• Going to the side or behind the attacker is vital to your survival.

• Context: John relates how virtually every master he’s trained with said in a real fight they’d skip the fancy moves and go straight for the eyes.

• Context: There is TV and movie nonsense depicting fighters shaking off eye strikes. Doesn’t happen.

• You need to train to react instantaneously, especially if there’s a knife involved. Which is why it’s so important to maintain your situational awareness and your Personal Comfort Zone. Don’t get sucked in to a nose-to-nose verbal confrontation.

• When you move offline in the first microsecond, you are stepping not just as an evasion but to plant and re-root/Drop. This is entirely different than just evading.

• Your hands should already be up, not in a combative stance but to non-threateningly indicate you want them to back off while strikes can be delivered instantaneously or simultaneously. This way your hands are already there to intercept and/or act as antennas. This is critical.

• You are never stopping or blocking strikes. You are changing your angle and striking simultaneously. If you get even the inkling of an attack, you change your angle while attacking simultaneously and immediately.

• Important: note that John demonstrates that when he throws up his “antennas” they are feeling/deflecting and entering simultaneously and that the shape his arms take have no pre-planned form.

• If you step back or attempt to box or spar, you’re finished. Any movement or pre-movement of the attacker’s body triggers your attack.

• John demonstrates here mostly “Prow” variations due to their simplicity: Drop-stepping in, turtling the head and shoulders, chopping or gouging/stabbing to the throat or eyes while maintaining a cover hand. Note however that his drop-stepping angle varies each time.

• John also demonstrates here the CCUE (Close Combat Universal Entry) consisting of a simultaneous and devastating diagonal Rocket Step/clear/chop/knee (for detailed explanation, see the GC Combatives Video).

• John shows the versatility of the CCUE vs a low-line attack (they get a knee smashed in their face and a chop to the back of the neck).

• Variations include a Rocket Step with a straight eye gouge, a side-of-the-face palm smash, a rising elbow to the chin, a horizontal elbow (“Drac”) to the nose, or a rising eye stab from below. The important thing with all of these though is getting off-line and in with the drop step. Note that getting “off-line” may be only a few inches. You’re simply never where you were: you hit from where you’re going to be, not from where you are.

• When you Drop on your strikes, the harder they come in, the harder they get hit.

• Practicing Contact Flow and Anywhere Striking allows you to instantly create follow up strikes from any angle because you need to finish the fight quickly.

• John then begins to show how Contact Flow training allows you to improvise your entry and follow up strikes as necessary. For example, their downward energy on your arm flips it into an upward strike – and vice vera.

• Or, their inward grappling energy pulls your strikes right into them as you collapse. Your looseness and sensitivity allows his hands to get you to hit him. You let him push your hands where you want them.

• John shows how Contact Flow training can allow you to corkscrew around their push of your arm and unbalance them by coming in at a different angle.

• John stresses the difference between the military application of “Combatives” and the GC version in that they just go straight in regardless of the attack whereas we trained to get offline and in (even if offline is just a few inches).

• John then shows very slow Contact Flow training to develop extreme whisper soft sensitivity and squid-like looseness to make you invisible, unavailable and also to find that one tiny spot that easily unbalances your partner without effort.

• For this exercise, don’t move your feet and drop your body weight

• John shows how when you do lots of super-slow/light Flow that when you move faster you’re completely out of the way already and feel like a breeze.

• John shows that the instant after snaking a strike in it ricochets to a 2nd strike.

• John clearly demonstrates his loose hand/arm movement and how the opponent just can’t catch it; at the apex of the movement however, John drops and for a microsecond the looseness disappears as the strike hits its target.

• As context, John relates horrific tales of extreme violence when he was a cop. Police must use relatively safe arrest procedures to avoid severe injury however, tasers, pepper spray and 3 section staffs often do not work on enraged criminals. Thus, these all potentially put police in greater danger. As a civilian, if your life is in peril, you do what you must to stay alive.

• The moral is: people do not go down so easily when fighting for their lives – competitive fighting has no correlation to reality.

• John gives multiple examples of how training a thousand techniques will not prepare you for real violence. If you’re thinking of any technique, you’re done.

• In your initial training, by combining getting off-line at every possible angle in a free-form manner with our 2 basic GC Combatives entries (Prow or CCUE – which allow for great variation) you will tremendously enhance your survival chances over rigid technique applications. Then, as you advance in your Contact Flow, you will quickly be able to abandon all techniques entirely.