WATCH THIS VIDEO CAREFULLY: Repeated viewings of GM Perkins’ movement while flowing with masters yields tremendous insights into how to react properly; words cannot fully convey this but you will begin to feel in your own body what is effective GC movement.

• Dropping is vital to survival and allows you to maintain balance, attack and defend.

• Dropping is vital for every aspect of the fight, including pulling a knife and stabbing with a knife. Drop-pulling a knife is much faster than just drawing.

• The more compressed a drop is, the more effective. A long drop is for pushing.

• A drop strike penetrates and shatters because it splashes the target without over-travelling through. For example, John demos a chest shot that he imagines is penetrating 2 inches through bone.

• This allows you to ricochet to an immediate 2^nd strike with the same weapon – but you may have to step in because the 1^st strike will be devastating and the enemy may back up and/or collapse.

• Dropping also facilitates escape and evasion by both rooting and loosening you – and giving you the added speed to escape because it overcomes inertia. This makes you unavailable and almost invisible.

• Dropping gives you instantaneous 360 degree balance during a fight, making you both loose yet immovable like a wall.

• You should be dropping repeatedly on virtually every movement like a machine gun so that you’re both nailing every strike and rooting every evasion – in fact John states you may get 20 drops in on a 2 second fight.

• If you watch carefully, John is essentially doing rapid-fire MLB, Rocket-step and single leg drops non-stop.

• The drops can also be used for pulsing and sling-shotting instantaneously (rubberbanding off a pulse to a strike).

• It is highly recommended you review the Guided Chaos Combatives video to see a comprehensive demo/explanation of the 5 different Drop Steps.

• 2 drills for practicing dropping for evasion during contact flow:

• 1. Be sure not to clash, stay as light as possible so you are constantly programming for unavailability. One student is the pusher and looks to suddenly unbalance you while otherwise staying light. You must drop and evade.

• 2. Same as above but immediately drop and strike within the drop (not after). You are hitting as you land.

• Note that you drop into 1 or both legs as you strike.

• The fastest competitive pistol shooters use dropping (like Bob Munden).

• In general, even when doing slow contact flow, you should try and drop on everything and the drops are done at the same slow speed as everything else – unless you are doing some other specific drill. You do not want your contact flow drop practice to look like tai chi push hands where the sudden push or fa-jing is performed at up to 10 times the speed of the rest of the exercise – which is a completely false representation of reality and promotes faulty nervous system development for fighting.

• Slow flow=slow dropping; fast flow=fast dropping.

• Vs. 2 attackers, John drops and moves into 1 attacker to solidify him for subsequent shattering strikes and then ricochet-drops using that springboard energy into a dropping attack against the 2nd attacker.

• John demonstrates how dropping adds energy and breaks inertia allowing a chop to the throat to simultaneously lift and throw an attacker that might not otherwise be moved.

• 3^rd drill: students back to back; 1 drops and shoves the other backwards without warning while the recipient must drop/evade/deliver 3 strikes as they land and maintain balance. The “pusher” should ideally be larger/heavier so the recipient is sufficiently challenged to develop a superior drop/loosening/evasion. Here, Master Watson does the unbalancing.