you who are still skeptical, I recommend that you remove your blinders and attend a seminar to obtain a complete understanding of this idea, apply it under pressure, and then make your decision. I’m confident you’ll be pleasantly delighted.
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