WATCH THIS VIDEO CAREFULLY: Repeated viewings of GM Perkins’ movement while flowing with students 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.
• “Sword and Shield”: training to use 1 arm on both of the opponent’s arms, leaving 1 arm free to either overwhelm 1 attacker or to use on a 2nd attacker simultaneously. This requires highly developed sensitivity and adaptability.
• With 2 attackers, you strike attacker 1 while still sensing the 2nd attacker and then attacking him.
• If you use 2 arms on attacker #1, you’ll have nothing to sense or disrupt attacker #2.
• If you use 1 arm on attacker #1 and the other on #2 simultaneously, you may have seen too many bad kung fu movies and set yourself up for disaster. You cannot typically strike 2 attackers at once [though we’ve all seen John do it many times!]. What John does demonstrate though is you may hit, unbalance or otherwise disrupt #1 with 1 arm while you feel/sense attacker #2 OR use the incoming energy of #1 to rebound into #2 while continuously moving to be unavailable to both.
• Your sensitivity allows you to flash back and forth between 2 attackers in close proximity while it appears to them that you’re fighting both simultaneously.
• This ability, to use one arm effectively against both of an attacker’s arms, is devastating, because when you bring your other arm into play, it’s as if to the enemy you have 3 arms.
• You “deal” with both attackers BUT, you don’t get CAUGHT UP with both.
• To develop this, do contact flow with 1 arm consistently using the entire arm AND your entire body (minus your other arm) to flow. This trains you to use multiple unlimited reference points to sense as you flow and to hit with more varied weapons. For example, your elbow learns to be as dexterous and sensitive as your hand.
• Ideally, you can have a circle of opponents and, as shown, flow with each one for 5 seconds using just 1 arm (while they use both) and then move on to the next opponent. Because everyone feels different, you experience faster growth.
• If you don’t move with your entire body to be both unavailable and unavoidable, you’ll just be flapping your arm and limiting your ability.
• By the way, John just hints at it jokingly, but he does indicate you need this ability to get to your gun: as in chopping with the lead hand while drawing with the rear. Note: we have an entire DVD devoted to this and related topics in the “GC Weapons Series Part IV: Bare Hands to Handguns.”
• John emphasizes the pattern-free, unchoreographed nature of GC and thus why it develops combative creativity, adaptability and ruthlessness superior to other systems.
• Even the “patterned” solo drills of Guided Chaos (like Swimming, Starting the Mower, etc.) are designed to train specific principles (Body Unity, Moving Off-line, etc.) and not for locking in fighting techniques. This is why you also learn free-form solo drills like Washing/Polishing right from the start so that you immediately begin developing creativity. [Note: all our solo drills can be found on the Attack Proof Companion Part 2 and Combat Conditioning DVDs/MATRIX vids, as well as the GC Combatives vids].
• This all carries over, by the way, to knife and handgun training.
• Again, GC has no “stance.” You create and abandon stances continuously in microseconds by developing a “root that can’t be found.” This is why you need to develop all 5 Drop Steps and apply them creatively. [All 5 Drop Steps are explained on the GC Combatives vids].
• The randomness and often clumsiness of the enemy creates chaos that you need to be trained for – and patterned technique just won’t cut it.
• You never know who you’re dealing with or what they’re capable of. Ever.
