Scenario training...

[ballen0351]

You are correct that situation was silly. Not at all what I am talking about though.

But being a prick also forces a reaction under pressure.

Real pressure exists when you can fail.

Well thankfully none of my training partners are pricks. We all come together to train to help each other not to show them how "I can kick the crap out of you ha ha ha" your attitude is selfish and all about you you you. When your a roll player for a scenario it should be all about them them them.

 

[RTKDCMB]

Sometime it may be better for students to ask questions than just to be quite.

I always encourage questions as long as they are relevant and constructive and always tell students to ask questions if they do not understand.

When students are quite, there are many possibilities:

- They are not interesting.
- They don't understand.

or - You've explained your self adequately.

 

[RTKDCMB]

Well thankfully none of my training partners are pricks. We all come together to train to help each other not to show them how "I can kick the crap out of you ha ha ha" your attitude is selfish and all about you you you. When your a roll player for a scenario it should be all about them them them.

Exactly. If an instructor of 25 years experience wanted to be a prick and go all out when sparring a beginner of 2 weeks experience then how could the beginner possibly learn anything?

 

[drop bear]

Well thankfully none of my training partners are pricks. We all come together to train to help each other not to show them how "I can kick the crap out of you ha ha ha" your attitude is selfish and all about you you you. When your a roll player for a scenario it should be all about them them them.

So you are about letting the other guy win.

Look if that makes people feel good about themselves then I am glad there is an outlet for that.

Or we could just be arguing the extremes in some sort of point scoring exercise.

 

[drop bear]

Exactly. If an instructor of 25 years experience wanted to be a prick and go all out when sparring a beginner of 2 weeks experience then how could the beginner possibly learn anything?

Everything I get on my instructor I have to fight for.

Everything is earned.

 

[ballen0351]

So you are about letting the other guy win.

Look if that makes people feel good about themselves then I am glad there is an outlet for that.

Or we could just be arguing the extremes in some sort of point scoring exercise.

No its about sticking to the scenario that the training was designed for. You have made it clear you don't care what the lesson is your going to fight. If I know that when I'm creating a scenario I just won't use someone like you. Training isn't about winning and loosing it's about learning

 

[oftheherd1]

No its about sticking to the scenario that the training was designed for. You have made it clear you don't care what the lesson is your going to fight. If I know that when I'm creating a scenario I just won't use someone like you. Training isn't about winning and loosing it's about learning

Agree. But there should be room for a student to learn consequences of incorrect decisions. Shouldn't happen all the time, but once in a while, even the most proficient and experienced person will make a decision that doesn't turn out as expected.

But all that said, I am in agreement with you that the goal for the instructor is to teach, and for the student to learn.

 

[Jason]

Scenario based training benefits when it exercises effective and efficient responses to simulations of reality. There are so many elements, however, that I believe are falsely simulated bringing a skewed picture of what real violence looks like. If you are going to mimic violence it would be a good idea to first look up real video footages of violence in its various forms.

The very first thing we should be thinking about going into scenario based training is how much information about the situation do you know going into the event. Often times attacker(s), victim(s), by-standers(s), and possibly a third party rescuer are all designated prior to going into the situation. Unfortunately one fails to learn to identify everyone involved. This is part of situational awareness and is crucial in knowing to act accordingly.

Another thing all too many people miss is understanding and identifying social, antisocial, and asocial behavior. Social behavior and antisocial behavior work along the lines of a social continuum of what is acceptable and what is tolerable in the social realm. People who operate on the social realm have a sense or tendency to "connect" with others. This line of connection is used to communicate whether it be though acceptable social skills or tolerable (bad but acceptable) social skills such as puffing up of the chest, flipping people off, raise voice,... This connection can be also be utilized for tactics such as verbal deescalating and like such.

However, someone who exhibits asocial (not social) behavior does not accept messages put out by people trying to connect. Attempting to connect with an asocial predator is very dangerous and can get you killed. It is important that we can identify like such behavior and include it into our training.

There are numerous elements in violence such as these and we could go on and on. The important thing is that we learn everything we can from real life situations and train to identify and act accordingly. This is where one must understand principles and concepts because people are organic and dynamic. Techniques that aren't guided by a principle are responses set into place and are limited to a controlled situation. Unfortunately the flashpoint of violence is most often times chaotic and a technique only becomes available when it is merrily an application to a concept in which it then becomes irrelevant.

Thanks for reading and I hope it helps draw attention the importance of training right so that our training is available to us when we need it most.

 

[MJS]

You are correct that situation was silly. Not at all what I am talking about though.

But being a prick also forces a reaction under pressure.

Real pressure exists when you can fail.

Be that as it may, the point we're trying to make, is if the person is a jerk ALL the time, the drill is counter productive. You said yourself, that you always fight, which leads us to believe you fall into that category of being a jerk, thus resulting in a counter productive drill.

 

[jks9199]

Scenario training is indeed a "laboratory" setting. A particular exercise probably won't cover every possible outcome. Taking Brian's design above (bar, 3 ruffians each with their own goal, bartender may or may not be in play)... you don't have a white knight bystander, you don't have actually drunk people, you probably won't have a cop rolling in to do a bar check... that list gets kind of endless. With a bit of experience, you can probably predict most of the outcomes that are likely -- but students will often surprise you. Brian gave a couple of common outcomes -- but then one student might leap the bar, grab the weapon from the bartender and use it. Good role players have to adapt within their role as the scenario runs -- but generally, the student's going to get response A if they prompt it properly. We all know the real world doesn't always work that way...

When you design a scenario, you generally should have a goal or purpose, as well as specific training objectives. The evaluator or instructor generally has the task of helping the student reach those goals. Again, using Brian's scenario -- one objective is for the students to get out of the bar safely. You might decide that a particular training objective for the exercise is to use verbal deescalation over fighting. So, if the student jumps straight to fighting, the evaluator should be stepping in, validating the good parts of the response but coaching on deescalation.

 

[Steve]

So you are about letting the other guy win.

That wouldn't be great training either. Sparring isn't about winning. You win or lose in the ring or at a tournament. But in class, sparring is about pushing each other. If you're less experienced, you should be stretching yourself and working technique you're not comfortable with. In BJJ, guys who camp out in their A game end up as blue belts with gaping holes in their technique. They may have a terrific top game, but are terrible from guard. You have to tap a lot and let go of your fear of losing if you're ever going to get better.

And for the more experienced person, it's about giving the other guy enough resistance to push him, but not to crush him. If I've been training for 8 years, and I'm rolling with a white belt, I could probably tap the guy relentlessly for 5 or 10 minutes. But is that doing him any good at all? I'd say not. He's learned one way to open guard and maybe one or two guard passes. If I never give him a chance to execute those techniques, he's not able to learn anything.

When rolling with brand new guys, I'll go slow (slower than normal, because I'm slow anyway) and give them time to see the technique, process it and then try to execute the defense. If they don't do it right, they get submitted or swept or whatever.

Simply put, I try to go just a little bit harder than them. Scenario training is just like that.

Look if that makes people feel good about themselves then I am glad there is an outlet for that.

It's a time tested, proven technique for developing skills, IF DONE WELL. It's LARPing if it's done poorly.

Or we could just be arguing the extremes in some sort of point scoring exercise.

It may be some of that. Hard to avoid getting sucked in.

 

[Steve]

Everything I get on my instructor I have to fight for.

Everything is earned.

Yeah, but here's the thing. Do you think he's fighting for anything he gets on you? I am guessing not. I would bet that he's giving you space to do things the right way. He's making you earn every inch of it, but forcing you to go full out doesn't mean he's even shifted into 3rd gear.

 

[Jason]

I agree...

If someone has the intent, means, and opportunity to hurt you that identifies him as a threat in which has now become my target.

"I prey on predators because I will not be a victim; I sleep with sheep because I am not a monster."
- quote from S-M-A.R.T. Training on a warrior's spirit

 

[Tony Dismukes]

As others have said, creating good scenario training requires careful preparation, good acting skills, and actual knowledge of what happens before, during, and after various real world violent encounters. This has nothing to do with how well you understand how to execute a right cross or double-leg takedown.

I've done scenario training with different people, but the best lessons were from the seminars I mentioned previously that were taught by my cop friend. Will knew how to set up little traps that made it easy to do the wrong thing under pressure. Whenever a student would fall into one of those traps we would review the scenario and establish how things could have been handled better. Some of what we saw included:
How acting at the wrong time could get you killed.
How not acting at the right time could get you killed.
How someone could handle everything reasonably in a violent encounter and still end up in trouble with the cops afterwards.

I don't think that I'm qualified to run any kind of in-depth scenario training myself. What I do use sometimes are exercises with specific asymmetric victory conditions that can map onto one little portion of a real scenario, just to break students out of the one-on-one dueling mindset. Even in those simple exercises, it's interesting to see how easy it is for students to develop tunnel vision and fall back onto habits from sparring.

For example, in one exercise the student starts out in one corner of the boxing ring. I'm at the other corner, representing the "exit". In between is the "bad guy", wearing boxing gloves and having instructions to aggressively catch and "beat up" the student. The student's victory condition was to get past the bad guy and reach the "exit." The confines of the ring meant that the student pretty much had to make contact with the bad guy at some point. When I ran this exercise last time I found that almost all the students, once they made that contact, became fixated on "winning" the fight and stayed engaged until they took the bad guy down and finished him - even when they had a clear shot at disengaging and getting to the exit. Only one student remembered the primary objective and disengaged as soon as he had the chance to get to the exit. I made sure to give that student a round of applause after we were done.

Note to Chris Parker - this does not mean I agree with your contention that sparring is counterproductive for real world self-defense. I still maintain that sparring (done correctly) builds important skills that no other training method does. Like all other training methods it has shortcomings which need to be counter-balanced with other aspects of training.

 

[Buka]

Scenario training. What a great thread this has been to read!


Lot of factors involved. Experience, as already mentioned, but resources as well. Some instructors I know have better resources than others. (just through luck of the draw) Some have friends that own bars that they can use in off hours, others are members of police departments with enough pull to use any and all of that department's equipment and personnel. Others don't really have many resources - but do a really good job despite that.



Another thing is the make-up of the students themselves. If the students are young adults, or police officers, advanced ranks, or housewives or fellow instructors or whoever - the depth and intensity of the scenario training could be quite different.


Some scenario training can involve the particulars of what you set up - and some can be non situational completely. For instance...I went to a nice recertification of DT. It was a week long training session. One afternoon we did what they called "A concentration scenario"


We took turns standing in the middle of the range. Three instructors each had a golf ball in a sock. They would swing them in an arc and let them fly at you. You were thirty - forty feet away, so it was no big deal. Then you put on goggles and popped in a mouthpiece and did it again. Then you did it again with vaseline on the lens of the goggles. Then again - this time they added the loudest, ugliest heavy metal music over the loudspeakers. (at this point I was purposely looking to get hit and killed) Then they added a strobe light. Then they started whipping the socks faster and faster.(man, those suckers stung) Then they cuffed your feet together. It was nuts....and a whole lot of fun. There was more to it, of course, using various aspects of vision, excluding noise, watching background etc.. By the end of the day we all had welts on our faces and knots on our heads, but it was a good exercise in concentration. Taken by itself, it was okay. Taken in context with the rest of the week's exercises and studies - it was superb.


Point being - some scenario training is probably more beneficial than others. But it's all good. it just adds to the students overall knowledge and, hopefully, abilities.


A few times every year, once class is lined up and bowed in - we have them go change into their street clothes, shoes included. Then we drill them that way. Other times, we bring them into the parking lot in the rain, snow or cold - and we train them like that. It's nice watching them fight in street clothes, especially on slick footing. (especially while I watch from the edges, all bundled up) This type of training makes them look at things entirely different. (and teaches them never to wear really nice duds to class) it makes them reassess their own abilities and increases their awareness of factors they hadn't been thinking about.

I consider all of the above as scenario training.


And it's all good.

 

[drop bear]

Yeah, but here's the thing. Do you think he's fighting for anything he gets on you? I am guessing not. I would bet that he's giving you space to do things the right way. He's making you earn every inch of it, but forcing you to go full out doesn't mean he's even shifted into 3rd gear.

Sort of. We tend to exhaust the guy first to even things out. But for the most part we never get good role play out of him if it is resisted. There is a difference between not having high pace or contact and fighting with intensity

 

[Steve]

Sort of. We tend to exhaust the guy first to even things out. But for the most part we never get good role play out of him if it is resisted. There is a difference between not having high pace or contact and fighting with intensity

I agree with you completely. I think that the guys here who are discussing scenario training would also agree. For any kind of scenario training, there has to be intensity.

 

[Tgace]

Scenario training isn't about the "fight" or how much you resist the student. You teach that on the mat/ring. Scenarios are about the strategy/tactics you employ to navigate through a "real worldish" type of environment.

Ive been through those "no win" style scenarios before, and in every one, it was about the egotistical ******* role player rather than any attempt to teach the student anything.

A scenario should be about trying to TEACH something vs an all out paintball game style competition IMO. For example...we had a scenario where we were trying to teach officers to call a known suspect OUT of a room and too them vs going into a room after a BG once you see him.

If the student called out the BG, the BG complied and then the SECOND person hiding in the room was found during the completion of the search. WIN. If the officers went in, both BG opened up on them. LOOSE.

There was a specific lesson being taught in the scenario....it wasn't about winning a gunfight. If the role players decided that they would "fight no matter what", the *******s would be removed from the training unit.

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[Tgace]

If a student LOOSES a scenario, he/she should be taught why, ran through it again and be allowed to WIN if/when they employ the tactic being taught. The absolute worst thing you can do to a student is have them walk away from a scenario "dead".

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[jks9199]

If a student LOOSES a scenario, he/she should be taught why, ran through it again and be allowed to WIN if/when they employ the tactic being taught. The absolute worst thing you can do to a student is have them walk away from a scenario "dead".

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Students should always end with a success -- and should never be "dead." The scenario may be stopped -- but I NEVER want a student practicing being dead. That tends to come rather naturally and doesn't need to be trained.

There is a small exception; students in a practical scenario testing where they are required to demonstrate particular skills may fail the scenario, and depending on the course of training, may end up failing the training. But testing is really a separate thing from training...