Self-defence is the most heavily marketed and least well explained thing in martial arts. This piece sets out what can genuinely be learned, in what timeframe, and what we actually do here.
Why six-week courses do not work
Not because the techniques are wrong. Because of what happens to a body under stress.
Faced with a real threat, heart rate rises above 150 within seconds. At those levels fine motor control disappears, the visual field narrows, hearing blurs and decision-making collapses. What remains is only what the body has repeated often enough not to need a decision.
Six weeks is twelve hours. Twelve hours cannot accumulate the number of repetitions that survive a heart rate of 150. What they can accumulate is a feeling of competence - and that feeling is dangerous, because it changes your judgement about what you walk into.
What self-defence actually is
It breaks down roughly like this:
- Avoidance and judgement - 70 percent. Where you walk, when you turn round, when you leave. None of it is technique.
- Posture, voice and boundaries - 20 percent. Most situations are decided before anything happens.
- Physical - 10 percent. And even that tenth is mostly escape and withdrawal, not fighting.
Courses sell that ten percent, because it is visible and photographs well. The first ninety sells badly.
What a year of regular training builds
A sense of distance. When someone is too close - before anything happens. The single most useful skill, and the only one that transfers into everyday life without exception.
Response under pressure. A body that has met pressure under controlled conditions a hundred times does not freeze as quickly. Freezing is the most common response and the largest obstacle.
A breath that stays open. The first thing lost in fear, and the one that decides everything after it.
A few techniques that live in the body. Not twenty; three or four - escaping a grip, creating distance, moving off the line.
The physical capacity to run. Underrated and decisive. Someone who can run two hundred metres has an option that someone who cannot does not.
The soft overcomes the hard. The gentle overcomes the rigid.
What cannot be done
Reliably overcoming a larger, stronger attacker. Technique narrows the gap; it does not erase it. Anyone claiming otherwise is selling.
Predicting the situation. Every scenario drilled in a hall is a simplification.
Guaranteeing an outcome. No training guarantees anything. It improves the odds, and that is all.
How we build it in
We do not run self-defence as a separate course with a deadline. It is built into the regular Kung Fu program, because it needs the same foundation as everything else: structure, distance, timing and breath.
Concretely: basic stances and weight transfer give the stability from which anything can be done at all. Sanshou drills with agreed resistance give the experience of pressure. Qi Gong gives a breath that does not vanish in fear. Only on top of that does working on technique make sense.
That takes longer than six weeks. But what remains, remains.
What you can do today
Before you sign up anywhere, three things that are free and more effective than any technique:
- Phone in your pocket when walking alone. Awareness of your surroundings matters more than everything else combined.
- Practise a loud “no”. It sounds silly. People who have never done it out loud cannot do it in a real situation.
- Know your route home. Where things are open, where there are people, where there is light.
If you want to go further, training at Ziherlova 44 in Ljubljana runs all year round.
