I believe in the saying that goes "How you train is how you act / react." I understand that.
There is another, often taught statement that mirrors that statement, "We don't rise to the occasion, we sink to the level of our training". There has been a plethora of data from multiple decades of real world altercations (armed and unarmed) that support this perspective. The results can be success or tragedy depending upon the type of training one has receive and the situation they find themselves faced with.
As an illustration; decades ago in what in now referred to as the Newhall Massacre, officers were found shot to death with empty revolvers, full ammo pouches and spent brass in their pockets. What happened is that while in a fire-fight they shot their revolvers dry and instead of immediately reloading and getting back into the fight, they stopped to collect the spent brass and put it in their pockets. The badguys, wondering why the officers had stopped shooting changed location and gunned down the officers. These officers weren't dumb and were actually very proficient with their sidearm. But tracing it back to training, they had an anal-retentive range officer who wanted a tidy range. So after every string of six rounds the trainees cleaned up the spent brass, placed it in their pockets, reloaded and then went back to shooting. Now after doing that hundreds, perhaps thousands of times it was ingrained in them. When the time came, and while under critical duress, they reverted to their training. This time with tragic consequences.
Another officer disarmed a badguy of his gun during a store robbery. The disarm was beautiful and worthy of any martial arts class....and then he gave the gun back to the badguy! Fortunately the officer's partner rounded the corner and shot the badguy before he could shoot the officers. Again, the officer wasn't stupid and obviously had great skill in disarms as he did it to a real badguy in a real robbery. But tracing back to training one officer played the good guy and one officer played the bad guy. The good guy would disarm the bad guy of the gun and then hand it back to him so he could do it again...and again...and again for practice. So under critical stress the officer reverted to his training.
From these lessons learned (the hard way), we altered our training methodology.
This can be applied to the martial arts. This is in NO WAY a shot at any art, don't take it as such please. Not all arts are meant for SD. Many have sole or strong sport elements such as Judo, BJJ and TKD. And they do great in sport venues. The point needs to be made however, that any art needs to take a very close look at its teaching methodology to make sure it is applicable for its purpose. You don't teach a TKD sport competitor SD methodology because it can't be used in the venue in which he/she competes. And the reverse is just as true. Under duress, you can experience a variety of things such as auditory exclusion (you can't hear the gun going off, the car coming at you, someone shouting), tunnel vision (you're focused on the threat to the exclusion of other threats, or help around you), loss of manual dexterity in the extremities (you revert to gross motor skills and refined motor skills become difficult if not impossible to attempt/complete), dramatically elevated blood pressure/pulse, memory loss etc. Real things that happen to real people under duress. To simplify, you go on auto-pilot to a lesser or greater extent.
