• GM John flows with Master Joe showing the higher levels of sensitivity and deception he uses to up Joe’s game.

• At the higher levels you didn’t need to wait for resistance to exploit, your antennas find where to go and where to strike. This requires disciplined practice where you really ‘listen.” Don’t try to win, force your way in or speed up. Let your mind go and feel where they are not.

• Practicing this way, you will be able to feel where they are unbalanced and take their balance briefly so you can hit.

• As with all these videos, words cannot do justice, you have to WATCH CAREFULLY the choices John makes in his movements while responding to his student’s movements as well as the movements he DOESN’T DO. After a while you can feel in your own body some of what John is feeling and begin to recognize visually what he’s doing. By combining this with your own solo and partner training and referencing John’s videos you can make huge leaps in your abilities.

• At 3:42 John clarifies the huge differences between a typical tai chi yield and return response compared to a far more efficient Guided Chaos simultaneous yield and hit response. Combatively, you have to achieve the most tactically efficient and brutal movement.

• If the opponent’s balance is disrupted, he can’t deliver his strike effectively. If you move off-line and counter-attack simultaneously, his unbalanced strike leaves him wide open while you remain Unavailable and Unavoidable.

• If his arm is long, you unbalance as you move inward.

• If you’ve been developing your drop-hitting with the Slambag, you can also destroy his limbs, effectively “chopping down the branches” as part of your entry. These destructions can be done with open hand strikes or with Combat Boxing fists.

• John explains to a student proper and improper dropping and contrasts it with tai chi pushing: the tai chi fajing requires time-wasting pre-loading, not to mention a GC drop-hit efficiently combines evasion, entry, unbalancing, striking and ricocheting/multi-hitting. This movement efficiency allows you to be continuously returning/hitting instead of separating the motions non-combatively. The faster you move, the more devastating this becomes. If you watch carefully, you can see how this return/hitting can be done with the hand, elbow or whatever.

• The faster the enemy goes, the more they over-travel, which is even more easily dealt with. He will often then walk right into your return strikes.

• Watch carefully for John’s examples of ricocheting/multi-hitting/loading your spring throughout the video. Developing this skill greatly increases your combativeness.

• You get there by flowing slowly and using the whole body.

• Include low-kicking and knees into your flow. Note again that GC kicks are low, mostly below the knee, and done with dropping and zero “chambering.”

• John re-emphasizes the dangers of grabbing and grappling during fights for your life. Do not do them when training.

• “Ballistic” breaks can occur, but these happen on a catch-as-catch-can basis. In other words, if their limb, hand, finger, etc gets caught up in your movement, you can ballistically break them and immediately move on to the next strike. You never fixate on a grab, grapple or break: you snap it and move on.

• Contact flow develops this free-form, creative, “ballistic-breaking” better than systemized locking/grabbing arts because they rely on practicing patterns -- and as we’ve all learned by now, all real violence is chaos.

• Using locking/grabbing/grappling methodologies are even more dangerous if there are multiple attackers.

• John then demonstrates how contact flow trains you to use the energy of one attacker against the others, kind of like a cue ball in a game of pool. The ricochet effect becomes multiplied.

• With multi-partner Contact Flow, you should be going slow and changing your position all the time to discover all the variables/options.

• Include kicking with this. John shows a nasty, atypical (for other arts, that is) low, inside insole-kick which would otherwise be ineffective without dropping.

• You never know what you’re doing next. This is what’s necessary for your Mushin “no-mind” state of creativity. You need to develop that to survive real violence because, as we repeat endlessly, there’s no time to deliver a choregraphed response – and it usually wouldn’t work anyway.

• You flow with multiple partners; you fight everyone, and no one is your “friend”. You keep your awareness circling and find your balance points while learning not to turn your back on imminent danger.

• Important: because you are continuously reading, moving and adapting to the opponent’s movement, you sense his intention before he strikes and are thus not reacting to his strike (which would be too late) but are adapting to his preparatory motion and thus hit him first.

• Beware of teachers who stop you to show you a specific attack/response. They are destroying your adaptability.

• John: “I’ve done every kind of crazy wrestling, no-holds-barred stuff on the ground. Guy wants to wrestle me…I’m just gonna hit him.” [Note: this is a different scenario then GC Groundfighting. see our long-form video for exactly why].